Ep. 43: Deke Sharon and the Business of the A Cappella Revolution

Deke Sharon, welcome to the show.

It’s an honor to talk to you.

Thank you.

The honor is mine.

I’m excited to dig into this fascinating and incredibly important topic.

Well, for most of the people listening to this podcast, they’re going to be composers, aspiring composers, or people who work in the sheet music publishing industry.

So a lot of my questions are maybe going to be a little inside baseball, but I’m excited to have the chance to pick your brain.

I love it.

In fact, I don’t think there’s anyone in Acapella who’s anywhere near as inside baseball on arranging as I am.

In fact, when I couldn’t get arrangements published in the early 90s and there was nothing out there, like there was no Lion Sleeps Tonight, there was no Four Longest Time, I found a publishing company right out of college who would publish some of this stuff.

They went belly up.

But the only thing they had that was selling well were my songbooks and then turned around and started a publishing company.

So I’ve been on both sides now, as Joni Mitchell likes to say, or The Singer’s Unlimited if you prefer the Acappella Jean Perling version.

Well, let’s start there because if I were to read your whole biography, it would burn the whole episode.

But could you talk a little bit about where Acappella was when you first started?

Because I think a lot of people take it for granted now.

People of my age that grew up watching The Sing Off and Pitch Perfect and hearing Pentatonix and all these collegiate groups, I think that a lot of people just assume, oh yeah, well of course Acappella is a thing, it’s awesome.

Acappella is awesome and it is the oldest music and we are hardwired to do it.

But there have been peaks and valleys.

Obviously, through human history, everybody sang before recording music.

You can look at, if you’re talking just about contemporary Acappella, I mean, you can go back to old folk songs and madrigals.

Then of course, there were sea shanties and work songs and field hollers.

Then if you get in the 20th century, barbershop 120 years ago, I mean, that was contemporary Acappella.

They were singing the pop tunes of the day, Stephen Foster and whatever.

It was actually an African-American tradition that people don’t realize this.

It started in the African-American community.

Then if you go back maybe 50, 60 years, 70 years ago, you got Doo-Wop, which was Eastern seaboard, your Italian-American dock workers, your hard-working guys, you got African-Americans, you got a lot of people who were more middle and lower middle class, who got together after work and created a lot of these harmonies.

But when they were brought in the studio, they had instruments at it.

Particularly if you’re looking at these two traditions, initially a lot of this was aural tradition with an A.

People created and sang and learned this music by ear.

But if you start creeping up to when I was in high school and started falling in love with a cappella, you had amazing groups like the Nylons, like the Bobs.

And they created their own music, but it was not readily available.

Moreover, the style of a cappella at the time still had one foot in the kind of post-duop era.

So there was a lot of dit dit and doot doot and shoo bee doop and very little kind of experimentation with other sounds.

The Bobs were real pioneers of this.

But when I was in college, I wanted to do the songs on the radio that no college a cappella did.

My group, The Tough Spells of Bobs, we gigged maybe more than anyone else.

And you could tell what every single song was going to be in the first two seconds.

So they’d start singing and be like, that’s don’t worry, be happy.

Like, oh, that’s in the still tonight.

Like you just knew it right away.

And the versions people did were just hewed so closely to that kind of canonical Crosby, Stills and Nash version or whatever.

So I started experimenting with using your voices instruments and vocal percussion and horn sounds and took what was really designed as a four part male ensemble and spun a lot of the arrangements out into 12 parts and started creating that kind of instrumental wall of sound that is the core of what is going on in Collegiate Acapella today.

Then I graduated and was like, I have lightning in a bottle.

If people only knew about this, it’d be amazing.

Everyone laughed at me.

Literally everyone laughed at me.

In fact, the character in the Pitch Perfect movie’s Benji is based on me.

I was overzealous.

I had to audition three times to get in the bubs.

It’s not because I didn’t know my music.

It’s because I was just way too into this thing when it wasn’t really something that people got into.

Anyway, I found in the early days of starting the Contemporary Acapella Society, the non-profit that still exists, that what people needed more than anything else was sheet music.

The real challenge was that the music back then was handwritten, Xeroxed, and handed around from person to person, and group to group, or whatever.

And there was no clear codification.

There was no way in which somebody who wants to sing along, and sleep tonight, for instance, would be able to.

So they’d either have to transcribe it and figure it out themselves, do it entirely by ear with their group, or find somebody who had a copy of it, and trade it further this version, or whatever.

So CASA in the early days actually facilitated this process by having an arrangement trading library.

You give a few arrangements, you can take a few arrangements out, and it grew very quickly, and became really the cornerstone of what the music exchange was in those early 90s days just as Contemporary Acappella was taking off.

I realized that was entirely one sentence.

Feel free to break in at any moment.

So when I was in that place as well, all I wanted to do was legitimize this and find a way to get this music in printed published form.

In fact, I had the first finale 1.0.

I mean, back when the notation program was absolutely, Nation was just getting born, we were just figuring out how to make computer notation happen.

And I couldn’t find anybody who was willing to take a chance on this young guy right out of college who liked this new kind of style of acapella.

So I thought, okay, the first thing I need to do is I need to publish the canon.

Let’s get these standard arrangements that everybody’s singing in published form.

And I found a small music publishing company called Voices Music Publishing in Texas.

And they did Christian music.

That’s what they published.

They were like, okay, we’ll take a chance on it.

So myself and I found a great person who did computer notation and cleaned things up because I’m big picture.

But when it comes to real little details, that’s not always me.

Anne Rauw, who did a fantastic job making the arrangement so good.

And Voices Music Publishing put them out.

They put out the Contemporary Acappella song book number one, number two, and then a Christmas song book.

And then Voices Music Publishing was like, your song is selling great, but we’re bankrupt, we’re going out of business, goodbye.

Perfect.

So maybe here’s a time to pause then.

Should we pause?

Any questions on this journey so far?

Well, okay.

How did you know you were right?

Because you had this sound in your head.

Well, I mean, all of it.

I mean, you were young, you were just starting in your career, you had this sound in your head.

I mean, you basically invented vocal percussion, and everyone laughed at you, but you kept going.

So how did you know that you had it?

So first arrangement I did like that was In Your Eyes, Piero Gabriel.

And I tried to go home and kind of arrange it in this acapella-y way that was so popular.

