With the current COVID-19 pandemic, my youth orchestra program has been severely affected. Our normal concert and rehearsal schedule ended after Spring Break in mid-March. For the rehearsal period from April through to June, we kept going virtually with moving rehearsals and meetings with students to the Zoom platform. The new buzz words for me this term are “asynchronous learning”, new software experiences with “Zoom”, “Loom”, “loopback” and other devices to integrate external mics and various apps together into the whole new online learning experience.
My main project with Richmond Delta Youth Orchestra was this virtual orchestra version of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”. I will be sharing all the materials necessary to do this and put it together on my site here over the next few weeks. Watch the video below.
The Ode to Joy Project
I created the base parts first through public domain parts available at IMSLP. I customized them to reflect the recording I would be doing.
I then created bedding tracks and additional parts in Finale and Logic Pro X. These were used to help the musicians learn the parts and eventually record them.
Links to the files needed to create your own Ode to Joy Project