Rehearsal Sites – Notes – Aeolian Singers

This page gives more information or advice about various rehearsal sites. They are listed in alphabetical order.

Choralia Net https://www.choralia.net

mp3 files are available for each voice part in three versions: Voice with metronome, Emphasised voice and other voices, All voices. The lead voice is synthesised and may not be to everyone’s taste.
In the middle of the window that opens you will see a control panel (surrounded by adverts*) where you can adjust the tempo of the piece, the volume of the lead voice etc. At the right of the window click on the image with the red down-pointing arrow to listen to the track. If you want to save that track, save the website address (URL) shown in the address/search bar of your browser and save that to a folder on your computer with a name that means something to you, eg the title of the work.

* You will see a message saying “Please disable your ad blocker for this website. You can make a donation to Choralia in order to obtain an ads-stop code.“

CyberBass – http://cyberbass.org

CyberBass is a collection of choral scores converted to MIDI format for play back on your computer that will help you learn your part. CyberBass is a note bashing site; is not beautiful or artistic, and does not playback dynamics or vocal nuances. It generally does not play back orchestral accompaniment. Although you will find some pieces with accompaniment sequenced lightly in the background.

CyberBass has a Major Works Index https://www.cyberbass.org/Major_Works.htm listing composers in alphabetical order. For most works the table enables you to puchase a CD (from Amazon), the Score (from Sheet Music Plus, although the link is currently broken), or a Learning CDs (from Cyberbass) – the sale of MP3 Audio Files currently not available for some works.
When you click on a Major Work in that table you are taken to a page with a clickable table showing the Movements and Vocal Parts. Although you can purchase Downloadable MP3 Audio Files you can click on Tutti or your voice part to Start Player. This plays a MIDI file with the chosen voice part emphasised. Adjacent to this table (or sometimes splitting the table) you can see a box headed by the name of the work you are playing which gives some Playback Controls.

JohnF’s Rehearsal Files https://johnfletchermusic.org

Anyone may search this site in order to see what music files are offered. You will see all titles and arrangements. After searching you will see as the last line under each title: “This entry was posted in…”
If it says “FREE” then you need to register for an “Individual – Free” membership;
if it says “PREMIUM” you will need a paid-for membership.
The Free membership gives life-time access to all those titles marked FREE, which are all the out-of-copyright files. To obtain access to any in-copyright files, you need a paid-for membership. Paid-for memberships for Individuals: £4.40, £6.60 or £11 for 4 months, 6 months, or 1 year respectively

There are rehearsal tracks for each voice part which you can listen to online, Copy to Dropbox, or Download. Scroll down the page and select the mp3 file for your voice part. There is a link to a MIDI file which you have to download, but that is for all voices.

The files on each page are stored in his account on Dropbox; you don’t need a Dropbox account.
Click on the “Click here for the sound files” link, just below the publisher information, which takes you to Dropbox. IGNORE ANY “SIGN UP” BUTTON; IGNORE ANY “JOIN THE FOLDER” BUTTON.
For more information, click on the “Files stored on Dropbox” link under USEFUL INFORMATION on the right-hand side of all pages.
Choose HELP>HOW TO PLAY THE FILES from the top menu for more help.
To return to his site, click on your browser’s back button

John’s Midi File Choral Music site http://www.learnchoralmusic.co.uk/index.html

This site gives is a “clickable” Table of the available Midi Files for these Works. Note that, for the most part, where a voice part is split into two, the relevant Files have been correspondingly divided.
If this is the first time you have visited this site you are advised to read items 1, 3 and 4, at the bottom of the home page.
John recommends you play these MIDI Files with Chris Hills’s MidiPlay, a free Windows program that shows the notes, and allows singers to adjust the playback to help them to learn their parts.
If you’re a Mac user try Roni Music’s Sweet MIDI Player, a free download from the relevant sub-page of the Roni Music Website; it is now also available for iPhone/iPad.

Singing Practice (Robin’s Midi File Store) https://www.singingpractice.co.uk

Each sung part has their own version of the work in the form of a synthesised music file known as a midi file (filename.mid). Parts and accompaniment have appropriate sounds similar to singers or organ and piano. The singer’s part will be audibly enhanced on the right stereo channel, other parts will be at a lesser volume on the left stereo channel, and accompaniments will be slightly muted and balanced over both channels. You can change your computer’s stereo balance to enhance these effects.

Please note that this is strictly for practice, and you may not always hear a particularly pleasant sound, and there will be no dynamics. Sometimes there are solo parts alongside the choral parts. In this case they will always be heard on both channels.

Before unaccompanied pieces, or pieces starting with no piano intro, two extra bars are inserted at the beginning to strike the rhythm for the singer. The first bar contains the initial note of the part on each beat of the bar, and the second bar is empty. However the bar numbers of the MIDI file should always match the score.

The famous Roland Karaoke program (free!) is recommended for practicing – find out below.
Find out about Roland Karaoke program! The ONLY way to practice. https://www.singingpractice.co.uk/music/programs/roland.html
To load the program to your computer click here https://www.singingpractice.co.uk/music/programs/Jukebox.zip

St Mary’s Singers https://www.stmaryssingers.com

Directory of training tracks for choirs. Sacred music only.
https://www.stmaryssingers.com/directory.html
These training tracks are provided by the St Mary’s Singers choir for the benefit of the global choral community to learn how to sing these songs.

The majority of songs are available to hear in MP3 format, however some songs are midi files. Click on the name of the part (blue) to play the MP3 in your browser. Right-click on the part name to get a popup menu allowing you to download the MP3 file to your computer. Click on the YouTube icon to the left of the name to view/hear the track on YouTube – this is only available for a few tracks.

The Silvis Woodshed http://gasilvis.net

This website provides a collection of midi files and tools to help singers learn their notes so that they can be ready to turn it into music when they go to rehearsal.

Unless otherwise noted, the files were sequenced by George Silvis and have only the choral parts (ie, no accompaniment) and are constant velocity (ie, no dynamics). All MIDI files in this collection are provided for personal use only. These MIDI files do not replace professional recordings and are of no use unless the singer has a score in front of them.

There are many programs out there that will play these files with the control that a singer needs: track pan, track volume and tempo control. Some that are recommended:

Melody Assistant
Sweet MIDI Player also recommended by John.
MITSYN
Midi to Wav converter

YouTube

If you find the adverts on YouTube annoying, you could use an adblocker extension in your browser. Unfortunately YouTube now detects and blocks such tools because they “violate our Terms of Service”. However uBlock Origin, the brilliant content-blocker, regularly updates its filters to get round YouTube’s ever-tighter restrictions and will continue blocking the ads in videos. This extension is available for most browsers on a Windows PC or an Android tablet, and also for Safari releases prior to 13 for both Apple Mac and iPad/iPhone.

However it is much easier to use the Brave browser, https://www.brave.com
The Brave Browser is built on the open-source Chromium Web core. By blocking all privacy-invading ads & trackers by default there’s less stuff to load on every single webpage you visit, so Brave is 3x faster than Google Chrome. Brave is available for the following operating systems:

MS Windows Windows 10 or later
Apple Mac OS X El Capitan 10.11.0 or later
iOS (iPad/iPhone) Version 13 or later
Android (tablet/phone) Version 7 or later

Another option is to use an alternative website which doesn’t connect to Google’s adverts. Piped https://piped.video/trending is a free website that allows you to search YouTube and play videos in your browser; the search box is at the top of the webpage. So you can use any browser.

FreeTube https://freetubeapp.io/ is a wonderful front end for viewing videos without ads, but it’s a desktop program rather than a website, so you have to download and install it on your Windows or MacOS x64 device.