Archive for Barbershop Blog

Basic Barbershop Interpretation

July 14, 2008 Jo No comments

I’m writing a resource sheet for school teachers who have barbershop groups at their schools and need to take the first step into changing their singing style from a cappella to barbershop. Here’s the gist of my tips on interpretation of songs…

Characteristic of the style, barbershop interpretation has several ‘rules of thumb’ by which we are guided as we strive to bring out the full musicality of our performances. These depend firstly on what kind of song it is.

Tempo Song (Uptune)

A Tempo Song or Uptune is one which is sung primarily with a strict beat. This can be 6/8 or C – as long as it is IN TEMPO it falls in this category.

Tempo can only be changed or interrupted once during the song – the ‘toe tap’ of the audience must not be lost more than once or their enjoyment of the performance will be diminished. This means that acceptable forms include:

  • songs with a single ‘ad lib’ verse sung in the middle
  • the inclusion of a ‘stomp’ section
  • a song that starts ‘ad lib’ then sets the tempo some way through.

If a return to the original tempo is required after such an interruption, this is usually done by a pause or fromata on the last note(s) of the ad lib or stomp section. Tempo can also be reset from a slower delivery by using an accellerando.

Many uptunes have an ‘intro’ which is generally sung ‘ad lib’, with the tempo set on the first beat of the verse or chorus which follows. Most uptunes complete with a ‘tag’ which is usually all or partly ‘ad lib’ as well, even if this is only a suspension on the penultimate tension chord and then a held resolution for the last chord. These bits are added to the top and back of a song to make it feel finished as there is no accompaniment to play an introduction or ending for us.

Ballad

Ballads are sung totally ad lib or rubato.

There is a general sense of ‘pace’ remaining, but all note values are changeable from what is written. The reason for this is that we strive to draw out as much of the song’s message as possible – for some songs this is easy, as high notes and important phrases coincide, but for other songs, where the held value is often on an unimportant word (like ‘is’ or ‘of’) it can make a dramatic difference to the portrayal of the message.

For example, if the words are “life would be nothing without you” then you have a choice of emphasis: “life would be NOTHING without you” or “LIFE would be nothing without YOU” etc. One hopes (as in this case) the melody will help us: it peaks on ‘nothing’, so that’s where the emphasis should be. This is where artistic license comes in, and individual interpretation and connection with the song.

In general, chords to hold include:

  • where melody rises to a natural word and music climax
  • in an end-phrase chord progression, the most interesting tension chord should be suspended the longest to increase the pleasure of resolution for the auditor
  • where pleasant chording combines with word emphasis

Words are milked of all meaning, using emphasis by sound colour, embellishment, vocal effect etc. to add full dimensionality to the piece.

Dynamics

Dynamics follow word meaning and melodic direction.

Unless done for effect (eg from fff to ppp), dynamics shouldn’t change significantly over a breath. Dynamic change should occur WITHIN the phrase, where it can be noticed by the ear and therefore used effectively to enhance musicality and meaning.

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Want to stay in pitch?

April 7, 2008 Jo 2 comments

Make sure that as you transition through the vocal line, each successive vowel is LIFTED into the vowel space under your hard palette, not allowed to fall into the jaw.

To feel the difference, try singing (on one note) “we are” and notice the way it feels to LIFT out of the EE to a bright AH (for “are”). Now go EE and let the AH (for “are”) fall into the jaw space. Doesn’t sound that bad, but you’ll lose pitch with that approach, and ring fewer chords with the ‘darker’ vowel sound. Can you hear and feel that the ‘dropped’ vowel has had the top resonators chopped out of it?

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Growth Mindset

December 2, 2007 Jo 3 comments

Just read a great article on how different mindsets affect achievement. The Growth Mindset is one where intelligence and ‘talent’ are recognized as requiring a lot of effort and hard work to bring to fruition. A Fixed Mindset believes that ability is innate and if you don’t have a talent for something, there’s no point in trying, resulting in the avoidance of that skillset, or making the individual feel disillusioned by lack of success, rather than spurred on to greater effort as happens with a Growth Mindset.

You can read the article at Scientific American: http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-to-raising-smart-kids&print=true

When I read it, I immediately recognized that this theory applies to singers as well. So many, many times I’ve been told by people that they’re not good singers, or that it’s all right for me, because I’m talented so singing is easy for me… What a bunch of crap! It’s when people truly believe that they will never sound good that improvement is impossible. Every time I make a learning tape or learn a song, I am aware of deficiencies in my performance and strive to correct them. When you watch me singing, I’m feeling each note and tuning it, caressing it, lifting it… a lot of practice has made it ‘easy’, so don’t belittle the achievement by telling me it’s just talent!

