Good rehearsals come in all shapes in sizes, but crappy rehearsals have a lot in common.  After spending thousands of hours in my own rehearsals, and attending rehearsals of many groups around the country, I’m amazed that so many people continue to make the exact same mistakes.  With an eye toward helping you improve your rehearsals, I offer now Part One of what I believe are the most common (very fixable) pitfalls:

• Room Not Prepared.  The music director (or whoever runs your rehearsals) should get to the space early enough to prepare the room.  Clear the desks out of the way, move the tables, write the agenda on the whiteboard, push the piano into place.  Get the room ready so you’re not taking rehearsal time to move furniture (or worse, rehearsing around some desks).

• Starting Late.  Duh.  Nearly every director I’ve ever talked to ranks this as one of the biggest fixable problems they deal with on a regular basis.  If one person is late just 5 minutes every rehearsal, over the course of a year that adds up to many hours of lost rehearsal time.  It seems like a small thing, but it adds up fast.  But how can you fix tardiness?  First, convince your group members that they shouldn’t arrive on time, but rather early.  Arriving early gives you time to put down your bag, take out your water bottle, talk to your bandmates, review your sheet music, and be standing in place when it’s time to begin.  And second, just start on time, every time.  It’s good for people who arrive late to feel late; it’ll encourage them to leave home a little earlier next time.

• Arriving at different times.  This is worse than just starting late.  When even one singer arrives late, the group fails to have the chance to start together.  This means that all the good energy you try to create through your warm-ups, opening inspirational thought, or similar intro is lost when that person isn’t on board.  People arriving late miss the rehearsal agenda, announcements, and pre-rehearsal chit chat that’s really important to staying on the same page.

• Bad warm-ups (or no warm-ups!).  Totally underrated.  Warm-ups help wake up your singers, prepare their voices for rehearsal, relax them, focus them, and improve their musical ears.  If you use the same warm-ups every day, repent!  If you don’t warm up at all, repent even more!  If you’re one of those people who has group members warm up prior to rehearsal so you can maximize rehearsal time, I challenge you to change your ways.  Warming up together effectively can help bring your group together at the outset of the rehearsal.  Plus most people never do it on their own even when they say they do.

• No one knows where missing people are.  So common, right?  “Is Jared coming to rehearsal?”  “I don’t know, I talked to him earlier today and he didn’t say anything about not coming today.”  “Does someone have his cell phone number?”  Tick tock, tick tock.  What a waste!  Make a new policy for your group, and consistently enforce it, that if anyone is going to be late to rehearsal, they have to notify the manager, director, and/or one other person in the group beforehand.  Text messages are most effective since they can be checked easily during rehearsal unlike voicemail.  Which brings up another point – every member of your group should have the cell # of every other member of the group saved in her phone.  It’s so important that I suggest you even use rehearsal time (or retreat or post-gig time) to do this if necessary.

• Poor individual preparation.  The extent of this problem will depend on your group’s commitment level.  Weekend warrior groups often require no outside preparation.  But even the most casual of singers can get frustrated when their bandmates spend each rehearsal re-learning the same material from the previous rehearsal.  Remind group members between rehearsals what you expect from them.  Music listening?  Plunking out parts on a piano?  Choreo review?  Prepared performers not only bring musical preparation to rehearsals, but physical preparation as well.  Sheet music, tape recorders, and personal calendars are just some of the must-have’s.

• No agenda.  This is one of the biggest time killers of all, and unfortunately it’s one of the most common.  Just showing up and “seeing what happens” is totally disrespectful to your group members.  They put in a lot of time, even in the most casual groups, and you owe them at least the basic duty of thinking ahead of time about what you’ll be doing and how long you’ll spend on each item.  This doesn’t mean you have to be rigid, but at least have a basic plan.  And it’s stunning how if you tell people at the beginning of rehearsal what you expect from them that day, they’re ten times more likely to actually get it done.

• No leader.  Not only does a rehearsal need a leader, but each song needs a leader.  You need someone to say “okay, let’s go back to measure 58 and re-work the bridge” or “no, let’s hold off on that suggestion for now, and just keep reviewing this breakout chorus.”  If you have too many chiefs, you’ll have people fighting over where to take a breath or whether to get quiet or loud on the second stanza.  On the other hand, some groups have too few chiefs, where everyone sits around saying nothing or insisting that everyone else decide.  If you can’t be there to run the rehearsal, appoint someone else to manage that rehearsal.  If there isn’t someone to tell everyone when to take a break, people will just kinda run things on their own.  Anarchy rarely works on a consistent basis, especially with a bunch of creative right-brained types.

Stay tuned in the next few days for Part Two of this article.

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