Personal Improvement - Commit To Change

If you're doing a vocalise for a single reason, you're wasting your time. Find 3. Here's a cheat's list: posture, breathing, phonation, resonance, articulation, intonation/tuning, vowel shapes, chord synchronisation... you get the idea!

To practice at home and get results:

1. Practice in front of the mirror to correct:

• Postural Faults / Tension in face or body
  
• Expressive communication - body and face
• Mouth shape
• Choreography
  

2. Tape yourself to hear:

• Vowel-to-vowel delivery of consonants
  
• Clear and bright, short vowels, forward and resonated, locked and rung
  
• Dynamic plan & vocal gems
  
• Lyric delivery - all parts sing as melody
  
• Lifted, relaxed, resonant, forward tone throughout range and dynamics
  

3. If you're singing for half a page without stopping, you're not learning anything. Expect to sing a phrase or set of phrases 5-10 times to get it to a higher level before proceeding. EVERYONE has SOMETHING they can improve on.

Speaking as a singer who is always striving to improve, every note and word I sing is on purpose. I'm putting placement, dynamic, character, emotion, tuning and more into every note, every phrase, while striving to achieve an effortless sound. Practice just lets you do it without hard thinking!

Learning Songs – Mark Your Target Vowels

Want to get a step ahead and learn your songs at the level you’d like to sing them? There are a couple of easy things you can do to improve your chances of success, and all they require is preparation before unleashing the song to your singers.Quartets may choose to do this preparation together, so initial interp of phrases is agreed by all, or your “Quartet MD” or coach can do it, if you have one!

Any note that is held for any length in a phrase, and especially the last note of each phrase should have its target vowel spelt above it.

In my example above, the red dots indicate a held word, green double slash is a unit breath mark. You can see I haven’t marked every single word, nor shown the diphthong every time – too much marking can obfuscate rather than clarify things for the learner.

For each held syllable I’ve indicated the target vowel.I’ve also marked the following potential traps:

• where a note is held by some parts and moved by others.... target vowel must not move until you’re ready to hit the next note (or breathe), as in “say” and “clear”. Also, the holding parts must practice ‘spinning’ the sound and keeping the vowel fresh and bright;
• some words are sound smudges waiting to happen. “message”, “matter” and “ever” are the 3 in this intro. Each has a second syllable which if not learnt correctly will end up only semi-sung “messg”, “mattr” and “evr” – no target vowel in there, so we end up with nothing we can use to lock and ring, and a smudge in the vocal line. If we identify the target vowels as we are learning, we can hope NOT to fall into that trap!

There are other things to look for and practice as the notes and words are being committed to memory:

• take note of big jumps in pitch. If they go up (as in “say” and “oh” for the basses) you must prepare mentally and physically for the upper note before you attempt to move to it – make the space for the sound first. You must also lift the top vowel, refreshing its shape as you move from note to note, where it is held for several pitches. If the pitch change is downward, sing the bottom vowel/pitch as bright and high as possible;
• work on the flow of each phrase, trying to feel a circular movement between held notes or over the phrase as a whole... kinda hard to explain! If you try and ‘direct’ your own singing, you’ll be less inclined to clomp evenly through sequences of words (like “message from my heart”).

Hopefully, your learning tapes will reflect these target vowels – there’s nothing like learning from a good example. Also, before you copy out the music for the rest of the chorus, these markings should be made so that your singers are all learning the same thing. If you let them mark up their own, I guarantee there’ll be some who miss bits out, some who think they’ll remember, so don’t write it in, and some who think they’ll write in their own spelling of the vowels.... it’s human nature!

New Music, New Level?

Have you ever noticed that skills you've spent the last 6 months drumming into your contest songs appear by themselves (at least to some degree) in the new song you started last week?

It's true, learning new songs is an important factor in increasing your skill level, especially if you're trying to make a big change from the 'old way'. I've frequently been asked if a group should 'chuck out' all its old songs because of the old habits in them, rather than try to fix them, and the answer in my opinion is YES. Now, I'm not advocating mass slaughter in the repertoire, but embarking on a 'music refreshment' program, replacing old songs one by one, can be of real benefit.

The key issue here is that new songs be:

1. chosen to work in with the skill set you have been working on
2. chosen to replace in function, the song being dropped (a show starter, or tearjerker ballad etc)
3. introduced with those new skills in mind, employed during the learning phase of the song, not once notes and words are known.

I guess this is one of my pet peeves: that so much of the time, learning the notes and words is given very little attention, especially in a chorus situation. It's once people are supposed to be 'off paper' that education starts to be applied to the music. That's BACKWARDS! If you were learning to play the piano, what would you think if your teacher gave you some music, sent you home and said, "go and learn this, and when you know it, I'll teach you how to play it"? You'd get yourself a new piano teacher!

But that sounds like a whole other entry to me! Learn Smart, not Twice.... coming soon to a blog near you :-)

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.