Vocal Tips

Gabrieli Roar Choral Director Greg Beardsell gives us his top vocal tips:

1) Listen to the music. You probably didn’t sit down and ‘study’ your favourite and best loved music, it just went in via osmosis, so get on to Spotify or download the tracks to your phone and listen to them next time you are on a boring car journey.

2) Karaoke time. Stick it on and sing along. Those tricky bits, especially in the Elgar, will become less tricky when you get your voice used to doing them, it’s partly muscle memory, partly musical development, and partly becoming less intimidated by it.

3) Mark up. The pros do it so you should. The time signatures change a lot in the Elgar and Britten and sometimes the phrases are irregular length so mark the counting above the bar. Breathe rhythmically and COME IN. Get your own pencil markings all over your copy – highlight your own entries, mark which other parts can help you find your entry pitch, that sort of thing.

4) Make mistakes. In your own choir rehearsals dare to be loud and wrong. If you wait around until you are absolutely sure about each pitch and rhythm before you deliver it, the learning process will be very slow and tedious.

5) Think upside-down. Reverse your natural instincts to put pitching first. Prioritise the music elements in this order – rhythm, emotion, articulation, clarity, dynamics, pitch. It’s what business consultants would call ‘picking the low hanging fruit’ – i.e. grab the stuff that’s easiest to grab first.

6) Get closer to the composers. Swot up, 2015-style. Next time you are sat watching telly with your smartphone in your hand, pull up the wiki pages of the 3 composers. This knowledge will broaden your affinity with the composers and give you more motivation to communicate what they were after.

7) Get help from other places. The music is technically demanding, that’s why we picked it. So, if you have singing lessons, extract a few of the most troublesome phrases and take them to your teacher. Then, when you take it back into full rehearsals you can smash it.

8) Take it to the next level. The pros don’t just rehearse so they get it right, they rehearse so they never get it wrong. When you know the music inside out you can have more fun in performance which is what we are all after, isn’t it?