Adolph Namlik

@ronws said a while ago my voice reminded him of Peter Cetera, so with that in mind I sang this. Sits pretty high the whole way through so I tried to lighten up, twangify and keep the sound bright as much as possible.
Any and all feedback welcome.

Hey Evan. If you want some feedback on your singing, you should post a recording of yourself over in the "Review My Singing" section:
http://www.themodernvocalistworld.com/forum/14-review-my-singing/
It costs, but having vocal coaches and experts take time to write you a review is well worth it.
As for AAA, they aren't singing in falsetto, but rather a connected full voice, belt range, "mixed" resonance. That's comes more easily when you learn to add in your TA mucles in your ehad voice, and tune the formant (shade or narrow the vowels) to support the notes more effortlessly. Keep at it. You'll ifnd a lot of help here, especially through the owner, Robert Lunte's course and/or videos.

Goofing around about two years ago.
 

Any holiday song, indeed.

As GSoul mentioned : " Any holiday song, indeed."  So yes, I'd say it COUNTS !!!
Very well done, Draven

As GSoul mentioned : " Any holiday song, indeed."  So yes, I'd say it COUNTS !!!
Very well done, Draven

Done:
Okay, so it's two years old. Does it still count? I wrote it, and even edited the video. That has to count for something.

It's that time of the year! A number of artists have just put out Holiday-themed albums, such as R. Kelly, The Rascal Flatts and Neil Diamond. Christmas, as well as some other holidays, are now upon us. There are literally tons of songs that can be sung here.
So, who would be up for a Holiday Season challenge?

So, I gather. Whereas, I learned a few times that it does no good to complain. Like one friend said, "no one listens, anyway."
And I have had great recordings using a cheap mic and Audacity, before. So, I know Reaper and my other mics do just as well or better. But in either case, it boils down to what I do with it.
And I have had a few people tell me I could not do a particular thing. And I would prove them wrong, which can be a delicious feeling, at times.
A co-worker and friend of mine said I would not be able to get a master electrician license because the test is just so hard, blah, blah, and blah. And so, that year, I took the test twice and passed the second time. First time, I use a study guide all summer. Didn't pass. Second time, waiting for the testing date, I did word search puzzles and passed. And let him know I did word search puzzles. So, not only did I get to prove him wrong, but rub it in a little.
The object of a word search puzzle and code book test is the same. The answer is right in front of your eyeballs, literally. You just have to allow yourself to see it.
And, I finished the exam before anyone else. 100 questions, 5 hours, open book. Even after re-checking all of my answers, I was finished at 4 hours and 25 minutes. I made sure my friend knew that, too.
And the next time I got a word search puzzle book, I wrote on the cover, "Ron's Master Electrician Study Guide" and took it to work.
It's how I was raised. My mother had a saying, "May God have mercy on your soul, because I won't."
Which was awfully close to the motto of the Outlaws MC - "God forgives, Brotherhood doesn't."
And I was still his friend but there are things I cannot forget.
So, take the things you feel you cannot accomplish and then prove yourself wrong.

never ever said anything COULDNT be done. I fully plan to make mindblowing music. I just like to reiterate and complain out loud how every single itty bitty step has to be some extreme uphill battle.
The Beatles were 4 guys plus a great producer plus studio musicians and  none of them ever worked a day in their lives. Im 1 guy doing this on top of a full time job. You know the spiel
 
Matthew 21:28-32
28 “What do you think? There was a man who had two sons. He went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work today in the vineyard.’
29 “‘I will not,’ he answered, but later he changed his mind and went.
30 “Then the father went to the other son and said the same thing. He answered, ‘I will, sir,’ but he did not go.
31 “Which of the two did what his father wanted?”
“The first,” they answered.
-----
 
Im like the first son. I moan and complain but in the end im getting the work done
 

Been working hard on getting my mixes better. This one took about a week. Good learning experience. Not perfect but im somewhat proud of it
 
Approximately 80 tracks involved
 
Its going to be a fairly low quality upload because its an MP3 to start with and then uploaded to an MP3 site
On The Inside, scratch full mix #1
 
EDIT: Rebalanced mix, much better On the Inside, rebalanced mix#1
 
Enjoy, JJ

Oh won't you, show me my fach?...

