Hello fellow SRS members!
As you’ve been informed, our regularly scheduled meeting for April 7 with Greta has had to be canceled. We’ve all been instructed to practice social distancing, and many of us are already sheltering in place. Unfortunately, that means no playing music with friends and no in-person music lessons. Fortunately there’s loads of music to listen to on the internet. For example, the Voices of Music channel on YouTube is loaded with wonderful videos of the best Early Music you’ll find anywhere.
For those of you who want to do more than practice on your own, I’ve uploaded quite a few play-along music files I’ve collected over the years to Dropbox. These are similar to the “Music minus one” LPs and CDs. Most can be played on alto, and some can be played on soprano or tenor. Some are fairly easy to play, and some are challenging.
• For many of them, all that’s necessary is to open the file and the music will be in front of you on your computer screen. Adjust the volume on the computer and play along from the screen. It’ll take a little getting used to but it’s worth it.
• For others, there’s a PDF of the solo part you can download and play from, while the computer, or your cell phone on external speakers, is playing the accompaniment.
• For others, there are two video files. One is complete: it plays the recorder part with the continuo. The second plays only the continuo, so you are the soloist. These also must be played while you’re sitting in front of your computer, or, if you’ve got the capability, stream it to your TV.
These are large video files, so I’d suggest downloading them separately. All together they take up about 442 Mb of space.
To get your music, click Here, or click on the link below:
This will take you to a dropbox folder labeled 2020-04 Mark’s April play-along files.
There are too many pieces to list. You’ll have to take a look yourself.
Look for a button at the top of the page that either looks like this: 
or says Download and click on it. A menu will drop down. Click on Download as .zip , and all of the music will download to your computer. Double-clicking on the zip folder should uncompress the files. If you don’t want to download all of the music at once, then click on just one of the titles. That single piece should automatically download to your computer. Depending on your download speed this should take anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes.
I hope this works for everyone. There’s plenty of music to keep you playing for a long time! If you have any difficulties downloading or using the files, please contact me and I’ll do my best to help. And . . . if they work well for you, please let me know!!
– – Mark
