I want to talk to you today about singing with simplicity.
I was chatting with another voice coach this week about what fires them up, musically and vocally speaking. This coach (female) is massively into RnB, soul, etc. THAT’S their bag. People should be going to them, not necessarily to polish their technique on a foundational level, but because this coach gets most fired up about styling the voice in the way that they & their students want.
This is awesome. I love this. It shows an understanding of who they are, and (most importantly) WHY they do what they do.
And it got me thinking, at least from a style point of view, why do I do what I do? Musically and vocally.
Well, once about a time, I was a bassist and guitarist, and I was heavily into jazz, some of it fairly advanced. I got stuck into virtuoso musicians and, in trying to cop what they were doing, I went out and learned how to do some pretty darn complicated things. I loved it… or at least, I think I loved it… truth be told, I can’t really remember whether I ACTUALLY loved the sounds I was making – i.e. I was making sounds that I genuinely thought sounded good – or whether I loved the feeling of doing something complicated – i.e. I was making sounds that I thought sounded impressive.
And it’s that question that’s driven me over the last few years. Am I doing something because it SOUNDS good, or because I think it’s impressive? Singing with simplicity forces you to confront that question head on.
Don’t get me wrong, the two are not mutually exclusive… but it’s an interesting question isn’t it?
And when you drill down into it, there’s also a fundamental difference in what each says about you. Choosing to do something because it sounds good is about delivering OTHERS a great sound, but doing something because it’s impressive says more about your need to impress others – again, not that either are necessarily mutually exclusive or that impressing others is a bad thing, but these are definitely some powerful thought experiments for musicians to play with, and these are the outcomes I’ve reached over the years
So where does that leave me with my voice and my kind of music?
Well, the realisation that simplicity and quality go hand in hand has been huge – singing with simplicity is the crystallisation of this. It’s made me realise there is real power in simplicity. Immense power, in fact. Just singing the melody (like my blog article ‘The importance of singing the damn melody’) and committing 100% to delivering it beautifully is HUGE. It can raise the hairs on the back of people’s necks without ever breaking a sweat, and without having to do insane vocal acrobatics.
In short, I’m a big believer that if your technique is solid (and I mean REALLY solid), utilisation of range, riffs, power, etc, they all get recruited pretty naturally as a way to support the quality of your voice. I’m not even saying “sound good first, style second”, I’d go so far as to say “sound good first, and you will FIND your style through that”… in essence, style becomes a natural by-product and outworking of great technique.
This is not to say that other teachers who start with style are necessarily wrong (though there are definitely coaches out there who ONLY know how to style, and not to train a voice), nor that style should never be looked at directly/explicitly… rather, that the above thought experiments and my own personality have led me to the working conclusion that simplicity is incredibly powerful, and that this musically trumps complexity every time.