This isn’t the first time I made a virtual choir.
In lockdown – July 2020 – I put together a virtual choir from my children’s primary school:
This project took about 200 hours, including time spent arranging, recording tracks for the kids to sing along with, stitching together all their vocals, “aligning” those vocals, mixing, and putting together the video.
Making several people on screen lip sync with a backing track that’s similar to what they sang, but has gone through some comping, and other improvements, is no small feat. It was a huge labour of love and I somewhat burned out.
I do love putting together vocal harmonies, so a lot of my recent releases usually have several vocal layers. There are about 7 of me on the Facebook group song:
I picture three of me on backing vocals, as there are three distinct vocal parts, but I doubled them up.
Even recording my own vocal harmonies is on a spectrum of easy to hard. In the above, I just improvised the harmonies. In other songs, I may spend a few hours scoring the vocals and then trying to record what I scored, which may or may not be singable. Autotune fixes a lot of mistakes, or at least allows me to turn my own voice into a guide track so I can sing along with it on a better take.
However, yesterday, I tried out a new form of virtual choir compilation. TikTok is a great place to see people making music together independently. In this instance a chap called Andy Arthur Smith released a “When The Saints Go Marching In” track, with him singing rather athletically, while also clicking his fingers (those clicks are handy for the process that follows).
My timeline was full of variations on this track with people duetting Andy, or duetting other musicians who had duetted him. There was this family tree of different versions of the song, each with something new in the mix. Sometimes people recorded multiple versions of their contribution.
I heard these and wondered what they might sound like together.
Here we stumble on Ashley’s law of online content creation:
The longer you spend on creating some content, the less likely it’ll get a bunch of views.
Put another way, some of my lowest effort reels get the most views.
Luckily, though, I didn’t spent 200 hours making the above virtual choir. I was kind of hoping it might take 90 minutes or so. It took about 4 hours.
I downloaded 32 TikToks and tried to work them into a mix. I was worried that this mix would be unlistenable without quite a bit of work, and there were moments where it threatened not to sound like anything more than mush.
However, with a lot of alignment of tracks, and various bits of processing, I managed to get something that seems to contain most people’s input. If you look at one of the people in the video, you can usually hear what they’re doing.
It takes a lot of compressing and EQing to get to this place, and I still don’t have the knack of making it sound the way I imagine it should.
Anyway, the TikTok algorithm appears to have shown it exclusively to the 30 creators I mentioned in it, and to virtually nobody else:
However, the mission I had was to hear what this choir would sound like, and to do so in a way which didn’t upset the original creators. The feedback from the “participants” has been really positive, and I learned a bit more about the craft of sound mixing in yesterday’s exercise.
Ashley Frieze 