How to sing male voice in our Church

By Saša Stevanović. Credits to Kristina, Valentina and Slobodan.

Notes/Disclaimers

• This is written for songs performed at Nativity of the Most Holy Theotokos Serbian Orthodox Church. Maybe works for some other churches? Who knows.
• This is written in English because most readers will be English speakers, and also, part of church services is in English too.
• I have no musical degree, so I actually might be off with sounds and with overall information; but I am highly confident that the guide is "just enough"; there are many other sight-singing guides available, but they might teach you something you don’t need to know, be harder, and not be applicable to our Church.
• Reading this page should take you about 20 minutes, but then you will have to practice on your own. This guide is a jump-start introduction, pointing you to some essential information, and then giving you some selected material to practice. What works best is to practice short and often.
• NEVER look at paper with musical notes or at the musical app on your phone while driving.

By ear, or by sight?

There are two ways to learn our church songs: singing them by ear (hearing what they sound like and then repeating, much like what you'd do for some popular song out there), or learning to sight-sing their musical notation (looking at the paper and producing the sounds). Of these two, I found that singing by ear is nearly impossible, because of various difficulties:

• first, when you listen, female voices are dominating the melody and your memory, and you need to sing the male voice
• next, the lyrics of liturgy songs is pretty hard to understand by ear, and some are in Serbian, other in English, yet other songs are in Russian or Church Slavonic
• there are not much recordings available on Youtube, so you effectively get to listen to them one-two hours per week which is not enough
• and finally, if there are recordings, they can be misleading because the melodies of songs are not standardized, even if the text is

A fraction is enough, and it’s a low risk!

Good news #1 is that a fraction is enough! You don’t have to learn all sight-singing techniques or skills. I also don’t know them. Just a small portion is enough to get started, and this will guide you to those most important parts. Learning just 6 notes gets you a long way! Plus, tenor's job is easiest, as we'll see soon.

Good news #2 is that you won’t get it wrong. It’s a low risk, background supporting voice. When you don’t know something, you can just skip it. The benefit, on the other hand, is pretty high. In singing, there is this thing called harmony, which effectively means that when multiple voices are singing together, they can produce this effect where "the whole is greater than the sum of the parts" and the resulting song sometimes can sound like it’s out of this world. And that’s quite useful for a church, right? And all these benefits are without even starting to talk about joint prayer, which is a completely new dimension.

Real life examples

Alright, so how to do it? Let’s jump into it. Here is a real-life example of what the choir in our church sings. They have lots of papers like this in front of them. It may look overwhelming at first, but let’s take a look at the pieces and see how in fact it’s not that complicated.

Visually speaking, let’s focus on two stripes of musical notes, in the middle of which we can see the text to sing. For now, we can safely ignore these two pointy thingys above the first stripe.

The first stripe is identified by two signs. The first sign is so called "treble clef". It signifies that this entire stripe is actually for female voices (known as soprano and alto). The second sign, that looks like small letter b defines the so called "key signature". This particular one shows that the notes are in F major. But since pretty much all the songs in our church are in F major, we can safely ignore this. In fact, since this guide is about male voice, we can safely ignore the entire first stripe. See, it’s becoming easier already.

The second stripe also has two signs. The first sign is called "bass clef", and it signifies that the stripe is for male voices (also known as tenor and bass). The second sign, also looking like small letter b, has the same meaning as above (key signature known as F major, and, as we said, almost everything is in F major). You may notice that this small letter b is on the second line from the bottom, not on the third line like in first stripe. This difference can be ignored. Also, we’ll get to these lines later. Note that even though this is called "bass clef", it contains the notes for both tenor and bass voices.

Namely, the first set of notes here is for tenor, and the set below is for bass. Note that tenor notes are pointing up, bass notes are pointing down, and some notes don’t seem to be pointing anywhere. The direction and lengths of these lines doesn’t matter; it’s just for easier visual identification. Sometimes the notes can touch each other, and sometimes even overlap (such as when tenor and bass sing the same sound). If we just observe tenor, we see that the notes are actually "outside" of the stripe. This is OK, we’ll get to lines very shortly. Also note, the rectangle for tenor in this picture contains one note from bass set, namely the third note from the left, the one below "Go" text. You can ignore that one since we’re focusing on tenor.

