On a lovely sunny day  in June , Cor Y Gleision Choir met at the Cornerstone in Charles Street for our choir singing day. Cornerstone is a  converted chapel  with great acoustics, and importantly, it’s large enough to accommodate almost a hundred of us.

We were there to improve our vocal skills and also to fine-tune the two songs we will be entering for the National Eisteddfod Mixed Choir  competition this coming August.

The morning began with some warm up exercises  and lots of laughs with Richard and Rhiannon including “Tony Chestnut knows I love him” and “The Grand old Duke of York”.  Even the marathon runners of the choir were wondering why they had achy limbs the following day.

We all found it so beneficial going through our songs in fine detail practising the phrasing, the intonation and timing. For the non- welsh speakers, the help with the pronunciation was invaluable.
At lunchtime, there was an outside area with tables and a coffee shop where we  were able to sit  in the sun to enjoy our sandwiches. Lots of us took advantage of the nice long break for a dash around the shops. M&S was  just next door.

In the afternoon we were lucky to have the expertise of Jenny Walker who was inspirational! Of course we had  the compulsory warming up exercises first. We tried singing Yellow Submarine and at the same time  adding syncopated percussion by leaping on the spot. Yikes!

Jenny had us all opening our upper palette through applying her “surprised hamster technique”.  It really works!  I can vouch for that. She was full of ideas and  techniques for improving our sound. She worked on our two eisteddfod songs and we could all feel the difference at the end of the afternoon.
We all went home (or to Weatherspoons)  in the late afternoon sunshine feeling that it was a very worthwhile and fun day. National Eisteddfod we’re on our way!