Lockdown, May/June 2020
We hope you're keeping well. We've been experimenting with playing music online via video conferencing platforms. It's taken a bit of getting used to, but it's good to keep things going, and we have a few recordings to share with you.
The biggest challenge in playing together remotely is the delay, or 'latency', experienced by each person, which makes it impossible to synchronise in the normal way. In each of these recordings, Tom (Guitar) is effectively playing solo, with Alex (Violin) and Robin (Bass) both muted during the video meeting. Alex and Robin can each hear Tom via headphones, but not each other. We each record our own audio track (separate from video meeting), then Tom and Alex email their recordings to Robin, who mixes all three together. Finally, we download a video recording of the meeting, and replace the in-meeting audio with the mixed track.
Of course, it's far from ideal to play in a trio and hear, at best, only one other player, but we're gradually learning how to make the best of it...