I wanna know what my fach is... I want you to show me...

My favorite song from this great band, has a certain "epic" feel to it, some nice technical details with dynamics on head voice and some more aggressive content on the high range.
 
 
 

Everyone that can listen and/or drop me a line about it, thank you!
\m/

Im not much of a fan of theater songs, but this one has a very beautiful melody line and points that call for a bit more of punch (and that I can just let go and sing all out) very fun study!
https://app.box.com/s/0l8idxrzlyh9kb3q09igptoz5ztbglot
Let me know how it sounds peeps

Really cool song Elise, good choice.
Review:
- Elise, your growing more confident. Nice stage pretense.
- Elise it is a pinch pitchy, tiny bits in the beginning. Not a huge deal, because it is not very noticeable, but given how hard you work on singing, you should strive to clean up your intonation even more. We all do, its not just you... 
- Love your passion, you are really crooning hard on this and you mean it. Its good 'mojo'.
- Tough love. Why does this entire song have a windy, open glottis sound color? Do you understand what Im talking about? Why not compress your vocal folds and have a more connected tone more often? I think you should.
- 1:34 - 1:40... now thats what Im talking about. More compression, more REAL tone... nice dynamic swell.
- .... Ok, I spoke to soon... the 2nd half has more compression ... GOOD!
- 2:30 ish... i like the "whooahs" .. pretty resonance / vowel dear...
- Cool ending...
sounded good... you did a great job Elise...
However,... 
- Elise, your being a pinch careless about intonation. I know you can tighten up your intonation better then this. It has nothing to do with your ears. Its all about... just paying attention more to the notes. Elise, this song in a minor key... that means you have to listen more closely on the intervals. Singing in pitch in minor keys is a tad more challenging then major... when you are singing a minor key song, ... hunker down and pay attention.
LOVELY as usual... your awesome.
I really wish you would take some lessons with me one Skype... I can help you take this song to another level for sure... Ive coached it a dozen times.

The 4pillars is pretty big. Take some time and look at some of the explanation vids etc. There are explanations and demonstrations of lift up and pull back.
The point of lift up/pull back is to help get you to "bridge". Bridge essentially means go from chest voice up to headvoice etc. In your example file you are not bridging. You are going up with chest voice to about g#4 and getting stuck there.
Basically you need to learn to access your headvoice. it can be tricky at first etc. You need to sort of learn to get the vibration (resonance) out of the throat and more up onto the roof of the mouth (hard and soft palate etc)
 
Do you have a keyboard? if not, here is a cool on online that tells you what notes you are hitting http://piano-player.info/
 
What happens if you try to hit a note around, say, B4?   A lot of people start off with chest voice and then they jump up to falsetto when they try to hit higher notes. Falsetto isnt really a true headvoice but its what most of us start with until we learn to vibrate the sound off the roof of our mouth or at least somewhere above the throat itself

Sounding great! I would love to hear you singing with a live band or better yet we have to get you in the studio A.S.A.P.! You are super solid live but it would be fantastic to get you on a studio recording where you can do multiple takes and experiment and really craft a definitive vocal take. You have the voice its time to get you on a pro recording. If you have any material to record talk to me about it. I have lots of studio work behind me and would love to offer any guidance or advice as I would love to see you succeed. I don't want to say you are coasting because you have done much more than I was doing in High School  but I learned really fast how fast youth can pass you by lol. You need to get on it girl, and start laying it down in the studio  Let's make it happen soon.

