Dealer's Choice: Purple Rebar
5th: Sunday Night Social - 6544 (90.9 average) 4th: First Take - 6552 (91.0 average) 3rd: Full Effect - 6645 (92.3 average) 2nd: Gimme Four - 6700 (93.1 average) 1st: GQ - 6723 (93.4 average)
Is your 2026 international quartet champion
5th: Parkside Harmony - 2170 (90.4 average) 4th: Alexandria Harmonizers - 2199 (91.6 average) 3rd: Heralds of Harmony - 2273 (94.7 average) 2nd: Music City - 2306 (96.08 average) 1st: Ambassadors of Harmony - 2307 (96.13 average)
Hello. I am fairly new to Barbershop. I’ve been listening to the society and internationals for going on about 3 years now. I have listened to the livestreams for 2 years. I am always impressed with the quality of singing that comes out during the competition. So I’m always surprised to see the listing of quartets advance to the next rounds. I am a musician so I can hear when some quartets aren’t going to advance but there are sometimes where I listen to a quartet in the quarter finals and am surprised they didn’t even sniff the 20. And don’t get me started on the chorus competitions. I’m completely at a loss for who even wins those! I know singing in essence is art so it’s quite subjective. However, the scoring in BHS seems to be operate quite objectively(or as objective as possible). Given that objectively I’m curious to know how often many long standing barber shoppers tend to agree with the judges.If there are any on Reddit please let me know whether you do. Also, please let me know what to be listening for when watching these competitions because I love music and I want to understand the essence of Barbershop and what makes champions from a world of greats!
MT: Smoke Ring
Secret Best Friends
Sunday Night Social
First Take
GQ
Full Effect
Gimme Four
The Ladies
Double Date
The Newfangled Four
Purple Rebar
PURPEL BEARRRRRR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Hey all, will be attending all day tomorrow with my parents, and we are wondering if there will be concession stands open for food and drinks?
My mom is a diabetic and cannot go all day without sustenance, and with the strict bag policy we obviously cannot bring in enough food to last us the entire event. (Yes, we know that she can bring in a bigger bag for medical reasons and she will def. have an emergency stash of snacks with her). We would also rather not have to leave the venue to search for lunch and dinner.
I have tried looking in multiple places online, but the Google searches have not yielded any answers. Thanks in advance for your help.
Hey all! I'm deeply jealous of folks who are at BHS International right now! So, I'm at home working on my book, a romance between a man and a woman competing in rival barbershop quartets. And I have a question.
The barbershop organizations in the book are obviously not the real ones--I can do more with fictional entities and not get sued at the same time! :) That said, I am trying to at least be fairly realistic about barbershop culture. So, folks who are at international or who have been before: Is it customary for SUI and HI queens to wear their crowns out and about? Obviously not if they're competing or otherwise on stage, but just around? This is normal at SUI and HI conventions, I wasn't sure if it was weird at BHS events.
Hey, gang! I posted a while back about attending the convention as a spectator and got a lot of info from you all, which I very much appreciate. To update everyone -
We attended quarterfinals yesterday and had a really good time! It was awesome to get to hear everyone live and get to actually see the groups. We met a few folks and got to hear almost everyone competing!
I will say this - we did in fact stick out like sore thumbs. Every person I spoke to was shocked that we were not related to a group and found it odd that we were there to watch. Everyone was nice, but imo the earlier parts of the week are not really for spectators.
Don't get me wrong! We had a really good time getting to see the groups (and rooting for our hometown boys, Fountain City Four) and it definitely was fun to do once.
I do wish the event had a broader appeal (and a lower ticket price) but I assume the later parts of the convention kinda make up for that.
Overall it was fun, and I appreciate everyone that offered their two cents originally!
YEAHHH SEVENTH VARIETY
International is upon us! I think Gimme Four is the likely choice for gold this year. Full Effect keeps getting better and I think they will shoot up to 2nd. I'm pretty sure this is the first time that GC and the Ladies compete in the same international, so I'll be curious to see where they both end up. What are your predictions?
I dont know if im being nosy or I just dont have information about it, but what happened to midtown and Nick (Their Original Tenor)? I saw the post in Facebook about a year or so ago that Nick will no longer be singing with the quartet and figured that he will not be singing barbershop in a while and would just come back to sing in the AIC. But to my suprise that the new tenor sang with them while Nick was still there in the AIC chorus videos they just posted.
Is there ongoing issue or did Nick just chose to not sing with Midtown anymore due to other reasons but still sing in the AIC?
First win of the week for the hometown boys. I hope to see another one at least on Saturday.
Hey everyone.
I wanna do a Disney concert next year with my quartet and I'm in search of arrangements out there. I would love to do Reflection from Mulan but I could only find a tag. Does anyone know if someone has arranged the full song?
