Do a virtual recording! I’ve been forced to get my Adobe Premiere and Pro Tools skills up in quarantine. Even an iPhone can produce a decent recording, it just can’t be so old that it has a variable frame rate. As long as Settings/Camera/Record Video allows a fixed frame rate, it should be fine. (Variable frame rate is near impossible to get synced correctly in a multitrack thing.) I’ve done a bunch of projects where the other musicians just used an iPhone. Make a click/master track and get a choir to do it virtually!
I’d probably just get them to do audio: there’s no reason we need to see their faces! I’ll think on it. Making a click track is probably the hardest thing, with rit and a tempo, etc.
You can also play around with the tempo track in play mode. I’ve gone to particular cadences and fermatas and just lowered the tempo at those spots for the desired effect. Taking a whole note at 80bmp and lowering it to 40bmp for just that measure will double its audible length, etc. It’s a bit fiddly, but ultimately that’s exactly the type of thing play mode edits are for and you don’t have to mess up your score.
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At least on social media, people seem to connect with it more when there’s video. Jazz clubs aren’t going to be having live music in front of an audience anytime soon, so it’s just been a way for me to keep connected with other musicians and audiences. I can’t imagine choirs are going to be rehearsing anytime soon either with studies like this coming out. I think musicians need to start realizing that until there’s a vaccine available, there’s not going to really be a return to pre-virus normal, so we need to find ways to stay connected and creative virtually. Monetizing that is another issue altogether unfortunately.
With no conductor, tempo changes and fermatas are a bit of a problem though. Not an insurmountable one obviously, but still an issue. If I can write it out exactly in time then I can be assured everyone will be together on the next entrance. To anyone watching the video, the effect will still basically be a fermata, but it makes the performance better if the click can be constant through it. For the A/V thing I did earlier in the week with Kevin Eubanks, he was just playing his composition Poem without a click and I had to write 3 woodwind parts and track to his audio. Took me way longer than I thought it would to get a 3 minute clip tight, and a lot of entrances I had to have one eye on the music I wrote, and one on the waveform in Pro Tools to know exactly when to enter. (In addition to him playing a bit rubato, almost every bar is a different meter which made life tricky too.)
If you can follow along with the waveform then the entrances are obvious, but most of the multitrack things I’ve been doing the other musicians just play along with a click and record into an iPhone. They aren’t recording into a DAW. I then assemble the project in Pro Tools and the waveforms are really easy to line up as long as they stay with the click. Simple things like slightly early/late entrances are easy fixes too.
I agree. It is not just what venues will permit, but what audiences are willing to do. As much as people complain about being homebound, they are getting more comfortable consuming programs from the couch. So while virtual performances may be the only way for an artist to generate some income right now, it does have the downside of possibly making it more difficult to get people to come out to clubs and theaters in the future.
I am currently the President of the board of a symphony orchestra. Most of our performances are in a school auditorium that seats 1400+ We have only one concert each season that has that size audience. That wouldn’t normally occur until February 2021, so maybe we will be “normal” by then, but I doubt it. And that particular concert has a 100+ voice gospel choir on stage, so it is really a worst case scenario. For the other concerts, there is enough room for adequate spacing for the audience. However our audience tends to be older, so I think it will be a real challenge to get them to attend our concerts until there is a solid vaccine.
Choirs and wind instruments are a particular problem as they project breath by their nature. We’re looking at the possibility of presenting small chamber orchestra (no winds) performance as a way to keep some small amount of momentum alive while science moves ahead at its pace.
Regarding jazz clubs, we are looking at the idea of presenting some virtual concerts from the club simultaneous with a GoFundMe campaign as fund-raisers for these clubs that have been among the most punished by these circumstances.
Some clubs are sponsoring stuff like that now. Nick Payton did one sponsored by Blue Note last night for example:
Many festivals are still trying to livestream at least the headliner performing at home too and paying something. As this stretches into fall though, it still seems pretty uncertain how virtual gigs subsidized by a club or festival are going to work. I imagine once kids return to school in September, there’s going to be a huge surge in cases a couple of weeks later, just in time to derail most fall arts planning. I have a two and a half week European tour still on the books for October, and the band’s manager still says it’s on, but I’m fully expecting it to get cancelled mid-September, if not well before then.
My wife’s job is secure, and i have a university gig so at least I’m not completely reliant on gigs and tours like some of my friends, but as this is going to completely change the performance scene, I’ve been trying to get ahead of it and get my home recording chops up. Just curious how others are adapting and planning for this …
For my project described earlier in this thread, one of the funnest things has been to find titles for all of those short pieces. It’s been almost as fun as composing them. Here’s the list so far, at the halfway point.
Wow, you have been busy! Has anyone posted any virtual performances of them on FB yet? Please share links to any that have been performed!
People have been mostly working on them at this point. Most pieces are not particularly easy but a good deal of them will be posted eventually. But I’ll have the Tarantella soon. The violinists have been also quite enamoured with their pieces and they’ve said they will post something at one point. It’s worked out well. Only about three people are not particularly fond of their piece, but I can’t bat a thousand on this! What’s been fun too is musicians asking to see each other’s pieces. I’ve had a blast with this.
For tempo changes, I change the tempo in the time track. Then I add a woodblock, and add quarter notes or whatever. For the tempo changes, change briefly to 8ths to help with timing.
Yeah, I have had to do that too. For this 5/8 arrangement, the DoricoBeep sound was way more of a hindrance than a help, so I made a click track for us to play with using Cajon and Cowbell sounds. The Cajon playing traditionally for that style (high on 1 and 4, low on 3 and 5) and bell on 1 counting the bars. As that arrangement went to 4/4 swing at times I had to spend a little more time than usual making sure the click was set up correctly.
Did anyone ask for “more cow bell”?
In all honesty, we probably didn’t even need it. The four of us that played that all have played together in a band that plays in 5/8 (and lots of other chacarera-based odd meters) a lot over the past 10 years or so, so the Cajon was probably enough. It just seemed like a click track should have an instrument smacking something on 1.
Thanks for your words! Honestly I didn’t think about fermatas! Anyway, for me it’s more convenient to use real bars to create a more flexible tempo map. For this piece I prepared a detailed tempo map in Logic, using a very basic live piano performance (with the essential lines), imported in Dorico (where I worked with a combination of my virtual instruments and NotePerformer), and then used for the final audio project in Logic.
WOW Kevin Eubanks! I remember an album in the mid '80s, “Opening Night”, very impressive form me!
Learning Dorico, starting today. First it was Finale in '94, then Sibelius in '04, now Dorico in '20. Sibelius (Avid) went AWOL on or before the day my system did last week. Phone menus only. So I decided to look at Dorico and was blown away by the guitar fingerings. That’s what I’m doing now in lockdown–copying Bach lute music, working out fingerings that sound nice to me and don’t injure my hands.
There are some little things that are big when you don’t know how to do them, like beaming all 6 16th notes together in ⅜ meter. That’s how Bach and his followers have done it. I have to figure out how to make Dorico do it. I already wrote a post today about that. Until further notice that’s what I’m doing in lockdown. I love it!
Popover shift-M the enter [3]/8 instead of 3/8. I know that one is a little obscure and would live more nicely in Notation Options, but that is the current way of doing it, short of beaming every bar manually!
Göran,
I liked your Étude Polymétrique so much I adapted it to organ. I hope you like my interpretation 
Don’t know what Göran thinks about it, but I certainly enjoyed it!