Susie Ro is a singer-songwriter, voice coach, ceremonial singer, song-leader trainer and composer for choirs. Based in Dartington, Devon, she has spent close to fifteen years touring internationally with concerts, harmony singing workshops, song-leader trainings and retreats. Her work resists easy categorisation. It is part concert, part communal singing practice, and part teaching, and these strands tend to run together rather than sit apart. BrightStar lists her as a yoga teacher because her Insight Timer page adds meditation and Yoga Nidra to her public offering, but the center of her work is the voice, particularly the voice raised in harmony with others.
Susie was born in New Zealand and moved to the UK when she was nine. Music, and harmony songs in particular, surrounded her childhood. The story goes that she could sing before she could talk. She was educated at a Steiner Waldorf school, a setting in which song plays a central role in how children learn.
The teacher she names as her greatest inspiration is her father, Nick Prater. This makes her lineage as much familial as institutional. The available record does not tie her to a single named spiritual tradition. Her roots lie in natural voice and community singing, learned first at home and then in the wider world of group song.
The clearest turning point in her story comes at eighteen. Inspired by her years at Unicorn Natural Voice Camp, she began leading groups and choirs. It was a short step from a childhood spent absorbing harmony songs to standing at the front of a room and offering them to others. The camp gave her a model of singing as an inclusive, shared activity, and she took it up as a vocation rather than a pastime.
From that start, her path unfolded through practice: leading, composing, performing and eventually teaching others to lead. The record does not give a year-by-year account of how this developed, but the shape is clear. Song leading came first, and the other roles grew around it.
Susie describes her performing work as medicine music, a blend of folk, spirit-music, soul and global influences. The phrase signals intent more than genre. The songs are meant to do something for the people who sing and hear them. She says they arrive in moments of inner realisation, deep emotion or reverence for nature, often as a way of letting go of something she was holding. That gives the material a quality of release rather than confession.
Her concerts are intimate and often bring the whole room into song with her. The audience becomes part of the music, which places her closer to a community song leader than to a conventional frontperson. This is not work for someone who wants a purely passive evening, and it is not aimed at listeners seeking virtuosity or dense production. It is built around voice and harmony.
As a teacher, she is known for a warm, inclusive approach. Singers of all levels are encouraged to explore their voices, connect with others and build confidence and self-expression. Recurring themes include harmony as a shared act, letting go, and attention to the natural world. Her teaching feels less like technical instruction and more like singing as a way of being with other people.
Her most clearly defined published work is her debut harmony songbook, which gathers 22 original songs and arrangements for choirs, singing groups and community gatherings. It is the natural starting point for anyone who wants to sing with others rather than only listen to her.
Beyond the songbook, her work takes several forms:
- Recordings and concerts, available through her Spotify artist page (around 34,000 followers) and her YouTube channel, @SusieRoMusic.
- Song-leader trainings and harmony singing workshops, offered in person on her travels.
- Retreats, though the record does not specify their structure or length.
- eCourses and online mentoring, which allow people to work with her from anywhere.
- Meditation and Yoga Nidra material on Insight Timer, which is more practice-based than her recordings.
The record does not identify a flagship album or name individual tracks, so it would be a mistake to point to one. The songbook and the practice-based sessions are the most concrete entry points.
After almost fifteen years of a packed schedule of events and travel, Susie now says yes to only a few invitations each year. She lives in Dartington with her partner, Jack. The slower rhythm suggests a deliberate shift from constant touring toward a more selective, sustainable way of working.
She is also making her second studio album with Txai Fernando in Norway. Details such as a title, release date or track list have not been confirmed, so listeners should watch her own channels for news. Her official site, susiero.com, is the most dependable source for events, trainings and releases, particularly as her public appearances have become rarer and each one carries more weight.
Susie Ro's significance lies less in chart presence than in the quiet infrastructure she helps build: people who sing together, and people trained to lead others in doing so. Group singing has a long history as a way of gathering communities, and her work belongs to the contemporary natural voice and song-leading world, where participation matters more than polish.
She reaches singers of every level, from the nervous beginner to the experienced choir member who wants to lead. She also reaches those drawn to meditation and Yoga Nidra, who may come to her through stillness rather than song. Because her songwriting, voice coaching, song-leader training and choral composition form a single practice instead of separate careers, her work holds together unusually well. The songbook and the live concert share the same logic: a song is something to be passed around a room.
In an era when music is often consumed alone through headphones, she offers a counterweight. Her work treats the voice as a shared resource and singing as a way of connecting, releasing and paying attention. That is a modest ambition on paper, but it is a durable one, and it explains why a niche following has stayed loyal across years of travel.