Having sold out our annual show at the Guildford Fringe Festival the last three years, we’re trying something a little different this time round.

We’ve given our show a historical theme, presenting a review of popular songs from the last hundred years. Starting with the oldest and moving forward through the decades, we’ll be performing numbers from The Andrews Sisters, The Beatles, and Coldplay (to name but a few). And our bass, Neil will be singing “Barbie Girl”.

As always, we’ll be singing a cappella, with no instruments – just the sound of our own voices. Though there will be our vocal percussionist and hi-tech vocal looping to help out. And we’ll be selling copies of our EP, unless of course you’ve already downloaded it from Apple Music or streamed it from Spotify.

The shows are at The Star Inn, in Guildford town centre, on Saturday 27th July at 7.30 and 9.00 pm. Tickets are available on-line at the Guildford Fringe’s website. In previous years we’ve filled the venue and had to turn people away at the door, so book early to enjoy!

Academix, the contemporary a cappella band based in Woking are pleased to announce the release of our first EP, “If You Never Try, You’ll Never Know”.

Academix sing pop and jazz classics from the present day back to the 1930s, inspired by the surge in close harmony singing seen in the Pitch Perfect movies, TV programmes such as the BBC’s Pitch Battle and Sky’s Ultimate A Cappella, and the London A Cappella Festival curated by The Swingles.   Academix have performed at concerts, festivals, weddings and parties throughout the south-east of the UK.  They have also appeared on BBC Radio and (for half a second) in the opening credits of Gareth Malone’s series The Naked Choir.

The EP features five of the bands favourite songs, with a cappella arrangements of songs by Madonna, The Buggles, Coldplay, The Real Group, and Kim Wilde.  Recorded in Woking, mixed in Nashville, and mastered in France, the EP demonstrates this versatile and entertaining band at their very best.   The band gratefully acknowledges the help of Danny Ozment at Emerald City Productions, Myles Eastwood at Eastwood Records, and Matt Leger in the production of the EP.

The album can be found on Spotify, Apple Music, iTunes, Amazon (UK and US), Google Play, and Deezer.  The CD can also be purchased directly from the band’s web page.

Academix will next be appearing live in a charity concert at the Electric Theatre in Guildford on Sunday June 3rd, and at Guildford Fringe on Friday July 27th at the Star Inn.  They can be followed on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Soundcloud.

Woking, 15th March 2018

Here’s a great review of our show at the Guildford Fringe in July, from the Surrey Advertiser.

 “Delightful evening’s entertainment by talented quintet”

Take two men, add three women, shake well and wait for the result – which turns out to be great entertainment.

The Academix a Capella is a talented quintet whose repertoire ranges over 60 years of popular music with, very occasionally, a trip even further back – the the Andrews Sisters and Don’t Sit Under The Apple Tree.

The only thing missing was their army uniforms.  Instead we had a red and black theme, and at The Star on Sunday, as part of the Guildford Fringe Festival, they gave the full house a delightful evening’s entertainment, filling the small upstairs room with glorious sound.

The men provided the backing group.  Not with musical instruments.  With their voices.  If you closed your eyes, you’d swear there was a double bass on stage.  Plus a guitar, a set of drums and the occasional violin.

We had Coldplay, we had Abba, we had The Beatles, we had rap.  We had a plaintive folk song from Lord Of The Rings pulling at the heartstrings and an impromptu ditty inspired by the audience, who supplied three words: chicken, melody, and would you believe it, miaow.

We even had one number sung without the ubiquitous mikes, which sounded so good it made me wonder why they bothered with amplification at all.

The last number (an encore) was another golden oldie, Goodnight Sweetheart It’s Time To Go.  And it was, regretfully, because the audience, with an age spread of eight to 80, had had a great time.

Margaret Burgess

The draconian press embargo is now lifted and at last the truth can be told: we only made it as far as Week 3 on The Naked Choir.  Not, unfortunately, as one of the lucky eight groups who were selected to perform.  But the eagle-eyed amongst you will have spotted a 1/4 second appearance by Academix on the opening credits for each of the first three weeks.  (It’s around 0:44, Mum, if you’re quick with the freeze frame).

We were pleased and excited to get an audition, since we heard they had nearly 300 applications.  We weren’t too surprised that we hadn’t made it through to the competition itself, since we also heard they auditioned over a hundred groups for eight places.

