The UK Brass Band I play with has already hosted one on-line meeting for our locked down brass players (via Zoom).
It was immediately apparent that timing latency makes it impossible for us all to perform together as though we were all in the same room. So we can't play pieces together.
But we can do exercises. If we were all in the same room, this is the sort of thing we might do:
- breathing exercises
- scales and intervals
- lip slurs
- copying back a played phrase
- watching the conductor
- improvising over a held chord
- listening for intonation
- fingering patterns
- stylistic techniques, e.g. how to swing
- etc.
When I physically stand in front of an ensemble my ears tell me which players are OK with what they've been asked to do, and who might need extra explanation/encouragement. But in video conferencing, the sound is mono, so everyone's sound comes from one point in space. It's much harder to know who needs the explanation/encouragement. So mono sound is another limitation of video conferencing.
My question is - what useful exercises can a group of musicians in lockdown do that still work despite timing latency and mono soundfield?