How SingleParts Choral Music Learning CDs are made

SingleParts is the product of over two years' investigation and experimentation. The raw concept was first brainstormed with several choral directors and professional and volunteer choristers. Following that, a prototype was built using the Brahms Requiem, tested with a very good 100 voice chorus, got their reactions to the experience and then scheduled our first recording sessions.

To produce SingleParts discs for a choral work, the first step is to locate a top quality recording studio experienced in working with the major classical music record labels. Then, having screened over 40 professional choral and oratorio singers and established a key group of 12 singers, we cast the 4 best voices for a particular work. A very good recording of the target work is located, licensed and serves as a background context for our teaching singers.

In the studio, each singer had a dedicated microphone placed in a partitioned quarter of the recording station. Here they can see and react with each other as they hear the background recording through earphones and sing their parts. This produces a very important quality in every SingleParts study disc - a sense of ensemble, a feeling that they are part of a cohesive group rather than doing a solo gig.

Once finished with the raw recording "takes", selected passages are excerpted and through patent pending technical process, slowed down a bit permitting you to better focus on the most challenging note intervals, rythmic patterns, language, etc. These slowed tracks are the StudySpots™ found on most SingleParts discs. On the finished discs the slowed passages are each followed by the same passage at the normal performance speed.

The last tasks at the studio are editing all the individual sessions takes, mixing and balancing each teaching singer's takes against the background track, and the creation of a production master disc for each of the four parts.

Rehearsal Arts' objective is to produce a choral learning aid that is as perfect as possible, one that gives the learning singer a really solid sense of their part in the full performance context. The process is expensive, but the results are deemed worth the effort.