ChoralTech: The Never-Ending Rehearsal

A core challenge for many choirs of all ages/ranges is helping our musicians practice between rehearsals. Thankfully, there are many ways that we can extend what happens in the rehearsal room and make it possible for our singers (of any level) to get work in on our literature in that “rest of their lives” time between rehearsals. With portable and mobile technology, it’s so easy to record and distribute audio that we can use really powerful rehearsal strategies beyond our traditional on-the-podium time.

 

Consider SoundCloud— a free service that allows you to upload and share audio with a defined group of people. While it’s pretty easy to record and post audio through a variety of sources, one powerful feature in SoundCloud is the timed comments– the ability for users to drop comments in to annotate specific points in the recording. A possible example would be recording something in the rehearsal and posting it on SoundCloud, and asking your singers to each post one comment about a specific issue that they’d like to address in rehearsal the next time. By having the singers build a list of rehearsal targets, you know that they have identified performance issues and more importantly, that they will come in with a mental target of what they want to improve and have a concept of what it sounds like. Alternatively, you as director could identify specific points in the recordings to focus attention on to ask singers to rehearse– and with the recording of your choir to practice along with, you know that they’re rehearsing the piece the way that you want to approach it.

 

Of course, the free version has some limitations– 100 downloads per track, for example, and you are capped at uploading 120 minutes. Rather than record your entire rehearsal, focus on one piece/excerpt/section that you’d like to record, and the 120 minutes will stretch a long way. Recording into SoundCloud can be fairly straightforward– your laptop’s built-in microphone will allow you to record live directly into the website through their interface. Unfortunately, that built-in microphone probably won’t give you the audio quality that you’d really prefer. If you find this useful and want to invest a small amount for large gains in your audio recording quality, there is a wide range of USB microphones that are very easy to set up and will increase your audio quality considerably.

 

SoundCloud is one way to extend the rehearsal so that singers can have more individual ability to practice and prepare. Aside from the tried-and-true rehearsal tape (/CD’s/MP3’s), how do you create a “never-ending rehearsal?”