sabotlours | The Swingles

When our season tickets for the 2019-2020 theater season arrived a few months ago, I saw that we had purchased tickets for The Swingles. At first I was puzzled, but then I remembered that when kitty and I were poring over the list of acts, we wanted to attend some sort of holiday show. We're pretty sick of "The Nutcracker" (except for the mice and the Rat King), and we really don't want to see A Mariachi Christmas. The Swingles sounded interesting. It's a 7-member a cappella singing group kinda like Pentatonix. They performed last night and we really enjoyed it. It was another little nudge to put us in the holiday spirit. They mostly did Christmas songs, but they threw in a few that were just more folksong-y. I'm still a little torn about a technique they used to enhance their sound. 7-part harmony is pretty damn impressive as it is, but they also use looping/sampling which could turn it into 14=part or even 21-part harmony. So someone can start a beatbox rhythm, and then mimic some other percussion while the first one continues. Then they could run both percussions while he switches to vocals. Now repeat that for possibly the other 6 members. You end up with a great sound, but I would much rather dispense with the audio trickery and just have them perform 100% "live". *shrugs* It didn't bother me all that much, but I felt it was just unnecessary.