HOLDING YOUR OWN

 

We kicked off this evening’s session with a little exercise using scales. As we develop as singers, it’s important to keep working on the fundamentals – and holding your own note is one of the trickiest skills to master.

It’s wonderful learning new songs and singing old favourites, and yes – for most of you, the main reason for coming to choir is simply to have a jolly good sing! But it’s even more fun when we sing in harmony, and to do that, we need to learn and practise the skill of holding our notes while other groups sing theirs. It’s not easy, but exercises like this really do help – and we’ll be doing more of them.

We then had a bit of fun introducing one of our new songs for this term – Fleetwood Mac’s iconic The Chain. If you were away this week, do have a listen; it’s going to be such a fantastic song to sing. It will take time, but how good does that intro sound?

This Is Home – we’re so nearly there! We just need to really tune in to each other – first within your own group, and then with everyone else in the room. When you listen back to the recording, you can actually hear that happening as we repeat the song several times. The final time is practically perfect! Listen back and notice how it develops: at the beginning you’re quite tentative with your harmonies, but by the end you’re much more confident. We just need to bring that confidence from the very start. Easier said than done, I know ☺ but believe in your wonderful selves! Take a few deep breaths before we begin, relax, and sing that first note knowing that you’ve got this.

Count on Me – yay! We made great progress with this fun song tonight. If you couldn’t make the session, please have a listen to the recordings so you can catch up on the little changes we made – hopefully they make it easier to sing. We did lots of repetition to learn the harmonies, which I hope you found helpful. Next week, we’ll learn the short section in the middle, and then we’ll be there – double yay!

After a quick break, we had another go at Barbara Ann. The glorious four basses were reunited and did some great work with the anchor line! As well as being a feel-good singalong, this song is a brilliant exercise in practising close harmonies. It’s not as easy as it sounds, is it? But we worked hard, and we’re getting there.

We then listened to the original Beyoncé version of Texas Hold ’Em, as several of you mentioned last week that you hadn’t heard it before. You’ll be glad to know we’ll be singing it a fair bit slower than the original!

We finished the session with another look at The Chain, before gathering together to celebrate another great day. Thank you, everyone, for your hard work and enthusiasm!

See you all next week – I think most people will be back from holidays, so steer away from coughs and colds, keep well, keep practicing and we will hopefully be back to our full choir. B xxx