Those who have been joining the virtual Sunday Services in recent weeks will have heard our St Mary’s ‘Virtual Choir’ in fine voice.

You can listen here to their most recent recording of ‘Now the Green Blade Riseth‘ arranged by our churchwarden and choir member Paul Vernon, with instrumental parts from the Beaman family.

Click on the play button below:

A huge amount of time, effort and expertise goes into the making of these recordings of the anthem and hymns for our weekly worship.

Here’s how they happen:

• First, organ backing tracks are recorded on a keyboard for the choir to follow as they record their individual parts, often with a conductor’s voice-over added too.
• These are e-mailed along with the sheet music to choir members who then practice their parts at home – the Juniors are having a weekly online choir practice, and the adults are practicing on their own, (whilst washing up is usually Jonathan’s suggestion!).
• To record their parts, each choir member listens to the backing track through earphones on one device (eg their mobile phone) whilst recording their singing on another (eg a tablet or computer).
• They send back their individual recordings early in the week, which are then ‘mixed’ in a special computer programme – usually by Paul and Kay’s son Tom.  Each part is added one by one, trimmed until it starts at exactly the same point as everyone else, and then the volumes of all the individual parts are adjusted until the voices are blended into the beautiful choral sound in the finished recordings.
• The recordings are then sent on to Will who adds the words of the hymns to sing along to at home, photographs etc, then adds them to the final ‘movie’ of the complete Sunday service.

Huge thanks to everyone for giving of their time and talents in making these recordings happen each week.

If you are interested in finding out more about joining the ‘real’ choir (either juniors or adults) when church reopens, please contact our Director of Music Jonathan Goodchild.