Inevitably, some singers will wait around doing nothing while the choir leader focuses on one of the other harmony parts.
Whether you teach by ear (as I do) or use sheet music, this will happen. However, there are ways of minimising this waiting time.
We all spend a lot of time crafting and honing the publicity blurb for our choirs and singing workshops.
But are we sure we have explained exactly what singers can expect when they attend?
I tend to teach songs quickly (see How many songs can you teach in an hour?). I can easily get through 6-8 songs in a one-day workshop.
A singer recently said to me that quality might be better than quantity. Yes, she’d learnt a lot of different songs, but didn’t feel that she’d really nailed any of them.
It’s very easy for singers to stay in the same voice part in choir, even though it may not be the best place for them.
Lovemusic Community Choir by Patrick_Down is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.
Rather than assume you can’t sing that high (or low), why not put it to the test? You might be surprised.
Sometimes I don’t know what I’m doing. There, I’ve admitted it.
We usually keep quiet when we’re unsure, but I believe it’s much better to own up in public. Here’s why.
Sometimes we encounter a challenging part of a song and need to work on it separately.
But if we try to keep this in mind when singing the first part of the song, it will affect the other notes. Here’s what I think is happening.
This is one of a series of summary posts around a specific topic, bringing together five relevant posts from the past.
This summary is all about vocal range: how it’s relevant to being in a choir and how you might go about finding where you fit. I’ve already referred to five older posts in the first part of this series.