And your progress is following the curve of what mine was. I developed huge power and volume up top and the finer control, when needed, came later. And true, it depends on style or genre of music as to how much softer, finer passages are needed. As long as what you can do is repeatable and does not result in loss of voice or pain. Notice I did nt say fatigue. Anything, including singing, can be fatiguing after a while because it is involving the use of tissues and muscles, etcetera, the body corporeal.
With practice and the actual training effect on muscles, down to a certain size, it becomes less fatiguing especially if staying within an expected limited of vocal usage specifically for singing. For beginners, I would suggest no more than 3 hours total in a day. But that's just my amateur idea.
But I do know a smidgeon about anatomy and mainly a little bit about how musculature works because I used to lift weights. I could butterfly 110 lb (50 kg) free-weights, or 135 lbs (65 or 70 kg) on machine. Muscles, when challenged with a workload greater than normal, tear down and re-build bigger, to handle the increased work load. You don't grow more muscle tissue, what you have tears down and re-builds bigger.
But if the muscle, instead, is now being tasked to complete the same work load but more often or for longer durations of time, then it re-builds the same size but more dense. The muscle cell then remains the same size but its material gets thicker. You can see this effect on fingertips when you learn to play guitar. Your finger developes a callus. The skin of the fingertip has not grown bigger, it has grown more dense. Muscles do that, too, to handle the workload expected.
In fact, a vocal nodule is the same thing. One point or another on the meeting surfaces of the folds that suffers repeated collisions, similar to how your your fingertip collides with a string on a guitar, rebuilds itself in that area thicker, to withstand repeated collisions and, in so doing, it is protecting the rest of the tissue and ligaments inside. Nodule is not a cancer, it is a callus. And it can have an effect on the sound produced because it is thicker than the surrounding tissue and may not vibrate as fast as surrounding tissue.
How do you get rid of nodules or any callus? By not doing what brought that on. A guitar player who quits playing guitar will eventually lose the calluses. Because epthileal tissue replaces itself all the time. You are literally not the physical person you were seven years ago.
With some activities you can reduce or avoid calluses by wearing gloves or other protective equipment, the main idea being to avoid the collisions of tissue with tissue or some other substance.
I don't think one can say that any training system will prevent calluses. But a training system like 4 Pillars goes a long way because it teaches you how to sing properly without damaging yourself, in a healthy way designed to keep you singing strong and loud and expressive for the next thirty or forty years. You can be the next John Bush.
When you are using your body in a proper manner, less damage occurs.
Now, you can go and be a rock star, where the pitfalls and dangers are still there. Being a rock star is a job, like any other job. Only, it's like an intermittent salary job, more like a commissions-only job. The exception being union musicians working in studios. but their pay is hourly and they are guaranteed three-hour blocks. But it is a job with difficult work environments. 
Stages may look glamorous but can be filled with danger. Pieces put together improperly. Smoke machine output obscures steps and obstacles and down you go. That's another thing. What's in the smoke machine? Vegetable oil, like a vaping tool? You will live. CO2? That is going to dry out your voice and make you sleepy.
You know why Van Halen put the m&m thing in their riders? I get this directly from reading Roth's memoirs, "Crazy From the Heat." He liked to do all those acrobatic karate moves. Slight bit of history, he had a weak bone condition as a child and had to wear metal braces from foot to shin bone until he was about 11 years old. Once the braces came off, he started studying kenpo karate, in which he holds a black belt. And also, the japanese sword fighting. In fact, he lives in Japan part of the time.
So, he likes to do the more acrobatic martial arts move as part of his show. And union rules in some cities require the use of local union workers to build stuff. And they would consistently NOT build the stage to his spec, Weak spots that would twist his ankle. Or build it in a venue with a low ceiling and not say anything. One show, David started with the jumping leg split off the drum platform and cracked his noggin on the ceiling.
Well the thing about contracts for tours, if either party fails to complete the contract, penalties are awarded. So, if tour management and locals failed to even exclude the proscribed m&m's, Van Halen did not have to pay them. This has the effect of teaching tour managers and union locals to read the contract carefully and do exactly what it says, including stage construction.
But you are also on the other side of the contract. You have to appear and perform on the assigned show dates and any others that are added as the tour goes on. Failure to appear involves a penalty. Either in the form of not receiving the performance fee from that night or some decided penalty amount from the whole amount of compensation.
So, there you are, 6 months into a 15 month tour, trying to sleep on a tour bus bouncing down the road, stretch in a bunk with the drummer's stinky feet about foot from your nose. You are at the mercy of whatever food you can find at truck stops, when you are usually busy making a bee line for the bathroom because you do not want to drop a deuce on the tour bus because that tank is NOT vented.
You have to get up early to do a radio interview because fans like that and it invites them to spend some hard-earned money to come to your show. The more press you get, usually the better the sales numbers in albums, show tickets, and merch.
In fact, side rant impending: every once in a while, people have to rag on Geoff Tate and say how his voice went to crap. And they usually link in a vid where he was doing a radio show interview and sang a song and was sounding rough. But if you listen carefully to the interview, they came into town the day before and did the show the night before. Left the stage approximately midnight. So, he gets back to the hotel to take a shower, change clothes, pack his stuff and check out for prep to ride to the next town. Get something to eat because it is been more than 8 hours since he had anything to eat. And then show up at the radio station about 5:45 am to prep for the interview. So, he has not been to bed since sometime the previous morning. He has been up and about for about 20 hours or more. And is singing a song because they begged him to do so.
And armchair or computer desk experts point to that as proof.
That could be you. So, training with 4 P is going to give you endurance and a methodology you will need to keep with you in those physically adverse conditions. You are on the right path with the right system and I know so because I hear Robert singing and his heroic sound fills any room. You also have one of those heroic voices and will go far.
Just watch out for low ceilings and brown m&m's.
 

