Singing on the Off-Beat, Part 2

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Saturday 20th September 2025
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In my last post I shared some suggestions to help people develop the musicianship skills needed for singing on the off-beat. The second stage of the process is to consider the music that is asking you to deploy these skills and asking if the composer and/or arranger are facilitating your success or creating obstacles.

You see, off-beat passages are a classic example of the kind of thing a notation program can do really well, as it just produces a literal rendition untroubled by the sense-making that the human brain brings to the process of singing. And whilst sometimes (well, quite often) the problem is patchy musicianship skills in the performers, sometimes the problem is also over-optimism on the part of a writer who hasn’t spent enough of their life in rehearsal trying to help people with patchy skills achieve rhythmic security.

I left you last time with the following exercise, which reproduces the kind of thing you quite often see in a cappella arrangements, and turns out to offer a useful case study to explore this central musical question.

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Singing on the Off-Beat, Part 1

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Tuesday 16th September 2025
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Every so often, it seems that everyone I talk to is grappling with the same challenges. Well, maybe not everyone, but enough to feel that we have something of a theme going on, and thus an opportunity to try to be helpful to multiple ensembles at once.

A conductor recently messaged me with the following clear summary of the problem:

a couple of our sections are having real trouble getting into singing off the beat. A good number of our songs have crotchet notes aligned on the half beat and they're often getting pulled into alignment with the beat instead. I wonder if you have any good ideas for how we can encourage off-beat singing?

Arranging for a Low Lead

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Tuesday 26th August 2025
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This is kind of a niche post, as it’s about a specific challenge that we don’t come across very often. I have been arranging recently for a barbershop quartet which has a lead who more usually sings bass, which brings the melody into a rather lower tessitura than one usually uses in TTBB barbershop. This is a distinct challenge from arranging with the bass on the melody, which we do fairly frequently, although some of the things learned doing that turn out to be relevant.

Interestingly, the singer specified reference performances of the songs in the keys he wanted to sing them in, so we’re working with an established performance history of the songs in a lower tessitura. Also interesting was that a casual listen to these recordings gave me an impression of richness and warmth, but not particularly low pitch. I found myself surprised when I actually checked what keys the songs were in – and realised that particularly in one case that I had therefore a rather more challenging task than I had first imagined!

Following Up with Surrey Harmony

Published by Liz Garnett at Helping You Harmonise on Friday 22nd August 2025
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In the character of robots...In the character of robots...

Wednesday took me back to Coulsdon for another visit to Surrey Harmony. Two months on from my previous visit, they had had time to work with the ideas we explored in June, and we could see what was working, what needed further support, and what could usefully be added. And once again, we were working both to support the development of their director’s rehearsal and conducting skills and to build the skills of the singers.

Indeed, these two things often work hand in hand. Their MD Penny had a clear idea of the challenges she was facing: things that she knew she wanted to improve but was struggling to get the results she wanted. Hence, the coaching processes of diagnosis and intervention served both to help solve the problems and to model ways to go about solving them.

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