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etekiller

TMV World Legacy Member
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Everything posted by etekiller

  1.   The funny thing is - when I started to practice singing I saw that breath control was a huge deal here. I came to a conclusion that I should focus on it first and put all of my efforts into developing it. It actually didn't change anything at all. Little did I know that I've already been breathing properly, lol. In fact I realized that I use the same type of breath control for speaking all the time. I just can't go back to those shallow breaths I used to take before I was good at rapping. Some of my friends tell me that I am yelling at them when I speak, because it's so loud, haha.     Yeah, I'm not really talking about those rappers that you can hear on radio stations. In my country it's pretty much weird, underground rappers are FAR more popular than mainstream rappers. They don't ever appear on radio stations, TV, anywhere basically. It's YouTube and live gigs. Almost nobody from my generation listens to the mainstream ones. For each of those mainstream guys there is about 100 of underground rappers that are more famous than him. If one of those guys tried to admit that he's not writing his own lyrics... man... he would have never, ever sold a single CD again.
  2. Yeah, you have to sound natural while having perfect rhythm and good breath support. Sometimes accentuation can be different for stylistic purposes, for example when you want to put two of the last words of a line in a "rhythmic setting" that's a mirror reflection of the next line then you change things a bit.   Putting pitch aside, the major difference between rap and other genres is that it's unacceptable to rap lyrics that are not yours. A rapper is obliged to write his own stuff (at least in my country). If any rapper announced that he doesn't write his lyrics he is basically done here. It's fully about skill.
  3.   Probably the only statement on the Internet where "your mother" does NOT end with an insult .
  4.   Rap doesn't have to include pitch. You can rap without it and it still sounds good.
  5. I am a beginner in singing, but I've been rapping for about 6 years now. To be honest, the same rules apply in rap when it comes to learning.   I regret listening to people who supposedly knew what they were talking about because they were better. Being a beginner I had no idea how to tell how good they are, so I blindly followed their advice. This got me nowhere, they used to give me tips like "don't squeeze your throat too much", or "add more power". I had realized that I had to start practicing seriously and do some research.   People used to tell me that I can't sing and said that "you need a good ear for singing". It kept me from singing for about 10 years, that was the reason I started rapping. I loved working with my voice, but while "not being able to sing" I picked up the closest thing to singing possible. To be honest, I can't say that I would change that if I had to start from scratch again. Rapping gave me a lot of self-confidence, extraordinary sense of rhythm and huge power in my voice. It allowed me to pick up dubbing, voice-acting, voice-overs, sound engineering. It's a great foundation for me now, when I'm starting my singing journey .
  6. Okay, but should I practice pitch on my whole range right away, or be mostly concerned with notes that are closer to my speaking voice?
  7. WOW. These tips are AMAZING, guys. It's really a very technical insight into training that I was looking for. I love all the technicality, I absolutely enjoy training when I know exactly what to practice and why.     Yes, I remember you telling me to practice this way, I've been doing it for a couple of days, I am very strict about it and I practice it every single day . I understood everything you said, thank you very much!       Great, what you and MDEW said is what I was suspecting to be my biggest problem. Now I am pretty sure that this is the case. Thank you so much .       Hmm, maybe I will write a song with my own melody and incorporate tough words in it. This could be a "workout song" for every day, I suppose . And by the way, maybe I could give you a tip for that "share" word, I had a similar problem. I added a little bit of vocal fry to the phrase during transition and it was easier to keep the same pitch between breathy and chesty. Maybe that will help .       Yeah, one thing I never knew was - how do people who can reproduce exactly what they hear feel before, during and after hitting a note? Is that like playing a very well known piano part, where your fingers seem to be "thinking on their own", or does it involve more conscious control?       Yes, chords are EXTREMELY difficult for me to sing to. I can hear when I nail them, but there is not enough muscle memory to sing to them correctly. Thank you for that tip and the pattern info, I love it.   I absolutely love those responses, I didn't expect to get that much information, thank you so much. I've got one more question - should I be practicing from the bottom to the top of my range? Or should I stay within a "very comfortable" zone? I ask because I had an appointment with a teacher, and after giving me a few tips she told me that I have a range of 4 octaves (up to A6, but at that point my voice stops being stable, so I suppose that G6 is the highest "normal" note for me) and that it might be hard to train that whole range at once. Is that true? Does a higher range mean more training? My speaking voice is at F3.
