I'm singing in a choir of 50 singers. We will be recording, and want to eliminate the sound of swishing pages when turning them. (Of course it would be better to memorize the music, but we haven't done this yet.)
Does anyone have tricks for making page turns quiet, e.g. folds, different weight of paper, lamination, ...?
A few guys I play with now are using Apple iPads (other brands are available!), even the conductor has succumbed, which contain everything they need on a screen. They also have the facility to 'turn pages' using a foot pedal - I have a Roland keyboard with that turn pages built in (but can't use it!). Useful also for size of print, repeats, etc.
Maybe this doesn't answer the question directly, but it does provide an alternative to rustling sheets, albeit at a more expensive choice than paper charts.
The things have have worked for me:
Turning pages is usually noisier than moving them aside, and paper on paper is noisier than plastic on plastic.
Depending on the available space and number of pages required, setting up wide music stands and having pages printed one-side only, laminated or in thin plastic sheets, and then moved from side to side, instead of turned, might help reduce the overall sound. Should be pretty cheap too and might work in combination with the other suggestions.
It would be useful to determine when the music lulls to avoid unnecessary movement during the quieter parts of the performance.
Practice turning pages very slowly with the choir. Make a game out of it. Without singing, turn pages and see how quiet everyone can be.
Find a way to stagger the page turns across (or even within) sections. You may be able to cut sheets of music in half and reassemble them in page protectors so page turns are staggered. (For example: the top half of page 2 now sits below the bottom half of page 1.) HALF of your binders would end up looking something like this:
|1|1|2|3|
|-|2|3|4|
etc.
If you can't do that, you may be able to bring one system from the next page to the bottom of the one before. Even spreading all the page turns across a few bars will help.
You may find it quieter to put the music in page protectors and link all the pages together with plain binder rings--no binder. It looks a bit odd, but you're recording audio and not shooting a video.
If I get it right, when you approach the end of a page, you need to turn it, which creates unwanted noise.
To counter or eliminate the noise here are a couple of scenarios. They are like a blueprint and any of your solutions should fit the scenarios characteristics. Think of guided creativity.
It's ok to combine ideas mentioned and to develop them further.
Here we go.
When approaching the end of the page, by some means X you can completely keep TURNING away from any page, so there is no noise.
Idea: An X with this property could be e.g. distributed pages. I.e. one set changes after odd pages, a second after even pages. If you split those sets among each other every choir member can follow left or right on leadsheets AND turn his or her sheet at different times, reducing noise considerably.
You modify the end of page such that there no longer is a need to turn a page, so there is silence.
Idea: You could take the one of sc.1 a step further and break pages not only at the end but say with an offset of half a page etc.
The end of a page is approaching and you can't prevent to turn it, thus creating noise, BUT X completely compensates the turning process' noise creation.
Ideas: The 3 ideas Aaron mentions fulfill these properties. I.e. experiement with different materials (noisy ones, silent ones), turning techniques (noisy and silent ones) etc. Consider going from uniform (all have the same medium, creating a lot of collective noise) to non-uniform (mix of media for the same song with different noise creation).
Modification: Come up with a turning strategy which simply spreads the noise in time. I.e. some start turning earlier than others, some later.
Sidewalk: When will the turning be most noisy? When you hold it up against the microphone. When will it be almost silent? Far away, lowered to the ground (i.e. shielded by the choirs bodies). Develop on that observation. (Here X would be the position, where you perform turning the pages.)
There are even more things you could do.
Resist the temptation to say "it's impossible, too costly" etc. Instead review what you already DO have (e.g. people, material, methods, rules, ...) and try identifying X amongst them (already there, or almost freely available).
A simple list, held against the 3 scenarios mentioned, might do the trick.
Part of the noise is created when you rub the corner of the page against the few ones you grab at a time, while trying to separate only one before actually turning it.
You may add "tabs" to each page made of "sticky notes paper" or even plain masking tape (painters tape). Each page should have the tab at a different position, thus making it easy to grab only the next one.
Projectors with laptops can be used, and you can easily block out the sounds of the mouse clicks. (I use plural because I assume rather than all reading from a common sheet, different voices have different music.)
I think the best solution might reliant on how the choir will be assembled for recording: one large group with a few microphones, or possibly each voice in a different grouping with different microphone? Perhaps a separate mic for soloist?