We were slightly surprised by the format of the first four weeks, specifically the way each group was given a brand new song and asked to arrange, learn, and polish it in three days.  Obviously this is an accelerated schedule: we typically take 2-3 weeks to get notes right, another week or two to memorise, and then enter a phase of continual refinement.  Learning a song in 3 days is like learning to speed-read, not like learning the art of literary criticism.

And this process all starts only once an arrangement is ready: the arranging itself can take weeks.  Speaking for myself, it starts by listening to the song hundreds of times, almost continually for 3-4 weeks while dressing, driving, eating, anywhere.  Then there is the very solitary process of writing down the arrangement and playing it back over and over, agonising over the two or three awkward places where nothing seems quite right no matter how you tweak it.  (Every arrangement has some of these.  At least, all mine do,)  I was pleased to see some recognition given to the poor arrangers of Choral Stimulation and Gospel Essence for the their sleepless nights in weeks 2 and 4.

I write this having just watched Week Four, and the standard is clearly climbing.  For the first time there were performances that made me want to pay money for the recordings, and there were also multiple Shiver Moments.  (A Shiver Moment is that feeling you get when you watch a performance and a strange involuntary tingle runs down your back and arms.)

As for our night with Gareth – well, we didn’t have one.  He wasn’t present at our audition, just a small camera crew and an interviewer.  So we have no secrets to spill.   Probably just as well, as we no longer make the opening credits from Week Four.  For us, it’s the end of the road.

It’s official!   A Cappella comes to Woking!

On Friday September 25th, Academix will be appearing live as support to the internationally acclaimed a cappella band Basix.

And to top it all, the event is sponsored by the lovely people at Winchester craft brewery MASH, who will be selling a selection of wines, beers and soft drinks at the gig.

At Academix, Tuesday nights are rehearsal night.  And for some strange reason, Tuesday nights seems to be reserved by South West Trains for spectacular delays between Waterloo and Woking.

This week was a good example. The train left late and was packed.  Then one of the passengers started a loud and passionate conversation with himself about his general dissatisfaction with life.  The poor guy was obviously not quite right in the head, but knowing this did not make it any easier hearing about his hatred of his father, his passion for smoking, and even allusions to killing.  As might be expected of a train of English commuters, we all kept our eyes down and our noses in our books.   Then, to put the tin lid on it, the train came to a halt half way home and we were informed that due to trespassers on the line they had cut the power and all trains were now stopped. I eventually got to Academix an hour late.

Starting a contemporary a cappella band from scratch is quite hard. But naming the band is really really hard.

Why are we called Academix? As Anita is fond of saying, the ‘Aca’ indicates ‘a cappella’, the ‘mix’ denotes the mixture of genres that we sing, and ‘dem’ is to remind Neil, our bass, of his words.

But there were many other names that fell by the wayside before we got to this one.

Alison Rogers recently asked Twitter for ideas on a cappella names. Here’s some of ours that didn’t make the cut:

• On That Note
• Forge (or The Forge – as in banging stuff together to create something else!)
• At Six (@6) (@Six)
• The Brink
• Reduce Speed Now (!)
• The Sound Borrowers
• Destination Anywhere (ref The Commitments)
• Defiant Celebration of the Uninvited Trout and Elusive (one of our offspring trying to ‘help’)
• Sponge… (exactly)
• D’a cappo
• All wow’s, no do’s (one of us actually like this…)
• B Natural
• The Cat’s whiskers …
• The Five (a little restrictive if we ever got a sixth member!)
• The Six (a little presumptuous that we could ever find a sixth member!!)
• The Accidentals (though there is already a college group with this name)
• Atomic Shutdown
• Fadeout
• Vice Versa
• Xpresso or Expressivo
• The Blades
• Four Alarm Fire
• Noteworthy
• Arse (we were most of the way down the wine bottle by this point in the evening)
• Take Note
• The Mellowtones
• Mac And Ella
• Sha Na Na s
• ShangaLangs
• The Star Tones (like star turns)
• The Rama Lama Ding Dongs
• The Songbirds
• The Nightbirds
• Satin Voices
• Velvet Voices
• The Long Tall Sallys
• The Mustang Sallys
• The Mustangs (we had returned to the Committments theme by this point)
• The Nightingales
• The Grapevines
• The Humzingers / Humsingers (Humzingers turned out to a brand of fruit sweet)
• The Velvet Crows (a bit dark).

Alison, use what you will!  But you also have to follow the Godfather’s Deke Sharon’s rules.

