Peter Bryant

Sing2026 — some personal highlights

2026-05-26T09:51:00Z

I just got home from the BABS Sing2026 convention, and it was an extremely excellent weekend on several fronts. I wanted to share a few personal highlights.

First to my friends in Hallmark of Harmony — the chorus I grew up in — who posted a massive score improvement and came home with a Silver Medal in the Male Chorus Contest. It's their first contest medal under their new MD Rob Stonewood, and they sang two new arrangements: one arranged by Sam Hubbard, and the other by my younger brother Nick Bryant. Very proud all round!

Second to Somewhat Original, who I worked with a little bit in the run-up to the contest. Their goal was to get a score of 70%, which they thoroughly overachieved on. They came home with Bronze medals in the Youth Quartet contest, and a score of 72.3%. They executed a lot of the new stuff we were working on, and got a great response from the audience. Again, very proud!

Third, I'm very excited that my quartet (Limelight) successfully achieved a qualifying score to compete at the BHS International! We got an 82.4% — our highest score to date and our first time qualifying since the score threshold was increased to 81%. We are thrilled to have the chance to compete at International again, and very happy that our hard work is paying off! It really felt like we had found our mojo again this weekend. Congratulations also to The Emerald Guard, Fifth Element, and Overtime, all of whom also achieved a qualifying score.

A final highlight for me was the induction of The Emerald Guard into the BABS Hall of Fame. They are only the second quartet to be inducted, and they are thoroughly deserving of this honour. They've been singing together for 14 years and continue to push themselves and our art form to new places. The work they've done to inspire singers across the country — including me — is huge. Very proud to know them and call them friends.

Trust your instincts

2026-05-21T16:19:00Z

I had a great day with the fabulous Noteworthy quartet last weekend. They all sing in my chorus so I know them well, and they're currently preparing for their return to LABBS Quartet Prelims in June. Having won Most Improved Quartet not just once but two years on the trot, and qualifying for the semi-finals last year, I'd say Noteworthy are on something of a contest high!

We talked a lot about interpretation during our session. This is a set of challenges that barbershoppers are almost uniquely faced with. Arrangers leave barbershop charts deliberately void of any dynamic markings, and are generally pretty conservative about tempo markings and other detail on expression or performance.

I think this because in barbershop, unlike in classical music, the performer is paramount rather than the composer or arranger. We are getting much better at crediting arrangers in barbershop, but nobody is going to barbershop concerts celebrating the work of Melody Hine, or buying compilation CDs of David Wrights arrangements (although I would almost definitely pay for both of those things). But people do go to concerts specifically for the purpose of hearing Bach or Mozart.

The point is that barbershop arrangers want to leave room for interpretation in their work, so that performers can step in and make their own creative decisions about how to use dynamics, tempo changes, and other expression in their performance.

This sounds great, but it means that performers can often be deeply confused about how they should be performing a song. Landing on a great interpretation is a skill that can really only be gained with experience.

There is also a lot of weird and conflicting advice on interpretation. Phrases like "sing it how you say it" and "forward motion" lead groups to make decisions that actually don't make much musical sense. They sing beautiful ballads way too fast, or gloss over the best chords, because they are focused on the one or two interpretive tools they've been coached on.

I sensed a bit of confusion in Noteworthy this weekend. They had some interesting ideas on individual phrases in their contest ballad, but it didn't make a ton of sense overall. And the decisions they'd made in favour of forward motion or "conversationalness" were sacrificing ebb and flow, and we were leaving a lot of barbershop juice un-squeezed.

To be honest, all I needed to do was to give them permission to trust their instincts. The moment we started picking apart their plan, they started saying things like, "Yeah, I never really liked how we do that but I feel like we have to cos something something forward motion?"

Hopefully we landed on something that puts the music and storytelling first, rather than trying to tick a particular box for the judges. We can often fixate on buzz-phrases like forward motion, but ultimately I've always found that singing in a way that feels right, and honours the music and the song, is the best place to start. And arrangers often leave more clues than we think.

