10 things singers can do at home when there’s no choir to go to

There are many reasons why you might not be able to get to choir and have to stay home.



How can you keep your choral and musical interests alive? Here are 10 ideas.

Does interval training work?

There are many interval training exercises to help singers distinguish between, say, a perfect fourth and a minor third.



But do they actually work? Do the exercises carry over into the singing?

How to adapt singing warm ups if you have limited mobility

Like many choir leaders, I get people to loosen up their bodies as well as their voices when preparing to sing (see Preparing to sing: what should a warm up consist of?).



But we also need to be aware of those who have limited mobility. Here are some ideas for making sure your warm up is as inclusive as possible.

How to keep your warm ups and singing sessions fresh and engaging

I teach singing workshops across the UK. I’m lucky to get a lot of the same singers turning up each time.



Which means that I can’t keep on using the same old jokes or worn out warm up routines. Here’s how I keep things fresh.

When you sing, forget everything you’ve ever learnt

In your singing lessons and choir warm ups you’re bombarded with exercises and technical advice about posture, breathing, enunciation, pitching, tension, placement and so on.



All good stuff. But when it comes time to sing you need to forget it all. Seems crazy? I’ll show you why it’s important.

Dealing with individual singers in a large choir

This post is part of a series of occasional Questions and Answers. Just use the contact form if you want to submit a question.

Morning Star asks:

“What do you do with your big chorus, when there are some folks that have real trouble with the pitch and some of them tend to sing loudly and throw others off?

I have spoken to the whole group many times about blending and we have done exercises to work on blend, but when those people get back in the group it often continues to happen. Do you ever speak with people individually?”

 

Fortunately, this hasn’t happened to me very often!

things usually balance out

If you run an open-access choir there will always be a range of different voices, experience, talent, needs, interests, etc. etc. This is one of the joys of community choirs – the amazing mix and variety of people.

Usually there is a reasonable spread of ability across the choir so things tend to even out. The more experienced singers carry the less experienced along with their enthusiasm and confidence, and any small tuning problems or glitches are ironed out in the overall mix.

But sometimes you will find that your choir is quite evenly balanced, with most people having similar experience. So if you get just one or two people who have far more or far less experience, they will stick out like sore thumbs.

giving individual attention

I often get frustrated with large choirs (anything over 20, say) because I can’t give people individual attention.

In a community choir there is always an element of training and vocal development in the warm ups each week. Sometimes I can see that people are struggling or just getting an exercise wrong and would love to go over and spend some one-to-one time with them, but there are 60 other people in the room who need my attention too.

For this reason, I try to pitch the warm ups so that everyone is challenged, whatever their level or experience. I constantly remind people that they are not to judge themselves against others, but only against themselves. Also, even if a warm up is very familiar, there is always something new to be learnt. In this way, I hope that each individual will develop at their own pace week on week.

However, there will always come a time when you get down to learning or singing a song and one voice will dominate.

the odd one out

The issue of whether or not they’re in tune, singing the correct part, have too much vibrato, have a screechy quality, etc. can be dealt with in the warm ups, but you need to be patient.

The only reason that there is a problem is that the person is singing too loudly. It will upset the overall sound and also put off other singers in their section.

There is a variety of reasons why someone might be singing too loudly:

• they have little self-awareness and just don’t notice
• they need to sing loud in order to hear their own voice
• their voice is very powerful and they have not yet learnt how to control it
• they have not yet learnt how to control their breathing properly
• they are over-confident
• they are under-confident
• they don’t have enough experience of singing in harmony

Most of these can be fixed in the warm up session, but again it will take some time. The one thing that is very hard to fix is lack of self-awareness!

singing too loudly

You can take individuals aside and point out that they’re singing too loudly and draw their attention to how to blend in in terms of volume:

• if you can only hear your own voice, you’re singing too loudly
• if you can only hear everyone else, you’re singing too quietly

It’s a bit like Goldilocks: you need to find the “just right” volume.

