Mark is the Midlands' leading Certified Voice Coach, providing professional singing lessons in Nottingham. Mark is known for getting BIG results in voices, fast. – 0115 871 7660 || admin@markjwgraham.co.uk
Author: Mark JW Graham
Mark is the Midlands' leading Certified Voice Coach, providing professional singing lessons based in Nottingham & worldwide via Skype.
Our clients range from total beginners to gigging and recording professionals. They all trust Mark as the "go-to guy" for quickly fixing issues in their voices faster than anyone else.
Join those in the know by booking in at www.markjwgraham.co.uk/booking or calling 0115 871 7660.
Hello! Welcome to another blog post where we feature one of my awesome students – this week we’re going to meet Gon Pan and his band ‘Down In One’.
When Gon first got in touch to work on his voice, he explained he’d been in a lot of metal bands before, and had often done a lot of screaming duties in those bands. While Gon still loves that music and it’s a big influence on him, he was wanting to become more a singer and less of a screamer… and so we set to work. Continue reading “Meet Mark’s Students – Gon Pan & Down In One”
I was working with one of my favourite students (Mike) on some guitar-y songs, and how to meld singing and guitar playing together, and we got talking about songwriters who do this really well.
John Mayer is a great one, Chris Cornell is pretty cool too, and there many others too numerous to mention, but today I wanted to highlight Ryan Adams.
Ryan Adams
Way back in the early 00s, I remember my Mum buying a copy of ‘Easy Tiger’, one of Ryan Adams’ earlier albums… and I didn’t ‘get it’ then. I Was more interested in heavy rock and intense guitar solos (rah!) at least at that time.
But now the songwriter scene is MASSIVE. EVERYONE and their Mum is a ‘singer-songwriter’… how many of your friends have ‘singer-songwriter’ on their Twitter account?
I’m not knocking it! It’s just what’s trendy right now.
A seminal singer-songwriter
Yet, despite it being a big thing now, Ryan Adams is (IMO) the earliest example of a true singer-songwriter. Someone who wrote lots of songs (good to great songs) and performed them… and he’s still going. To me, even though I didn’t appreciate him at the time, he is one of the earliest ‘seeds’ of the singer-songwriter ‘movement’ (if you can call it that). Someone who knew what he wanted to produce, didn’t say no, didn’t give up, and kept doing what he wanted. Now loads of others are doing that it’s not quite the pioneering genre it once was (every episode of Scrubs and House ended up having a singer-songwriter song playing it out… now every mobile and energy company advert has a singer-songwriter in the background), but cast your ear back 12-13 years, and you’ll find Ryan Adams doing it all from scratch even then.
As an artist, I think Ryan Adams is the real deal. Someone who knows what he wants, and spends time developing and crafting it.
See for yourself…
Just watch this fab video of his song ‘Lucky Now’. It’s not got the most incredible vocals in the world, it’s not ear-shredding guitar, but it hangs together as a complete piece… and he sells the piece. To me, this is the sign of a complete artist, and beginning singer-songwriters could do far worse than to learn from Ryan Adams and take a leaf out of his book.
Rachel has been studying with me since last year, and we’ve been working hard on her voice. Rachel is in sixth form college right now, but she’s already focused on how to improve her abilities to set her up from graduation onwards.
I thought we’d try a more interview-style format for this week… so I sat down with Rachel and asked some questions to tease out her musical story and upbringing, how she got to where she is now, and where she’s looking to go… Continue reading “Meet Mark’s Students: Rachel Burbridge Singer”
A student brought in some Mika this week – and I hadn’t heard this song in ages! So I bookmarked it for sharing this week… and as I was mulling it over, the following thought dropped out onto the blog post.
So, do you hate the sound of your own voice?
This is a really catchy song but certainly not in vogue with current trends and preferences in popular music. It reminds me of certain Queen songs with the melodies, slight aggression, more pristine vocal quality… while also reminding me of some Take That in terms of the emotive feel and production on the track, and still also reminds me of the Scissor Sisters in terms of the slightly eclectic song writing.
Mika’s Vocal Styling
What I find really interesting about Mika’s vocal styling is his use of a much lighter higher range where most singers then and now go for “RAH! MORE POWER EVERYWHERE” (to quote the Eagles song Life in the Fast Lane ‘everything, all the time’).
It sounds a little quirky (note how I avoided the word ‘funny’ there!), but it definitely works.
So Mika clearly does not sound like many other artists out there, and clearly isn’t copied by many others, and yet he had (has?) a successful career doing his own material – yet I know 99% of singers would feel rubbish about themselves if they sounded that way or as different as Mika does, simply because they don’t sound like singer X, Y or Z.
The Lesson to be Learned
A lesson to be learned here is that even if you don’t quite sound like singer X, Y or Z, you should NEVER dismiss what you are doing as artistically unuseable. You may not have found exactly your niche or style just yet, but if you keep developing and trialling what you’ve got going on, you’ll start to develop something all your own.
This lesson is a really useful one even for me. As someone who hears a LOT of singers every day of every week, I encounter singers with voices that I am tonally envious of. Seriously. It’s the ‘grass is always greener’ syndrome. And it’s 100% normal to feel like this from time to time. The challenge is to not be discouraged by this, but to harness that into pure motivation to keep working on our voices, developing strengths AND weaknesses to create something wholly your own… much like Mika has done – unique and standing apart from many other singers, where others may well have given up.
So, are you going to give up? Or are you going to keep going?
Meet Rachel:Â Rachel has been studying with me for a couple of years now, and she’s had some fantastic leaps and bounds in her voice and artistry in the time I’ve known her. She’s got seriously hardcore commitment to making her voice the best it can be – she studies with me weekly even now – and the hard work is really paying off. Continue reading “Meet Mark’s Students: Rachel McClean Singer Songwriter”
Rachel has been studying with me since last year, and we’ve been working hard on her voice. Rachel is in sixth form college right now, but she’s already focused on how to improve her abilities to set her up from graduation onwards.