Due to the Coronavirus regulations in Netherlands, choirs are not able to rehearse in person at the moment... and the concerts are pretty much an impossibility. So, one of the choirs that my wife plays the piano for is doing a video with all the individual voices mixed into a single edit.
What that means is that there is the recorded piano track... and then all the singers go individually to a venue and record their parts whilst singing along to the piano track (on headphones!). They have four pieces that they are planning to do like this... however, the conductor found that she only had time to do three of them.
My wife asked me if I would be able to piece together the individual recordings of the last piece... and if I could, she would volunteer me to do the last piece. I figured that I may as well do it, I'm not playing in any concerts at the moment, so it gives me something that is vaguely music related to keep my mind and time occupied.
Thankfully the piece isn't that long at around 5 minutes total...
I do find that I have a bit of learning to do... lining up singers isn't quite the same as lining up instrumental parts. They have a bit of a different way of attacking and sounding out consonants and vowels that we don't do on instruments. Well, we do, just not in the same way!
Plus, there is the added difficulty that it is an amateur choir... so there are a number of little adjustments that will need to be made to make sure that things stay relatively well together. Or there might be some judicious cuts to mask really bad mistakes. Also, there will be some balancing required to make sure that it blends nicely together, with perhaps a bit more focus on the stronger singers with the other singers providing colour.
Anyway, it was a long morning of doing that... and so it was nice later to go to a church with my wife to test out a piano and venue for doing some recordings. It is a church that I play at quite regularly... we provide some music for cantata services in exchange for the use of the church for rehearsals, recordings and concerts.
Anyway, I noticed that they had a piano there... I'm usually playing with a harpsichord so I hadn't really thought about it before. And my wife was looking for a place to do some recordings with her on piano, and a singer and possibly me as well (not singing...).
So we went and did some playing... unfortunately, the heating wasn't on... so it was a touch on the freezing side of things. However, it is nice to be able to play music with someone who is close to you... especially if you don't get the chance to regularly do that!
