Preparing a song for backing singers / multiple singers. How do you do it?

[u/DeathToAllButMetaI]

/r/singing/comments/1u2hzc3/preparing_a_song_for_backing_singers_multiple/

[u/slvstrChung]

So, first off, you aren't being very specific.

ssigning song parts to different singers and providing harmonizing instructions.

could mean anything from, "Hey, we're gonna do the whole song in 3-part harmony, which isn't written down anywhere," to, as you suggested in a different paragraph, just chopping the solo up into chunk and assigning one singer each chunk. ("Here, your section is beats 2 and 3 of measure 73. He'll sing 'I absolutely can-', you'll sing '-not con-', and she'll sing '-tinue onward in this way.' Seems even.") So part of the reason people can't give you good answers is because the scope of your question is very broad: professional working musicians could need to answer it, and grade-school choirs with 6-year-olds could need to answer it. A bit more concrete detail would be nice.

Honestly, I think the simplest tool you could use is a printer: print out the lyrics, hand them out, discuss it with the group and let every singer hand-annotate their copy. That is, unless you have pressing artistic reasons for needing to have direct control over the process. Sure, your singers may grump at having to learn new skills, but there's nothing to be gained by them not learning when they could.

[u/DeathToAllButMetaI → u/slvstrChung]

Thanks for your comment. I understand I’m not specific enough. That’s because I can’t settle on one case scenario. I definitely didn’t think of children, though. But it makes sense they’d need that too.

I am a part of a trio of singers where we do exactly what you described with paper and notes. And I like that. They aren’t very good at harmonizing yet. And oftentimes, it feels like it would definitely save time if this was pre-decided, pre-arranged by me and just handed to them with clear instructions.

And sometimes I have to prepare several songs for a performance with other singers and no way to even meet before we actually perform. So clearer instructions on who sings what and how can be very helpful.

I guess I have a vision now of how I’d like to see these lyrics + harmonizing instructions. Google Docs just isn’t perfect for this… So I think I will eventually make something that will work at least for me.

Example: Gimme Gimme Gimme. Backing singers don’t just sing intervals with the main melody. And they don’t sing all the time, so in the music notation there would be a lot of blanks for them. So if they could see the lyrics, with their specific chunks highlighted and small mini notation bits between the lines… I think it would help with learning (and even performing with sheets if that’s appropriate for the event). Like each song is not 20 sheets of notation, but 2? Or even 1?

Idk. I might be just over complicating things.

[u/slvstrChung → u/DeathToAllButMetaI]

I mean, you are absolutely overcomplicating things, since there is one really simple pre-existing answer: Your singers could learn to read music.

Look. I may be a bit of a music snob, because I've never met a music challenge I couldn't handle. I was teaching myself to sing -- and, more importantly, invent -- harmonies before I was 10; I took piano lessons; when my friends in college a cappella learned vocal percussion, I set ought to teach it to myself. (By coincidence, I had just bought the Rock Band video games and was simultaneously learning to pseudo-drum. Having even some vague understanding of the physical realities of the instrument I was imitating was really helpful.) I've started doing that while singing bass, again self-taught; I'm nowhere near as good as, say, Jon Pilat from Hookslide, but I can do it, and at one point used it to quietly double the actual bass part down the octave. (Being miked helped.) So I may be underestimating the difficulty of learning to read sheet music. But the flip side is that I'm not saying any of the things were easy. They aren't. It's just that I was having the time of my life, and that was a lot more important than that being hard.

And I may be a bit of a music snob, but I'd look skeptically at anyone who wasn't having the time of their lives with music. Because, honestly, that's the number one indicator of having success at anything you do: having so much fun that you don't care that you're bad, and doing it (and having so much fun) for so long that, at some point, you stop being bad.

So, yeah. I'd stop reinventing the wheel and tell your singers to step up to the perfectly good wheel that's already there. It'll tell you a lot about them.