The Art of Acapella

Around November last year I auditioned for and joined my uni's Acapella group. We get together twice a week to sing a wide repertoire of songs (just not choral/classical). Most of the time we sing old classics like Bon Iver and Simon & Garfunkel. Yesterday our Acapella group took part in the London Acapella Festival from 10am-7pm, and intensively participated in workshops designed to better our vocal skills. There is no way anyway can give you a satisfactory set of tips to better your voice in hour long sessions when they have no idea what kind of voice you have, but they did provide us a good summary.

There was one workshop on music arrangement which I found particularly inspiring. The speaker was Christopher Diaz of the podcast Mouth Off, who gave us a very refreshing approach to music arranging. Rather than thinking of scores and notes etc, he advised us to arrange based on feelings. Depending on where we are, what we are feeling prior to writing, what we FEEL like getting out of the original track, we will all produce very different interpretations.

For anyone wanting to do arranging, a basic understanding of music theory is crucial. This automatically implies that the main difference of what makes a good arrangement and a rubbish one does not lie in how deep your knowledge of chordal progressions and triads are, but of how capable you are of delivering a feeling. I'm pretty sure I have written on this very blog in the past that music is an art form, and if it evokes your senses, then it is a successful piece of art. And there was Diaz on the stage, saying exactly what I believed in. He told us, who cares what methods you used to arrange the track. At the end of the day if your listeners like what you did, you did well and your method was a good one.

His particular method was listening to the song over and over, and jotting down the main lyrics/bass lines he wants to pick out from the original. From there he would think about the lifespan of the song, ie techniques the singer could use to bring out the places that need accentuating. When I heard this it really rang a bell because when I make remixes, this is exactly the way I go about doing it. I listen to the original track and pick out bits I want to expand on and bits I want to give a different feel to. In our acapella rehearsals we sing to each other and work out the best ways to deliver the songs together. Everything is trial and error, but at the end, it always works out.

In the talk he also emphasised the importance of singers singing together in acapella groups. Not just singing together but a real tacit understanding of each other, where we know when to start and stop singing just by looking at each other, when to control our vocal projection to compliment the others' voices. There's a lot of science behind singing in unison, for example on average a person's breath lasts around the same time, and so if we sing a note, naturally the dynamics will vary the same way for different people, and when we sing together we should sense when we are all going to finish that note, even without looking at each other.

I first knew about acapella through DBSK when I was around 14, I was just blown away by their acapella version of Whatever They Say:

I was so impressed by how they enunciated the words in exactly the same way, making sure their dictation emphasised the same words with the same level of impact. It's clear that their vocal bond does not only come from practising together, but years of living and understanding each other to know how to sing as a group, and not as a soloist. I watched interviews of them discussing each others' voices, and at the time I didn't think much but now I am even more impressed how much each member knows about the other members voices. From my experience singing with others it's not easy to give all rounded judgments on what you know about voices that are not yours.

Acapella singing is to me the most natural art form. Every person is born with a voice, and fron the moment we were born we used that voice. Possibilities are limitless and you could do so many wonderful things with it. People began singing together ever since civilisation began, and now we have perfected the craft so well it's created the world of Acapella. Some groups blow our minds with technique, eg pretending to be musical instruments as Cluster did in their version of Jingle Bells:

Nothing from what you just heard was made by an actual instrument. It is 100% entirely vocals.

While this sort of thing is amazing, I still think real talent of a group lies in the unison of their voices. When you hear a collective voice that rise and fall together as one, whose singers speak and breathe together down to the last syllabic detail, you can tell straight away whether the singers understand each other well. Whilst it's important to pick singers whose voices SOUND well together, it is ever more crucial to make sure the singers BLEND well together. Successful groups will know how to fit in with each others voices instinctively, and the sound they create is just sensational.

Listen to the way they begin and end the notes so precisely in unison. It feels like one person is singing the song.

After the long day we all chatted for ages and talked about new ways to rehearse. In some ways I'm glad we are becoming so comfortable with each other. I think it's the only way we can understand each other's singing voices: by understanding each other first.