Setting up a choir takes about ten minutes. This is the order that causes the fewest questions from your singers afterwards.
Before you upload anything, read copyright and licensing. You are responsible for holding the rights to the music you share, and owning printed copies is not the same as being allowed to digitize them.
1. Create the choir
Settings › Start another choir, or the prompt you get when you first sign in.
Choirs live inside an organization: a church, a school, a society. If you’re the first person here from yours, you’ll create the organization at the same time, giving it a name and a short URL identifier. If your organization is already on Choirside, pick it from the list and you’re only naming the choir.
One organization can hold several choirs, which is how you’d run a chamber choir and a youth choir side by side without mixing up their music or their members.
2. Decide what your choir uses
Open the choir from Settings, then Features. Five things can be switched on or off:
| Feature | What it gives you |
|---|---|
| Music library | Songs and their backing tracks |
| Member recordings | Singers can record their own parts |
| Messaging | Announcements, bulletins, polls |
| Calendar | Rehearsals, services, events |
| Attendance | Tracking who was present |
Members only see the features that are switched on, so this is the fastest way to keep the app simple for a choir that only wants practice tracks. New choirs start with the calendar and attendance off. Turn them on when you need them, not before, you can change any of this later.
Each feature has its own settings behind it. Recordings, for instance, let you require director approval before a member’s take is visible to anyone else, and cap how many takes are kept per song.
3. Add your music before you invite anyone
An empty choir makes a bad first impression, so do this before step 4.
Create a song with Title and, optionally, a tempo in BPM. The tempo drives the count-in metronome your singers hear when they record, so it’s worth setting. You can also choose whether the song is available to this choir alone or to every choir in your organization.
Then add recordings to it. Choirside distinguishes a few kinds, and picking the right one matters because it decides who sees what:
- Instrumental track: the accompaniment alone.
- Piano reduction: piano covering all the vocal parts.
- Guide track: piano or another instrument on one voice part.
- Sectional track: a person singing one part, as a model for that section.
The first three appear to your choir as soon as you upload them. A sectional track stays hidden until somebody with permission publishes it, so a section leader can record one without it going out unreviewed.
You can record directly in the app or import a file you already have. MP3, M4A and WAV all work, and MIDI is accepted too, though a MIDI file with no tempo inside it will ask you for one.
4. Invite your singers
Open the choir and share its join code, an invite link, or the QR code. The QR code is by far the easiest thing to put on a screen at rehearsal.
When you create an invite link you can set an expiry, cap the number of uses, and choose what role it grants. Links that never expire tend to escape into places you didn’t intend, so a season-length expiry is a reasonable habit.
There’s also a per-choir setting for whether ordinary members can see and share the join code. Turn it off if you want every new singer to come through you.
Send them getting started as a choir member.
5. Set voice parts
This is the step people forget, and it generates most of the confusion.
First, define the parts your choir actually uses. Open the choir, choose Edit details, and set its voice parts. Until you do, there’s nothing to assign, and the choir page will show Voice parts: None set.
Then open Members, tap a singer, and set their part. New members arrive with none, and until you set one the app can’t tell which recordings belong to them, so features that depend on it won’t work properly.
While you’re there you can set their role:
| Role | Can do |
|---|---|
| Member | Sings and records their own parts |
| Section lead | Also approves their section’s recordings |
| Accompanist | Also adds backing tracks |
| Director | Full control of this choir |
What to expect afterwards
Practice takes your members record are private from other singers, but visible to you, which is the whole point, it’s how you hear who’s struggling with an entry before the next rehearsal.
If somebody shouldn’t be in the choir any more, remove them from the Members list. That takes away their access, but their own recordings stay with them. Removal is not a way to delete a member’s audio. A member who chooses to leave the choir themselves does have their recordings from it deleted, which is the opposite behavior, and worth knowing before you promise anybody either outcome.
Two heavier options sit at the bottom of the choir’s page. Archiving hides the choir from its members and can be undone. Deleting is permanent and removes everything in it.