Remote Rehearsing: Some Specifics

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Monday 6th April 2020
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So I thought I had probably gone on enough about this, until a chat with a friend, who said, amongst other things:

I don't want to burden you but I feel like if you were to post something quite directive with specifics on what functions to use on Zoom (which is surely what everyone is using) with some sample vocal activities that work with those, you would really be the hero of the moment and carry barbershop forward while there is serious floudering going on

It may be that there is only the one person in the world who wants more from me about this, but this is for her. Anyone else is welcome to share though :-)

On Time-Management and Paying Yourself First

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Thursday 2nd April 2020
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I drafted this post a few weeks back, before everyone was trapped at home trying to work out how their new life patterns work. I can’t work out if it is more or less relevant now than then, so am sharing it anyway. You will figure out to what extent you find it useful and in what ways, in the context of your life - as you always do indeed.

‘Paying yourself first’ is one of those ideas for managing your money that has done me well over the years. The principle is to allocate your regular savings/investments up front, and squirrel that money away before you go on to do the rest of your day-to-day spending. If you wait until you’ve done everything else to save the surplus, you’ll often find that surplus has mysteriously evaporated.

Remote Rehearsing: Can We Sing Together?

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Saturday 28th March 2020
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I will stop blogging about remote rehearsing all the time in due course. It’s just that when a lot of us are learning a lot in a short time is when it is useful to share ideas. You can wait a bit longer to hear how the 8-part arranging project is going (quite well, btw).

So, the question that everyone always wants to ask is: can we actually do any singing together in an online choral rehearsal? You, know, like the definition of ‘choral’ would regard as pretty much essential. And the answer is usually no: there’s too much lag, sorry.

Like everyone else doing this lark, I came away from my first remote rehearsal both incredibly buoyed up by having been able to do it at all, and craving harmony. So we did some experimenting in our Music Team meeting that was fortuitously already scheduled for that week, and found ourselves some improvements for our next chorus night.

On Surface Over-Compensating

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Tuesday 24th March 2020
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When I was observing a lot of conductors as the heart of the research for my choral conducting book, I noticed how certain hand positions appear to correlate with certain types of relationship with the activity. In particular, I noted a kind of angular hand shape: wrists cocked back, fingers straight and folded forward at a right angle from the main knuckle, thumbs sticking up, and the ictus formed by a kind of scooping motion with the heel of the hand.

The choral sounds that this hand shape typically elicited were quite bright in tone, and reasonably well controlled, but often containing audible vocal tension and lacking bloom on the sound. The overall sound was often rather more contained and muted than you might have expected from the number of singers involved.

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