You’ve heard of a one man band. I’m going to try to be a one-man barbershop quartet.
To save me the expense and difficulty of growing three entirely new sets of respiratory and vocal apparatus, I plan to use technology - I will build the song incrementally by recording each track separately.
I plan eventually to do this as a live performance (only small stuff like the local talent show and church harvest supper night), using Audacity on my laptop to record the tracks (it permits you to record a track at the same time as playing back others - so I’d probably have a hidden metronome track to start with, or something, and live-mix and replay after laying down each part)
I can sing - with sufficient range to cover bass, tenor and (most of) alto - and have sung in any of these roles in quartets and choirs before.
I can’t read music though (one day, when I have time). So in the past I’ve always needed resources that would allow me to pick up the part by rote.
What I’m looking for is suggestions for pieces (and resources related to them) that you think would make a good starting point in this foolish venture.
Good plan. Look here - NWC is Noteworthy Composer - they have a free viewer application.
Could be a good start. There are other MIDI arrangements about for Barber Shop songs - take a look around, but Midi files can be a bit tricky to track down these days due to publisher pressure.
And Rosegarden provides both Midi and Audio recording under Linux, and can display scores as well.
With any of the above to play it back to you, Google “The Long Day Closes” for a start. Sullivan on a not bad day, and it’ll exercise your range - the four parts span the second E below middle C to the B above.
I have done some layered vocal recording like this. Do you intend to do actual barbershop quartet arrangements, or are you interested in something more popular? Good barbershop stuff will be so closely sung that it will be hard to distinguish the individual parts by ear.
When I was teaching myself to do this, I used If I Fell by the Beatles to start with. It is two-part harmony that is fairly easy to distinguish on the CD. I then moved on to James Taylor’s version of Handy Man, a fairly easy three-part harmony.
It will probably help you to have an instrument of some sort around, a guitar, piano, harmonica, something, so you can have a reference for figuring out triads. Good luck!
If it’s actual barbershop you want, the SPEBSQSA sells learning tapes, similar to Music Minus One. One part is on one channel and the rest are on the other. This allows you to adjust the balance so you can first learn the part, then silence it when you’re fully confident.
There are a few mp3 samples near the bottom of this page:
Just for interest, here’s something along similar lines to what you’re talking about. It starts getting interesting at about 1:00, then again at about 5:20.