The aim is to sing and hear your own voice AND the other voices in your part AND the other parts which make up the harmonies. A tricky balance, and one that only comes with experience.

If you do need to have a chat with a particular individual, make sure it is in private and not in front of the rest of the choir.

for the greater good

There is only one time I’ve had to ask someone to leave a choir and I felt awful! After all, the choir was founded on the principle that everyone can sing and everyone is welcome, no matter what their experience is. But there was one person who consistently sang loudly and out of tune. It didn’t affect the overall sound of the choir too much, but it DID affect the other people in the part who kept getting put off.

For good of the choir as a whole, I had to ask the person to leave. What I said was that they needed to go and develop their listening skills (not their singing skills). The fact was that the other people in the choir had more experience in this area. I told the person to go an get more experience singing in unison, for instance, singing hymns at church. In this way they would learn when they were singing the same notes at the same volume as everyone else.

It was a hard thing to do because I didn’t want to knock the person’s confidence, but I felt that I had to do it for the greater good of the choir.

 

Chris Rowbury's website: chrisrowbury.com

 

The 10 most popular posts of 2009

I reckon most of you will be too busy with Christmas to read my blog this week! Full to overflowing with turkey and all the trimmings, it’s hard to get off the sofa to switch on the computer. Besides which, computers might remind you too much of work!

photo by IngaMun

Rather than a normal post, I thought I’d list the most popular reads from 2009 in case you missed them first time around.

So . . . a very merry Christmas and happy New Year to one and all and thanks for reading. I couldn’t do it without you!

1. Preparing to sing: physical and vocal warm-up ideas for choirs
   After considering why you should bother with warm ups at all, and what kinds of things you might include in a warm up, this post lists some specific physical and vocal exercises that I use with choirs.
   
   
2. How to teach (and learn) a song by ear
   Some techniques and tips for teaching and learning songs without written music.
   
   
3. Preparing to sing: what should a warm-up consist of?
   Having decided that warm ups are a good idea (see next post), this post considers the elements that need to be covered in any good singing warm up: body, voice and mind.
   
   
4. Preparing to sing: why bother?
   Why bother with warm ups any way? 10 good reasons why it makes sense.
   
   
5. But I can’t sing that high!
   How to find a comfortable place in the choir for your particular voice.
   
   
6. How to be a good choir member
   What makes a good choir member? Things like punctuality, commitment, self-awareness, trust, sense of humour, etc.
   
   
7. Learn how to sing in tune – matching pitch 1
   Once you’ve figured out whether you’re singing in tune or not, here are some basic tips on how to go about improving your tuning.
   
   
8. Singing in harmony 1 – how do they do that?
   Singing in harmony with others needs a whole set of skills which are different from singing solo or with a backing band. Here are some hints on how to sing harmony effectively as part of a choir.
   
   
9. Singing the same note – differently!
   The thorny question of matching male and female voices! The introduction of the tricky concept of ‘octave’.
   
   
10. How do I know if I’m singing in tune?
    It’s all very well for your choir leader to tell you you’re out of tune, but what does it actually mean to ‘sing in tune’?

 

Chris Rowbury's website: chrisrowbury.com

From the back of the choir 1 – first steps

This is a guest post by Deb Viney who works at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, UK. It is about her experience of joining a new choir where harmony songs from around the world are learnt by ear.

The very first evening …

I really can’t remember how I heard about the SOAS World Music Choir but I know I loved the idea: a choir with no auditions, a promise we would never be asked to sing alone, learning music from all over the world, all by ear, in the original languages, anyone and everyone welcome, no experience necessary. I’d been missing music since I started my new job in London, so I thought I would give it a try.

The first session was actually only a little scary. The room was full of newcomers, so none of us knew what to do. I think there were about thirty of us that first evening. We stood in a loose circle, clearly all wondering what would happen next. The choir director started with a physical warm up – kicking off our shoes, shaking out tight muscles and generally getting used to the idea of making strange noises by adding sound effects to a silly story. But then (amazingly fast!) we started to make much the same sound – even by the end of warm up, we sounded pretty good.

