Dateline: April 28 2020
The magic of video that the public sees when a band ‘big’ or other, or cast of thousands of singers appear to performing together at the same time over the internet is of course just that. You can’t have multiple performances over the internet in real time, in sync.

There’s a variety of ways to seem to be achieving this feat and last weekend Alan Parsons and recent MCTS vocal star David Pack delivered a beautiful performance of The Beatles' Tell Me What You See for the Los Angeles Mayor’s Fund to assist those on the front line in the fight against against Covid-19.

David took the lead on this and simply recorded (on video and audio in ProTools) his part, which he then sent to Alan as two tracks of audio (vocal and guitar) with his accompanying iPhone video. With his trusty engineer Noah Bruskin safely in his own home in Santa Barbara, driving Alan’s ProTools session remotely using TeamViewer (’a bit slow and fuzzy so Noah couldn’t work at his usual lightning fast pace,” says Alan), Alan then miked up his own voice and acoustic guitar and played along to David’s track. They didn’t use a click, just a count-in as you can hear on the broadcast.

A sprinkling of reverb on the vocals and that was about it, a quick balance, and that was about it. David didn’t hear or see Alan until Alan had recorded his part.

Even once the current health/isolation crisis is over no one is going to forget this in a hurry nor figure that it can’t happen again. But even though we won’t be able change the laws of physics, we will get better at these domesticated concerts. Whether it’s Paul McCartney in his kitchen (does he really keep a Rhodes in there?), Elton John in his shrubbery, or Eddie Vedder on his harmonium ’somewhere,’ this might not become the new norm exactly but it will become commonplace and we will - and dare I say need to - get better at it.

We’ll be offering more thoughts on options, equipment and more in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.