So far these are the songs on my list:
- Vuelie from Frozen
- When You Wish Upon a Star from Pinocchio
- Trashing the Camp from Tarzan
- When She Loved Me from Toy Story
- Go The Distance from Hercules
- Be Our Guest from Beauty and the Beast
- Kiss the Girl from The Little Mermaid
- I Just Can't Wait to be King from The Lion King
- Either Friend Like Me or Prince Ali from Aladdin
- The Bare Necessities from The Jungle Book
- Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious from Mary Poppins
Any recommendations are very welcome :)
Edit: I already have found arrangements for all the songs on the list above 😊
Hello!
I will be flying in to St. Louis Internationals Thursday night so I can see the Quartet Finals as a fan of barbershop, super excited to see many great quartets on stage :)
I was wondering what should I do when I arrive?
Currently My plan is to wander in awe around 9am check out the Harmony Marketplace to buy Barbershop memorabilia, I signed up to interview for the Harmony Movie, Try and meet/sing a tag with amazing quartets especially OC Times, buy some more merch, and Watch the finals.
Is there anything else you all would recommend for a first timer? I am so pumped!
Edit: Flying in Friday Night*** so Saturday will be the only day I am there :)
The barbershop chorus I’m in is rather small (under 20 people) and we’re trying to buy new music (women’s arrangements). We’d like to do more modern songs, and we need at least one that’s contestable. However, there’s so much online and it’s so hard to choose. We need something that’s not very difficult as well. How do you choose a song in your chorus? Do you have any recommendations for songs or websites to purchase from (we’re in Canada by the way)?
I'm flying in on Sunday for Internationals. Other that taxi or Uber/Lyft, is there decent, less expensive transportation from the airport to the downtown area via a tram or something similar? (Denver was really nice in this respect.)
Hi there, friends! I'm hoping the small but mighty reddit community of barbershoppers might be able to help here.
The context: a couple of friends and I from the Philadelphia BHS chapter started a quartet last year, and after doing pretty well in MAD Divisions back in March (novice champs!) and qualifying for Districts in October, we got the unfortunate news that work developments are taking our tenor out of this part of the country, and he won't be able to continue with us after Districts. If all goes according to plan, he'll at least be able to make it to Districts regardless of when his move ends up happening, but the rest of us have been left a little adrift wondering where to look/how to find a replacement tenor!
We've considered some of the obvious options for tenors in our age range (mid-20s to mid-30s), like the tenors in our home chapter, or other tenors we've heard of through the grapevine of friends in BHS, but nothing has panned out quite yet, and I figured I might be able to get some nuggets of wisdom here.
Has anyone done a new member search before, and if so, what were your success stories like? Where did you look? Or, if you are a tenor in the MAD area yourself and are interested, we're a fun couple of dudes that would love to meet you!
Howdy folks! I was hoping you all could help me locate a specific barbershop recording, if you've got a moment.
It was an all-male arrangement of Lone Prairie that I used to listen to on Spotify, but it was taken down a few years ago, and now I can't remember the group who sang it. It ended with that classic Lone Prairie tag by Norman Luboff, but one of the guys did horse hoof sounds over the last chord.
Also, the lyrics were "Oh bury me out..." instead of "Carry me back to the lone prairie," but the lyrics were the same otherwise (a la Eddy Arnold).
[Edit: It's been found! The Western Continentals singing Lone Prairie. Thank you Synester!]
Here's all the other details I can remember:
It wasn't a live recording - no audience noise or applause, and there was no dialog or anything, just the quartet.
The ending: 2 measures of swung tongue clicks (like horse hooves) and a horse-lip-blowing sound on the downbeat of the last bar. All done over the last chord. [edit: it's only 1 measure of clicks]
It had the style and recording quality of an 70s-ish quartet - warm, fuzzy, not very bass-heavy. And the tenor was pretty heavily featured. Kind of Gas House Gang-y.
The first two lines of each verse unison ("Oh bury me out on the lone prairie/where the coyotes howl and the wind blows free", and "I'm a roving cowboy...where I used to roam"), and then they broke into harmonies for the other two lines.
They sang that first verse twice, and on the second time, they did a funky chord on "howl" and fell off it (like, they briefly slid down their respective pitches, I'm not sure what the technical term for that is), so it sounded like a shout.
It was slower, somewhere around 85bpm-ish.
I remember the quartet's name sounding vaguely western, but I wouldn't bet my job on it or anything. I can't remember the album art.
If anyone has any ideas on who that was and/or what album it was on, I'd be grateful! I love that specific arrangement, it had such a sense of solitude and breadth that I thought really captured the spirit of the wild west.