Blue of a Kind will be singing outdoors at this festival above in Salem MA on August 29 from 12 to 1 pm. Singing in the open air is always exhausting. The wind is blowing, birds are flying by, children run around, women smile and mosquitos and flies dive bomb the baritones. There is no end to distraction! In addition, your sound flies out into space. It has nothing to bounce off and you can't hear anybody else. You easily can't sing as one. Tuning, matching vowels and dynamics, even staying on the same verse together all become much more difficult.
Electronics to the rescue! In this case, you want a sound system to amplify you for the benefit of the audience as much as for yourselves! What kinds of equipment does your group have for outdoor gigs? We'd like to hear.
Blue of a Kind has kept it simple. We typically sing indoors and enjoy decent and sometimes superb acoustics. Sometimes the venues are large, and the house will provide an array of microphones and a sound engineer to amplify the whole group.
For a bunch of guys who don't rehearse with any electronics, learning how to balance the sound can be tricky. If you've sung with a microphone, you know a few things - how to avoid popping, how to lay back so you don't overwhelm the audience with your voice and how to produce a sound that is basically in a balance with the rest of the ensemble.
Blue of a Kind is working with a simple system these days for outdoor work. We have sung on floats in parades several times with this setup, and it has the advantage of being powered entirely by batteries. It's portable and does the job surprisingly well.
The core of the system is a Boss digital recording system that can mix several microphones and the monitor can be jacked into a separate amplification system, in our case the Roland Cube Street. This gives us a little something to listen to as well as projecting our sound a bit more to the audience. The same system can record the performance. Blue of a Kind uses these recordings the same way football teams use game tapes.
We're looking at better sound systems to manage indoor and outdoor performance situations. The requirements are pretty much the same. First and foremost, the system must be portable. We don't want to lug a ton of stuff around - we're a cappella and we travel light! Battery power is a plus factor as is the ability to make field recordings.
Field Recordings
These became really important early in our development. Here's why:
First of all, the group generally takes away a single impression from any given performance. If it is successful overall, the blemishes are utterly forgotten, except by the director! As director, trying to make a lesson out of a successful performance often falls on deaf ears. So early on, I decided the guys needed to have a listen to each show with some objectivity in order to take ownership of the issues that arose in performance.
So field recordings became the "tail of the tape"; the recordings don't lie. You can still tell whether the audience digs it, but your emotions and nervous energy are gone now. You can listen coldly and hear exactly what you did or did not do. You can ask yourself whether it moves you. You can talk about it as a group, press rewind and hear it again.
Sometimes those field recordings are dead solid perfect. You can use them on your next CD as we did on To the Sky. It was not only a good performance; we had used a top-notch digital recorder to capture it.
How is your group handling concert recordings?
The App Store: Tools for the Singer and for the Director
You know I work for Palm. OK, we're HP now. We "Palmers" all love gadgets and especially Apps. Apple made Apps the next best thing to sliced bread, and Palm has The App Catalog. We're making the world a easier place to live using the smart phone in your pocket. Hey, we're carrying these tiny computer/communicators, so of course it's really cool if they can tell us when the moon is full or help us find a restaurant.
As a musical director, I'm finding Palm Apps now like Pitchpipe, Metronome and other basic tools I use for singing. My dream is to be able to create and assemble songlists for concerts, and to tap each song in the list to hear the starting pitches, maybe the first bar or two in the correct tempo. Right now, I carry a real pitchpipe and a set of note cards with handwritten information. I might have to write this app myself.
If you know of any great Apps out there for any phone, post a comment here.
How I Spent My Summer Vacation
The summer began with a 10 day trip to Cuba to sing with the Yale Alumni Chorus. It was the experience of a lifetime. Many non-US travelers have enjoyed visiting Cuba since 1980, but for US citizens you need to jump through a lot of hoops to do it legally. Luckily, YAC managed all this hard work for us, and the choir only had to sing and prepare to share friendship.
We have a phenomenal group of singers of all ages, and one of the best directors you could ever sing under, Jeffrey Douma. The singers work independently to learn the music for months. They gather for a couple of regional rehearsals under Jeff to put it all together. Once in Cuba, we rehearsed a couple of times a day for the first few days to get the spit and polish we needed. After Jeffrey shapes the output of 200+ voices, the results can be quite intoxicating! We were able to sing joint concerts in Matanzas and Havana with professional choirs and perform at a very exceptional level.
The Cuban people were thrilled that we wanted to come sing for them, put all our hearts and souls into it, and meet them as friends. It was a wonderful experience and we made many friends.
Summer Arranging
I also did more arranging this summer, focusing on classics from the American Songbook, and produced these new works for men:
Getting Some Fun Out Of Life
Lil' Darlin'
I Hadn't Anyone Till You
And I reworked a couple of SATB arrangements for men. These two were taken from the YAC Cantemos! repertoire:
El Bodeguero
MLK
Topics for the Coming Year
What shall we talk about this season? I'm developing an agenda for Blue of a Kind so we can continue developing and having fun. I have also developed a list of blog topics for the coming season. Last year, I got into a groove of producing an arrangement a week for 6 months and wrote about each one. This took me on a very single-minded journey which was quite productive, but requiring many hours of work before I wrote the first word of my blog entry. It also changed the course of this discussion, which is aimed at all things a cappella, rather than arranging tips and techniques.
If these are of interest (or not) I hope you'll post a comment with your thoughts:
And What Else?
Do you have any other ideas or things you'd like to hear about or discuss? Post a comment and let me know!
