15 jan 2009

term 2, Week 1 – your mouth is a cathedral!

Hello and welcome to the new regular choir blog! And also, welcome to choir, old members and new. We did sound good considering our long break since the concert. Some one suggested it’s the carols.

Ed talked about how we might learn songs this term, by revising an older one each week and adding in 1 new song, instead of chucking in new songs a few weeks in a row, then re-capping for a few weeks, meaning we had left some songs unsung quite a while when we came back to them. Our concert was a success and Michael gave us the total money raised for Seb’s odyssey, to cheers! At the concert we also proved that we had a nice young fresh sound, with not to many warblers! (Cough, shuffle).

Ed stressed the importance of practice, preferable a little a day, rather than 2 hours on a Sunday while ironing ones parachutes. I have to admit, I don’t yet wear parachutes but im sure my time will come … work on your head voice, and your chest voice will follow! You really need to come to choir to see Ed demo that difference! This is the way to get a strong head sound, and a firmer chest … or something like that. We get plenty of exercises and tips at the start of choir, you just need to sing ‘if you’re happy and you know it’ every day like me, and you’ll be fine!

So we moved to our warm ups and started with some humming. This is when we found out that we were cathedrals, our bucal cavities merely vast caverns to reverberate rich sounds! And our lips must tingle as we try to make a good strong loud hum. Did yours? Sorry about showing of with my long hum. Good job Ed made me laugh as I would have kept going!

Ed also talked about shifting gears; now please don’t look up ‘the art of shifting gears’ on ‘youtube’ because he doesn’t mean that at all. Just start singing in first gear, and save your bigger sound for the bigger sound bits, ie a later, juicier, chorus! This technique was def needed for our first song.

We tackled the take that number, ‘rule the world’. Ed said it might be a bit low for most of us, but it didn’t seem to be. Added in a nice harmony, and a really lovely overlap, and we were cooking on gas! We over ran on this one, I think Ed gets very excited. We stood up to perform but there were many protests of ‘we can’t see’, so we cat down again.

The second song we ran through briefly was ‘you raise me up’, sung solo at our concert but now it’s the whole choirs turn. Oops, Ed emailed the wrong words to Michael so we sang the verse twice.

Suddenly it was kebab time. See you next week, and perhaps give thought to whether our next concert should be on a Thursday or a Friday evening?

Cat xxx