Social Distance Under the Sea

Three NHBCOS musicians (Linda Dickson, Mark Rankin and Larry Jones) recently recorded a performance of "Under the Sea", by Alan Menken, from Disney's animated movie, The Little Mermaid. This recording of three individual and totally separate musicians was brought together by Sergei Vassiliev, Principal Clarinetist, Colorado Springs Philharmonic. You can watch the performance by clicking on this link then come back and read comments by Larry and Mark about their experience below. Well done, to all three of you!

Larry Jones: "We were all operating on a metronome. I was crawling up a learning curve, so initially I had earbuds with the metronome feeding into them. Then I discovered the click came out on the audio track. So the headset was only to mute the earbuds! I have since discovered the connection adapter so that I can feed the metronome directly into the headset. I used a Zoom H2 microphone (no relation to the remote meeting software) for the audio (pretty high quality for such a small mic), and recorded both audio and video on an iPad (the duplication of audio made it easier for Sergei to synch the separate H2 audio). Lighting is important. You can tell Linda did a better job on the intro lighting than I did. I’m pretty sure LInda was operating with earbuds directly. I have to admit, I’m amazed at Mark. I don’t see earbuds, so he’ll have to tell you how he did it. Natural rhythm?"

"Sergei says he did some minor synch editing. As he told me later, we picked a tough one to do remotely since there’s a lot of sixteenth-note synchronization going on. He uses Logic audio and Final Cut Pro video for his editing and composition tools. He’s getting good at multiple camera angles and splicing for his own recordings."

Mark Rankin: "While this project took some work, it was a lot of fun and a great learning experience for me.  Though I wish I had natural rhythm, I'll confess to using a metronome in my pocket with the ear piece cord snaked under my shirt to my left ear.

I used a tablet (Samsung Galaxy) to record both video and audio.  The audio was not great from the tablet so also used my Tascam DR-07X recorder (equivalent to Larry's Zoom H2) for better audio. Since the video files were too large for email, I used a cloud service called Dropbox to store the files to be shared.  Sergei was then able to access the files to do his sychronization/editing magic. I appreciated immensely Larry and Linda's initiating this project as well as Sergei's willingness to help us."