To See or Not To See .. .. .. .

.. .. .. . that is the question !

Whether it is nobler of the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of spending a fortune, or get some advice .. .. please ?

My wife has recently taken up permanent residence in a Residential Care Home. During a recent visit I wandered into the residents' lounge for the first time and admired a splendid looking Grand Piano occupying one corner of this large room. The musician in me couldn't resist the temptation and I wandered over, sat down and had a good play. Initially I got some grunts of approval and applause but after a while I got a series of ' .. .. play something we can sing to .. .. .' comments.
I was happy to oblige and having calculated the average age of my company I played a couple of wartime songs and a couple of slightly later numbers. I became aware that each number started well but the singing stopped after a couple of lines .. LOL .. they don't remember the lyrics !

Unable to think of a reason why not quickly enough, I've promised to return for another go and I need to take some lyrics with me. I could just print some paper song sheets but I can hear someone saying ' .. .. I haven't got me glasses .. . '

I came up with the idea of using a laptop .. the lyrics of most songs are easily located on the web, and then a video projector onto any one of several large walls available in the room. I've never used that sort of gear and I've found some comments about the need to significantly darken the room for the image to be visible which would probably be a problem for safety reasons.

Anybody got any experience to support some advice or a better Idea please ?

Thanks

MM

- if only 1 or 2 lines are displayed then a greater distance works with a small monitor.
- connect the laptop to bigscreen with VGA, change TV to VGA port.
- CHoose either display projector, Clone or extended display 1& 2 whichever works best for you.
- show scrolling lyrics from some source or App https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=scrolling+lyrics
- you play to sync up to lyrics

Good evening MM.

As someone who has carried a video projector from Stavanger to Mossel Bay and Bristol to Ulsan, and many places in between as part of my former day-job, a darker room was often better for displaying pictures, ie photographs of some odd items of equipment.
It was not necessary to have the room dark like a cinema, a good compromise was to have no lights shining directly on the wall used as the projection screen.

Another thing to consider is the size of the projected image, the bigger (wider and taller) the image, the lower the brightness for the same lamp power.

In the case of Mrs MM and her fellow inmates, I guess that your lyrics can be simply black text on a white background, or white text on a black background, for maximum contrast and best readability.

One thing which occurs to me, and I don't know if this exists as a simple piece of software and readily available...
Something to display just one or two lines of text at a time with a jolly bouncy pointer highlighting where you are in the song.
This may be difficult to sync to your playing though.

As for the video projector itself, when I bought mine about 20 years ago, there were cheap ones and there were good ones, mine cost me just short of £1k, cheaper ones were available for £200 or £300.
I never regretted the choice that I made.

My projector has an incandescent lamp, but the newer projectors have LEDs of course.
The only LED projector that I have seen close up is nice and bright, but I don't know how much it cost.

My experience for what it is worth.

JimB

Perhaps a high brightness, outdoor type projector, such as one of these, would work.

Hi Guys

Thanks very much for the advice, makes good sense to me!

I didn't know there was such a thing as a high brightness, outdoor type projector.

JimB said:

One thing which occurs to me, and I don't know if this exists as a simple piece of software and readily available...
Something to display just one or two lines of text at a time with a jolly bouncy pointer highlighting where you are in the song.
This may be difficult to sync to your playing though.

Click to expand...

As Tony has eluded to, there is a variety of ready-made and free software available that will either scroll the lyrics or scroll a marker over the lyrics to indicate the position, however, I see a problem with the use. Out of necessity the scrolling of the lyrics is metronomic, very precisely timed. I know from past experience that folk, particularly the elderly, do not sing with the same degree of precision timing, synchronisation is lost and the singing stops because ' .. you're playing it wrong ! ..' If the lyrics are just a static display I can quite easily follow the singing.

My next step - I'm going to try and hire a projector and experiment with it .. ..

Thanks again Guys, much appreciated.

MM

JimB said:

One thing which occurs to me, and I don't know if this exists as a simple piece of software and readily available...
Something to display just one or two lines of text at a time with a jolly bouncy pointer highlighting where you are in the song.

Click to expand...

The software is easy enough, eg.

That's free,

However the music with included lyrics is generally not free - you have to buy either individual tracks or collections, from such as here:

The program runs on any PC or laptop, allows you to select a track and play it, with the lyrics prompts in time with the music.

If you had speakers near the piano so you could play in time to the music, it could work?

This forum never ceases to amaze me with it's incredible range of knowledge.

Mike.