You know, back when Boys To Men was doing It’s So Hard To Say Goodbye Yesterday, lots of oohs and aahs and dits and do’s and whatever.

And I mean, it didn’t work.

You can’t shoo-bee-doo-wop your way through this world music masterpiece that Piero Gabriel put together.

So then I was like, okay, I got a piece of orchestral staff paper and I just started writing out everything I could hear.

So I heard like a shaker.

So I was like, how do you do that?

He goes shh, shh, shh, shh, shh.

And then there’s like a talking drum.

Okay, how do you do do do?

And I was in a West African drum ensemble then at Tufts University.

So I was like, familiar with these different instruments.

And then they ended up five different vocal percussion parts.

Like I didn’t, the concept that one person could do it all was absolutely foreign at that point.

And also something that should be noted for those people who were like, wait a minute, beatboxing has been around since the early 80s.

Why are you, don’t try to take credit for something that already existed.

The fact of the matter is beatboxing back then, the human beatbox and that whole sound, that was like, stick a stick, a stick a boom, like that kind of stuff.

I’m choking as I try to do it.

That didn’t work with Led Zeppelin.

That didn’t work with Duran Duran.

You couldn’t do that with a rock tune and not sound ridiculous because it was designed for hip hop.

It was less imitative and more kind of like funky groove based.

What we needed was just a clear hi-hat, a good snare, and a good kick drum, and put that together and weave those sounds together.

I brought this whole arrangement into the Beelzebubs.

They laughed at me as they often did when I brought in crazy ideas.

But I was like, let’s just try it.

We sang in rehearsal.

I was like, guys, can we just please try it this weekend?

We did and I buried it in the middle of the set.

We have great openers and closers.

The audience would get all excited.

We sang through the whole thing and then at the end of the song, the audience was just silent for too long.

I was thinking, oh, crap.

In the Christmas story, one of those moments where you’re like, oh no, damn it.

Then the audience, literally after this too long pause at the end of the movie, they literally all jumped out of their seats screaming their heads off.

It was unbelievable.

I remember to this day, I was like, oh, this.

I started experimenting with it, and my last year in the Bubs, I did all of these different songs like this style, and Billy Joel and the Who, and Pink Floyd, oh my God, Comfortably Numb.

You couldn’t do Comfortably Numb a cappella before, believe me.

Sound effects, and synthesizers, and all kinds of different flanged effects.

So each year there’s a big get together with all the alumni and sing for them, and long story short, they pulled me aside afterwards and said, you’re ruining the group.

You’re ruining a cappella.

This sounds terrible.

We can’t woodshed it.

There are too many parts.

The whole tradition is being destroyed.

I was like, I respectfully disagree.

You should come see us sing at a college and watch us get a standing ovation after every song.

This is the thing.

This is the future.

But literally, I was persona non grata.

They were not happy with me.

But I forged onward and then I told everybody I was going to make a career of it.

Even the people who sang in the group with me who were like, okay, but what are you going to do for money?

I was like, no, I’m going to start festivals and non-profit and compilation CDs and we’ve got to get a publishing company going.

We’re going to bump up and they literally were like, okay, kid, good luck.

You can do the crazy dream and look, I worked my butt off but you need to be very lucky as well.

I was extremely lucky and I think the time was right and it was in the air.

People wanted this.

They wanted to be able to sing all the songs that they heard because it was almost like an arms race in what had been happening in recorded music and overdubbing and layers of percussion and sound and stuff.

The time was right for it.

So fast forward today.

How would you describe the current state of the Acappella industry?

How are things going?

Well, COVID kicked everybody in the teeth.

Anybody who sang in any kind of format alone, but especially with other people, it was like the number one thing you’re not supposed to do.

Super spreader event, etc.

I mean, people could get together and play basketball, sweat and spit on each other.

But God forbid you have a bunch of people stand and sing together.

So that definitely took things down a notch, particularly I’d say in the scholastic realm.

There are some young groups, nation groups that basically dissolved at that point.

But it’s back and better than ever.

I talked to Stray Note Chaser, they had their best year ever last year.

Atonix was on the road, so the pro groups are going strong.

College groups are raging back.

I just did a festival last weekend and this past weekend.

So many groups, so good, so strong.

The desire is still there, the fire is in the belly.

People love it.

So Acappella is going strong.

Something that I did in the early days, very intentionally was rather than create Acappella Incorporated, and I’m going to be the CEO and I’m going to tell everybody how it needs to be or whatever.

I was like, that’s the slow way of starting this.

I didn’t have a lot of seed money.

I didn’t graduate with college debt, but I also didn’t have this huge trust fund or anything like that.

I literally, when I graduated, I was making enough money to live on by doing arrangements for other college groups who had heard my music and really liked it.

Then I was donating the rest of my time to start all these other things to try to make a community.

I realized I need to come up with good ideas, hand them off to others, and then they’ll make it their fire in the belly, and the community will grow much faster and it’ll also be decentralized.

I started the competition that’s in the Pitch Perfect movies.

It’s the ICCA, the International Championship of College Acappella.

I started it as the NCCA as opposed to the NCAA because I wanted a March Madness Acappella, and now we have it.

And it took off pretty quickly.

I started the Best of College Acappella recordings and compilations, which there was an article in the New York Times recently about, which long story short there, you get a bunch of colleges to sell the CD at their own table after the show.

So then that spread word amongst all of these other schools back before the Internet, before there was any kind of distribution model or whatever.

So you’ve got one track on it, but then the other 18 tracks are other groups and sold them to the college groups for five bucks each and they’d sell them for 15.

So it was a huge profit center for them.

Anyway, college acapella exploded as a result of that.

We had 220 groups, something like that, when I graduated college.

Now there are over 3,000.

So the best thing is that the acapella community is very strong and it’s decentralized and everybody’s making their own music.

Whatever the latest Billie Eilish tune is, they just saw the Barbie movie, they want to do that last song.

They want to do some score from Oppenheimer.

They can do anything acapella, no rules, no one’s in charge and it’s going very strong.

The publishers are all on board.

Everyone loves it.

You can get anything in print you want, right?

Oh, I left that part of the story out.

So let’s go back in time to the Hollander Corporation, who I arranged for and I am close with and I have only the utmost respect.

The Voice of Music Publishing folded.

