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Sam Moore – the soul man – was a fantastic soul singer who most of you will have heard, often without realising. He was born October 12th 1935 and died recently on January 10th 2025.
He was most famous for being part of the soul duo, Sam and Dave. They were active from 1961 til 1981. Sam Moore was the higher of the two voices, and he was a huge influence on many aspiring soul singers of that era.
To commemorate his incredible voice I thought I’d simply send out a few of their greatest hits. Here are some live and in-studio versions of his songs.
Soul Man (Live)
This is by far the most famous of their songs, and showcases how epic his soul singing ability really was. He sits up at the 2nd bridge as comfortably as most male tenors sit into their chest voice. Incredible.
A few of you keen-eyed musos may also recognise many of the band members from the Blues Brothers line-up.
Hold On, I’m Coming (Live)
When something is wrong with my baby
This is a less well-known song, but shows how capable he was at singing ballads despite his voice sitting so high.
What a fabulous voice. I hope you’ve enjoyed diving into the back catalogue of one of the greatest singers of the last 100 years.
This week I want to talk about how to use songs as exercises. Those of you who have read my prospectus will know that the later stage of building a voice is to sing songs, both in lessons and as long-term goals.
Here’s the challenge
Singing songs without any consideration to the technical demands of those songs will generally exacerbate existing vocal/technical issues. This is why technical assessments and exercises to address technical issues must be dealt with first.
However, once you’ve begun to address your technical issues, we have got to get you stuck into songs. Exercises are just the forerunner to singing songs, not a replacement for them.
We are not going to just put off singing songs until your voice is “ready“. We’ve got to get you and your voice stuck into the very material you want to sing. Through doing so we will integrate your on-going technical development into the songs themselves.
This is the whole point of voice training, for everyone, at all levels of development
Sing songs every day
It’s important that songs form a regular daily part of your vocal development regime. For example, even just 10 minutes of exercises to get your voice warm and co-ordinated, followed by 10 minutes (or as long as you like) of singing songs, can form a very potent protocol to develop your voice.
To sing well, we must learn to move from chest voice into head voice. We need to be able to dance back and forth without difficulty – this requires cultivation of different bridging strategies. To be even more precise, we must learn to transition across multiple passagio/bridges, and to tonally match the bottom to the top and vice versa.
Although there is a particular pathway to achieve this, the exact nuances of the bridging process as felt by each singer can be a little different. And even within those nuanced routes, there are different bridging strategies that are employable by even the same singer to colour the sound in different ways, whilst still being within the realm of technically correct and aesthetically beautiful singing.
Three examples of the same song by three different singers.
Pavarotti
If you listen to the opening notes, you’ll hear an overly narrow and tightly controlled vowel width (at his first bridge). This yields a rounder tone with great bottom end extension (as well as upper harmonics and ring).
If you listen to the climaxes later in the piece, you’ll hear a much wider approach to the next portion of his voice (second bridge). The tone still ‘matches’ the bottom, but there’s less of the same polished rounded bottom end and a gradually wider vowel than employed at his first bridge. The sound becomes more midrange focused and slightly more mouthy at his second bridge than his first. Still a beautiful sound (the whole world broadly agrees on this!), but Pavarotti employed a slightly different approach to bridging at his second bridge than his first.
Domingo
If you listen to the opening notes (again, around first bridge), you’ll hear a deeper tone overall (such was Domingo’s tone), and a narrow and tightly controlled vowel sound like Pavarotti’s approach. I personally hear a little bit of extra width in the vowels compared to Pavarotti (excluding the odd wider vowel Pavarotti throws in lower end) but still very tightly controlled.
However the key difference is at the climaxes later on. You should notice there’s very little difference in vowel width or tonal similarity at his second bridge when compared to his first. It’s a very very controlled and even sound from top to bottom. Both his tone and Pavarotti’s tone are self consistent, but I would argue that of all of the different bridging strategies employed in this list, Domingo’s second bridge is the most well executed. This shows how similar his approach to bridging at his second is to his first.
Kaufmann
I present this as another example of another singer with yet another different bridging strategy and approach. His approach involves a slightly lower larynx (in my opinion) than the previous two singers, leading to a darker and thicker timbre overall. I’d say his vowel width is similar to Domingo, maybe slightly narrower at points, but the darker timbre can make it seem narrower than it is. You can hear a great deal of consistency in his approaches to his first and second bridges, though he’s somewhere between Pavarotti and Domingo in consistency in his approaches, at least in this piece.
Summary
Once you CAN bridge, you can (and inevitably will) shape and shade the exact nuances of HOW you do so and how you sound. This is in part determined by the physical preference of how it feels, and in part determined by stylistic/aesthetic preference of how it sounds.
This week I want to ask you ‘what is your musical diet?’ A Youtube creator I follow called Rick Beato put this great video out last week on ‘Has every song been written?’ commenting on the fleet of lawsuits that artists are firing at each other over copying songs.
Now while he sets out to discuss the nature of this, it’s the last few minutes of the video (I’ve timestamped the video to start from this point) that I wanted to share with you. And that is in relation to musical diet…
As I’ve mentioned recently, I’ve been spending a lot of time in the recording realm and inherently comparing live vs recorded vocals. I have pretty good pitch, but even I notice how unforgiving it is to hear your own recorded vocal back. We might only be talking about just one or two notes in a 3 minute difficult performance that are off, but they can completely change the perception of a vocal take being good vs bad.
Here’s a basic test for you to see what I mean. Here is a clip of an incredibly consistent and incredible live singer – Peabo Bryson. I go on about him because he is excellent. He is often held up by recording engineers and producers as being a “one take wonder”, where he can just record a single take and it’s basically perfect. Continue reading “Live vs Recorded – Our own double standards”
I was watching an interview a little while ago, with a famous fight trainer. The interviewer asked him who the most dangerous/incredible fighter he’d ever seen was, and he told this story about a guy called Steve Rusk.
Steve was just an outdoors-y kind of guy in the US (hunting, fishing, etc), but he’d come in and train with the fight trainer’s top world-class fighters. And Steve would utterly destroy them. He was just THAT physical and that good… but he never had the desire to be known across the world, he just liked training and being good at that. It was it’s own reward.
In the same way, there are some INSANE singers out there that you will (very likely) never have heard of… and I thought I’d share a few of my absolute favourites on here. All of these are bootleg recordings to help capture how good these guys are live. Enjoy! Continue reading “Epic voices you’ve (likely) never heard of”
In the classical world there is this idea of the “covered” sound, and in a video I’ve linked below, Pavarotti demonstrates covered sound.
What this broadly translates to is a sound where the brashness of chest voice is rounded off as the voice ascends, to create a deep and powerful sound, but with appropriate darkness and brightness therein. The easiest way to demonstrates this is with a clip, and who better to demonstrate than Pavarotti himself! Continue reading “Pavarotti demonstrates covered sound”
One of the biggest benefits of today’s article is that it’s an easy way to improve your singing performance in just a few easy steps, so read on.
Key Choice is EVERYTHING
Recently, I’ve been visiting songs new and old and concocting a list of 10-15 songs that I like and are exciting, both to sing and listen to. One of the big questions with each song is – what’s the best key to sing in?
Picking the right key, for the right song, for your voice will not just help you acquire the best quality for the basic singing of the song, but will naturally lead to style opportunities. But we’ve got to be honest with ourselves about where we sound good, rather than doing it in a particular key “cos that’s where the original artist did it“. Continue reading “Ease, strain, and time to think (improve your singing performance easily)”
