This is a topic that has come up a lot for me and for clients over the years, but it feels even more relevant recently. This is not just about picking the right songs, but also extends to vocal development, tessitura/range that best shows off your voice, and where your personaly wants you to sing. Continue reading “Personality Mismatch in Singing (Picking the Right Songs)”
How to become a singing teacher & what it takes
We went to a friends’ birthday party on Saturday and got chatting with someone about how to become a singing teacher.
What happened was, I struck up a conversation with someone my wife went to university with, and we were talking about what she did for a living. She then confessed she really doesn’t enjoy it that much, and is looking for a change. When I asked what she was thinking of doing, they said something along the lines of the following: Continue reading “How to become a singing teacher & what it takes”
Five Famous Singers with Vocal Problems
From Nodules and Granulomas, to Haemorrhages, and Surgery Complications
This week I thought it would be interesting to look at the kind of issues that can befall singers who neglect their vocal health, nodules and otherwise. Now some of the following are due to particularly hazardous vocal technique (or lack thereof). However, even with half-decent or great technique, if you over-use your voice and give yourself inadequate rest you can encounter similar issues.
John Mayer – Granuloma
A few years ago John Mayer had to cancel an extensive tour to undergo surgery for a granuloma.
John Mayer is a self-taught singer, and if you watch interviews with him at Berklee College of Music he talks about the search to find a great ‘base’ tone for his voice. Sadly, this tone (as cool as it is) is not a healthy form of phonation full stop, let alone for extended periods. Granuloma is a swelling/inflammation of the cartilage at the back of the vocal cords, whereas nodules occur on the cords themselves (see below). However the growth of this inflamed tissue can interfere with vocal function and cause a great deal of pain and dysphonia (i.e. can’t pitch correctly).
In my opinion, from a technical perspective John Mayer has always been way too light with his chest voice. I’m talking purely technically and NOT stylistically. This results in a LOT of excess air passing over the vocal cords (which you can hear in almost every song). Functionally speaking, this results in insufficient stability throughout his voice, which then leads to strain at the top of his (chest) voice when he tries to gun it on the higher notes.
He also constantly flips between a light insufficiently stable (but regularly strained) chest co-ordination and his artistic use of falsetto. This kind of vocal habit can really wreak havoc on a voice. This is because the cords are constantly being strained and excessively taut one second, then being suddenly let go of like letting go of an elastic band the next. Such a constant flip-flopping can create a lot of wear on the voice and the connective tissues. Add into that an intensive gigging schedule and you’ve got a recipe for vocal disaster.
Adele & Sam Smith – vocal cord haemorrhage
A haemorrhage is a particularly unpleasant issue. It’s where the tissue of the vocal cords themselves rupture and bleed all over themselves. This also creates swelling, much like any other cut in the human body.
In Adele’s case, you can hear the amount of sheer pressure she uses when she sings. In fact, if you listen to her recorded version of ‘Rolling in the Deep’ you can hear her voice trembling to try and hold onto that very first high note in the chorus. This is indicative of a singer using significantly excessive amounts of air pressure to generate their sound and trying to retain that chest-like sound as high as possible. Sam Smith has vocal habits/behaviour a little closer to that of John Mayer.
Singing in a kind of ‘crafted yelling’ co-ordination or repeatedly cranking up the volume without adequate technique or rest periods in between is remarkably bad for the voice. I can’t even begin to describe how damaging it is, even for short periods of time, let alone entire concerts night after night. Continued misuse and OVER-use of the voice in this way is what resulted in this damage to her voice.
Michael Buble – nodules
A year or so ago, Michael Buble announced he had to cancel at least part of his tour to have vocal cord surgery to remove nodules. Nodules are like blisters/callouses on your vocal cords. These generally occur as a soft localised swelling on one cord initially, then hardening to a hard nodule (like a blister), and often result in a matching nodule on the opposite cord as the initiating nodule rubs against the other vocal cord during phonation. Soft nodules can occur quite regularly with even loud shouting at events, football matches, concerts etc, and so are not uncommon per se (though we should try to avoid even these). However, prolonged singing on nodules or adema (swelling) is what tends to lead to hard nodules.
