A lesson on music acoustic. At our Burlingame worship site, there were a few factors that had made the acoustic environment good and thus the wonderful worship experience was made possible. This time we had the best production because the tone of the choir and also the balance with the orchestra was at its best. This is attributed to our expert sound engineer Mr. Alan Chang from First Presbyterian, Burlingame. Alan had miked each string instrument so he could adjust the balance between the strings and the woodwind instruments from his console. Once the orchestra is balanced and the choir (using choir mics) balanced with the orchestra, with the large enough air space inside the sanctuary and the full audience to absorb the reverberation, (The speakers on the ceiling were aimed at the audience instead of the walls,) which gave acoustic space for sound adjusting and enhancing, the whole performance group on stage became a better blending unit. The balance of a choir in terms of parts is of utmost importance. My ratio is S7A8T4B5. With this ratio, there would be no problem of balancing the choir and because of this balance the whole choir would be blending and matching in tone color and the choir would even sound louder and fuller. Like a choir, the balance of an orchestra is best achieved by having the proportion of numbers of instruments. For example, if you have three trumpets in the orchestra, you would need 6 to 8 violins to balance each one of them. In our orchestra, the orchestration requires 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, 2 French horns, plus woodwinds. In this case we need a violin section of 16 to 20, half plays First and the other half plays second. Then 6 to 8 violas, 5 cellos and 4 basses. On top of that, we should have a choir of 80 to 100 to balance with the required orchestra size. At that proportion, we will have to have a large musically designed hall with a lot of air to beat to do justice to the musical. Now what we have was 48 singers (way below what we should have, counting the number of our active singers, which is 86.) At our Burlingame production, we have seven violins, no violas (I cut violas out because they play in octave with the violins.) 2 cellos and 1 double bass. Now you understand the problem. The stage at First Presbyterian Church only have room for our small, unbalanced orchestra. The choir loft can accommodate 60 singers or a little more. Why cant we have 64 singers? Where are our awol singers? Dont they know that their absence is hurting us? Then how did we solve the problem? We dont. We crossed our fingers and hope for the best and deal with the worse. I am not going to dwell into the crazy acoustics and personnel problems we have at The Point Church. The problem of the sound environment at The Point Church is too complicated for the average person to understand even at the surface level. However, it is wonderful to watch how God is working with us to slowly shaping us to be a great music team. We learn as we go. I always crossed my fingers and hope for the best.
Posted on: Tue, 04 Nov 2014 09:09:42 +0000