Barbershop Tags
My new app has been posted, Barbershop Tags. It is an app to help with singing Barbershop Harmony. Now, most people are too too familiar with Barbershop Harmony, so here is some background to you will need understand what this app is intended for.
1. It is 4-part harmony. The four parts are Tenor, Lead, Baritone and Bass. Usually Lead has the melody.
2. When Barbershoppers congregrate, we like to do something called tagging, which is basically where 4 or more people sing the last few bars of a song, since this is the best part and everyone can learn it fast, since we may not know any full songs in common. Usually there is someone who knows all 4 parts of a tag, and they'll teach it to everyone, we'll sing it, and then move on to the next one.
3. Barbershoppers use a neat little thing called Learning Tracks to learn music. There are usually 5 learning tracks to a song: All Parts, and one for each part. Each part-specific track is in stereo. It has its main part in the right channel, and the other three in the left channel (or vice versa). This way, you can shift the balance on your stereo to hear ONLY your part, or ONLY the other 3 parts.
4. The website www.barbershoptags.com hosts learning tracks and sheet music (as gifs or pdfs) for over 1,000 tags.
5. There is a book of 125 Classic Tags that are the most popular ones sang at Barbershop events. These tags are also hosted at www.barbershoptags.com in a special section.
Now that you understand Barbershop harmony and tagging, here is what my app does:
You can browse and search the tags on www.barbershoptags.com and download the sheet music and learning tracks. Once downloaded, you can play the learning tracks and view the sheet music at the same time. You can choose which learning track to listen to, and shift the balance as needed.
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