I recently spent a morning working with the director and assistant director of a choir on a variety of elements of both vocal and conducting techniques. It was an interesting session for all kinds of reasons, not least the resonances between the work on their own voices and the work on how they will help others’ voices with their gestures.

We spent the first part of the conducting work using the principle that you can hear what kind of effect your gestures will have on a choir by listening to how they affect your own voice. Singing a simple 5-note scale to a conducted 4-pattern, for example, gives a very immediate and clear indication of where that pattern facilitates legato and where it is bumping. Down-beats in particular are a challenge to combine the clarity needed for accurate rhythm and a synchronised performance with the continuity that voices need to flow at their best.

The only picture I've found from the show itself: a bit grainy, but gives an impression...

One of the highlights for me at October's ladies' barbershop convention in Llandudno was the premiere of two arrangements commissioned by the Cottontown Chorus for the Saturday night show. The Meatloaf ballad 'Two Out of Three Ain't Bad' and a medley of a ridiculous number of other Meatloaf songs (35 minutes of original music crunched down to about 8 mins of a cappella!) were at the heart of their set, and provided the theme around which they built the rest.

This was a highlight for all the obvious reasons. Not just that it's exciting to hear one's creation come to life for the first time (a treat I also had over the weekend from Silver Lining), but that it's exciting to hear extended musical structures sung so well. And they had really gone to town on the staging, even building a mock Harley Davison out of an old chopper bike and bits of motorcycle.

Just before the recent LABBS convention, I came to the decision that I would stand down from the role of barbershop contest judge at the end of 2013. I have told my judging colleagues, and I am choosing to tell you in my blog so that it won’t be too much of a surprise to you next time we meet at a barbershop event and I’m not on duty. With any luck we may even get to talk about something other than this when we next meet!

It is simply that I have been serving as a registered judge for 13 years and feel like that's enough for now, thank you.

You know how it is when somebody gives you a piece of cake, and you think, 'Ooh how exciting!' And then they offer you another piece, and you think, 'Lovely!' When they offer you a third piece, the cake is as nice as it ever was, but you're a bit less excited by it. Sensible people don't wait until they've stopped enjoying it to stop eating.

Every year, Zemel Choir holds workshop day called ‘Celebrate with Song’ at which they invite visitors to join them for a day of music-making in preparation for a concert a couple of weeks later. This year, they invited me to come and lead a workshop on ‘Singing and Movement’ during the afternoon. It ran twice, each time with half the participants, while the others spent the time with expert on Russian and East European traditions of Jewish music, Polina Skovoroda-Shepherd.

Short workshops like this always present of the dilemma of how you balance the big-picture value of exploring skills and ideas with the goal-directed needs of preparing people for a performance. This dilemma is heightened when a significant number of participants have a relatively brief space of time in which to absorb all the repertoire in the first place - they may not have a lot of cognitive space left to think about other parts of the body.

No, I don't mean the musical equivalent of a stripogram; the post I am talking about here is that particular feature of barbershop arrangements when a song is finished with a long (sometimes very long) note.

The post is nearly always the tonic note, and its origin is as the final note of the melody. In traditional short-form barbershop songs such 'Heart of my Heart' or 'My Wild Irish Rose', you can hear this very clearly - the post is simply a matter of sustaining the end of the melody through a short embellishment that tidies up the end of the song and finishes it neatly.

October by the sea: why they invented the phrase 'bright and breezy'The weekend saw the Ladies Association of British Barbershop Singers head to North Wales for their annual Convention. One of the things it is easy to take for granted when it works, but which should not go unremarked, is the efficiency and competence of the event's organisation.

Saturday was dominated by a mammoth chorus contest, with the first singers on stage at 10 am and the last scheduled for 6.25 pm, so it is more than a little impressive that the whole thing only lost three minutes over the course of the day. The Convention Team and stage crew need to feel very pleased with themselves about this, as it makes the experience so much better for competitors (who can therefore pace their preparation accurately) and audience (who can therefore be sure they get to see the groups they are particularly interested in).

Everybody in the creative and/or performing worlds (and I suppose many other areas too) needs feedback. We have our own sense of how well we are managing with our tasks, and to what extent we are achieving what we were aiming for, but we need the reality check of other people to calibrate our self-awareness. Does it come over to others as we perceive it ourselves? Do they notice things that we don't? Are the things that are important to us as we work also important to others?

Without feedback, we can't grow.

But receiving feedback can be an emotionally wearing experience. People who may have only a brief or casual relationship with our work can make throw-away remarks that make us question everything we've done. Conversely, people who already love what we do can validate things that really should be questioned. Confidence and self-knowledge are both at risk when we hear commentary on what we do.

My last post on this subject explored the idea of motivating people to achieve more and better things in rehearsal by raising the stakes. It found a distinction between bullying (which will do this effectively in the short term, but at the cost of making everyone miserable) and game-structures that increased the importance of the desired behaviours without putting personal pressure on people.

This post aims to analyse the various aspects of successful stakes-raising tactics to see how we can generate them in rehearsal. There are four main elements I have identified, and some activities involve more than one of them.