Online Singing Group
By: Graham Galloway, Kirrie Connections Meeting Centre
We use Zoom for our singing group and for all our online meetings. Our singing group takes place every Friday afternoon and there are usually around 7 people there.
There are two main issues with doing singing groups over video calls. Latency and feedback. Latency means that there is always a slight delay between whomever is leading and everyone else joining in, so it sounds terrible. This is made even worse as it also tends to cause really bad feedback.
The way we get round it is by getting everyone but the person leading to mute. We then turn it back on for chats in between songs. It’s useful if you can have a second person helping run the group to help mute and unmute everyone, as it can be difficult for the person leading to be performing and dealing with the tech side. We have some placeholder songs that we use every week to orientate people, one of which is ‘Auld Lang Syne’ which we sing at the end of every session. We all sing this together, as it doesn’t really matter if it’s a bit tuneless.
We send out weekly newsletters with songs of the week, and use them to stimulate conversation. Share screen is useful to show lyric sheets. We also take requests and just wing some, for example, a chat a few weeks ago about a broken washing machine lead to a discussion about washboards, which then led onto skiffle, and ended up with us all singing Lonnie Donegan songs.
Our choir leader Christine Kydd has done a wee video for Luminate that you can see here.
Photo by Clint McKoy on Unsplash