There is another program that I find very useful when producing learning tracks for Barbershop songs. That program is Harmony Assistant by Myriad Software. Harmony Assistant, when used with the Virtual Singer add-on, is capable of producing very nearly human-sounding vocal tracks. When the notes are adjusted to the proper Just Intonation tuning using JustChords, the result is a great starting point for learning a new Barbershop song.

I have written a Harmony Assistant plug-in, available here, that imports a MusicXML file which has been augmented with tuning info by JustChords and produces a 4-part song with lyrics, ready for splitting into separate learning tracks for a quartet or chorus to use. Here is a brief outline of the process:

The process is actually pretty simple, and most of the necessary tools are free. Harmony Assistant plus Virtual Singer currently (May 2020) cost only $110 for a lifetime license, including all future upgrades. The other tools mentioned here are absolutely free. With a little practice, you should be able to go from a PDF to perfectly tuned learning tracks for a new song with less than 8 hours of work (estimated).

VirtualRobert

Virtual Singer comes with many different sampled voices. I find that the one called "VirtualRobert" works quite well for Barbershop, once you tweak it a little. The changes I recommend are the following:

If you find zero vibrato and zero scoop to sound too "robotic," feel free to add some humanness back in.

SAMPA

You can get Virtual Singer to pronounce a syllable completely differently from the way it's spelled. I find that I need to "correct" a handful of syllables in nearly every song. The mechanism for doing this is called SAMPA. This notation gives you precise control over the consonants/vowels that Virtual Singer uses to render a given syllable, if its pronunciation is somewhat off. The SAMPA notation does not show up in the printed score, so you can still use the same file for printing, if desired, after correcting the pronunciation.

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