Entrepreneur Don Gooding ended up saying, I’ll buy them out, it’ll be one-third you, one-third me, one-third Ann, and let’s start this publishing company and own it ourselves.

I was like, music to my ears, much better than having anyone else be in charge.

We only did songbooks because we can only get the rights for songbooks from them.

They wouldn’t let us do octavos or small, three-song compilations, whatever.

We started selling these songbooks and they were selling like hotcakes.

When we asked for a reprint, Hal Leonard said, no.

We were like, what do you mean no?

It’s the sheet music industry.

We’re paying you to get the rights to do all these, so you’re making money, the songwriters are making money.

Nothing like this exists in the world.

Why no?

They just said no.

So we were beating our head against wall.

We were like, do we have to do like an antitrust lawsuit?

Like what are we going to do?

And Don knows all these lawyers and he’s a big venture capitalist guy.

So he was getting all geared up there.

And then all of a sudden, Hal Leonard came back and said, okay, we’ll let you do these books and you’ll be under our umbrella.

So the way I described is like, we’re like the iced tea at the bottom of the Coke machine.

We’re on page 57 of their catalog.

And they were like, but you can only do 10 song, songbooks.

So we’re like, okay.

So for a little while we did that.

And then they were like, okay, no little more slack on the leash, you can do five song compilations.

Then for a little while it was three song compilations.

Finally, then it was like, okay, you can make octobos, but only a couple of year.

And then, you know, as you can tell, it kind of expanded out from there.

So bottom line, Hal Leonard then had us under their umbrella.

They did the printing for us.

We could clear any song they had within reason.

I mean, not every single song.

The latest things sometimes they wouldn’t let us have.

But then we were able to expand.

However, it’s very expensive to do printed music.

And I would say for the first decade, we took every single penny of profit.

We hadn’t plowed it back into the company to be able to expand and grow it.

The whole reason for the publishing company, as far as I was concerned, was to foster and propagate Acappella.

Initially, it was to put the standards out there, so groups could learn the standards quickly, have them, get them out of their system, and then go do whatever other music they want to do.

Learn how to arrange.

And in fact, the first book I wrote was called Acappella Arranging with Dylan Bell to teach people how to arrange the style of music, so that they would start doing their own versions of songs, because that’s what’s most exciting.

And frankly, last rest of all I went to, I had never heard most of the songs on it.

These college groups come up and they perform like, here’s this obscure group by the band Purple Lizard and the Seventeen Clowns.

You’re like, I don’t know what this is, but that’s great.

I mean, that’s what it should be.

Any group can sing any song anytime.

So anyway, we started with that and then started taking some other classic songs that weren’t necessarily acapella-ish and put them in printed format.

So, and this allowed college groups that were starting to have a launch pad, it allowed people who were former college music directors who are now music educators to start creating high school acapella groups, which has now exploded.

And it’s a huge thing.

In fact, I think a lot of show choirs and vocal jazz groups kind of shifted their format into acapella and their ranks swelled precipitously.

And all of this is before Pitch Perfect and The Sing Off even came along.

This kind of subculture was growing and growing and growing.

And then I think Hollywood took notice of it.

And we were able to go from there.

So where would you say is the line between a oral arrangement that is acapella and a contemporary acapella arrangement?

OK, I have two answers.

The first answer is from the starting of creating the Contemporary Acapella Society of America, I’ve always seen acapella as being big tent.

So there’s a best barbershop, there’s a best doo-wop, there’s the best classical, there’s the best holiday song, the best comedy song.

There’s no like, the reason I chose the word contemporary was in fact for two reasons.

Number one, the newsletter that started in my college dorm room was called The Can, the Collegiate Acapella News.

But after putting a couple of them out and, you know, networking the whole college acapella world, all these pro groups and fans basically came to me and said like, there’s nothing like this for anybody, can you expand it out?

So before I even graduated, I changed it from the Collegiate Acapella News to the, well, I needed another C word because it starts.

And I went with contemporary because I didn’t want it to be modern acapella, you don’t want it to be the man.

But moreover, the word contemporary I always liked because it just means people who are doing it now, you know, this person is a contemporary of that person.

It doesn’t dictate the style, just means all of these things are happening at once.

And the beautiful thing in acapella is that you’re absolutely able to travel through time and jump between styles.

Look at a King Singers concert where they start with Gregorian chant, go all the way through up to 21st century classical, and then they go around to folk and pop and sing a Paul Simon and a Billy Joel song or whatever.

And you know, you’ve literally traveled around the world and you’ve done what would take an early music ensemble, a full string orchestra, jazz band, rock band, like you can do it all with your voice.

And that’s, you know, that’s what’s so exciting and powerful.

Plus, look at a group like Take Six.

I mean, they really do gospel repertoire, jazz harmonies, R&B stylings.

So you can blend different styles.

And so whenever people say like, well, contemporary acapella is a style, I’m like, no, it’s really just a choice of instrumentation, for lack of a better way of saying it.

It just means you’re just using your voices and you can do literally anything you want with it.

That said, I’d say the difference is in the past, an acapella version of a song would generally be very, very lyrical or oohs and aahs and usually a ballad.

Not always a ballad, but if you look at the show choir sets, they’d often do like, oh, it’s time for our ballad.

We’ll do a little acapella thing, show off that we can sing in harmony and tune and lots of lush chords.

So you go back and you listen to those great arrangements, the great Kirby Shaw ones, the Steve’s Agrees and stuff that are still out there in print or whatever.

Fantastic.

Now, there are exceptions to this.

You had Ward Swingle doing the, da ba da ba da, da ba da ba da ba da ba da.

That kind of like, let’s take Bach and Mozart and literally transcribe it and turn it into voices.

I mean, everything that’s being done now, the Swingles are now, the Swingles singers have become the Swingles, but they’re still going, they still do that music.

So it’s still all contemporary.

But the way I would really describe the style of contemporary a cappella as it has come to be meant in most people’s minds is a style of arranging that is more rhythmic, that has a wide range of syllables, many more eighth and sixteenth notes, because even if there’s not a vocal percussionist, you want there to be this churning driving engine of momentum to make the song work.

If anybody’s heard.

It’s a kind of energy and motion in all these background parts to try to create the effect of having keyboards and guitars and drums and bass and all that going on.

Okay.

So it all falls under the umbrella, but I think when most people think about contemporary a cappella, they think about everyone’s got their own mic and the microphones, I think, play a big part in it.

