Music for Jamestown Presbyterian Church

When the world went into quarantine in 2020, Jamestown Presbyterian Church was left empty and elected to begin streaming services to their members’ homes. Handling music with a full choir was a particularly difficult task due to the lag inherent in all video streaming services. My mother, Nancy, decided we needed to come up with a way for every choir member to participate in a music piece that would be edited into the weekly, streamed service. The system she and I devised started with her making midi recordings of the piano part for any given piece followed by midi recordings of each vocal group (Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Bass). Due to rampant upgrading on my MacBook I had lost compatibility with much of my audio software, so I decided to use Garage Band to wrangle all of the midi data. We would then send each group an audio recording featuring a piano part, a metronome, and a synthesizer playing their particular vocal melody. Each choir member was respnsible for making an isolated audio recording of their vocals while listening to the provided midi pieces (so that the timings would line up) and sending mp3 files back to my mother. We would gather all of the vocals and I would set to work cleaning out static, adjusting volumes, and generally trying to do a quick and dirty master of each full song. Meanwhile, Nancy would line up all of the necessary CCLI (Music performance licensing) information for us to post in the final videos we would produce. After producing a final mp3 she and I would sit down and try to find a variety of royalty-free images on Google to fit the themes of each song. Once we had those downloaded and checked for watermarks I would edit everything together in Apple Motion and type in the song’s lyrics. We would send the final video  to Jamestown Presbyterian for integration into the weekly service. At this point we would maybe have two days to rest before starting the whole process again for the next song.

All piano performances, midi recordings, and CCLI License management by Nancy Delap Lanier

All vocals and instrumentals by the Jamestown Presbyterian Church Choir

Video/audio editing by Michael Brinkley Lanier