Well what can be said? That was an amazing weekend and produced just what was expected of it. Not only was a lot learnt but I was also able to catch up with some friends from previous weekends with barbershop who were there unexpectedly and also met new people.

Starting off on Friday we were thrown straight into it with a warm up by Mike Brewer. You may think that a simple warm up might be easy to learn and do well. But this is a Mike Brewer warm up and is in fact quite the opposite. Taking us from country to country in his warm up techniques everyone was quite quickly confused, yet by simply saying to sing like an Italian he showed us how much a chorus can improve in a short time. How he was able to memorize the African songs 5 or so parts when we were all struggling with the single line he gave us is a mystery. After we were all thoroughly confused and tired we were off for some drinking and singing that we knew- My Wild Irish Rose of course. As far as I remember myself and Angus held up the Scottish end of things pretty well with being the last to go.

Saturday was packed with more techniques and practices for us, with Rob Barber going over my DVD with me, telling me what to correct. Saturday afternoon we learnt how to lead and manage the chorus which I know from experience is no easy task. We were then taken through half of the college song "Once upon a time". You may think this would only take a few minutes as we all had learnt at least one part each before attending directors college but it did in-fact take around an hour and a half, after going through every single chord we sang individually, naming it and deciding why the arranger put it there. And here was me thinking it was just because it sounded good. Then of course followed the afterglow again in the evening after another meal. This time the afterglow lasted till around 430am with getting up at 7am for breakfast coming up fast.

Sunday we were then taken to our classes like liability and insurance for arranger etc, but the real fun was getting to direct and be videoed in order to mark my progress from my previous DVD, which showed a remarkable difference.

In all it was a great experience which I will hopefully take back to my chorus to create a better sound. Thanks for sending me.

Nick Drew (Rolling Hills)