Choir practice. Quire practice.

[labelleizzy]

Choir went well. I both dread and look forward to being forced to sight-sing.

It's scary as hell. *grin* I'm glad I keep going.
Good for me to remember that there's stuff I wanna do that I have to work on learning how to do it.

and this lesson's visceral. the fear locks up in my belly, and the frustration makes me squint and work harder, and I angle my head so I can hear the other altos and try to tune in to what they're singing...

very physical. Is good stuff.

Comments

[serendipity17.livejournal.com]

What I found helped was getting one-on-one time with a well-tuned piano, Work your voice through interval training, such that your brain instantly knows "this is how I sing a [second, third, etc] up or down from any note", both major and minor intervals. Also work major and minor broken chords. As an alto, you've got it tougher for sight-singing, because you can't just follow upper piano melody (soprano line = easy). Think of your line as not only an interval from where you've been, but also as an interval relative to the soprano line. Does your church choir sing Traditional 4-Note Chord Hymns for Organ, or something more flexible in structure?

My choir director started every day after warmups with having us take a blind stab at middle C. We'd come to a consensus, he'd hit the key, and we'd facepalm, then adjust.

[masterfiddler.livejournal.com]

Welcome to my world, Dearie.

Do you remember that I went through college on myh voice, not violin?

Just hinting, here.

What do you really want to work on? Balance, singing in tune, part versus part, vocal gymnastics, insert other silly thing here...

Also, any good MIDI program can let you input choir parts, and you can practice against the sound of the other parts, and hear how your part fits in.

Kind of depends on what you're doing, I suppose

[labelleizzy.livejournal.com]

Well, Mark gets us CD's with MIDI files of the upcoming performance pieces, and Jeff and I practice using those... but really, I just want to know how to train my voice to hit "D" when the music says "D". In service of that goal, a bit of music theory would be good also.

Singing in tune/recognizing when I'm "off", since I can't always spot myself in comparison with the others...

yeah. training my ear and my brain to work together, breath production and management, phrasing, and nailing the harmonies.

heh.
I don't want much, do I?