I was really amazed how fast we could learn at least the basics of a song — this was my first experience with a choir and three or four part harmonies. The director would teach each part in turn, singing each part herself, then allowing us just a few repetitions, then on to the next part, then putting them all together, so quickly. In under 40 minutes we were raising the roof (or at least shaking the basement windows) with a song that sounded fantastic to me as a newbie!

I think we learned two or three pieces that first session, but now, nearly three years on, I honestly couldn’t tell you what they were. However, I do remember I told someone the next day that it was the most fun I had had at work in ages!

And did I mention the surprise at the end of the session? It turned out that the previous year the choir had acquired some ‘traditions’, one of which was an impromptu performance in the School’s main reception area at the end of each practice session. So we all trooped off with our coats and bags, and we just stood around the director and repeated the songs we had just rehearsed. There was no chance to be scared and it was a great way to get people used to performing.

If you are interested you can find some of our rough recordings on YouTube. Those performances turned out to be a good recruiting tool, too!

SOAS World Music Choir

In 2007 and 2008 the choir was led by SOAS ethnomusicography graduate, Liz Powers, who brought astonishing energy and enthusiasm to each and every session as well as a vast range of music from Africa, Australasia and Eastern Europe and a few pieces in English.

Choir membership varies between about 50 – 100 people each year. Sometimes only a small group turn up every week, the others are more transient, which can make it difficult to achieve a familiar repertoire. Also, as individual students move on, about two-thirds of the members are new each academic year. We only run in the Autumn and Spring terms as the Summer Term is swamped by exams.

In summer 2008 Liz and her husband Andy (bass) had to leave us for Yorkshire where Liz now co-leads the Manchester Community Choir. We recruited a new director, Judith Silver, who is a singer-songwriter in her own right and a member of the Natural Voice Practitioners’ Network. Judith has a different style, but no less enthusiasm and knowledge! With her help the choir has survived its fourth year and we are now planning for Autumn 2009.

The choir’s membership is incredibly diverse, like our School. We have had all sorts of members in those three years – Chinese, Korean and Japanese students, Muslim women in their head scarves, people of all ages — representing more than twenty nationalities from almost every continent of the world. This quite often means someone in the choir speaks the language in which we’re singing, so we work hard to get the pronunciation right! We even had enough men and ‘lower ladies’ for a modest-sized tenor and bass section. Many of us are not musicians or music students, but what we lack in expertise, we make up for in enthusiasm.

Next time I’ll tell you what a typical practice session is like and say something about what it’s like to learn songs in a language you’ve never heard before and don’t understand …

Deb will be following up with another guest post in the near future.

 

Chris Rowbury's website: chrisrowbury.com

Preparing to sing: hip wiggling and knee bending

This is a guest post from Alexander Massey of Authentic Voice™. It originally appeared in the Natural Voice Practitioners’ Network newsletter in June 2005. This post is the last in the series Preparing to sing. 
 

This is the fourth in a series of four posts looking at warm ups and how you prepare to sing.

Preparing to sing: physical and vocal warm up ideas for choirs

Now that we know warming up for singing is a good idea (Preparing to sing: why bother?), and now that we’ve considered what kind of things we might do in a warm up (Preparing to sing: what should a warm up consist of?), I’d like to turn to some specific exercises that you might use in a physical and vocal warm up for a choir.


This is the third in a series of four posts looking at warm ups and how you prepare to sing.

Preparing to sing: what should a warm up consist of?

OK, we’ve looked at why we should bother to take the time to prepare to sing (Preparing to sing: why bother?), but what will that preparation consist of?


This is the second in a series of four posts looking at warm ups and how you prepare to sing.

Preparing to sing: why bother?

I’m often asked for ideas for vocal and physical warm ups for choirs. I’m also always on the lookout for new ideas for my own choir and singing workshops. I can get bored quite quickly doing the same old exercises, and so can the singers I’m working with.

This is the first in a series of four posts looking at warm ups and how you prepare to sing.