To illustrate what makes a truly great song, I want to use an analogy. Jimmy Carr There’s a comedian in the UK called Jimmy Carr. He is a one-liner comedian, and while his comedy tends to be quite crass, he had something very relatable to say about crafting great jokes. In an interview, he commented
I was having a chat with a local artist recently about developing vocal style and development of artistry. One of the topics that came up was about learning new things and expanding one’s palette of available musical ideas, genres, musical phrasing etc. The whole point of doing so is to expand and grow one’s musical
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
Reading time: 4 minutes Before we go any further, let’s recap some of the material I’ve covered from the workshop with Rhonda Carlson. In part 1 we established the importance of a specific backstory. This enables you to inhabit the story the song is already telling, and give it nuance and a personal connection.
Reading time: 3 minutes In the first performance article we talked about Rhonda Carlson’s advice on having/creating a backstory to whatever song you are going to sing. The more detailed and personally invested you can make the character singing the song, the easier it is to inhabit that story and sell it… but to sell
Yet another instalment of the very popular ‘Five songs from this week’… 1. Rolling Down to Old Maui – The Longest Johns One of my longer term students sings in an old folk group that sings a lot of sea shantys. This is one of their current songs and he’s working on this – reeeeally
I had a load of positive feedback last time I posted a feature on five songs from the last week, so here we are again with another instalment! 1. Salley Gardens A solid folk tune, this was brought in this week by a fab student whose voice has REALLY come on in the last few
I was chatting with a few other teachers and some students recently about how to learn a song quickly and how I go about learning songs, as well as what the most effective method is. Learning a song is a remarkably complex process. There’s the lyrics, the melody, the rhythm, the harmony, perhaps some ornamentation
