That swell near the start -- did the choir do that or did you use a fader?
Yes to both.
I was wondering how to get a choir to do that, even if they're all in one room.
Pretty easy when everybody is in one room and they're well rehearsed — two things not available for nearly a year.
monkey man wrote: ↑Fri Jan 29, 2021 9:32 pm
You
can get 'em to do it, Stoivo, but I could tell that there was artificial gain employed 'cause the tonal changes that would normally occur weren't really there.
Monkey is nearly right. More accurately, there may have been a
lot of control by the choir, but there was
definitely a fader involved.
Most of it was the choir but, as one can hear, not all. In fact, for the services, I'd left that alone and the tonal change is easier to hear. But the effect wasn't as dramatic as I liked so I enhanced it in DP for the YouTube video. Here's the volume graph for those measures. As you can see, not as much fader as one might think.
The Bethel choir had one rehearsal and service with me as their new temporary director before lockdown. I'd been an occasional soloist and substitute conductor over the years and my wife, Sylvia had been the pianist for a year. So, when the director quit suddenly, the coir asked for me to step in till they found someone. I had two Sundays a month at PoP where I'd been leading the praise band for a year. Sylvia would conduct on Sundays and the organist would accompany the choir. As I mentioned, that lasted a week but we all knew we'd be back in a month or two…certainly by Easter, right?
The choir asked for a Zoom meeting. My wife and I both in the same room—no latency— conducted and played to faces that we couldn't hear. When done, we greed that would never happen again … till they emailed us and asked if we wanted to do it again. On the third meeting, I decided to teach them how to use Dropbox. Sylvia and I would make guide tracks; they'd upload vocal tracks… Ten months and 27 videos later, here we are.
All the while, I was doing the same thing with the praise band at PoP while trying to convince the choir director to do what I'm doing with the choir. You see, that was not my first choir but it was my first church job 49 years ago and I'd hired the current director as the organist in 1976. This was their first foray into a Zoom video and I hope they do more. I do hear the Twilight Zone theme in the back of my head when I realize I'm working with that choir (and a few of those singers) again.
As to the amount of work it takes to get that many singers to work together when no two are in the same room, a picture is worth a thousand words. This doesn't show the all of the tracks but is the entire timeline. You can see that I engaged the fader a little at the end. Again, not much—still mostly choir.
A 27" monitor is not large enough to show everything, of course. The Mixer is on one side screen while the score is displayed on another.
Effects are few: the MOTU DeEsser and Eventide SP2016 Vintage Room at 31% on the Master. Certain singers are easier to manage with the MasterWorks Limiter. Sometimes, I need to fix this and that with RX8a on a few tracks.
The visual markers that DP embeds in tracks saves me many hours when editing. You can't quantize choirs and I will not use a click (praise bands are different). Certain vowel and pitch changes show up about 90% of the time. Logic can't compare for what I'm doing.
I do not use pitch correction unless the basses just can't hit the required low notes and
that I'll fix. Otherwise, what happens when they sing live again? One would not want to hear most of the individual tracks that make up an online choir.
