Throughout lockdown, I've been keeping my depression at bay by singing regularly. Unfortunately, my usual Adult Musical Theatre group has had to stop, however, I have been able to join The Collective - a virtual choir made up of many people around the world!
The Collective was started by Simon Lubkowski, a music teacher and barbershopper. His vision (I encourage you to read the About Section on the Facebook Page) has taken off, with a fantastic team of volunteers who are all encouraging everyone to do their best, and now with thousands of participants, singing their hearts out. Being part of the group, I can see the amazing amount of work that the leaders all do for free - from the admin, the tech team, to the music group and section leaders, to Simon himself, who seems to not need sleep at all! It is the type of production that people would gladly pay to be part of, but it is done solely for the love of music and spreading joy. It's amazing.
I missed out on the very first song (White Cliffs of Dover), but I have joined for three songs, and unfortunately have had to pull out again, because I'm just too busy to dedicate the time the latest song deserves.
The first of these songs was One Voice by Barry Manilow. Not being a Manilow fan (sorry! I don't dislike him, just couldn't care either way) I didn't know the song beforehand, so had to learn everything from scratch. The materials to learn the song, both the music script and audio of the song, plus individual parts (I sing soprano) are all provided to you as part of the collective. The music team then gets to work teaching everyone, over zoom, the melody, breath points, various singing and breathing techniques (ninja breaths!), multiple times a day, multiple days a week, across various time zones for the international singers.
One participant, Ian Walker, deserves special mention as he made an app for all the information you could possibly need: links to videos, audio, script, rehearsals etc all separated out into your section part (Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Bass or Solo), and adjusted according to your timezone. Very impressive!
Once the song is learnt, the music team then focuses on performance, how to put emotion in the song, and the tech team teaches how to record your final version and the technology you need. And, if that wasn't enough, they invite everyone participating to record themselves to gain feedback to improve their performance.
As I write this, I had a sense of deja vu, and I have written about this before, so sorry for the repetition.
I will now get to the point of this post - the final video!
Recording it was a bit of a palaver, as I didn't have a good set-up, so I'd have to balance my laptop on a couple of boxes on an upturned bucket on my bed. Not only that, before this recording I woke up late, and had to rush to put my make-up on, before joining in the zoom meeting.
But that didn't put me off. After the tech team did their magic to integrate all the individual recordings from hundreds of people, to align them all, and then to get it to align with the video (that was recorded separately) the video was finally finished! Hours and hours and hours of work for the volunteers to produce this 8minute final video. I am there; briefly during the song itself, and more clearly in amongst the credits at the end.
I hope you like it.
No comments:
Post a Comment