Now while Michael Buble is not perfect technically, he doesn’t sing in ridiculous keys. He also doesn’t sing with dramatically excessive volume, nor does he experiment with vocal distortion. He is relatively clean when he sings and doesn’t jam his voice as hard as it will go as often as he can. In short, he’s not perfect, but he is a great example of what can happen when even as a singer with half-decent technique. Over-singing (gigs night after night!) can just create that level of wear in the voice. Gigging every night with inadequate rest can still lead to serious vocal issues.
Julie Andrews – Nodules, then surgery complications
Julie Andrews is an unusual case. She went in to have nodules removed, but the surgeon allegedly botched the operation. This resulted in a piece of her vocal cords no longer being there or being available in the way it once was. My recollection from conversations with other coaches was that the surgeon slipped during the operation, but I cannot find a reliable source to corroborate this. In any case, surgery is a serious route to go down, and the consequences never leave the voice the same again. Once nodules reach the hardened stage, they must be removed surgically, whereas soft nodules (the ones that are “merely” a localised swelling) can reduce with rest and corrective exercises.
The Upshot is…
You only get one voice – be smart about how you use it and look after it.
If you’re straining, stop doing it. If you’re repeatedly straining, DEFINITELY stop doing it. Whether you’re being too heavy and aggressive (like Adele previously), or light and flipping to falsetto (like John Mayer), or even whether your technique is reasonably together but you’re singing without adequate rest (like Michael Buble), you have GOT to respect the inherent requirements of how the voice is meant to work and how it’s meant to recover.
Learn More: Related Articles
If you want to learn more about vocal health and voice issues, you may enjoy the following articles:
Shouting masquerading as singing: Why so many singers are just yelling
Why vocal problems so regularly derail careers, permanently
Vocal Health Issues
My Singing Voice Hurts: 5 Habits for Vocal Health
Vocal Longevity: The Icarus Effect
Why do I keep losing my voice: Overuse, Misuse and Abuse
The Seriousness of Vocal Fold Nodules
Five More Songs from the Last Week
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 months. There are many versions, but this is one that I quite enjoy!
2. Christina Perri – Jar of Hearts
This was brought in at the end of the week by a local performer. Whilst too high in the original key for their particular voice, this stuck in my head for the rest of the day.
3. Demi Lovato – Skyscraper
This is an oft-talked about song by students but only a few bring it in to work on. This particular song requires quite an attitude to deliver just right, even with technique being under your belt!
4. Sting – If I Ever Lose My Faith
I am a moderate fan of Sting. I really enjoy certain pieces but there’s a large number of tracks I just don’t gel with. This one crossed my ears again via a cover someone had done on Facebook, and when I mentioned it in front of a student later in the week they jumped on the chance to give it a whirl!
5. Matt Redman – 10,000 Reasons
I work with a fair few church singers and worship leaders (if you’re not sure what this job is, it’s a kind of band leader and functional lead singer for modern church congregations), and it so happens that this track is a fairly common song to hear at modern churches these day by a writer of MANY modern hymn classics. It’s got a somewhat tricky ascent in the chorus, and is tough to nail with quality (given the ballad speed it goes it) without just yelling (as many leaders tend to do!).
How to learn a song quickly
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 or some hidden complexities, and there’s the challenge of successfully putting all the components together, still sounding like you whilst still doing justice to the original piece (artistry). And that’s just if you’re wanting to SING the song… if you’re wanting to accompany yourself that can create a WHOLE raft of other issues.
For a moment, let’s park our discussion of the artistic. Let’s also not worry about whether we are trying to accompany ourselves on an instrument.
I’m talking about learning a song quickly (the technical) AND, at the same time), progressing towards the best tone you can deliver (the aesthetic). Interestingly, you CAN do both, if you know what you’re doing.
Here’s my process for assimilating a song.
INITIAL PRIMER
1) Find a version I like – The first step is obviously important to make sure you WANT to sing the song.
2) Listen to it 3 or 4 times without singing along with it or playing along with it.