Or am I taking that too far?

No, no, no, you’re right.

Okay.

So yes and the catch with contemporary a cappella is, we’re leaning into the sound of modern music, whatever it is, whatever pop music is on the radio.

Almost everything that’s on the radio, after the lead vocalist, the next loudest thing you’re going to hear is the rhythm section.

You’re going to hear bass and percussion.

The catch is vocal percussion is not that loud.

I mean, getting your beatboxing, your vocal percussion to be as loud as your tenor who’s screaming loud in the background parts, it’s not going to happen.

Plus, as all of the other voices, soprano, alto, tenor, whatever divisions you have, they start going up, up, up in their voices, higher to create more intensity.

You know, we start getting up in Idina Menzel range.

The basses are going down, they’re going lower because you want that distance between the two so you really get the overtones and it tunes well.

But the problem is the bass just gets quieter.

You can’t force out low notes any more than you can stretch a rubber band to be tighter and then expect the pitch to go down.

It doesn’t work.

Amplification is a core part of what people think of as contemporary a cappella, but it’s also really allowed for a really nuanced vocal percussion that is heavily textural and not loud, as well as a bass singer who in the most ideal situation, if you’re going to deal with a great contemporary a cappella bass, they’ve got a pretty neutral vowel going and they don’t put a lot of diphthongs in it, so God bless them, Barry Carlin, Rockefeller, like all that kind of post-duop thing that says, I’m a human, but I’m a tenor, so you’re not going to get much out of me right now, but that sounds much more acoustic, or if you’re going to do a stand up string bass, and you can use the microphone in the proximity if I can get right up on it, I think we’re going to have to do that.

But the key is you want all of that to be nice and quiet, so the engineer at the board can crank up your low end, crank up everything, and compress you so it’s not like you’re jumping up higher in your range like an amateur bass would do, like a young bass, and get twice as loud because that throws off the whole thing.

So they have to stay quiet, and the microphone allows them the control to make all that happen.

And then at the soundboard, your lead can be louder, your bass and percussion, and all the other voices can tuck in where they belong.

Is there a standard for how that, let’s call it non-traditional stuff, ought to be notated, the vocal percussion, and the bass lines, and the nonsense syllables?

No, do your best.

In fact, funny story from Pitch Perfect, I did the arrangement of Since You’ve Been Gone for that audition scene originally with my professional group, The Housejacks, because not only was I a practitioner of contemporary a cappella, I was out there on the road for almost 25 years showing people around the world, like this is what this new sound and style is.

I made a record deal, but nobody knew how to market us before YouTube and all that.

But we still have many albums out there and you can go listen to them.

But we did Since You’ve Been Gone, all male group.

But we started it with a guitar sound.

You can hear the buzz, you can hear the rasp in it.

I wrote that down as ZHM.

But when Estradine got the sheet music and I was trying to teach her ZHM, she couldn’t really do ZHM, she did ZHM, ZHM, ZHM, ZHM.

I kept saying, Estrad’s ZHM, ZHM, ZHM.

She’s like, right.

ZHM, ZHM, ZHM.

After enough back and forth, I was like, you got it, that’s it.

In the movie, it’s ZHM, ZHM, ZHM, ZHM, ZHM, ZHM.

We let it be.

It’s a cute scene.

But you do your best.

The other thing you need to know and for anybody who’s not really aware of this, vocal percussion is almost never notated.

If it is notated, there might be one or two measure loop that’s indicated at the bottom of the first page where the copyright credits are or whatever.

Because everybody’s technique is so different.

The way in which they use their voices, the way in which they create the different kick and snare and hi-hat patterns, where they breathe, and there’s no uniformity to it.

Unlike a lot of the background voices, which need to be aligned, they need to be to know who’s singing what note at what time.

I mean, that’s the reason why notation is so essential for a cappella, particularly contemporary a cappella, as opposed to, maybe Ladysmith Black Mambazo does a lot of it by ear, because it’s mostly one, four, and five chords, and they can tell this is where we’re going to go, and these are the vowels we’re using, and so the aural tradition works well for that.

It’s very difficult if you’re going to do extremely complex layered arrangements and do it entirely by ear, particularly if you’re handing it off to a bunch of students and all that.

So vocal percussion is kind of like World War II squad, and you’ve got the sniper who does his own thing, and he goes up to the bell tower, and that’s his saving private ride.

He’s the unique individual who has his own mission, his own purpose, his own or her own way of doing things.

So generally speaking, it’s like-

Do you put any notes in there, like here’s an idea, or do you just assume that they’re going to do the thing?

Every group that I work with is entirely different.

They have totally different ways of doing it.

I mean, back when I started the house checks, Andrew Chaikin, Kid Beyond, he used a PF snare sound, which sounds much more reminiscent of a rock drum.

But then Kevin Alucila from Pentatonix, he uses that K snare, that sound, if he’s inhaling, which sounds more like a triggered electronica, snap clap kind of a sound.

So it’s all.

No one’s in charge, everybody can do whatever they want to, but when it comes to vocal percussionist, you want to find somebody with a great groove or whatever, and then you just wind them up and you do your thing, and you can do that on that one part.

Everything else really needs to be very closely intertwined.

Then if somebody is doing a groove and it’s not quite right, or they get too busy and it’s slowing down the groove, it’s like lighten it up, thin it out a little bit, let’s stay on target.

Is there a distinction in how you market or label music that’s written for a larger ensemble, like a show choir that’s doing an a cappella piece?

I work in show choir land, so I will occasionally get asked to arrange a cappella versions of pop songs, but it’s for a group of 50 people.

You can shrink that down and have eight people sing it, right?

But it doesn’t always go the opposite way.

Like you said, you write something for a smaller group that’s all using mics, it doesn’t necessarily transfer up to a larger group.

How do you make sure the right people are able to find it?

If you’re intending for it to be sung by a choir, quote unquote, versus a small group or what have you, like how do you label it correctly?

I don’t.

But I do think about it.

The question is, who are you arranging for?

What can their voices do?

There are times when I’ll do a canonical published arrangement for what I would think a high school group is.

So most recently soon, Harry Styles’ Music for Sushi Restaurant is going to come out.

I know that when I do these things for Howe Leonard, strict four parts, no separate lead, or like I did for the Dua Lipa, Don’t Start Now, it’s going to be sung primarily by high school groups.

