Critique my Singing?

[MAGIC_MIC]

I've started voice lessons about a month ago and am just now experimenting with recording myself sing. Whenever I listen to myself sing in the recording, I find it very dull and lacking color. I was hoping you guys could listen and give some feedback.

 

[WRGKMC]

Its hard to tell from only one song that's an imitation of another singer. We learn through imitation but along with that imitation you have to focus on basic training. Its like a football player going to boot camp. He does specific drills targeted to build strength, endurance and agility so he has them when he goes out and actually plays the game.

 

What I hear is a young voice that has good vocal tone. What I heard when you sang was a rounding off of pitches like you were on a roller coaster. You'd hit a plateau in pitch but the ride up and down was more like a kazoo bending pitches up and down instead of a series of fixed, stepped pitches. This is fairly typical with new singers as they learn their basics. They tend to mix up the use of dynamics with pitch changes. The key is to stop one note, before you start the next pitch, and not bend into it. Lind of like lofting a foot up instead of shuffling. The dynamics make you think its a bend but its actually a step.

 

Again, the song you picked is partly at fault. The style is advanced and has allot of ethnicity. These aren't bad of course but, not maybe not the best building blocks to begin with.

 

The other item I heard was the diction, the actual formulation of the words. Learning to articulate words well was always one of my toughest achievements so I recognize it when I hear it from others. Your best singers usually have a wonderful speaking voice. They often have the ability to imitate how others speak and sing. Much of this is the actual emphasis of the word syllables, the attack of the words and the smooth sustain of others. Getting it right truly takes dog years of practice.

 

There are a few exercises I'd recommend. The first and most boring are scales. There's no way around it. If you cant discipline your self to dong Do Ray Me Fah Sow Lah Tea Do several hours a day, the chance of singing well is slim. There is just so much competition putting in the hours or hard work. The whole myth about being given a gift is a bunch of baloney. You may have an aptitude, but without the hard work it goes no place.

 

You can kill two birds with one stone however. Combine two exercises at the same time. The only thing I recommend is you do it in private because someone hearing you do these exercises will think you need medication and be put in a straight jacket. Well, maybe not that bad but it can be a real hoot if you've heard it done. Its the shortest and fasted method of building up both diction and pitch.

 

What you do is use the vowel system of short and long vowels. A E I O U and a e i o u.

 

Next you work your way through the rest of the alphabet finding that constantans and put them before the vowel so you have two letter words.

 

Example, A is the beginning of the alphabet so we skip that and take the letter B.... Next we take the vowels and add it to the be.

 

Result: Long Vowels - Bay - Bee- Bye - Bow - Boo

Result: Short Vowels Bah - Beh - Bih - Boh - Buh

 

Now you simply replace the Do Ray Me with Bay Bay Bay, work yourself up the scale and bac, then take the next, Bee, Bee, Bee and so on.

There's allot of different scales you can do too. I'd start with Major and Minor first before trying anything more complex.

 

They sound a bit nonsensical because they are, especially when you sing them. In the beginning you'll think you're imitating Elmer Fud with a fat lip with all the tongue twisting it causes but you'll see how quickly this works. Most people have issue formulating the beginning of a word more then the end. This will get you to do it right every time.

 

After you finish with the B's, You move on to the C's, F's F's etc all the way through the alphabet.

 

The end goal here is to be able to formulate any word at any pitch on demand when its needed without struggling and having it perfectly obvious what word you are forming. A listener shouldn't have to guess what words you're singing.

 

Practiced right, this exercise will take you months. you have to keep at it too. You will see some immediate results right away, but don't fool yourself into thinking what you gained is permanent. At first its just a good warmup. Later it becomes a way of life.

 

After you get past the partial words then you can move to single syllable words and accent the endings of them by speaking the words in slow motion with a sustained tone followed by rapid machine gun pronunciations. Two or more syllable words are their own can of beans. In essence you can look at them as several single syllable words strung together, but it goes much farther than that. This is where a good instructor can really help. There are things you can do to accent syllables, stretch them out to create two words and intentionally trick the listener and it has allot to do with dynamics and expressing emotion that really separates the men from the boys.

 

All that's further down the road. I'd focus on the basics above for awhile.

If you get board of the scales use the technique singing along to songs too. Take a single "Bay" and use as a substitute for every lyric in the melody. Second verse use Bee, The Bye for the third.

 

Some are going to be a real hoot to pull off when you get to them. G is one because its so guttural. Some might feel very natural and others you really have to work hard because you simply avoid using those words. How often do you use Q in a sentence or Y. Maybe certain words but rarely the entire vowel range short and long.

 

I guarantee you you'll never know just how good the words start sound not only to you but others.

 

Some of the best singers I know can do this stuff so well its absolutely amazing to see them do it. Kind of like Robin Williams when he was wound up doing one of his skits. Key is to be understood when you speak. Second is to do it in pitch with the music. Its like any other discipline, Do it enough, with a passion and you'll simply get better at doing it then anyone else. You want to be the best, you got to put in more serious hours then the pros do. you have people out there singing 8 hours a night and practicing during the day. They are going to be tough to beat if you cant match them first.

 

This ends my lesson for the day. Sorry I cant point you to some specific site that spells out how to do it better because it doesn't exist. This is a method I wove together from a a bunch of different sources, many from pro singers from asking them what techniques they used then expanding on it over the past 50 years. Just the best bits and pieces of essentials needed and tied into a method of practice. That's all music really is in the end anyway.

[MAGIC_MIC]

Could you maybe post an example of you doing the exercise? That would help a lot