The Breath Of Life

When we sing for any audience, breath is life - literally of course, but also the life of the sound depends on HOW we breathe.

Leading breath of the song: breathe in the pitch, breathe in the vowel.

Take Full Body Breaths wherever possible. This means breathing from the feet up, relaxing the diaphragm, springing open the ribcage (from back to front) and releasing all accumulated tension in the body to reset to a poised posture and attitude.

NEVER 'snatch' a breath. Personal Breaths are taken mid-note, mid-phrase and involve a PROPER breath. It takes no more time. It gives you 100% air instead of 50% and it releases tension instead of adding it.

NEVER 'push' your stomach out as you breathe in. That engages muscles not suitable for singing. The tummy FALLS naturally when you spring the ribcage and relax the diaphragm.

The 'pregnant pause' in the middle of a song is too often an excuse for the singers to HOLD their breath till the end of the pause, then breathe relatively quickly (and noisily) to start the new phrase. BREATH IS LIFE. Any time you are NOT breathing either in or out, you are technically DEAD. And this is where the philosophy of breath and energy gets involved...

When we sing, we are breathing out in an unusual way, and producing sound energy. Music also evokes an emotional response when performed well - let's call that emotional energy. So our instrument is putting out huge amounts of physical, sound and emotional energy. Is that why we're so drained by the end of the song? The fact is, we SHOULDN'T be drained, we should have MORE energy (be more pumped) at the end than at the beginning.

As a Showmanship tool, we talk about bringing in the emotional message of each phrase on the breath that precedes it. I like to talk about inhalation being our only opportunity to TAKE IN ENERGY while we perform. Breath is life, so each breath we take during a song should come with a rush of energy, which we immediately transfer into the sound and emotional energy delivered in the phrase. So take in that emotional energy (with a spring-relax breath) before every phrase and you will feel your performance energy build and build.

So back to the LONG BREATH (nee pregnant pause).... it can take a long time, but should be a slow, steady inhale of breath and energy, setting up the next phrase.

Breath also affects our unity. 75% of all synch problems are caused by confused breath plans, and at the higher levels, by lack of unit approach to breath style.

Lastly, without a relaxed body we cannot achieve vocal freedom. We cannot have a relaxed body if we breathe in a way which creates any tension. Remember that when you breathe, it should be a RELEASE, not a GRAB.

A Note On Unity

More than any other vocal ensemble, the barbershop chorus requires total unity of voices. As the First Violins of a chamber orchestra must sound like one instrument and not vie amongst each other with individual 'soloist' character, so each voice part must be of one voice.

This means, of course, that soloist traits such as vibrato, 'chest' pressure on the sound, and spontaneous interpretive embellishments (altered timing, vocal inflections, dynamics, breath plan) are not present. The greater the skill of the chorus, the more of these expressive elements they can execute AS A GROUP. The artistry is in the ear of the director, not in the individual singers. Theirs is the skill of unit delivery and 100% commitment to the artistic plan from the director.

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.

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!

Spelling Vowels

The key here is BE CONSISTENT.

Whatever you choose as your example words, make sure vowels are never spelt with more than one vowel (EE is the same vowel twice, so that’s OK, but AY is not – that’s a diphthong, and yes, Y is a vowel) and choose SHORT vowels whenever possible.

Below is my method of spelling, which works well with Australians and Brits – not sure about our US friends. I like to put an H after the vowel as it reads shorter: “I” could be said as “eye” but “IH” reads like the vowel in “itch”.

Vowel Spelling (reminder word)

• IH (it)
• EH (pet)
• UH (hut)
• OH (hot)
• OO (ooze)
• AH (part) – a classical vowel, not the Aussie crow... almost always comes before an R. Wherever possible, use UH instead – it’s shorter/brighter and less difficult to match!
• EE (beat)
• A (at)
• URGE (urge) – this is a funny one: you might spell it ER or UR, but the whole point is to sing the vowel without introducing the R into it! Obviously, you don’t put the GE on when you sing it in context.

When a matching problem comes up, replace the syllable at issue with the reminder word for a few repetitions, then when you’re used to the sound it should be, try the real word again.

Make sure you pronounce a big contrast between the 2 vowels of a diphthong, max 80:20 target:diphthong. In “my” you can feel the distance between the target vowel “AH” and diphthong vowel “EE” – make sure you travel all the way, or you won’t hear it at all.

You will find from time to time something you can’t spell using these rules.... find a reminder word that works for you!