Back in 2008 I composed a musical for Easter, following the events of the last week in the life of Jesus Christ. It was all part of the “Hope 08” churches together activities we saw that year. It was performed twice, in my church and also in a local school, by the members and soloists of the Churches of Canley Choir.

I decided in 2009 to return to it, and I reworked some aspects of it, including a new version of the first song, “Hosanna”. This was the version which later that year we performed in a number of different venues, and then later recorded.

Whilst a CD recording was produced, I was never terribly happy with it, as I lacked the technology at the time to deal with pitching issues, and we’d recorded in a church hall which had questionable acoustics. Over the years since I’ve toyed with the idea of somehow separating the vocals from the instrumentals in the original mix and therefore having them to play around with and improve, if at all possible. And last year, lo and behold, I found an online tool which promised to do just that. Lalal.ai has indeed done what it promised to, and has given me vocals with very little trace of instrumentals at all. What’s more, there is not much degradation in the quality of the vocals.

With my vocal tools, including Melodyne, I was able to correct pitching and timing issues for the most part, with a slight issue remaining with tracks which have a soloist singing above a choir – here it became quite difficult to change the pitching of individual voices within the mix without also affecting the pitch of other voices. In an ideal world, I’d reform the choir and get them into a recording studio. What I’ve got is the next best thing.

And its worked really very well. I’ve returned to the original instrumental files and remixed them with updated sample libraries, I’ve given the whole mix a little more lift and sheen by using equalization and compression, along with a lashing of reverb. It feels like a whole new piece. And I’m really very pleased with it.

It’s available to stream on Youtube, Spotify, Apple music, and Amazon music, amongst others. Links are below.

Please do listen on your chosen platform, and through it may you experience again the Hope of Easter.