With convention and our big national competition just over a week away it’s full steam ahead with rehearsals. April was a busy month as we had 2 weekends of coaching.

The first was with vocal and performance coach, Doug Harrington. With the help of his expertise, we added the sparkle to our ballad. This included some rhythm changes and embellishments. All very exciting! We also worked on achieving a fuller sound to really ring those chords!

Our second weekend took us to one of the high-rise buildings in the city, on the hottest weekend of the year so far. Even though we were indoors and the London Marathon was running (literally!) close to our building, we brought the sunshine inside with the energy from coach Rob Mance.

Rob Mance’s specialty is posture and during the weekend we each took on the daunting task of singing solo in front of the rest of the group, while he corrected our alignment. We discovered that the “Official London City Singers stance” is leaning too far back with the head too far forward. Those with this posture (all but two people) were corrected to lean forward, with our heads back and chin down. And also to not move our jaw too much!

Throughout the weekend we only worked on posture, positioning on the risers, and singing concepts. So when it came to singing through our contest set at the end of the Sunday rehearsal we were astounded by the changes in our sound. Who knew that having more chins and less jaw movement could make such a difference without even working on the songs.

With just the dress rehearsal to go, we are pumped to see what we can do on stage at the Sage next weekend. You can watch us live on the webcast on Saturday 12th May (Stage time approx 12:50pm) here: Newcastle 2018 Convention