This is something I did a few months back that I wanted to share, it's when I first starting feeling kinda comfortable around the C5-D5 area in full voice. Any and all feedback welcome.
 
https://app.box.com/s/zt2zay06qbl8orzn9y9fwvcozqlz41bv

2nd video really explains it well. You have chest voice and you have head voice. (yes, im comfortable using old outdated terms lol)
there is that range where the voices overlap. At first, an untrained singer has a big gap and he has to flip to yodel to get up to the higher notes. With trainingtraining, the singer is able to smoothly work through that whole range without any huge or sudden changes in tone etc
Later on, the singer can learn to work thru that range in different ways. He can sing notes in that range using different techniques.
for example lets take the note A4. The trained singer may have 3 different approaches to that note:
1) gradually let go of the chest voice and let head voice smoothly take over. You get a blend of chest and head voice. IMO that would be whats called "mixed voice", though I never personally use that term. I usually just call that "singing in the bridge" or "the bridge area"
2) belting. use more compression etc and forcefully sing the note using more of a chest voice feel. Also called "pulling chest' lol. This is the opposite of what the guys in your vids are doing. Do they sound like Bruce Springsteen or Bono or John Fogerty? no
3) bridging early. This means the singer went ahead and let go of the chest voice feel and embraced the head voice at a lower note than he might normally do. This is what I think of when I hear the term "light mass" singing.
 
Its a stylistic thing to. Some people NEVER belt because they arent trying to get that type of sound. IMO the guys in your vids arent belting, they are using either early bridging or just natural bridging but in any case they are keeping it pretty light.
Some people NEVER use head voice because they never learned how, or because they want a loud, chesty, shouty type of sound.
other people use various voices as I described. a good singer might use all 3 of those bridging methods in the same song or almost in the same phrase

Maybe it's time to get a real teacher?
Yes there are a lot of concepts out there. People loooove concepts and fancy words... You think there's some magic ingredient you are missing when in fact you simply need to train the fundamentals correctly: air, muscle, vowel.
 

I really liked it. And I want to say that the folky rock and southern fried rock and assorted outlaw country and stuff is really good in your voice.
side note: my wife and I know a guy in Austin who has been singing all over the state for decades. A guy named "Shake" Russell. He actually helped Clint Black craft "Nothing but the taillights" when Clint was unknown. Anyway. so Shake sounds just like Harry Chapin. I have expected him to sing this song.
Another side note: I have been working on an original song for quite some time. And even have entertained the notion of making it a three-way singing thing between myself, you, and MDEW. We may not be able to get together for brisket but we can sing about it if I ever get it finished. Kind of medium shuffle with a ZZ Top kind of turn-around in the riff.
And another side note: back in the 90's, I auditioned for as a singer for a band called XLR8, headed by a guy named George Chapin, one of Harry's nephews. I ended up not getting the gig. They took back their old singer because he coughed up some recording eqiupment they were needing. That band didn't go as far as the previous band George was in, which was called Silverado, a locally known band that was big around here for a while.