There’s no soloist, there might be vocal percussion, but there might not.

You need to have a lot of the energy written into those four background parts.

Melody needs to be somewhere, hopefully it jumps around some.

That can work with a small ensemble, but can also work with a large group of people.

When I was doing the opening numbers for The Sing Off, I knew I had a large group of people.

Those can be done one on a part, but they’re really designed to withstand large numbers of people on each of the parts.

In fact, you don’t have to think as much about where are the breaths.

Because if you’re going to do, still haven’t found what I’m looking for, and you have this started, and you’ve got seven people on that part.

You don’t want it to end.

You don’t want there to be a big breath at the end of each measure, and have the whole thing start and stop again.

Keep it instrumental, keep it driving, and then they can all stagger breathe as we were taught when we were in choir.

There are some principles that you need to look at.

I would say, where do people breathe is the most important, and that plays a huge role in the whole thing.

Also, your use of extended range expectations, as you know, for high school singers, as opposed to college, as opposed to adults.

But ultimately, when I get commission to do an arrangement, I stopped counting years ago when I hit 2000.

I would arrange it for the group that I did it for, and then, God bless them, when Arrangement came along, I just uploaded like, here’s 1200 arrangements I’ve done that now I can plop online and sell.

I don’t really worry about like, oh, well, I did this for an odd voicing of like S-A-A-A-B, or something like, I don’t know what.

I just put it up there and I say, this is the voicing that it’s for.

And then I always let people know, like not only can you change my arrangements, I want you to make them better, make them fit you better.

Custom tailored.

I love it.

Like I’m not that guy.

I don’t have the eco tied up in it.

So that’s a great segue.

What role does self-publishing play in the current industry?

It’s almost everything.

It’s almost everything.

Contemporary Acappella publishing still is going strong and we’re selling tons of sheet music and people still want printed sheet music, but also a lot of it.

I mean, we made sure everything was available in digital downloads.

And each year you see the percentage of the digital downloads growing and growing and growing.

And they’ve got like 10 copy minimum or whatever, which is fine.

But I stopped bothering with that because when you print a piece of sheet music, you need to print 3,000 copies.

And that means you need to pick a song and pick a voicing and make things very standardized.

Whereas Arrange Me is literally the greatest thing to ever happen to Contemporary Acappella.

Because not only am I able to take all these songs that I’ve done and throw them up there, every single time I’m talking to any young arrangers, I’m like, put your songs up there.

It doesn’t only matter if you only have six.

You did a cool version of the latest James Bond theme.

Put it up there.

You never know who’s going to buy what or need or want what.

And it’s actually the unique unexpected voicings that end up being most, you know, helpful to people who have unique unexpected groups of people.

Well, everything normal has already been done.

Well, yeah.

And the normal is still going to be out there.

And there are some songs.

I’m sure if you look for Piano Man, they’re going to be like gobs of versions of the whole thing.

But especially really current and recent music, that’s what’s desired.

That’s what’s wanted.

And also it takes the legal headache out of all of this, where you don’t, you know, everybody wants to be legal.

Everybody wants to do things the right way.

And there were loopholes before.

It’s like, okay, we’re going to record this song.

So now we can make copies of it because, you know, Nelson Riddle could make copies of Fly Me To The Moon for Frank Sinatra.

And he wasn’t in violation of copyright law.

Like we had to figure out all these loopholes because, whereas the Barbershop Harmony Society had a person or a desk, like an office designated like, oh, you want to do, you want to arrange this George Gershwin song.

Let me go get the rights for you.

Okay, now you can do it legally and you can make this many copies or whatever.

It doesn’t, it didn’t work for the latest song by Adele.

There’s no, there’s no, like, hi, our college a cappella group of 15 people wants to sing the song that you just released on the radio.

The amount of time, like one hour of the lawyer’s time to even answer this email is more money than they would ever make from those 15 copies.

So the whole thing was untenable and for a long time, incredibly frustrating, but it’s working out now.

Hopefully, we’ll get to a place where that kind of compulsory license exists the way it does for recorded music thanks to piano rolls.

Yes.

Couldn’t agree more on that one.

This is a pointless speculation, I guess.

But do you think if back in the day when you had first started, if Hal had just given you everything you wanted, do you think things would have ended up differently?

If they had just let you publish everything you wanted to publish right off the bat, if you didn’t have to go to the smaller publisher and fight and claw for every.

I think it would have accelerated the process somewhat.

But honestly, let’s be honest about what goes on in copyright law.

What wasn’t being served within legal channels was being taken care of by people sharing arrangements behind the scenes and writing things down and handing them out to the group and not getting clearances for it.

I guess that’s what I’m getting at.

Is this the natural conclusion that we were always going to get to at some point, do you think?

I don’t know.

There’s a lot of stuff about copyright law.

It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.

The way it was described to me by the son of Roy Allard, the great songwriter who did Walk My Baby Back Home or whatever.

His son had a publishing company and his dad’s music and a bunch of other stuff.

He said, the way copyright law should work is you should be allowed to have stupid kids but not stupid grandkids.

That all stuck with me.

His point was basically, the money that you generate from the thing that you created should take care of you and your kids, but then by the time it gets around to your grandkids, that’s too long.

It’s too long for people to be able to determine what can be done with it or whatever.

Now, obviously, the Disney Corporation disagrees and they’re not happy about Steamboat Willie Mickey being out there on T-shirts now that they can’t control anymore, but they kept extending and extending copyright law.

I watched this happen over the course of my life and so frustrating because that was already to be like, okay, great.

Now, poor game best, we can’t.

No, we can’t.

We can do Alexander’s Ragtime Band, but then the rest of Irving Berlin, we’re going to now have to wait another 25 years or whatever.

It’s frustrating.

Nobody’s trying to take money out of those songwriter’s pockets, and the fact that Arrange Me now exists so that it can all happen in the simplest way possible, I think is fantastic.

What kind of feedback do you get from the original artists of songs when they hear one of your arrangements?

Oh, well, it really depends.

Do you have any good examples?

Good and bad, maybe?

I remember in the early 90s, I was also publishing through UNC Jazz Press because nobody was like this new style of music, but they were like, okay, yeah, we’ll do a couple of songs for you, so I did an arrangement of Salisbury Hill.