Just recently several people have, quite separately, told me they hate to listen to their voice (on recordings) because they hear all the deficiencies and failings in it. This indicates to me a Fixed Mindset – you don’t want to hear your deficiencies as you believe you can’t correct them. It’s also a major problem with vocal freedom and truly giving yourself to the music as your vocal self-image is something you hate. It sounds a bit naff to say ‘learn to love your own voice’ but your singing confidence and ability will definitely improve if you can get over that aversion.

Dale Syverson has a vocal lesson every week. Luciano Pavarotti had a voice teacher and lessons all his adult life. You think they’re not talented? Effort is rewarded in this artform. ‘Talent’ is really just good technique, and the only gift some people have is starting out with better natural technique, or fewer problems!

So tape yourself singing a song you love. Listen to it, to the sound of your voice. To start with, don’t get hung up on technical faults you hear, but listen to the vocal character – what makes it sound like you. Listen to it and listen to it (you may want to do more than one song!) for weeks and months and slowly you’ll get used to that voice. If a technical flaw is bugging you, work on fixing it, record a corrected version of the song, and enjoy hearing the improvement! As you continue this process, you’ll not only lose the ‘hate’ for your voice, but will start to feel proud of your voice, proud of each correction you make. You’ll start to feel great satisfaction, knowing what you are achieving, and this will only spur you on to greater improvement. Practicing in front of a mirror is a great way to eliminate bad vocal habits by the way: you can see posture problems and see when your mouth isn’t the right shape or moves on a target vowel. It’s another thing people hate doing, because they don’t like to look at themselves – yet not looking isn’t going to solve the problem!

So don’t hide away from your voice – that’s defeatist and Fixed Mindset and will never allow you to grow beyond your current abilities.

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The Lost Art of Breathing In

November 12, 2007 Jo No comments

I’d have to say that THE most common breathing problem I encounter in one-on-one vocal lessons (and quartet coaching) is inadequate or faulty inhalation. People seem forget how to breathe in (something fairly vital and unconscious) once they start singing. In fact, people work so hard on breathing that the breaths they take get smaller and more muscle-bound than ever and getting them to release all that tension and remember the full-body breath is hard work!

Do you fall into that category? If you’ve been practicing your ‘catch breath’ and not practicing the relax-and-spring-open feeling of taking a full breath, you’re probably missing out on air and working far too hard to do it.

Go swimming and do some breast stroke with your head going under at every 2nd stroke, breathing out through the mouth while you’re underwater – you’ll find you take a lovely, full breath very quickly and without muscular strain. That’s just what you need to be going for when singing.

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Building Unit Sound

November 3, 2007 Jo One comment

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.

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Lead, nee Baritone

November 3, 2007 Jo No comments

A really good way of fast-tracking the transition from a harmony part to Lead is to get your lead to sing your songs by themselves, in front of you. It may feel a bit embarrassing/scary at first, but you’ll get a lot out of it as a quartet:

  • singing Lead requires a certain amount of solo quality and charisma – this strips away the hiding spots and helps you get over the hurdle of OWNING the melody and selling the song;
  • if you’ve just switched into Lead, your quartet lineup is new. This technique will get the harmony parts attuned to your inflections, sound etc. much faster than when they’re singing at the same time
  • it’s very easy to be ‘driven’ by other members of the quartet if you’re not used to singing Lead – a real no-no, so getting to put your stamp on the interp solo is a really good plan. But do remind her, harmony parts, where you have moving notes when she’s holding (& spinning);
  • the Lead needs to take responsibility for lyricism. If duetting with another part feels like a fight, or you feel you’re changing what you do to fit in with them, stop, sing the phrase solo for them, then insist they sing it exactly as you do. You should feel totally supported and weightless in a duet or full quartet, if they are doing this properly!

Even if you’ve been singing Lead for years, this can be a great way to refresh your confidence within the quartet and get those pesky harmony parts listening to you!

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Learning Songs – Mark Your Target Vowels

October 27, 2007 Jo No comments

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!

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Spelling Vowels

October 27, 2007 Jo No comments

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!

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New Music, New Level?

October 24, 2007 Jo One comment

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 :-)

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New Quartet? Learning Songs

October 23, 2007 Jo No comments

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.

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