YRCC Zoomed 28SEP2020 Review and 05OCT2020

 28-SEP-2020 

The day the York Region Community Choir went Zoom!

Zoom kind of worked. About 22 people came and talked and sang and we’re going to do it every week. We’ll see how things go as we get better at Zooming. I don’t have great plans, great expectations, as we don’t have a concert or any performance at all to rehearse for. But, I want us to continue to be together and singing our songs. With Zoom, we can be together and we can sing our songs together, sort of. 

We all hear the same recording and we all sing our choir parts in our own homes. We’re all on mute because the quality of our wifi and hardware and software are a bit of an issue. Timing is off for one thing. No problem when we’re muted. 

We sang You Raise Me Up and Somewhere Out There. We had the sheet music on our own devices or printed out from the website. That way, we could use the screen entirely for seeing each other! A lot of us spent a lot of time looking at the music and not each other, but it felt good to be surrounded by our friends any time we looked up. I loved seeing you all singing together. It made me happy.

One big problem we had was that we got kicked out. Suddenly it ended. Free Zoom has a 40 minute limit. It happened a couple times. I forgot to let you know that you could come back. It was enough though for our first time. I think one hour is what most people can manage comfortably in a Zoom meeting, but if we do a variety of things, maybe we can last longer. 

Next week, we’re going to see how it works when someone else hosts. Tab will be the first guest host. She has the total Zoom deluxe package with no time limit, and all the bells and whistles. (Break-out groups sound like an interesting feature-a group for each part?) We will send an email through the website so that we can be sure everyone gets invited (at least I hope so. I missed people with my thing and kept having to add individuals and probably still missed someone-sorry it it was you!). 

Next week, let’s sing Why We Sing and You’ll Never Walk Alone. I’ll attach them to the YRCC Calendar again. If we have extra time and energy, we’ll sing Hallelujah. 

I’ll see if I can put the Zoom info there again too. Should be possible. 

Thank you for being patient with me and each other as we adapt to this new and hopefully very temporary situation. I am longing for the day when we can all see each other again in person, IRL, in real life. We’ll wear the shields Carol arranged to get us and we’ll keep our distance until the day we can hug again. 

For now, we’ll be Zoomers.