#aca-bloggin

Gird your loins, lads: it’s time for a vaguely emotional post.

As you all know, I’m in an all-girls a cappella group at my university. In fact, I’m the musical director of the group, which means I write most of the arrangements along with teaching them to the girls and making sure they’re performance-ready.The above video is our audition for an a cappella competition, and it features one of my favourite arrangements to date: a bilingual version of Hallelujah, otherwise known as Haleliwia.

If you’ve been following me for a long, long time (and I’m talking five years), you’ll know two things: this isn’t the first time I’ve covered Haleliwia, and I used to have a crippling fear of singing in front of people.

I shan’t go too deep into why I was so terrified of singing, but I basically had a very bad experience when I sang in front of my teachers when I was younger, and they laughed and told me to stop. I was also briefly bullied as a pre-teen, as my unusually deep voice was a pretty fun thing for people to tease me about. Around the age of twelve or thirteen, I pretty much stopped singing unless it was in a big choir where no one could hear me. (I wrote about the bad experience in a post here, but please bear in mind it’s a very old one from 2011!)

My vocal lessons - which were a compulsory part of my GCSEs - were largely useless, as my teacher was determined to make me a soprano despite the fact I had the vocal range of a male tenor. Regardless of my very negative experience with auditioning in front of my teachers, I was still very actively interested in any school musicals or choirs. I just never really let anyone hear my voice again unless it was thoroughly necessary.

Around 2010, I joined Tumblr, and whilst scrolling around my dashboard full of Glee, Doctor Who and Alan Rickman (I had an interesting taste in men as a sixteen-year-old), I came across SoundCloud. I thought: “Snazzy! Might as well give this a go.” I grabbed my father’s microphone (fresh from the nineties), downloaded a dodgy backing of Leona Lewis’s ‘Hallelujah’, and uploaded the result to Tumblr.

Bearing in mind that I only had around a hundred followers at the time, the reaction I got to this cover was pretty huge for me, and it became the first step which led to where I am now. In the five years since I received those handful of notes and wonderful comments, I’ve become someone entirely new. I used to be terrified of letting the world hear my weird, loud, deep, uncontrollable voice, but now I love nothing more than unleashing it on unsuspecting eardrums. No one expects a five-foot-two girl who weighs less than a hundred pounds to have the voice of a foghorn. No one expects a girl who was once petrified of performing to go on to sing in front of thousands of people in shows, flash-mobs, YouTube videos, on the radio, on the street, on stage.

I am a vocal percussionist, a director, a composer and, most importantly, a singer. I am neither professional nor overwhelmingly talented, but I am still a singer.

After finding out I was the DeciBelles’ newest director, I went home, sat by my laptop, and composed an a cappella arrangement of the song which gave me the confidence to sing again. The arrangement became one of the most well-received things I have ever created.

All of this - my love for music, my confidence, the way I now live my life - is down to those people on Tumblr who said they liked my voice, five years ago.