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briesmith

TMV World Legacy Member
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Everything posted by briesmith

  1. Mel Torme called his style "the Velvet Frog" I believe and with good reason. Exceptional pitching, perfect rhythm and he held his audeince with his story telling. Belting is all about passion and transferring it to the audience. ("You can tell I'm being emotional; just look at the agony on my face", sort of stuff). A little one dimensional IMHO. There are many more emotions and crooners could express them all.
  2. Clap the rhythm first and get that right. The melody will then often flow/be more predictable. You really cannot learn the rhythm/phrasing of an unseen piece and get the melody right at the same time. One has to precede the other. Once you've got the rhythm you can use familiar songs to remind you of the required intervals. Twist and Shout gives you 4! (of the seven) Ah (root), ah (3rd), ah (5th) ah (7th) with "shake (it up baby, now)" giving you the octave.
  3. C2 might be rare for a baritone but F2 and G2 are pretty much standard starting points (for me anyway) so not a million miles away. I know a semitone here or there means you can or can't quite sing something in the key it's in but I wonder if we get too obsessed with "counting the octaves"? And there are, at the end of the day, well established techniques for "managing" notes outside your range without detracting from a performance? Every note counts in a song (in the music genres where notes are differentiated sufficiently to hear them anyway) so straining for something you can't deliver full value on makes no sense. Better to concentrate on quality? Destroying your vocal shape in order to still only deliver a poorly performed song and making it likely you'll be in no fit throat condition to sing the next one is a high risk vocal strategy? I think we have two types of singers on this website; the effect makers and singers. Removing all musicality from a "noise" in order to produce it at the right pitch and intensity makes sense in the heavy metal world and that's fine. Singers wanting to deliver a song where they play a part in producing a piece of music will probably have different objectives when it comes to range preferring to look for reinforcement rather than extension. It all comes down to choosing material you can "sell"; visually (a middle aged man singing Shania Twain?), mechanically (too fast, too much breath control required?, technique wise (unachievable steps as in many contemporary show tunes) and musically (suited to your range and timbre). This from 680News commenting on Placido Domingo's return to baritone roles says it all for me, "His is not the ideal Verdi baritone, lacking the timbre in his lower voice that can boldly slice through thicker parts of the orchestration. Yet, he is so much a musician that he turned Boccanegra into a sympathetic and noble triumph, with silky softness substituting for polished power." You can read the whole review at http://www.680news.com/entertainment/article/18650--review-domingo-takes-it-down-a-notch-sings-baritone-in-simon-boccanegra?ref=topic&name=TIFF&title= .
  4. I find practising - even the thought of it - at home very difficult to manage. I've no idea what I'm achieving when I sing; am I actually changing anything by my practice? I am not a keyboard player, can pick my round a guitar or on-line keyboard but that's it. I am totally impressed by the people on this forum who have done home practice and benefited from it. All I can ask is,"How did you do it?" "I would say it's not uncommon for a person singing in this program to have at least a 3 or 4 octave range by the time they have developed. ", "After training with Rob I sing over 5 octaves with NO strain" - is this for real? (No offence intended by the question; I'm just blown away by the thought of it. My "standard" baritone G2 to C5 seems ludicrous/pathetic by comparison.)
  5. Italian - and to a lesser degree, French - has a pure vowel sound throughout and Italians work very hard with their lips and tongue to achieve consistent "perfect" vowel enunciation in their everyday speaking. Us guttural, in the throat speakers don't attach much importance to this (nor to rhythm in speech) and we are the poorer for it when it comes to singing. Opera singers do this instinctively and are helped by so often singing in Italian. Verdi or Wagner anyone? (And before anyone starts on me, Mozart wrote to an Italian book which sort of supports my point). As for it not being taught, my teachers have always emphasised it together with mouth shape, tongue and soft palate control. (Not that I can actually do any of these things. Sadly, if I were Italian I wouldn't even need teaching it).
  6. I noticed the previous posting about tenor voice preference and I am a regular visitor to the Critique my Voice forum and a thought that relates to both occurred that I wanted to share. Firstly; why do so many posts on the critique forum concern themselves with what I call "agony" singing? There is so little musicality - and so little virtuosity - in Sweet Child of Mine, Highway to Hell, anything in fact from that AC/DC, Judas Priest, Metallica and so on genre, that using their songs as test pieces is largely pointless. There is simply not enough in them to let any one judge the voice. Anyone with a trained, capable voice can make any sound they want. But why would anyone with a trained, capable voice want to make that sort of sound? Surely the only reason Axl sings the way he does is because he doesn't know any better? And this brings me back to the tenor - baritone issue. Being a baritone myself I understand the frustration that the emphasis on the tenor voice can bring. But when listening to Juan Diego Florez, say, you simply have to admit that there is something in his tenor singing that makes it stand out and admit to understanding why people want to hear it and more importantly, pay for it. It's also true that the tenor canon contains some of the "best" (ie most popular, easy listening) songs ever written. What I would say is that the top of the baritone range and the top of the tenor are not millions of miles apart and a baritone singing "up there" with the right qualities to his voice can sound every bit as bright and interesting as a tenor. Singers fronting bands doing 2 and 3 hour gigs are there, on stage, for the long haul and their voice has to stand up to the demands of long sets. Singing with a "bit in hand" whatever the "range" of their voice has got to be a sound strategy? It seems to me that while singers might need to grow their listenable range, bands and instrumentalists might need to learn a bit more about transposition?
  7. Unlike a piano, but like a violin, the voice can produce a seamless spectrum of fequencies; some of which coincide with the notes played on a piano or guitar and the rest of which Europeans - but not orientals who recognise quarter tones, for example - hear as noise. Grouping these coincidental frequencies - which can be noted on the bass and tenor cleff - into registers is a handy way of recognising where a singer "is" within the whole noise frequency range humans are capable of. Moving onto tone and colour, timbre etc is where it gets away from physics and we move into what sounds move the human spirit, appeal to our souls. No one wants to listen to a dockyard whistle - even if it is a perfect C, G or A - or considers it "music" because it has no colour. The same applies to singers; perfect pitching and phrasing are all very well but why did we listen to Rex Harrison or Maurice Chevalier? There's something undefinable about singing that is more than registers, pitch, rhythm. When I find out what it is I'll pass it on.
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