Building Unit Sound

Here’s one way of looking at Unit Sound.



Listening Skills provide the foundation to all good ensemble singing. You need good ears to hear and adjust to the others in the group, but you’ll find that as you get better and better, your ears will also improve, so you can hear smaller and smaller decrements of difference and work at eliminating them.

Instant, Accurate Pitch is required to produce vertically aligned chords. It’s pretty hard to think about unity if the sound is muddy from chord to chord, or plain out of tune!

Blend is the bit that most people think of for unit sound, not surprisingly! We’re looking for similar vocal production skills and the same ideal sound, but also the harmony parts need to listen to the natural strengths and characteristics of the Lead’s voice and try to sing with a similar character – enough to make the blend great and the sound clean.

Instant, Matching Vowels will make a huge difference to blend, among other things, and working on vowel matching can help with matching Sound. The bit I’ve called One Voice is the hardest part. It’s 100% mental. It’s the transition from singing together to singing as one. You can’t achieve it without a certain mastery of the other aspects of unit sound.

There are several techniques that spring to mind to assist in promoting these skills in a quartet.

• Sing in a circle – only back-to-back. It’s a totally different aural experience.
  
• Use vowel vocalises to focus your ears on matching – this is why ‘warming up’ as a quartet is essential. My fave is the 5 vowel unison-split to chord, followed by 5 chord tag sung on those vowels (‘I Sing Barbershop’ tag chords). More on that and how to make the most of it if you ask me!
  
• Duetting – if you can’t hear the lead, you’re too loud. MATCH volume, bass/lead and bari-below/lead to give her full support without drowning her out. See my other posts on why duetting is brilliant.
  
• Sing lying down, with your heads in the centre. This totally changes how gravity affects your breathing mechanism and facial mask. It’s much harder to force chest voice (therefore much easier to mix into head tone) lying down, so you end up with an open, relaxed tone which is easier to mesh with the rest of the quartet.
  
• Bitch pitch. And ALWAYS lift the octaves and 5ths (that’s YOU baris and basses).
  
• Break down phrases to identify target vowels and ensure all 4 voices match. Watch out for consonant clusters.
  
• Voicebox Tunnel – get your lead to sing “wee wee wee” (slow and strong) on an Eb or so in her best resonant, open tone. Stand in front of her, adjusting for height so that her voice is projecting directly into the back of your neck (your voicebox). Sing the “wee wee wee” with her, matching her sound as much as you can, feeling her voice resonating through your voicebox and out through your mouth, mixed with your sound. This can be a really weird experience at first! Get the other 2 to stand out front and comment on the blend. This is the best exercise I know to get in touch with the Lead sound. Thanks Dede :-) You can do this with phrases from your song too.
  
• Use One Voice – more on this soon.

New Quartet? Learning Songs

After the initial fun of finding a name and a couple of songs to sing, many inexperienced and some semi-experienced quartets have difficulty translating that enthusiasm into a fantastic educational momentum that can mean the difference between a long-term success and a short-term dabbling into the art of quartetting.

For quartets where there are non-music readers present, if a member of your quartet can sing you a tape, things will come together much more quickly (professional tapes are available if there's no-one in your group, or you don't want to put extra pressure on anyone). Set your expectations before you start rehearsing - what you expect to be practicing at the following rehearsal (so you can all do homework) is a great way to wrap up a session, and can help focus you on the lessons of the day. If you've stated that you all want to be off paper (mostly at least!) with a song within two rehearsals, then everyone knows what is expected of them, and you'll all feel like you're pulling equal weight.

Once you have a general handle on the music and your phrasing/breath plan, it's time to start the most important activity of your quartet life: duetting. Many leave this step until they're fine-tuning for contest or an audition. My tip to you is do it as you are learning each new song.

By doing so:

• the lead will have a chance to practice (over and over) her fluid vocal line, working on her interpretation and consolidating her technique in tricky bits, so that the other parts can match her sound and consistent (but musically flexible!) interpretation;
• each part will fine tune their ears into the lead sound and feel where their part lies in relation to the melody, so that solid, vertical chord singing is encouraged, and you reach the best blend and unit sound possible;
• each part can practice singing their part like the melody - it's so easy to sing a harmony part as a sequence of notes, rather than lyrically as the lead does, but until harmony and melody match in flow, synchronisation and unit will suffer;
• the 2 listening parts can tune their ears to the level of unity they are striving for themselves in helping the duetters to sing as one - it's much easier to hear a mismatched vowel or badly aligned consonants when you're not singing at the same time!

Bass-tenor, bari-tenor and bass-bari duets are..... interesting, especially if their are a lot of octaves in the duet, but the three lead-? duets are of primary importance while learning a song. Yes, this means the lead sings 3 times as much. That's her job - her line is the most important!

Start with lead-bass (the most important duet of all), then do lead-bari, then trio lead-bari-bass, then lead-tenor, then trio lead-bass-tenor, lead-bari-tenor, then put all four parts together.

I promise you. It will sound fantastic.