SSAA, a lot of women’s groups loved singing or whatever.

Here’s the question, where’s the imaginary bar line in that song?

Seems to shift from the verse to the chorus.

You literally change the time meter or whatever, so I kept it standard all the way through.

Years later, I got a letter from not Peter Gabriel’s attorney, but Peter Gabriel himself saying something like, you put the imaginary bar line in the wrong place.

We are disallowing you to publish your sheet music anymore.

You idiot.

I mean, it had like that.

I was like, okay, wait a minute.

Deep breath.

I’ve heard he’s a control freak, but that’s crazy.

There was another time when I was publishing, oh, for like an Americana compilation, Coming to America, the song, the Neil Diamond song, and I grew up listening to Neil Diamond eight tracks, as we drove in our suburban in California and my mom loved it.

So we’re coming to America.

Great song.

And when it came time to like send off the music to make sure that the original songwriter was happy, it was his manager who went through it all with a fine tooth comb.

Are you sure this should be an eighth note and then an eighth rest?

Well, the singer needs to breathe here.

Right.

But Neil doesn’t do it that way.

The way it is in this piece of sheet music that I have is it’s held over.

What’s that one called?

That’s a quarter note.

Yeah, it looks like that one’s a quarter note.

So you should do a quarter note there.

Okay, but I felt like saying the whole time to him, have you heard Neil Diamond sing?

You’re his manager.

Has he ever done things the exact same way twice?

Like, you know, like there’s flexibility and fluidity and that’s okay.

Like people need to breathe.

So there are crazy stories of having to jump through hurdles to placate people before there was this kind of standard allowance going on.

And there was also a fair amount of fear in the whole community.

And I will say, I’m very glad that at high school in Southern California, I stood up to Trisona, you know.

I did not support sitting in the back of a show and then coming up and telling people they need to pay a lot of money or having to charge, you know, $1,000 to get $500 to get the rights to a song.

That’s not reasonable.

It’s not reasonable for a high school program.

It’s not reasonable for a college program.

I might not be making some friends by saying this, but the bottom line is the system through which Arrange Me exists where nobody pays any money up front, it’s a small amount of money and the people who use it, hate for it, that makes sense.

That is fair and it’s reasonable and you’re not putting an undue burden on amateur singers and students who are just literally trying to get together and sing songs that they like on the radio.

I’m hoping you also get some positive feedback though.

I mean, do you ever get a text from Cyrus or Adele or somebody like, hey, that was cool?

After doing the version of I Got the Music in Me that we did on The Sing Off as an opening number, which is really fun.

I got a note from Tobias Bischel.

I think his name is from London.

He basically said, I saw that performance and my heart opened up because I wrote this song stomping around in the rainy streets of London.

The way all the singers came in, they stomped and the energy you put into it and the fact that it was all voices and it just swelled and I got the music in me and the double meaning of it being like the music is inside of the people and the only one’s making the music, he was like, it literally brought to life everything that I ever wanted for the song.

Yeah, I’ve had some nice comments too.

Well, and the reason I bring it up, aside from just the click bait, is I’ve done a lot of reaching out to artists to get permission to arrange stuff for show choirs and most of the time, the answer I get is, what is this?

They don’t understand what it is that we’re trying to do.

They haven’t heard about show choir or a cappella, and they get confused.

They’re like, is this a video?

Is this like a sink?

And I just wish more artists realized the power that their music can have in sheet music form, because there’s just millions of people that want to be able to perform it, and they need that aid to make it happen.

And to your point you made earlier, like it’s small potatoes for them financially, especially if they go through with a fine-tooth and a comb and nitpick everything and have their lawyer.

Totally.

But if you’re repeating this word three times here, you’re like, well, yeah, the background’s echoing it, right, but the words only the lyrics want.

It’s like, well, but this is an effect.

And I want to be just like, why don’t you just take five minutes, say yes, take your 100 bucks and leave us alone?

You know, like, I don’t know.

Exactly, exactly.

It’s maddening.

It’s maddening.

Exactly, in our world, we can say Pitch Perfect and they know what we mean.

And for you, tell them like, it’s likely.

It’s likely, exactly, yeah.

But I’m on the same page with you as far as Arrange Me and how that’s changing things.

And I suspect that it will continue to help more artists understand the potential that’s out there.

I mean, my basic sales pitch to people is, listen, you’re going to make more money selling sheet music than you are on getting your 0.0 cents on Spotify, even if all you care about is the money.

At least we’re talking about cents rather than fractions of a penny.

Of course.

And also, the copyright law is completely ridiculous.

So I think anybody who’s listening to this probably knows this.

The one person who does not know this, when you do an arrangement of a song, your arrangement is owned by the original songwriter or songwriters, publishing company, whatever, the publisher of the music.

You don’t own that arrangement according to copyright law, which doesn’t actually make any sense.

Like you would think that like, well, the elements that are theirs, they created, but then the stuff that you did, you should have some element of ownership over.

But it’s the way that copyright law is written.

So that’s why we make a tiny little sliver and the much larger chunk goes to the songwriter.

And that’s the industry.

I didn’t go into arranging to make gobs of money.

I went into arranging to change the world.

Because it’s so small potatoes.

And this is just wild speculating.

But do you think there’s any chance of that ever changing?

Like copyright law with respect to arrangers and their rights and their-

No, I don’t.

Because especially now look like David Bowie estate and Adele.

People are selling their catalog to investors who want to make as much money as possible on it.

So then those people have lawyers and the Sony Music Corporation and all the record labels that ended up owning the publishing, the whole like, we own 100 percent of the publishing of your song, you own 100 percent of the writer share.

Well, you each own 50 percent of the song, but the publisher gets to decide what’s done with it.

That was an absolute bait and switch that’s been going on in the music industry for far too long, and some people are waking up to it.

But the bottom line is the corporations are the ones who get to decide what happens with music if it’s a convenient commercial or whatever, and they’re very jealously guarding their interests.

And I don’t think it’s going to be the case that they’re going to say like, yeah, let’s just open it up, and anybody can do whatever they want to.

They’re not going to do that.

And I think Hal Leonard got out in front of this.

I think there might have been a shot at some kind of compulsory license for music use and across all different media, including Printed, if Hal Leonard didn’t come up with Arrange Me.

But they were hemorrhaging money.

