Re: Remote Ensemble Playing

[Urs Liska]

Am Mittwoch, den 01.04.2020, 08:51 +0200 schrieb Gianmaria Lari:

Off topic but very interesting :)

Does anyone have any idea how these people is able to do things like these?

https://youtu.be/Sj4pE_bgRQI

https://youtu.be/3eXT60rbBVk

I think the Rotterdam Philharmonic information says it all: Most of the solutions that pop up so far are not "playing together" but playing separately to a preproduced "click track", whether this is an actual click track or a video recording of the conductor. Then every musician plays their part and someone does the digital post production.

In the Rotterdam recording you hear that the instruments are really recorded in their actual living rooms (although with professional equipment and personell normal people wouldn't have at their disposal). But I'd bet when the choir enters *that* is from an existing recording.

The Ravel is surely done the same way, and I have the impression that what you actually hear is an existing recording (just listen to the homogenity of the mix and the acoustics), so what they presumably are doing is essentially a "music video".

In a way you could consider this as cheating, but OTOH, all the classical music recording industry is built on similar cheats, and if you look at the comments on YouTube it does serve a positive social purpose.

Best

Urs

PS: Listening to this and watching in preparation to a video meeting discussing how the conductors in my music university may go forward in an "online semester".

The only information I found is this:

https://slippedisc.com/2020/03/exclusive-rotterdam-made-that-amazing-beethoven-9th-without-rehearsal/ 

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[....]

SD What technology did you use for recording?
RP: The video might look ‘easy’ but its not. We used really professional hard and software, since we also have to protect the level of recording that we put of there Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra. Besides that we believe that the quality is part of the impact a message like this has.

(We asked Mike for further specifications). Mike adds: In general, what we do is we pre-produce a click-track which the musicians play to. Keep in mind that you have to think about tuning and intonation. Then we put all those videos in sync and work on the sound with professional studio software and equipment. [....]

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What does they mean with "click-track" ?

Thank you, g.