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May 2008                Archive | Ads | Submissions | Links          Online Edition #5


Tips & Techniques


However, with Audacity, you can now take your rehearsing several steps further. With any kind of microphone plugged into your computer, you can now record yourself singing along with those tracks. You then can replay your "performance" and determine what area(s) you'd like to work on in your next "performance" . You can rehearse in either a "quartet" or in a "sectional" mode for hours on end with no scheduling conflicts!

And there's more. Now when you're done, you can then email it out to others to either listen to or allow them to record their part along with yours. If you do this, congratulations! You may have just had your first "virtual rehearsal".

You need to have a microphone that you can hook up to your computer (either through the Line In port, or if you’re really fancy you can buy a USB microphone), and some headphones so you can hear what’s being played without playing it over your computer speakers (where it might get picked up by your microphone). Paul uses a nifty USB headphone/mic set. Open the learning track in Audacity, press “R” to start recording and it will play the learning track and you can sing along and record yourself. Press the space bar to stop recording. You can play around with switching the Left/Right balance so you can hear yourself singing with the trio, or singing along with just your voice part. The latter is a really good way to see how well you’ve learned your part -- are you singing all those pitches just like the guy on the learning track? For me, this is equal parts “immensely valuable” and “exceptionally depressing”.

There are many good tutorials for Audacity available from the Audacity web site.  It's fairly intuitive and among the most downloaded software in the country! Again, Audacity is a very powerful, very useful and very FREE tool!

*If you're using Audacity to export MP3 files, you'll need to download an additional file.  The link for the file is available through Audacity link or Chordiology.com 

The Truth Machine

We use Audacity outside of rehearsals to learn our parts and to get feedback from the other guys on how we’re singing. During quartet rehearsal, too, we’re recording ourselves fairly regularly. To do this, we purchased an audio interface device that lets us connect up to eight microphones (yes, we only use four) and send the signal into a computer where we use audio recording software to capture each channel (each microphone) separately. Then we can play it back as many times as we’d like, listening to all four parts together, or dropping out one or more of the parts to isolate individual voice parts to find where we’re having problems.




Singing In The 21st Century
(click image for album)

by Chordiology

Many quartets and choruses use Learning Tapes or CD’s to help them learn a song. Chordiology has been doing that for years now. We especially love any Learning CD put out by Tim Waurick, and we think we’ve learned to sing better, not just learned the notes, by listening to Tim sing and trying to match him. Nearly all of the learning tracks available through the Music Premiere series (available through the Society barbershop.org) over the last couple of years have been produced by Tim, in addition to the tracks available through his website www.timtracks.com

But there are a couple of more “geeky” things we’re doing.

Audacity

If you are not familiar with the Audacity software here is a rundown of what the software is, how much it costs (by the way Chordiology will be picking up the cost of this software for ANYONE that would like a legal copy), and how it can be most effectively utilized by anyone regardless of their technical abilities.

Recording software allows us to individually record ourselves singing along with a learning track, and then we send those recordings around to each other for comments. We use Audacity from  audacity.sourceforge.net to do this, but nearly any audio editing application can do the trick, as long as it can play and record at the same time. We like Audacity because it’s FREE and works on Mac and on Windows. It does a lot of things, but we really just use it for recording.  With this software you will never miss another rehearsal!

Audacity is very powerful and best of all its FREE TO EVERYONE!!! And given that it is free, again C4 is more than happy to pick up all of the costs for purchasing this free software. :)  It allows you to pull in LEGAL learning tracks and then do all of the things that you would normally like to do such as listening to your part solo'd, part predominant or missing from the mix altogether allowing you to sing in a "quartet" environment.

This is by far one of the most useful things we’ve started doing in the last few years. So many times, we have been practicing a tune and thought, “There’s something wrong with that chord”, but we just can’t figure out what it is. Recording this way lets us go back and really examine a section, down to individual voice parts, and see where the trouble is. At the end of a rehearsal, we can email the good recordings to the group.

It’s another one of those “valuable depressing” things. Every scooped interval, flat pitch, and flubbed word is right there, crystal clear and waiting for each of your buddies to hear. No matter how well you think you sang it, there’s gonna be something embarrassing in there, I guarantee. At one of our rehearsals this summer, we were getting a little goofy and slap-happy over some of the things we were finding in our recordings, and the entire rehearsal came to a rollicking, laughing collapse when we replayed a part where one guy muffed some words which came out as “I water myself”... It was at least twenty minutes before any of us could compose ourselves long enough to sing a single chord. For ten bucks, I’ll tell you who it was. For twenty bucks, Cliff, I won’t tell them it was you... 

The device we purchased is an Alesis iO|26 (pictured above). As I mentioned, it has eight microphone inputs (XLR or Phono), and connects to your computer via a FireWire cable. Looking at the Alesis web site now, it does appear they also have a similar device with only four inputs (the iO|14), which would probably work for a quartet and would be cheaper than what we got -- it costs about $200. As an added bonus, both devices have MIDI jacks so you can connect a MIDI keyboard to a computer to use it with music notation software if you wish.

Any multi-track audio recording software will work with this device. Cubase LE is the application that comes with it (Mac and Windows). I already knew how to use GarageBand (Mac only), so that’s what we normally use during rehearsals. Unfortunately, as far as we can tell, Audacity doesn’t do simultaneous multi-track recording. We have four Shure Beta 58 mics, and mic stands.  We plug speakers into the Speaker Out port on the computer, so we can listen to our recordings.

Recording ourselves -- individually outside of rehearsal, and as a group during rehearsal -- has improved our ability to find problem spots. Painful as it can be, hilarious as it can be, that’s what we do.
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