hiskeys wrote: ↑<span title="Mon Jun 26, 2017 4:23 am">7 years ago</span>
Surpinto said: Thanks for the information. I will have to consider when the best time to arrive would be. It could be very hot that day and waiting in line in that sort of heat is not exactly my idea of fun. But I am not worried about it at the moment, I'll figure it out that day.
If you didn't care what you looked like, you could find an umbrella hat like the King's choristers did (for 10p each) on their 2013 Far East tour. - He talks about it at :13 seconds in.
By the way, the whole set of these videos from 2014 are rather well done.
Hahaha, it's not that big of a deal
I can tolerate it without anything special like that - I was just needlessly bitching.
It's funny that the King's College Choir did that though.
King's College is an excellent choir and one of my favorites in the genre.
bachmahlerfan wrote: ↑<span title="Sun Jun 25, 2017 8:25 pm">7 years ago</span>
I noticed that the Houston based Fort Bend Boys Choir promoted the upcoming Libera concert in Houston on their social media accounts. They are considered one of the largest boys choir organizations in the country, so they may help attract some extra concertgoers. It's funny how some groups will eagerly promote a Libera concert, while others will act like they don't even exist.
I think it's that many don't know that Libera exists. The boy choir genre doesn't exactly have a good reputation in the US - and for a very good reason. Many so-called boy's choirs in the United States who claim to be anything other than a glorified elementary school choir really are not. The choristers are not trained well and the music chosen for them to sing is even worse. When such choirs make recordings they will often only sell them in very small numbers either as a fundraising ploy, or to raise additional funds from the boy's parents because only the parents would truly even want the recordings. It is a very sad situation.
Now, to be fair, I listened to a few recordings of the Fort Bend choir and they are definitely not the sort of mediocre group I describe above .
However, the recordings (and these are recordings from their 2016 CD) sound like they were made in the 1970's: they choose an acoustically decent location, set up two large microphones in front of the group, get a piano player who accompanies them into the room, and record the whole thing. If there is any post-production it appears to have been minimal.
The correct way to do this of course, for the last 30+ years, has been to record the instrument(s) separately from the singers in studio. Then have the singers wear headphones which plays the accompaniment and they sing along with it. This would also require them to have more microphones recording the group. This allows for the recordings to be polished and also to record certain, more difficult songs, in segments and then mix together the best takes of those segments.
Having said that I am not trying to judge the Fort Bend Boy's Choir, paying for the sort of studio time that the above requires may very well be out of their league. Additionally the audio editing involved may not be something that anyone they have in-house knows well - again incurring costs. But then this begs the (rhetorical) question of why release a CD at all and expect any substantive sales aside from purchases made by the chorister's families?
This is the exact problem that so many boy's choirs run into in the Unites States. Things like this do nothing to improve the reputation of the genre, which is why so few people have heard of or care about Libera in the US because to them it's just another "boy's choir" of the sort I mentioned above
The fact that a group like Libera who trains their choristers properly, chooses suitable and excellent music for them to sing, and makes professional studio recordings exists at all is a foreign concept to many in this country.
This is why so few serious advertisements are made when Libera comes to town.