They realized the entire sheet music business is going south and everything is happening online and they didn’t want sheet music to become napsterized.

So they figured out this method and floated it.

And they have the whole noteworthy thing as well, which is great because then you can change the notes yourself within their online note program.

They’re the Coca-Cola of sheet music publishing, as everyone is listening to this knows.

They are the big, you know, they’ve got the most and they have the most to gain and lose from it all and I applaud their decision to move into the future before copyright law forced them to.

But now that they have and they’ve created this model, I do not believe that it will change, not during our lifetimes.

I don’t think there’s any reason for it to, because they’re able to still maintain control.

And if a songwriter says like, I don’t want anybody to do it, they’ll take that song down.

But for the vast majority of them, especially if it’s owned by corporations and publishing companies and whatever, they’re like, great, we’ll take our additional ancillary money, whatever that money is going to trickle in, because we’re trying to maximize our profit centers everywhere.

But maybe we can at least move up from Sweet Tea, right?

Move up a couple of rows.

Well, I love the beautiful democratization of it all.

For the first 10 years of my life, while the house checks were building a career and I was touring around and performing, the majority of my income, I made more money from arranging than anything else.

I had an arranging, I’m basically a monopoly on contemporary Acappella arranging for probably the first 15 years of it up to the middle of the 2000s.

Then I was like, I’m exhausted.

I have a staff of arrangers like, I’m going to publish this songbook.

I mean, this manual, Acappella arranging, and by the way, the summer, the second version 2.0 is coming out with mashups and all these different additional techniques and whatever if anybody’s interested in learning about that.

But I was like, I want everybody to be able to do this.

This is really important.

If Acappella, so here’s my little history lesson.

Barbershop came and went.

It was a flash in the pan.

It was a moment in time and style of arranging Acappella and singing it and then it kind of disappeared.

Look at Doo-Wop, had like a wonderful little moment on the radio setting and then boom, vocal jazz up and down.

The like four-part harmony, like the high lows and the forever plaid, all that kind of stuff, like had its little moment and disappeared.

I do not want that to happen to Contemporary Acappella and I did not want it to happen.

So by designing the community the way that it is, by making no one in charge of any creative aspect of it, putting it in people’s hands and also designing competitions where there are no rules like in barbershop, these chords are allowed or this kind of thing.

But anybody can do any music they want.

What’s happened is Contemporary Acappella has kept pace with current pop music on the radio, especially because so much of it is driven by high schoolers and college students.

So this whole movement started in the early 90s.

It’s still growing and going strong.

And that far outstrips what happened originally with barbershop, the renaissance of it since then and the growth, whatever, is beautiful and amazing.

But doo-wop is pretty much gone except for a few handful of revival groups or bands or whatever that perform here, there, and whatever.

So I want the original style and vision of contemporary acapella, always being able to be any style of music and constantly adapting to envelop whatever is going on in the latest songs on the radio, to continue in perpetuity so that people always have the ability to sing this music for fun at school, after school, for the rest of their lives, around the world.

Well, I hope you’re successful with that.

I think it has proven remarkably successful so far, and I think it’s a good model potentially for other types of music to follow.

Yeah, it is.

I think in your world, in the show choir world, it really exists at the high school level.

There are some amazing collegiate show choirs that I’ve seen.

They’re so good.

Just throw them on the Disney stage now.

Give them a contract.

But show choir really exists in a largely competitive format, as unfortunately, I think a lot of barbershop does, and is also very attached to school.

What I’ve always aspired to have happen in the contemporary a cappella world is that it’s without style, but it’s also without age.

So you’ve got big pop community choirs and stuff that you find in Europe and in Asia, but you’ve also got middle school groups, high school groups, college groups, some compete, most of them don’t.

A lot of people just sing music and they sing the music, what I call the music of their lives.

So if you go back and you look at songbirds, there’s a window of time during their development that the music that they hear sung around them, the chirps, the tweets, whatever, that becomes the song they sing really for the rest of their lives.

We as humans also have this window of time really from your pre-teen years into some time in your 20s for most people.

I think some of us are musicians vastly expand that, but there’s this window and that’s the music that people really feel is theirs.

The music was that they’re prom.

For my contemporaries, a lot of it’s like 80s music, like a group with the 80s, but then the people are younger, it’s the 90s music, and then every people have their decade, their era.

But some people grow up and their parents are in a string quartet and they listen to classical music all the time, and then that’s the music that imprinted on them.

I want that, the ability to sing whatever that music is that you love and everything else to always be available rather than have it only be, you know, these eight years were when acapella was big and that’s what you sing and nothing else.

You kind of alluded to this earlier, but there are a lot of times where we’re reliant on non-musical entities like corporations to provide funding or support for projects.

I imagine you had to strong arm a lot of producers along the way with, you know, Sing Off and Pitch Perfect and those kinds of things.

How do you talk about your music to non-musicians that aren’t going to understand it on a technical level?

How do you convince them to support it and get behind it, even though they don’t really understand what it is that you’re doing?

Well, it’s literally, it’s like BC and AD.

We have before the Sing Off and Pitch Perfect and after.

Before that, if I told people like, oh, what I do is a cappella, but it’s like modern a cappella, people would be like, oh, you mean like Gregorian chant?

Or like, oh, like barbershop?

And you’d be like, well, not really.

Like you sing current songs, but then they’re like, okay, but do you wear the straw hats?

Like people just like didn’t understand it.

And then once we were able to be on national television, I made the Sing Off also in the Netherlands, in China and in South Africa.

So it really, the a cappella thing really blew up and went truly global.

Now people get it.

And then the movie Pitch Perfect, of course, is the easiest calling card in the world.

So what’s funny is before, if you said the word a cappella, people didn’t really know the genres.

Now, if you ask barbershoppers, they said, well, we sing barbershop, you sing a cappella.

I’m like, no, no, no, you sing a cappella also.

It’s a cappella.

Like you’re part of this big tent.

But they’re like, no, no, no, you’re a cappella.

We’ve completely controlled the meme.

So the beautiful thing is everybody, I think when you say the word a cappella, they think vocal percussion, pop songs, maybe choreo, probably like you said, handheld mics.

I’d say there are more groups that sing contemporary a cappella that don’t have handheld mics and never use them than do, but the more successful ones, Pentatonix is filling arenas now.

They’re bigger than most rock bands and pop groups and hip hop artists.

