Category: 500 words or less

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How to Use Songs as Exercises – “Etudes”

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.

This is not just from a performance/rendition perspective, but as a form of etude… Continue reading “How to Use Songs as Exercises – “Etudes””

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Different bridging strategies

To sing well, we must learn to move from chest voice into head voice and be able to dance back and forth without difficulty. 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 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. Continue reading “Different bridging strategies”

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What is your musical diet? What are you consuming?

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…

Continue reading “What is your musical diet? What are you consuming?”

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Live vs Recorded – Our own double standards

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”

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Pavarotti demonstrates covered sound

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”

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Ease, strain, and time to think (improve your singing performance easily)

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)”