Committing to the bit with Somewhat Original

2026-05-14T07:55:00Z

I had the pleasure of working with Somewhat Original this weekend for the final stages of their preparation for the 2026 BABS Youth Quartet Contest.

They've been around a little while and have a few contest appearances under their belts. They met at Durham University as members of Full Score barbershop choir, and have kept singing together since graduation as a long-distance quartet.

It was a rare opportunity for me to be a group's first ever coach. Despite having sung together for a few years, they told me at the start of our day that they'd never had a coaching session before. This is a bit of a dream for a coach — something I think a lot about is making sure I don't tread on the toes of coaches who have gone before. But without that consideration, I was excited to come at this with a completely fresh slate.

The first thing to say is that this is a really great quartet. As individuals their singing skills are all excellent. So we spent much of the day talking about musicality, storytelling, and performance.

Barbershop judges talk a lot about identifying a song's "theme" (melody, rhythm, lyrics, comedy etc), and leaning into the primary theme as much as possible. They already had a pretty great idea for how they wanted to present their songs, and it was satisfying for me to be able to help bring that vision to life a bit more, with a few simple tweaks and fixes.

We had been hosted for the day by Caroline — mum of lead Rachel, and a member of my own chorus — and she had arranged for a little garden party for the neighbours as a sort of send-off/dry-run for the quartet. The neighbours, many of whom had not heard barbershop before, were suitably impressed.

Overall a great day — big thanks to the quartet for inviting me. Make sure you see them in the contest if you're going!

Do barbershoppers need social media?

2026-05-06T10:44:00Z

I'm not oblivious to the fact that having a blog, as a barbershopper, is weird.

Barbershop, just like every other community in our lives, is largely centred around the major social media platforms; primarily Facebook and YouTube, but a bit on Instagram, TikTok, and Discord as well.

This is fine, except that an awful lot of folks out there are choosing to opt out of social media completely. It's increasingly understood that algorithmic social media causes all kinds of harm, so it makes sense that lots of folks are deciding they want no part in it, or at least that they want to reduce their consumption.

That said, social media can be an incredibly powerful tool for barbershop groups. It's an amazing way to connect with fellow singers, and keep up-to-date with your favourite groups.

So is it possible to have the best of both worlds: a connection with the wider barbershop world, without being tied at the hip to harmful social media platforms?

Before social media, there were blogs.

Blogs were created by nerds who wanted to be able to share their thoughts, feelings, and news on the internet. At the time, social media didn't really exist, so if you wanted somewhere to post, you had to build it yourself.

This led to an incredible diversity of independent websites, created by individual people, for fun, all over the internet. They didn't rely on a tech giant; just a few HTML files hosted on a lil server somewhere (often on a computer in the blogger's house). The bloggers would reply to each other's posts by email, and link to each other's websites in their own posts. A decentralised network was born, and thrived.

Then social media happened, and consolidated everything into a few homogenous mega-platforms. Now, in order to share stuff on the internet, all you needed was a free Facebook account or Twitter profile, and to give up your right to own anything you posted. Blogs, for the most part, died.

Fast forward a decade or so. Tech companies, including Google, Meta (which owns Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp), and TikTok, have consolidated utterly dominant positions in their markets. The entire media industry has needed to reinvent itself around the new world order.

If you still have a website, you have to share everything you make on Facebook and Instagram as well, and shape your content according to Google's opaque "search engine optimisation" rules to ensure you appeared in search results. (Ever wondered why all the recipe websites have several paragraphs of waffle before getting to the actual recipe? Yep, that's Google's fault.) Some new businesses skip the middle man altogether, choosing to just have social media instead of their own website.

And as the pressure grew on the tech companies to make even more money, their targeted advertising platforms became more and more advanced. They follow us around the internet, whether or not we have accounts with them, and learn everything about our online behaviour in order to ensure we click on as many of their ads as possible.

