Rehearsal, July 30, 2014

But I Know How To Sing On Pitch!

We didn't have a really big crowd last night, and we didn't do a great amount of singing. Still got some interesting lessons about how well we sing.

We started out by singing The Old Songs. Easy, right? After all, we sing that one almost as often as Keep The Whole World Singing. We all have that one down solid. Well, we thought we did.

After we ran through it one time, the director (actually the assistant director, as the regular director is at Harmony University this week) asked for the pitch to be blown again. Ouch! We were 'way below the proper pitch. How did that happen?

So we had another run at it. Same result. Hmm...

Then we went to work. Turns out that many of us seem to have developed some bad habits. The leads weren't really getting up to the right pitch in the first phrase. Then the basses were letting their pitch sag, as basses often do. Then the baritones and tenors didn't have any choice but to slide down with us.

After going over the proper pitch several times, some of us started hearing what we were doing. Some of us didn't. This made the resulting sound seriously bad. Happily, the director stayed with it until we got a lot better. Whew!

Then we spent most of the rest of the evening working on getting up to the correct pitch on a couple of other songs - mostly the Armed Forces Medley. We've been letting the pitch slide so much that the bass solo on the Marine Hymn gets so low that we can't really sing it right. After a half hour or so, we were doing better.

We were sent home with the admonition to work on getting what we sing up to the actual pitch of the music.

I love a capella singing, but it's too easy to get lazy and lose your pitch. We're really going to have to work on it. I found an application called "Canta" that allows you to see what you're singing in relation to the actual notes, but it won't run on our Windows 7 laptop. I'll have to see what else I can find and report on that next time.