BABS is a charitable organisation with music education as its goal.

The Chorus Director is at the forefront of all our activities and is responsible for the week on week encouragement and training of our members. Directors' College is a weekend event held early in January each year. It has been running for over 7 years and is open to all who wish to learn the essentials of Choral Directing. The college teaches the importance of good directing skills, analytical listening, musicality and leadership and management. The Chorus Director's web site provides more details - click here.

The flagship of our Educational activities, the event takes place in August and provides training for chorus and quartets as well as enabling individuals to become more skilful in specific areas like singing, presentation, music, chorus directing and management. Run by a faculty of over 30 coaches and 10 technical staff, the College attracts around 350 people from clubs inside and outside the Barbershop Genre. Click here for the web site. Click here for the web site.

The Guild is an important resource for BABS. Our judges are recognised experts in the main aspects of barbershop, namely singing, music and performance. They undertake bi-annual training at specialist seminars to be able to judge our choruses and quartets in competition. They have offered their services to clubs to attend and assist with areas that the clubs have highlighted.

Advice on coaches who are registered with BABS can be obtained from Wilf Pattison whose details are available in the Directorate listing.

BABS is assembling resource materials to enable clubs to more effectively educate their members. An increasing amount of such material is available on the Education website : click here

Financial awards are available from Harmony Foundation for BABS members and non-members to attend Harmony College and other events.

We also believe that our educational events could attract sponsorship from other funding bodies such as Local Councils, Regional Arts Funds, Lottery and Music organisations such as Making Music to which all BABS clubs have been affiliated since January 2007.