By Marcy Webster (Choral Director) and Hillyn Natter (Band Director).
(December 19, 2020) — Happy Holidays from the H-K Music Department! We are excited to share our 2020 Winter Concert with you all!
The hybrid model at Haddam Killingworth High School has enabled us to safely and effectively continue to play instruments and sing as a part of our band and choral curriculum. In addition to working outside when the weather allows, we also spread out in the auditorium and music suite of classrooms and single practice rooms.
All choral performances are recorded individually at school as well as at home for those students who are fully remote. To ensure that it all fits together, students listen to the same recording using headphones and record their voice unaccompanied. Those individual recordings are then uploaded and pieced together using the music software program Audacity. It takes hours to align each voice together and adjust volumes while filtering out page turns, background noise, etc. to get a clean recording. These are the same skills we teach in our music production course. The final step is to add some type of video that makes the performance feel “complete”.
Special thanks to H-K TV studio students Katja Berardino, Patrick Boots, and teacher Kasha Topa-Finberg who grabbed videos uploaded from Flipgrid and formatted and edited to the audio tracks to create the videos seen in African Noel and True Colors. We also use WeVideo to create some of the videos shown that have lyric captioning.
Concert Band students tackled chamber music arrangements that could be performed in small groups, spaced out for safety. Those videos were filmed and edited to create one uninterrupted performance. Jazz Band students recorded their part individually using a click-track to keep the players together and then woven together using adobe premier software to complete the finished product.
It was a labor of love to get to the final results but it was worth it for students and families to have something to enjoy and share out. We hope you enjoy!
The performances can be found here: Virtual Concert 2020 (google.com)
