Beginners Guide - for Great British Home Chorus

Who this is for

Like thousands of others, I have signed up for Gareth Malone's Great British Home Chorus during the present COVID-19 lockdown period, and have very much enjoyed the daily sessions he shares, teaching songs, sharing techniques, and giving people the chance to make music together. Some of us are there because we belong to real life choirs, and miss this aspect of our lives during the lockdown, so it is a way of continuing with something that is already familiar to us. I am one such person.

But there are plenty of other who are trying out something completely new to them. Being able to sing is one thing - being able to understand the terminology used by a choir leader, and to find your way around a piece of sheet music, is a different skill entirely. Unless you have been part of a choir before, these are skills with which you could probably could do with a little bit of help.

It became clear to me during Tuesday's session, reading some of the comments that people were making, that there are people struggling to understand these things, people who really want to know, but maybe don't know where to start.

So this is why I decided to write this blog, to help you pick up the basics, so that you can better understand what Gareth is talking about, and get more benefit from the whole experience.

What I hope to cover

There are two main areas that people seem to want to know about, judging by the comments made during Gareth's rehearsals.


1. All about voices - Soprano, Alto Tenor, Bass.  What does it mean? How do I know what I am?

2. How to make sense of the printed sheet music that is provided for us.


So I hope, at least to provide some answers to these two questions.

What I DON'T intend to cover

This is not intended to be able to teach you to read music - that would be a much more ambitious task than I could try to cover here in a few pages, and there are plenty of sites where you can learn the basics should you want to, such as here

The thing is, you don't need to be able to actually read the music, to be able to learn a lot from it, to get an idea of what you are supposed to be singing and when you should be singing it, to understand how to follow whereabouts we are up to in a rehearsal or performance, and to pick up some basic clues about the music itself.

Shall I let you into a secret - there are plenty of people who regularly sing in choirs, who use sheet music, but who have never learnt to read it. You can still learn your part by ear, just as you would learn a song by listening to it on the radio, but having the music gives you a head start in learning to sing a song that you haven't heard before.

Parts and Voices

Music for choirs is usually written in separate parts. This is called singing in Harmony - when different voices sing different notes at the same time, and they blend together to make a pleasing sound. For example one part may be singing the tune at the same time as other parts sing 'oooh' or 'aaah' with different notes. Or everybody sings the same words at the same time, but using different notes (some higher, some lower).

Sometimes however,  all the parts sing the same melody (and same words) at the same time. This is called singing in Unison

The type of choir music we are using in the Great British Home Chorus uses four voices, and is known as SATB music, which stands for

Soprano
Alto
Tenor
Bass

This is the most usual arrangement of voices for a mixed choir containing both men's and women's voices.

The highest voice is the soprano and the lowest voice is the bass.

The upper two voices are normally sung by women (or children) and the lower two voices are usually sung by men, but there is no reason why you can't be a female tenor for instance, if you are comfortable singing the range of notes that are written for that part.

So in general

• if you are an adult woman with a high voice you will probably be most comfortable singing soprano. (Children will probably be best singing soprano too.)
• if you are an adult woman with a low voice you will probably be most comfortable singing alto
• if you are an adult man with a high voice you will probably be most comfortable singing tenor
• if you are an adult man with a low voice you will probably be most comfortable singing bass

There is a useful video here that can help you to identify what voice is the best fit for you.

The four parts (which correspond to the four voices) are written in the sheet music in exactly the same order. So for any section of the song, the top line of music shows what the sopranos are singing, the next line shows the alto line, the third line is for the tenors and the bottom line is the bass line.

Actually its rather more complicated than that, for sometimes there are not four separate lines, but some of the parts may share a line. This may happen when the choir is singing in Unison, or when (for example) the two mens parts are singing one thing while the two ladies parts sing something else.

Understanding Sheet Music

It is definitely worthwhile to find out a little bit about how music is written for choirs.

The dots, squiggles words and lines on the page can give all this information:-

1. Which voices should be singing in a particular section of the music
2. What notes (higher or lower in pitch) should be sung
3. What words go with each of those notes
4. What rhythm the words should be sung to
5. How fast the song should be sung
6. How loudly or quietly each section should be, and where the volume should be changed
7. Where there should be any pauses or other changes in the tempo (speed) of the music
8. What instrumental music will accompany the sung parts

That's quite a lot of information isn't it? Sometimes people who don't read music say they would prefer to just have the words, (which is a fair comment if you just want to save paper!), but for singing a choir song it is definitely worth getting to grips with some of the features of how the music is written down in sheet music otherwise you won't know

1. Where your part is supposed to come in

2. Which other parts are singing while you are singing your part.
3. What words/notes those other parts are actually singing while you are singing (often useful to know if another part starts first then you come in when they have sung certain notes/words)