Now, let’s just observe the first 5 notes, and also remove the bass note out of sight, to avoid confusion. Here is what it would sound like:

That should not be too hard to sing: Te-bje Go-spo-di. Play that again and try to sing on your own!

In our musical notes (F major) this would be: Sol-Sol-La-Sol-Sol. Note how third note sounds higher than others, and is also drawn higher up on the paper. Also note how some sounds are longer and some are shorter. You might be guessing that black note with line sticking up is shortest, white note with line is longer, and the white note with no line at all is the longest. The rest of this guide is to help you identify what the notes sound like and how long they are, which lets you further practice. It’s worth noting how only a small number of notes (in this case just two notes!) are enough to create a melody that sounds very nice! Also worth noting, if you sing a little higher or lower, that’s fine too. The rest of the guide will help you differentiate the notes (also known as scale degrees) so that relative to each other they sound as they should; after that, your brain will automatically be able to adjust higher or lower. Before continuing though, let’s listen to that once more:

Extremely basic theory

To properly sing the notes from the lessons, you have to be able to hear them first. Using the app of your choice, you can hear the sound of "middle C", which is very important. Or, if you have a real piano, you likely have someone who can show you the middle C. It should sound the same as what you already heard earlier as "Sol" in this guide. Some apps that I used are "Pianist HD: Piano Teacher" (for Android) or Chordio app (for MacOS), but any app that allows you to press on a middle C key and hear the sound will be sufficient. I found that both of these apps are full of popups asking you to pay for some extra features etc, but none of those features or payment is needed for learning church singing. I also include a link to Learn Music Free Youtube channel, which I personally found very useful for understanding basic theory.

A little more theory, and how some notes are above the lines. In this example we illustrate how some notes on bass clef and on treble clef produce exactly the same sound. Namely, the notes connected with orange arrow are the same sound (also known as same pitch) even though some are performed by tenor and some are performed by alto. It helps you with further understanding, although not mandatory for sight singing. For sight singing, all you need to know is what sound does each note make, and practice to reproduce that sound.

Practice

And for that, you should download some pages from this PDF manual called Singing companion lesson book – bass clef. Print just 7 pages: from page 2 through page 8. For this guide those pages are a mandatory practice. Namely the page 2 introduces you to hand signs/motions that help your brain remember the notes, and then there are 6 pages of lessons, from easier to harder. Learning the notes is probably harder than it sounds, but with practice it is well within reach. Remember: what works best is to practice REGULARLY/OFTEN, even if just for couple of minutes per day. In my case, I have a couple of papers printed, so I practice whenever alone on a hiking trail or in a car while not driving. For this, obviously you will need some app since a real piano will not work, and my picture below is just a picture and not an app you can use. Remember: NEVER look at paper with musical notes or at the musical app on your phone while driving.

For copyright purposes, I will not include the content of that PDF guide in this guide. However, you will see that the lessons look similar to what I showed that our church choir has, and it is all in F major. So, it is important for you to be able to play and hear the F major scale. With your app of choice, once you find the middle C, finding other notes on F major is not hard, except that "fa" is somewhat tricky. You can use the Youtube link I provided to learn more music theory, or simply accept this picture as helper that should be sufficient for anything you need to know. So, if the lesson asks you to play sol or mi, you can easily hear what it sounds like and continue to practice. For reference, F major should sound like this:

Now rinse and repeat! Go to a lesson from the PDF, see a note, press the key, hear the sound, sing it. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Consider this: since the length of a lesson page is about 1 minute, you can practice 10 times per day. Finally, for the lesson 5 which introduces "fa" note, we also provide mp3 files which you can download and listen to without having to play them on your own.

Real-life practice

After going through the lessons, you can understand and practice the actual songs from the Church song book. The below audio files are for notes only; you will need to obtain a PDF of our church songs in order to sign. NOTE: the speed in these audio files still needs adjustments, I hope to fix it soon, in the meantime you can practice the slow or the fast version, whatever you prefer.