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Fake It until You Make It

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Fake it until you make it.

Standard show biz advice. And salesman advice, too.

And it applies to singing. Recently, a friend and fellow member in the forum was experimenting with what he called a "fake" sound in his voice and the result was more appropriate than what his "natural" sound was. Not because his natural sound is "bad," just different. And he had an insight that has also worked for me. He then realized that his "natural" sound is also "fake." And what led to this insight was that for a while, living in a different region, he had picked up and was able to "fake" the accent of that region, as well. Which, of course, meant his "natural" accent was also fake.

And to paraphrase and honor the wisdom of fellow forum member, Jens, the entirety of the voice is made up. And most voices really do have quite a similar range, differing by a few notes at the bottom or top, although I think true bassos are rare and special. Operatically, a fach covers 2 octaves. Outside of opera, many voices can cover an average of 3 octaves and this tends to match the dynamic range of most human voices.

Especially in popular music forms, where amplification is d' rigeur. This allows singers to go into parts of the range that would normally not be heard of an orchestra in a regular performance hall situation.

So, I reviewed my ability to "fake" it. I can do several accents of English outside of the predominately southern accent I have. For I was born in California and lived there until I was 10 years old and we moved to Texas. And I have been in Texas for the past 40 years and it has had some affect on my accent. Yet, I can do a british accent, scottish, irish. Once in a blue moon, I can "fake" a little bit of New Zealander accent. Accents, like singing, are all vowel use and cadence.

And of my own accent, people that were born and raised in Texas can tell that I was not born here, regardless of having been in this state longer than they have been alive. The two average questions are: You're not from Texas, are you? and; Where are you from? And I will get those questions more often because my use of cleaner vowels in singing is filtering into how I speak.

A common greeting for me is "Howdy." But I pronounce it as h-ah-dee. When the natural texan accent is to have a dipthong of h - ah - oo - dee.

So, I suggest, especially if you are enamored of a style of singing, to absolutely continue faking it. As long as it is not hurting your voice and you are on pitch, it is all "fair." Even opera singing is "fake." And before someone gets offended by that, I would like to point out that most opera singers do not get to the main roles and premieres in their careers until after at least 10 years of coaches telling them what sound to make, which is usually different than the sound they came in with.

So, you can fake opera, blues, metal, country, jazz, whatever fakery appeals to you. The first step is to allow yourself to fake it, which is mental. Which means that you must either call all of it fake or none of it fake. There is no middle ground. Either it is all fake or nothing is fake. And that is also mental.

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