Yesterday evening I went with Clare to the Fountain School Community Choir practice. Despite my often lengthy absences, she's keen to get me singing whenever I can. I'm not sure if my voice or my sight-singing is up to it. My lower register has certainly diminished in recent years, and my upper register improved somewhat, so I'm more of a light baritone than a bass in old age. I wasn't quite as rusty as I feared I would be, perhaps singing a few times with the St George's choir in Malaga did me more good than I realised. But now, I have to work on rescuing my lower range notes, with a few daily exercises.
Father Mark dropped off the audio adaptor cable last night for my to test this morning. I went to St Catherine's to celebrate the midweek Eucharist, and after the service the girl-friend of the deceased young man called in for a trial run of the music for tomorrow's funeral. The adaptor fitted into one of the floor sockets for microphone cables, with a phone mini-jack at the other end of a light 30m cable. I plugged it into my phone, and selected Catrin Ffinch playing the Goldberg Variations. It worked perfectly for all of ten seconds, then gave up altogether with a loud crackle. Somewhere in that 30m line there's a short circuit. Impossible to commit to working with unreliable kit in the day.
Before leaving home I tested my phone with another cable attached to a portable radio/CD player, and knew this would work in church, with one of the substantial radio hand mics to distribute the sound through the church sound system, so I was able to reassure the girl that we had a solution. But things are never so simple. She showed me her phone and started to play me one of the tracks they wanted to use at the service. In fact she had a phone in each hand, one piggybacking on the wi-fi of the other to stream music from an internet site. Streamed from one device with its own internet connection would carry a degree of unwelcome risk going live at a funeral, to my mind.
The phone signal in church is quite strong, though not uniformly so, and if there's any sudden local demand, the signal can drop and sabotage the streaming process. Therefore, tracks downloaded and then played on a single device attached to the sound system is the least risky thing to do, I explained and begged her to go and get help to organise this side of things properly, and get the device to me well before the service, to test and adjust sound levels. Printer's proofs for the service leaflet arrived by email from the funeral directors approval, then later in the evening, the family eulogy arrived by email, and all I needed for tomorrow was ready to go. It's going to be a very well attended service, so naturally we do our best to ensure everything works as intended on the day,
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