Start your next creative digital project with Dave Carroll, a choir director and technical generalist with decades of experience in audio/video production, web design, custom software and music education. The first decade of my professional career was spent in Information Technology and Software Development. In 2012 I earned certification as a choral music educator, and taught for nine years in pu
blic school in Southwest Virginia. My choirs received consistent superior ratings. He has served on executive and audition committees for the Virginia chapters of NAfME and ACDA. You don't teach any more? I resigned in fall 2021, but I will always be a teacher. I just don't work for my local public school system anymore. What are you up to now? I am not hoping to have a traditional job at the moment. I seek to work on projects with creative and interesting people who are accomplishing things I find fulfilling and worthwhile. In our society this means "freelancing". In the first six months after leaving the school system I have: implemented a website redesign for a local church, created a community choir's Thanksgiving virtual choir performance, and began transforming an author's quirky database into an attractively laid out to-be-self-published catalogue of collectibles. What sort of website work do you do? Though I have the technical background for professional-grade web applications, I am thus far focusing on easy wins using Squarespace. It takes a developer and designer to make the best structural and visual decisions. Here's my latest work: https://stthomasabingdon.org
Virtual Choirs, huh? "Margot Venus" started as a side project making these during the height of the lockdowns. I have developed a very keen ear for making disparate recordings sound as though the performers were all in the room together, and enough basics of video production to feature the performers without overwhelming the audience. What is your musical aesthetic for Virtual Choir productions? We do not erase all imperfections of the source recordings. Choirs should sound authentically human! When at all possible we avoid pitch correction ("autotune") and never use audio techniques which would create a hyper-professional sound which could not exist in reality. We employ subtle use of reverb, selective editing of entrances and exits, "de-echoing" of source recordings, appropriate frequency equalization, careful mixing of voices and parts to ensure blend and balance, and uncomplicated stereo panning when mastering. What tools do you use?
- Logic Pro X
- Final Cut Pro X
- Apple Motion X
- Vocalign
- Accusonus post processing
- Permute (preprocessing)
Why "Margot Venus"? The name is inspired by the 1954 Ray Bradbury science fiction short story "All Summer in a Day". A character named Margot has recently moved to a school located on a future Venus, where it rains constantly. Margot is the only child in her class who has seen the sun. A tragedy ensues as she is bullied when the clouds actually part and the class experiences a rare moment. The name was inspired by how blissfully brief I hoped the COVID-19 pandemic would be.