The second time is important to do it uninterrupted. Give your brain the best chance to internalise the song and also not associate the song with the stress of getting bits wrong (this IS going to happen when learning songs so we don’t want to create that stress unnecessarily).
3) Listen to it 3 or 4 times whilst humming or singing gently along.
This is the next step, but make sure not to stop and start again, or try singing the bit you just heard but got wrong over anything bit. Let the song wash over you whilst you tentatively follow along.
4) Listen to it 3 or 4 times trying to sing gently along, but pause and rewind to figure out difficult bits.
Try to keep the flow going as much as possible, but make sure to stop and retrace your steps if you mess something up. The quality of tone and range is not important at this stage, but it IS a chance to check your work.
Now we’ve done that, it’s time for the next steps…
MAKE IT EASY TO SOUND GOOD AND SOUND LIKE YOU
Many great teachers have said to me “I’d rather have half the range, double the quality”. Many singers agree intellectually with this, but emotionally their ego gets in the way. But the truth is, this is sage advice – and we’ve got to go DOWN if we want to go UP.
4) LOWER THE KEY and practice the song til you can do the whole thing – I generally take it down to where the top notes are SUPER pedestrian. If you’re unaccustomed to this approach, whatever key you might initially take a song down to, you could probably take it down a key or two more. For female voices or lighter male voices this can often stick the lowest notes too low overall, but you can apply this process in reverse for just those portions of the song, or even change the melody to be workable even in that lowest key.
Once you’ve got this sounding good and like you (which is ludicrously easy to guarantee because of how much this should be sitting in your chest voice, the place where you speak), we can start to change the key.
NOTE: This is working with the assumption that you have some level of functional mix going on. If you try following the next instructions without a functional mix, you will just end up straining or struggling with your voice.
That caveat aside, the next step is:
5) Take the key up ONE semitone, and repeat the process – Yup, just one singular solitary semitone, and make sure it sounds EXACTLY the same as the key before. Any strain, volume increases/drops, vowel changes etc all need ironing out at the next key. Other than the intellectual knowledge that it’s a higher key, the sound of your voice when singing in this key should be indistinguishable from the one before it.
6) REPEAT – Take it up another semitone, and repeat the process. You must make sure that each time you change key it exactly matches the one before. Even the slightest deviation from the sound that was delivered previously will yield an undesirable runaway process in how good the voice sounds as we ascend. Be incredibly picky about whether it’s the same or not, your voice will sound all the better for it and you’ll develop a LOT quicker overall as a singer.
The first key or two shouldn’t take too long nor be too difficult to do in the first instance. But once you get maybe 2 keys or so higher than your original comfortable key, you’ll start to find the hard work begins. You’ll find it reeeally hard to keep the volume the same, you’ll find vowels start to slip, either getting wider or getting much narrower than you’d like. You’ll find it more energy-intensive to sustain and you’ll need more rest breaks. Assuming you’ve got a functional mix and are adjusting correcting, this is normal and to be expected.
WHY DOES THIS WORK?
What this does is the tone-matching we talked about in my earlier article. We are putting our voice solidly in our modal register (our chest voice) where we are recognisably ‘us’, and then making DAMN sure we don’t lose that as we ascend. Singers all too often and far too willingly sacrifice quality and ease of production JUST to say they’ve hit the note… what’s frustrating for me as a voice teacher is not the sound they got (hey, sometimes it DOES sound cool!) but the sound they DIDN’T get.
Eh? The sound they DIDN’T get?
Once you’ve heard a true powerful voice that’s been built bit by bit in the manner described above, you cannot UNHEAR it. It changes you. It’s an ENORMOUS sound, like getting hit in the head by a freight train, all because of the way the voice has been built… and yet it’s not killing the singer to sing in that way, nor has it compromised ease or consistency to achieve that sound. So when I hear a singer that even sounds good before this approach, it makes me sad to think I could’ve heard something even MORE impressive.
IMPORTANT RULE OF WHEN TO STOP
7) When you can’t keep the same tonality as the key before, you stop.
