Yep, I fully second that. It's by definition not "playing" together, mostly because of the total lack of spontaneity. But on the other hand, with a few - or to be more honest: a hell of - adjustments to the MIDI tempos in advance, you can in fact account for a great deal in terms of at least agogics.
You can then proceed with sending everyone the recording, if you want, letting them make their own adjustments and re-recording. This way you can get a decent piece of music out of it, instead of using the musicans only as MIDI instruments. (This is kind of the very slow way of a good orchestral rehearsal: Everyone brings an idea of his part according to the conducter and at the same time listens to the other ideas and adjusts individually to it.)
But to be honest, and having done both: you need a different subset of skills for this than you'll need in daily orchestral playing. The fewest musicians playing in orchestras do studio recordings where they get to play to click regularly.
Christian
Am Mittwoch, den 01.04.2020, 11:33 +0200 schrieb Christian Masser:
Hi!
I think whether it's easier with only click or with click+MIDI purely depends on the player's own stability in terms of intonation and rhythm. (And in terms of MIDI accompaniment you have to pay special attention to the tuning of the MIDI instrument.)
Having done a few of this recordings myself I found that for chorales or hymn tunes it's easier having a MIDI track because of the many small corrections you have to make in tuning depending on the harmony you're in while on the other hand it's mostly easier for rhythmically difficult pieces to just play along the click.
But this is all probably very subjective to my own musical approach.
One issue is that in 99% of classical music (with the exception of many contemporary music ensemble pieces and maybe the Bolero) musicians do *not* go along with a strict click track. Therefore usually a video of a conductor will musically be more adequate. Of course having many musicians perform against that video without hearing others will usually not result in really synchronized playing.
One possibility might be having one instrument play along with the conductor video, then have the next musician play along that video while listening to the first recording and so on. That might work out to produce a decent recording (with unreasonable amounts of technical trickery), but I have to second Ralf in saying this is not really playing together. "Making music together" (but not at the same time) might capture the idea better ...
Urs
All the best
Christian
PS: Sorry Gianmaria, I accidentally answered to you directly without posting to the list.
Ciao Urs!
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?
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.
Could be a "click track" a "neutral" recording maybe a midi file temporized according a conductor? So that each player can play "with" the music?
I'm asking this because, of course the orchestral musician are professional, but to play an instrument part without the other instrumental parts and only following a metronome (or a video of the conductor) doesn't look easy.
Does anyone know if this (temporized midi file) is something that people do? Or they really only watch a click track (a video with the score and the beating metronome)?
Thanks, g.
P.S. Hope my english is understandable.