Their platforms are optimised for engagement above all else, and they have discovered that the most engaging stuff is people posting angry, controversial opinions. It actually doesn't matter to Meta whether what you say is true or kind or helpful; they actually make more money if it isn't.

Now, in the age of AI, the platforms are being flooded with slop: AI-made content which can be produced at alarming rates for very little cost, drowning out the voices of real people with stories to tell.

But there is hope. As the world is becoming more fed up with tech platforms, there is a quietly determined rebellion taking place behind the scenes. It's called The IndieWeb.

The IndieWeb is a people-focused alternative to the “corporate web”.

We are a community of independent and personal websites based on the principles of: owning your domain and using it as your primary online identity, publishing on your own site first (optionally elsewhere), and owning your content.

In other words, blogging is coming back.

What's in it for barbershoppers?

I get it — this all seems a bit "fringe". But let's be honest, barbershop has never been exactly mainstream, has it? And as ubiquitous as it has become, social media has largely not been able to keep its promises when it comes to growing barbershop. (I asked Claude AI to research this hypothesis for me — it's full findings are available here.)

To me, this comes as a huge relief. We are free to put our efforts into other strategies. And we can find new ways to stay connected to one another. As well as important things like optimising the first-rehearsal experience, encouraging members to invite guests, and cultivating an inclusive culture, I would like to suggest that barbershop groups should all put more effort into having a great website with a blog and an email newsletter.

But where do I start?

The good news is that, unlike in 2001, you don't need any special technical skills to get started. There are some wonderful independent platforms where you can set up a blog very cheaply, including Pika and Bear. If you're interested in digging into the technical stuff, IndieWeb has some great guides.

You may even find that your existing website already has features which support a News page or a blog.

I'm not saying that barbershoppers should ditch social media entirely. Anecdotally, it has worked tremendously well for some groups (particularly groups which have formed recently, and for recruiting female singers). But it's clear that we don't need to rely on social media, and a blog is a very fun, much more personal substitute.

If you're a barbershopper and you set up a blog or a news page — whether it's for yourself or your quartet/chorus — please email me with a link and I'll add it to my list of barbershop blogs.

Breathing for Singing: A mythbusting exercise

2026-05-06T07:45:00Z

We had a pretty interesting idea at Main Street Sound recently. Each month, we would dedicate a few minutes to a "Mini Workshop", in which we would dive into a particular topic we wouldn't usually get to cover in the normal course of rehearsal.

We devised the list of topics based on our members' 2026 New Years Resolutions; everyone was asked to write down something they wanted to learn more about with the chorus for 2026, and pop it in a box. Some really interesting themes emerged, and we wanted to try and get to at least the most popular ideas.

We had the first session this week, covering breathing for singing. Singers talk an awful lot about breathing, but I've come to learn over the years that we probably overthink it quite a lot. There's also some very strange advice going around the barbershop world which, while well-intentioned, might cause more harm than good.

We ran the session in two halves. The first half involved splitting into groups and writing down as much of the breathing advice the singers could remember receiving over the years. We wanted them to include everything, whether they knew it to be helpful, unhelpful, or anywhere in between.

Once we'd compiled all the ideas, we came together to categorise then into "True/Helpful", "False/Unhelpful", or "Grey Area/Sometimes/Maybe/It Depends".

The result is in the photo below. I was pretty pleased with this outcome, but I'm keen to know if anyone has alternative opinions about where we've placed some of the ideas!

New podcast episode: The 1234

2026-04-16T00:00:00Z

A new episode of Tune In available today: an interview with 2025 BABS Male Quartet Champions, The 1234.

New podcast episode: Tim Briggs

2026-03-19T00:00:00Z

We released a new episode of Tune In today: the first in our series of interviews! I was very excited to chat to the wonderful Tim Briggs about his life in barbershop. He wasn't quite prepared.

Listen using the Spotify embed, or wherever you get your podcasts. More options here.