This tells you where you are technically with your voice and with the song. You should not care too deeply about where the original singer put the song. We all have different voices in different stages of development and with different attributes and attitudes.
THE REAL PAYOFFS
What I love about this process is it reveals the BEST of your voice throughout – why? Because it starts in your TRUE voice, your speaking voice, and goes from there. This process has an in-built safety to prevent you compromising on that.
What is ALSO brilliant about this process is that you will have made sure you sound good in EVERY key you visited (other than the last). Which means that you are comfortable singing in every key you visited.
This in turn means you are psychologically singing much closer to the concept of mix – the idea of the sound of your true voice everywhere, with no reach, strain, stress, or deviation in the correct vowels.
MY PERSONAL OPINION AND FINDINGS
In my experience, voices expand exponentially when they follow this approach. They learn songs ludicrously quickly, and their voices start to sound impossibly enormous in terms of their tone (even without being loud). Once you hear this, you can’t unhear it, but best of all, it helps you to learn songs quickly AND sound great on them at each stage.
That’s it for now folks. Any questions, just let me know!
Creating a great Mix: Tone-matching
Creating a great Mix: Tone-matching in another musical world
In the guitar world, tube amplifiers (the very first kind of amps for guitar that were ever created) have been the sought after tone machines for guitarists.
The issues with valve/tube amps are that they are heavy, too loud when delivering a great tone, require increasingly expensive maintenance, etc. As such, despite sounding great, with the advent of digital technology being so powerful now, people have long been trying to recreate the sound of tube amplifiers in digital products – these are often referred to as ‘modellers’ as they are trying to recreate a working digital model of an existing amplifier. The advantage of this is that the devices are much smaller, work at any volume level, and virtually no maintenance costs.
Nowadays there are products that can do live tone-matching with an existing tube amplifier. What this entails is that the modelling system is hooked up to an existing amplifier and it runs various listening diagnostics to the amplifier to try and mimic the amp as closely as possible, in terms of tone, feel, etc.
This is super-important that the digital model not just sound the same as the original amp, but that the model FEELS the same as the original, as the closer all those factors are to the original, the less of a discrepancy there is in the digital model from the original amp… thus rather than creating something that elicits the response of “oh, that’s a convincing copy”… people are left completely unaware they are even listening to something other than the original – the tone-matched model and the original amp sound become essentially one and the same thing.
What has this got to do with singing?
We’ve talked a lot about chest voice in previous articles (because a solid established TRUE chest voice is of critical importance in building a voice).
Take this tone-matching analogy in guitar amps. What they are trying to do is take something that sounds a beautiful way NATURALLY, and try to emulate that in a domain that does NOT naturally sound that way. It does so incrementally and repeat efforts to tone-match helps refine that sound.
In the same way, once the true chest voice of a given singer is established in that singer, we have the “original” sound that we are looking to recreate everywhere in the voice. Our goal is therefore to tone-match that sound as we develop the functional ability to move through the rest of our voice and our bridges. We develop functional ability to move through the voice first, but increasingly tone-match note by note from chest through the start of the bridge and upwards, making sure that each ascending note matches the one before it, both in terms of tone and feel (and certainly control of volume, though that takes time). If even one note is not matched to the extent given above, the consistency of the mix is lost.
The better the tone-match as we progress through the voice, the better the sound… AND the feel. For everyone involved as well! For the singer, for the audience, for everyone. Once you can start to tone-match your upper register to your true chest voice, high notes stop SOUNDING or even feeling that high. Of course their pitches are still high in an absolute sense, but the lack of reach, the evenness of timbre, the fact that the notes still sound like chest means we are psychologically trained to recognise the sound as chest and therefore we “feel” like those notes are in a comfortable range (as both singers and listeners).
This is huge
THIS is one key attribute of developing a great mix. Once the chest voice is established appropriately, tone-matching that quality throughout the range is what breeds a solid, powerful and expressive, mix. And few ever take the time to get that granular about their voice and any mix that may be established.
Any questions? Probably, as it’s quite a complex topic that I’ve tried to boil down into a simple analogy. But if you do have them, just post them below and I’ll be happy to update this article or chip in.