Unbelievable.

Of course, they need amplification.

Anybody who’s out there on stage needs some amplification.

Well, I thought we’d end with a lightning round of questions, if you don’t mind.

Some quick ones.

Are you an early worm or a night owl?

I am more of an early worm, but my wife is an incredible night owl, so I end up like my worm is burnt at both ends.

I don’t know what else to say.

That sounds about right.

What’s your favorite time-saving trick in notation software?

Copy, paste, and repeat symbols.

What I will say is, being a music director who, for so many years, directed the groups that sang the arrangements I did, I have a strong empathy for music directors.

I never make anything more complex than it absolutely has to be, and I think about the end experience for the audience who ultimately don’t really care about like, oh, well, you floated the Ad9 in on the second beat.

Like, lovely, wonderful, great doing it in the studio, but you’re going to be up in front of a bunch of people at a farmer’s market or whatever.

Like, let’s just, let’s make it work.

So I think things just don’t need to be different every single time, all the time.

Sometimes they do.

What’s your go-to snack when you’re arranging?

Oh, wow.

It’s usually green tea.

I’d say some element of a slow burn of caffeine.

Just an IV drip in the arm?

Yeah.

While you’re burning the worm at both ends.

I will live to regret that statement, I’m sure.

If you could time travel to see one musician perform live, who would it be?

Oh, that’s a rough one.

Gosh.

I have so many different ones.

If I could go see any live performances of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong as they sang, they have the greatest duets that have ever been recorded.

The two of them singing together, absolutely mind-blowing.

That was my first answer.

I’ll put it there.

Also would have been great to see Jimi Hendrix just shredding and changing the sound of the world or whatever.

There’s also a piece of me that would love to go back and hear the Contemporary Acappella of the Renaissance.

What were madrigals really like when people were singing them?

Not in the sacred, but the secular world.

What we now think of as a Renaissance fair, because they were a body.

All these fountains spurting and people dying in each other’s arms.

I mean, this racy music like a Bruno Mars tune.

So how did that go over?

Was it as crazy and raucous as we see Shakespeare portrayed now, where people threw tomatoes and yelled and laughed along and sang along?

So that’d be fun to see too.

All right.

Last one.

What’s your favorite arrangement that went nowhere?

Something you thought was really great and for whatever reason, just no one bought into it.

Oh, I’ll tell you a story.

Nylons grew up worshipping and loved them.

And they asked me to do an arrangement for a Christmas album many, many years ago.

And I did.

I did a four-part arrangement of White Christmas for them.

And I was very proud of it, very intricate, careful, took the time.

Every note, every passing, where the breath’s going to be.

They got the arrangement.

They were like, no, we don’t like it, we’re not going to sing it.

I was like, well, I can change it if it’s not correct.

They’re like, no, it’s totally off the mark.

We don’t like it.

So I was heartbroken, crestfallen.

I was like, finally get an opportunity to arrange for these idols of mine.

And they hate it.

So I had a barbershop group called the Gas House Gang.

They said, we’re making an album.

You got anything you throw?

I was like, well, I have this rejected arrangement that the nylons hated.

Do you want to sing that?

And they did.

And it’s one of my most popular arrangements that I’ve ever done.

White Christmas, the LA Master Chorale, sings at the end of a concert many years and have recorded it.

It’s sung throughout the barbershop world, but also there’s an SATV version.

It’s the same idea, like just beautiful lines intertwining as they say in Spinal Tap.

And so in that particular case, it did end up going somewhere, thankfully.

Well, this was really wonderful to get to talk to you and go behind the scenes and see how the sausage was made and all of that.

Any parting words of wisdom for the people still listening who maybe want to become a a cappella arranger themselves someday?

What would you say to them?

Well, first of all, no one’s still listening.

I mean, obviously, if they’ve nodded off and we’ve done our job.

We’ve definitely stared them off by now.

Yes, exactly.

Do it, just do it.

So many people are in the choral world or whatever think like, well, with the Sackappella thing.

I thought people were turning the nose up at it initially and kind of staying away from it.

Thankfully, ACD is now embracing what we’re doing.

But no, the problem was that they were scared of it.

They were worried, well, I learned choral music and I’ve studied jazz, so I know how to teach those things, but I don’t know pop.

In the same way that your first language, which for most people listening to this will be English, you didn’t learn the subjunctive, you didn’t learn participles, you just knew the music, the sound of the words and you put them together and you understood, your brain was wired for that.

You are wired for current pop and music.

You are wired for the music you grew up listening to.

So if you want to arrange an Aretha Franklin song or you want to do something by any pop, rock band, whatever, the Eagles, you already know how it works.

You know the styling of the sound.

Just dive in and do it.

You’re fluent in this.

You might not realize all the skills and the talents that you have.

And the one thing I’d say is, whereas in choral music, everybody’s aiming at these canonical tall ahs and ohs and there’s like one right way to do it, that’s not the case in contemporary a cappella.

There are no right or wrong.

You can change anything, change the form.

You use different vowels for different things.

A Dolly Parton or Willie Nelson country tune would have these kind of vowels.

And then a folk song might have something totally different, just the way that shape note is very different from an Episcopalian hymn.

So just lean into learning how to arrange similar to the original version.

And once you start getting comfortable with that, you’ll realize like, wow, I can do anything.

And then you’re off to the races.

Where can our listeners find you and your music?

Give them the sales pitch.

If you listen to Acappella, you’re going to trip over it at some point.

You can find me at dekesharon.com.

And I’m Deke Sharon on all the social media.

And to anybody who’s listening to this, I make this offer constantly from stage and whenever I’m online.

My life’s work is to spread harmony through harmony, to help people sing better and connect through music.

And then that makes the world a better place, more social cohesion, and try to repair the rifts that are happening through our constantly divisive for-profit media and all the fear and anger that get thrown around.

We need to knit back together society.

So if you’re looking for a group to sing in, contact me, drop me an email or find me on social media.

I will help you find a group in your area.

You want to learn how to arrange?

I’ll send you resources.

You’re starting a new group.

I’ll send you some free arrangements to get started.

Anything I can do to help you in what you want to do with vocal music and vocal harmony, I will happily do free of charge.

That’s what I do.

This is what we need in the world.

Well, thank you again.

This was really fantastic.

I really appreciate it.

My pleasure.