Barbershop Porn?

Almost a quartet - but not yet, singouts, and chorus rehearsals

After a successful quartet session in a chorus practice just over a month ago, I agreed to meet up for a separate bi-monthly session to sing in quartet with a few guys from the chorus, I was excited we agreed dates when we could meet up, between agreeing dates and the first session kicking off - the summer holidays happened a number of the guys weren't available for a month or so due to holidays etc. also the children enjoyed time away from school. So my children's daily activities changed around significantly.

I missed the first session due to babysitter arrangements not coming together by the second week I had realised that the situation wasn't going to get any better - gutted!

I did manage to attend 2 successive sing outs which was a great experience, I now have 3 sing outs under my belt - each a completely different venue, audience and experience. A large beautifully sounding church, an outside singing event and singing in a shopping centre, the first as the crescendo of a concert evening, the second as a nice background noise for some people that were dinning in the open air and the last a capturing of shoppers walking by. Also when at the shopping centre, because we were there for some time we got to sing the same songs more than once which was great - by the last time I think I was singing it much better than the first.

Great to be able to sing a number of songs all the way through without stopping for perfectly hit parts or more commonly issue areas of songs in one particular voice part. 

I am always amazed at people's ear to be able to pick out a slightly flat or sharp note in one person in one voice part when standing in front of close to 50 people. The sing outs made me realise on the fact that I know the songs in the repertoire we sing, but not perfectly enough, a number of songs I tripped over the words in one or two places, maybe still not bad for 6 months of learning but I must spend more time on each song on my own - words, breath, tuning and pacing can only get really embedded which lots of repetition.

We have a number of further sing outs to prepare for as the year continues, I am only going to be able to make a few of them unfortunately, a young family, busy work life and a love of singing don't go great together last night we had a good session learning a new, to us, song - "Happy Together" and tried to get "Who will buy" together a little better, we have been given the opportunity to sing in a professional recording studio and cut a CD, which should be a great experience, but the songs still aren't chosen yet so we have been tasked with learning our new song to perfection within 5-6 weeks, much like the voice course learning "Mary Lou" - should be fun, need to get the teach tapes as soon as possible and listen to it to death! the lead part, which I sing, doesn't have the tune for the majority of the song also, so it's a real challenge I think to all the leads especially those that don't read music... 

Wish us luck!