critique me please

[Mercenary]

I posted here a few months ago with a cover of bad moon rising to show my beginner singing voice and received great critiques. I am not a singer, but a guitarist that cant find a singer. I have come back a few months later and want to see if i have improved. here is a cover of My hero by the foo fighters. all critiques welcome, and please direct me to any sources that would help me sing better.

http://www.soundclick.com/player/single_player.cfm?songid=10582259&q=hi

[Jersey Jack]

You surely have potential as a singer. But this clip seems designed to reveal the flaws in your voice. Your voice is mixed way out front on this recording, and it appears to be untouched by reverb or any other "enhancer." If you pull back the vocals and add a touch of 'verb you'll sound a lot better without any work!

 

As to your voice, you have many of the same problems I had. Your pitch seems fine, but you need some work on breathing and on vowels. Your voice is a little unstable because it is inadequately supported from below. There are any number of singing resources (every one, actually) that will give you breathing technique, but you should certainly look into taking a few lessons if that's poissible. It's not easy to learn breathing from a book, and a live teacher can get you through this stuff pretty quickly.

 

As to vowels: You tend to make your vowel sounds muddy and indistinct rather than pure and clear. Listen to how you pronounce this series of words in the first verse of the song: now, about, down, out, loud, around. Everytime you hit that ow vowel sound your voice gets unstable. This is actually a dipthong, i.e., a vowel sound created from two other vowel sounds. Thus ow is pronounced as if it had two syllables: ah-oo. Try shaping these vowels as a pure oh sound and see how that works.

 

Also, it sounds as if you haven't worked very much on the melody. Just because you know a song very well from listening to it or singing along with it, you may not know the melody in the sense of being able to sing it by yourself. When you play sing along with Dave, Dave is serving as a crutch. You need to gain an active knowledge of the melody, and you can only do this through focused practice. Play the melody on an instrument and sing along, then in individual phrases practice the melody without the instrument. Rinse, repeat....

 

You can work on both of these issues at the same time by using a single, comfortable vowel sound (not ow!) and learn to sing the entire melody using that one sound, Then once you're comfortable switch back to the lyrics, little by little, a phrase at a time.

 

I hope this helps. You definitely have the ability to be a singer, but it will require a little bit of work to get where you want to be.

[Mercenary]

seems like this was locked for some reason, but it got unlocked!!

[davie]

I think Jack locked it by accident earlier. lol

 

Anyway, your vocals. I'm not sure how you sounded before. But you seem to have some pitch issues. And you seem to 'yell' the words at some points, but I'm guessing you're just trying to 'push' the higher notes.