Back in October, Neil suggested we should make a “Christmas Video”. Well everyone seems to do it these days so why not? Stick a camera up, press record and let it run…….

We then discovered it wasn’t as easy as that. There’s a lot involved in making a video and there’s still things we would like to go back and do again.

Firstly, we had to learn a new song in haste. Jonathan dragged out one of his old arrangements (“Santa Baby”) and re-worked it for Academix but we had to learn it in double-quick time and still needed some cue cards for the words as a backup!

We also thought finding a venue would be easy. Well everyone’s got a Christmas Tree up at this time of year haven’t they? The problem here is that the local shopping centre or town square tree would have terrible acoustics around it so we decided to stick to a more contained acoustic and build our own set!

Interestingly, the Voice Festival UK published a video outlining tips for creating video content for a cappella groups. We found this particularly helpful as it confirmed some of our thoughts and also gave us some good pointers in the areas where we were less experienced. In summary, it explains how you can create content with limited resources in terms of software and hardware and come out with pretty good results.

We used an HD video camera with separate digital audio recorder. We actually did a test run the week before the live recording in order to test the technology and work out some sort of layout. We went away and put together a test video using iMovie. iMovie is fantastic for this purpose but it is a free piece of software and therefore does have some limitations. That said, plenty good enough for our first attempt.

We all reviewed and discussed the first video in preparation for the live recording and agreed on how we would approach the evening. On the day we all turned up with our Christmas decorations (including a tree!) and spent some time putting together our “set”. Despite “best laid plans” and all that … the video recorder had a problem on the night with a corrupt SD card. Once this was formatted we had to reset the camera. This was fine except that the quality was reset back to 720p rather than 1080p. So, apologies, if you were hoping to see the fine quality of our complexions on your TV. For Neil and Jonathan that was probably a good thing. The audio was fine though (and we recorded at 48 kHz). I expect you’re all familiar with the movie “clapperboard”. Well, the idea behind this is that it allows you to hook together your picture and audio from separate sources and it really does work! Our “clapperboard” is replaced by the clapping of hands as you can see from the Out Takes.

The recording itself was perfect first time and we did it all in one take without any problems or issues at all (as you can see from the video embedded below)!!!

We then spent a fair amount of time back at home doing the post production. This involved tweaking the audio, attaching the audio to the video and then adding titles and, most importantly…. snow. A few final iterations of feedback and then we cut the final version. The fun part was putting together the “out takes” video which actually did stretch our knowledge of iMovie beyond 101. However, it’s all good experience and we have learnt a lot for next time (assuming we do another soon enough to avoid having to go through the learning curve again!).

Last week saw our first gig outside Surrey.  The Brandenburg Fringe is an off-shoot of the more choral Brandenburg Festival (@brandenburgfest).  At Fringe events, a cappella enthusiasts come for an evening of unaccompanied singing without knowing who will be singing or even what style will be heard.

Our appearance was at The Cheshire Cheese, just off The Strand.  (One of three Cheshire Cheese pubs in London, and not the most famous, so some care is needed finding the venue!)

First on the bill were the London City Singers, a barbershop chorus of about 20 ladies.  Their 30 minute set ranged from traditional barbershop through show tunes and more contemporary pop.  They were followed by Morrigan, an entertaining quartet of folk singers who introduced each song with a little story about it’s origins.  The performance area was next to the bar, and at the end of each song they had an endearing habit of returning to lean on the bar for a minute.  This is not a practice Academix will be introducing.  (Let them get to the bar and I might never get them back again.)

The final set was ours, and had been re-structured since our SATRO charity concert in Epsom because the small performance space meant that there was no space for mics and speakers and therefore any songs requiring looping or pedals was ruled out.  We started with some Pharrell and Kim Wilde, slowed things down a bit with Blackbird and Fix You, and then wound things up again with our third performance of The Real Group‘s “Pass Me The Jazz”.  (We are very proud of this one.)  We finished up with our own “Why Do Fools Fall In Love” arrangement, which is rapidly becoming a signature tune.

After the performances the audience and performers met and mingled, and we were blown away by the kind comments.  An Australian couple told us we were the highlight of their trip to England.  (They then revealed that they were over here for the birth of their second grandchild.  We were rather honoured!).  We were able to exchange ideas and tips with singers from the barbershop and jazz worlds.  It just goes to show, as the sainted Ed Randell of The Swingle Singers says, “a cappella is not a genre, it’s an arranging choice”.