The Last Words of David

[Tritonemusic]

A perhaps relevant trick from the Singers Unlimited: Only one of them sang the final consonants. One is all you need and there’s never a double-T that way.

That's a great tip.

[mikehalloran]

A perhaps relevant trick from the Singers Unlimited: Only one of them sang the final consonants. One is all you need and there’s never a double-T that way.

That's a great tip.

Yea… in practice, not as easy as it sounds. Anyway, hard consonants and glottal stops (a, e, i, o at the beginning of the word) are easy to sync. Soft consonants (h, m, n, w, th) are easy to ignore.

S and sh, OTOH, are a real bear: where they land in relation to the vowel are tempo, context and singer dependent — until you've done it, you just don't know. Easy to get right when everyone is in the same room — if not, why is one directing a choir?

[Jim]

Impressive!

[mikehalloran]

Impressive!

Thanks!

We've become a little more adventurous since then. Here is Palestrina's Gloria Patri from last Sunday (Trinity Sunday):

https://youtu.be/eysuHL0iiJQ

This time, I created my own double-choir.

Same 14 voices for Main and Echo except that I doubled the octave for the final Amen — the only two notes I sing. Some singers submitted Main and Echo tracks; for those who didn't, I split the Echo out in DP so that I could process the two groups separately.

To differentiate the two choirs, I used DP's MW Limiter on each of the Main tracks. For the Echo only, no limiter on the individual tracks plus I ran all voices in Melodyne Studio—correcting all the Eco pitches gave me a thinner, less full sound.

brainworx_limiter True Peak on the Master bus only saved me hours trying to get the Main right without a ton of distortion and let me balance it with the Echo — nearly as loud. True Peak is my new best friend for dense vocal tracks (the only kind I deal with). The Reverb was the Large Hall setting on Exponential Audio's PhoenixVerb set to 75% — again, on the Master only.

I did not process dynamics at all other than two overall settings for the Main and Echo. I did edit all the consonants for timing and the closing to the "nnnn" at the end. That's what takes all the time.

The video recordings were done on Zoom. I edited the videos, stripped the original audio and dropped the DP track in Adobe Premiere Elements. For what I do, PE is faster than FCPx.