Love of music unites senior choir for one last performance

WORLAND – Each year the Marshazz choir group at Worland High School has a senior song that they sing at the final concert.

However, with all school events being canceled since mid-March due to the novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19), Choir Director Chad Rose decided to share a piece with the music students that they had "worked on with Grammy nominee Sara Gazarek at Jazz Festival."

The piece the choir performed is called 'American Tune' which was written by Paul Simon and arranged by Jamie Dyer

To start the whole process, Rose had his friend Erik Olson who is a freelance jazz musician lay down the piano track for the song. After that he sent the piano track off to his students and had each of them sing their individual part.

Once the students were able to send their recordings back to Rose, the difficult process of editing the 15 different videos to be in sync with each other along with the piano baseline began.

According to Rose, he "did not know the software at all before the process," but figured since he was stuck inside, he thought it would be a great time to learn a new skill and did the editing process himself.

When he began the editing process, he contacted Tony Huerta who is the studio producer and live sound tech for Take 6. From there, Huerta introduced him to some sound production plugins for the multi-track software program that Rose has used for about 15 years. Rose then separated the audio and video tracks for balance reasons and spent a ton of time learning Adobe Premiere Pro to help him edit.

With each of the audio coming in great, Rose then faced the challenge of confirming closing consonants and tuning chord tendencies when they are not in the same room as the other singers.

Rose compared the process much to that of a studio recording, and hopes that it was a great lesson to the kids teaching them about the "power of making music with others, and how different the studio process is to the live process."

Rose has posted the video on his Facebook page, YouTube channel, and it will be available to view on the Northern Wyoming News Facebook page.

"In regards to the time, I will say this," Rose said. "When you are putting together something you love, by people you love, for people you love, time really isn't the issue."