There’s a new male a capella group at St. Thomas and its members hope to make a name for themselves; once they come up with one, that is.

Freshmen Ben Dymit, Michael Gaytko, Enan Zelinski and Nick Dedolph formed a barbershop quartet on campus after discovering they all had a passion for singing.

Dymit and Dedolph are in choir at St. Thomas together and were both in barbershop quartets in high school. They said they decided to try out the quartet concept with Gaytko and Zelinski.

“We tried practicing once … and we were like ‘yeah, this is really cool.’ So we decided we would actually become a group and try to actually do it,” Dedolph said.

Dymit sings bass, Gaytko sings tenor, Zelinski sings baritone and Dedolph sings lead in the group. All of their songs are sung without instruments, but Dymit says that barbershop music has a certain sound.

“You sing four piece arrangements,” Dymit said. “Sometimes composers will write their own songs, a lot of times they’ll just transcribe popular songs. It has a distinct style to it.”

Zelinski explained that the group has a sense of spontaneity to it.

“We’ll just be standing in line somewhere or walking through the quad and then just burst out in song completely at random,” Zelinski said.

Although there are other a capella groups on campus, like the Summit Singers, the quartet assured there’s no competition.

“It’s great to see other groups like that on campus kind of doing the same thing,” Gaytko said.

On-campus performances for the group may be in the near future.

“PULSE would definitely be an option,” Gaytko said. “Also at Scooter’s, they always have kind of an open mic night.”

Although the group plans on performing on campus soon, Gaytko said its first order of business is to build up a repertoire.

“We’ve got two songs, we’re working on a third,” Gaytko said. “We learned those in two practices. It really depends how much time we want to put in.”

Of course, every group needs a name, and the men have been brainstorming a few options.

“The one that we all agreed on is ‘Bed Head’ because we all have different styles of hair,” Gaytko said.

Another name that the group liked was “Four by Six” because they’re four singers over 6 feet tall.

The quartet said it doesn’t know exactly what will be in its future but for now, Dedolph said it’s not too serious.

“It’s more about having fun and just singing,” Dedolph said.

Tarkor Zehn can be reached at zehn0241@stthomas.edu.