Dear Band Members,

In response to a number of requests, this e-mail contains a link to the recorded tracks from the previous Believers Band rehearsal. The goals of this effort are as follows:

– To provide a way to “re-live” the rehearsal in a convenient way, controllable and available when your schedule permits.
– To let everyone hear what the conductor/audience hears when we play, not what we hear sitting in the band.
– To capture the conductors’ instructions which you may not have had time to write on the music.
– Perhaps most important is the ability to practice by playing along with the recordings. Commercial versions as found on J. W. Pepper and YouTube are very useful but are often different than the way we will play the same music, at our conductors discretion. They are often just sound clips and not complete versions.

With our Spring Concert just around the corner, this would be an excellent time to take advantage of this resource. :^)

Now the mechanics…..you need to have a computer that is on-line to the internet and has the ability to play sounds/music through speakers or headphones. Windows and Apple devices meet this requirement.

Here is the link:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/4d4u6fgk7ym3zfz/AACzlpvAMaBcwHxEogmL-gnQa?dl=0

If you need a refresher on how to proceed:

Copy this link and then paste it into your PC browser and hit enter, it will take you to a folder in a “cloud” storage service (Dropbox specifically) and you will see a list of the songs in the order they were rehearsed. Clicking on any song title will launch a music player. Depending on your specific machine, it may automatically begin playing the song or you might have to click on a small triangle like the “play” button on a CD player. That’s it.

All of the players I know allow you to start, stop, pause and go to a specific part of the song so you can re-play anything as many times as you wish. Somewhere on the player screen you should see a time indication (like 02:31) that shows you that point in play-time. In the example shown, it indicates that it is 2 minutes and 31 seconds from the start of the music file. This allows you to pause, choose a place in time and go directly to it without searching back and forth. Remember cassettes?? :^( The current players also show a kind of “picture” of the music where you can go anywhere by point-and-click,

The music files are read-only so there is nothing you can do to damage or change them. No worries.

The plan is to continue distributing these recordings whenever the rehearsal has suitable material that is not too badly chopped up. And yes, the dress rehearsal recording will be posted next week.

Any comments about your experience using this resource are welcome. I hope you find it useful.

Ron Foster
rfoster@stanvik.com
678-997-5405