Introduction to Course

This is a course for absolute beginners in barbershop arranging. It's helpful if you have some familiarity with music notation and harmony, but we will be explaining everything as we go. We assume almost no musical knowledge on the part of the student. What we will do in this course is take a song with very simple harmony and arrange it together. We will introduce a six-step process for arranging a song. This process can be a template for all future arrangements. As you gain skill, you may be able to do some of these things out of order. But you will always be able to fall back on this process in developing your arrangement. Depending on the song, you may find some of these steps more challenging than others, but that will show you where you need to improve. For the song we're going to deal with today, all the steps should be relatively straightforward.