4. How to find a particular place within the music, using bar numbers

5. When the notes in your part go up and down, to remind you what to sing.

So I will try to stick with the basics, to tell you what I think will be most useful to you

Lines of music 

Music is written on a stave which is five lines across the page

These staves are grouped together with connecting lines between them on the left edge (see red marking)

In the above example (which is from 'Ordinary World' which we are learning at present)

 the two upper staves (which each have lyrics underneath them) are parts for the choir to sing (in this example the top line is for Soprano and Alto, and the next line is for Tenor and Bass - you can tell this because at the start of the two lines they are labelled 'S A' and 'T B'. Subsequent lines will follow the same pattern, until it changes, when new labels will be present)

The two lower staves in the group (in our example above) are not for the choir to sing (clue - there are no lyrics!) but instead show the musical accompaniment for the song (written for piano). It can sometimes be useful to know what accompaniment comes immediately before you need to come in - you don't have to be able to read it exactly, but can get a feel for the notes and can counts the beats.

So in order to follow along with what you are supposed to be singing, you need to find the line of music within the group (see my red circle above for what I mean by the group) that corresponds to your particular voice/part, then every time you get to the end of a line, jump to the next group of staves and find the same corresponding line. Many singers find it helpful to mark their own lines with a highlighter pen (if the music is your own copy), or to make a pencil mark next to the start of your own lines (if the music is borrowed from your choir) so that you can always see at a glance which line you are supposed to be following.

Beats and Bars

I said I was not going to try to teach you to read music, but there is one thing I definitely want to teach you about, as it will be very useful for finding your way around the music for a song, which as you will know can be many pages long. Using page numbers is not particularly helpful when the conductor want to tell the choir exactly which point they want to start at during a rehearsal, as there will  be several lines of music on a page, and so they would have to say something like 'page 7, on the 3rd group of staves, about halfway across the page'. It is much easier and more accurate to use Bar Numbers for this

Before we think about bar numbers, I want to explain the concept of Bars within music. And firstly to talk about Beats.

The Beat of a piece of music is  the regular pulse that you can sense when you listen, that you would move in time to if you were dancing, or clap along to. Beats usually come in groups of two, three, four or six, which are called Bars. The strongest beat you can feel is normally the first beat of a new bar. There is usually the same number of beats in a bar throughout a song.

The most usual number of beats in a bar is four. If you look at the very beginning of a piece of music nearly the first thing you will see is two numbers on top of each other. The top one indicates how many beats there are in a bar.

The bars in the music are separated by vertical lines that reach all the way down the stave (which is the five horizontal lines remember). Everything between two adjacent bar lines is one bar of music.

Within the music, the bars can be numbered. This feature enables you to be told exactly where in the song we are looking at during rehearsal. The convention is that the bar numbers are only shown at the first bar in each line (to avoid clutter).

Up and Down

Without needing to fully read the music, you can still gain valuable information about the tune you are supposed to be singing by looking at when the notes go up and down.

The notes are those little blobs that sit on (or sometimes above or below) the five lines of the stave. 

As an aside, you may notice that they may have different shapes (a black blob, or an open circular blob for instance), and they usually have 'tails' (small lines coming up or down from the blob itself) and the tails may or not be joined up with the tails from other notes - you don't need to worry about any of this.

Each note represents a sound that you sing. The words underneath the blobs show you how the lyrics fit with the tune. You can see where the blobs get higher or lower on the stave. this indicates what happens with the notes that you sing. If a note appears higher on the stave (compared to the previous note), you know that your voice needs to go up a bit higher to sing this note. If the notes keep going down on the page, you will be in a section where the notes you sing keep getting lower. Or the note might be the same as the previous one, neither higher or lower. Often you will notice patterns where the notes may go (for instance):

 up up up down same down up down up 

Then this sequence might repeat. When this happens the next phrase (group of notes) you sing will sound very similar to the previous one (but possibly with different words). If you look closely you may notice that although the pattern is repeated, the second time around it might be all a bit higher or lower on the stave. Let me illustrate with a tune you will probably know - this is the beginning of ''What shall we do with a drunken sailor'

I have marked the two repeated phrases with red brackets. The pattern is the same in each phrase. It goes

                                   same same same same same same down up up

If you look closely  you will see that when this phrase is repeated it's all a little bit lower on the stave than the first time. If you hum the tune to yourself, you will be able to realise that this is exactly what happens in this song (the third phrase in this particular song will go up again, and be exactly the same as the first). 

 Clues like this can tell you lots about how the music should sound, and help you to learn a new song more quickly, by seeing when the notes get higher and lower, and spotting similar phrases that get repeated.

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