Projecting Notes Along With Lyrics

[jdycus]

Our Easter Cantata is coming up and the minister of music wants to project the lyrics on the back wall so that the choir will not have to use books. Choir members are asking if I can project each page from the song book so that they can see the notes. Is there a way to do this?

[wogster]

I can't see why not, you would take the song book, scan the pages and put them up as images or pictures, although there are a few issues,

1) Screens are landscape in nature (wider across then high), your book is portrait in nature, which is higher across then wide, so you tend to have a small image in the middle of an otherwise dark screen.

2) When you add the musical notation, that makes everything on the screen, much smaller.

3) There are 2 ways to denote SATB (Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Bass) music, one is where each part has it's own line this makes it easier to read on a screen. The other is where SA is on one line and TB is on another line, essentially the way to tell if a note is your part is the tail, tail up is Soprano or Tenor, depending on the line, and tail down is Alto and Bass, the tails are thin and could get lost on a screen, especially if it's lower resolution. It gets worse if there are splits where one or more of the parts is split into first and second, which is common on choral music.

4) You probably do not have the rights to scan the song book, to put on the screen.

A comment, now I have been in a variety of church and other choirs, some really good, some not so good. Over the years that has involved memory work on many occasions. Memorizing musical notes is a fairly quick and easy process, memorizing the words that go with that music, that's a slow labour intensive process. Most singers will remember the notes after about 3-4 rehearsals, meaning it comes down to memorizing the words and watching the conductor for intro's and cut-offs.

If your choir is half descent, they can memorize the notes and you can just put the words on the screen. It will only be confusing where different parts have different words, but you can always use different colours or fonts for different parts.

[andrewf]

We project the chords and words, but not actual notes.

This has worked out well for us for years.

[[Admin] osborn4]

If you went with the scan method, you'd have to do two screens per page. Then you have all those wonderful repeats, ds al coda, 1st, 2nd, 3rd ending. So you'll have to know what screen to jump to at any given time.

I agree with wogster. This should have enough rehearsal that they should have the notes down cold. Memorization is a good thing. Of course, that's probably not your call.

[jdycus]

Originally Posted by andrewf

We project the chords and words, but not actual notes.

This has worked out well for us for years.

How do you accomplish this?