  8. Okay, thank you. I will now incorporate those tips into my training.
  9. So I've been training my ear-voice coordination for a few weeks now. I am able to hit notes when singing to piano keys (sometimes I have to "bend into" them, but it's almost instant and I don't have to bend that much, just a little bit). I am able to sing intervals when they're being played on a piano too.   This, however, didn't help me with singing songs on pitch. I find it extremely hard to hit the right note while singing some songs. And I don't mean that it's out of my range, it's easily in my range, I sometimes even overshoot greatly.   When I listen to the original version of a song (with artist's vocal track) then it's pretty easy for me to hit the notes. Really, as if I recieved +1000 singing skill points every time I sang with the artist. While singing to instrumentals I sometimes can't even begin the song correctly. I am right away off pitch. I checked with AutoTune, while singing with the artist - it's a bullseye, when I am singing to an instrumental - I miss some notes.   Why am I able to "nail" notes while singing to a piano, but completely fail while singing songs? It makes no sense whatsoever. This does not seem to be a problem with my technique because when I sing with an artist's vocal track I simply nail the notes too.   What could I be doing wrong?
  10. Have you ever been diving? I mean, really diving, water and stuff. If yes, then you are probably able to close your airway to nostrills before a dive. I am not talking about putting your hand on your nose and closing the nostrills. I mean closing the nasal airway in a natural way. If you are able to do it then know that it's your soft pallate that's doing it. This is exactly what it does and it's the way you can control it.
  11. Don't worry, you will learn it. I am a walking example that it's just about training. I was COMPLETELY out of rhythm when I started rapping. I had no idea how to follow or anticipate drums. I simply tried my best to sing good and after about a month I saw a small improvement. Overall, it took me about two years to get perfect in it. Now I can rap to any speed and drum combination you can come up with.   The reason I am great at it is the fact that I was terrible at it. Seriously, I became obsessed with being better, I couldn't stand being worse than some bad rappers in my city so I started practicing every single day for the first few months. It's so riddiculous to think where this need to be better than other people took me.   This is one of the reasons why sometimes people who are good at something from the start don't get perfect at it. They just don't have to dive into extreme details and basics during practice. It can leave a broken foundation under whatever you want to build on it.
  12.   Yeah, I agree totally. I wasn't able to reach some high notes until I realized how to switch the resonance into a different resonator. All high notes were really easy to hit (still are ugly, because I need to develop coordination for that, but hitting them was pretty easy). Once you go through that breaking point it's like making a hole in a water plug.
  13. This sounds like a recording trick rather than an actual technique. Two vocal tracks, one on top of the other, one of them is more chesty, one is more heady. You tear off all of the really high and low to lower-middle frequencies from the heady track and widen it in stereo by about 10-20%.
  14. What I used to do was starting at a preferred note and going up smoothly. Without any key or scale. Just going up and down with your voice at a preferable speed and intensity. Whatever feels comfortable. It's similar to doing a "siren" but it's not really oriented around starting from a note "x" and ending at a note "y". You don't even have to sound pretty doing this. It's mostly about feeling what your body does when you go up the scale.   Here's a recorded sample. It's just an example (i've picked a random one, it's ugly but it demonstrates what I used to do).  
  15. I've just found a way to practice with some fun. I got a copy of Guitar Pro 6 and I am downloading tabs for my favourite songs. It displays vocal parts too. Everything in a sheet music form.   This way you can practice nailing songs the way they were exactly written (to the shortest note). It helped me to learn some complicated melodies, and in Guitar Pro you can play any selected part at any rate and tempo. You can even modify that sheet music to play different notes.
  16.   Yes, of course. I was just showing a concept. By expanding the belly you basically shift the pressure that your lungs apply to your abdomen when expanded, so that it's pushed a little bit away from the back and towards the belly. It's like poking a balloon on one side. It will make the balloon expand a little bit in the other direction, but all air that has created that expansion comes from a collapse from under your fingertip. Expanding the belly is just pointless.
  17. Actually you can even put that theory to the test. When you inhale normally (no expansion control) your back, sides and finally the belly expand a little bit. When you're full try expanding the belly, you will see that yes, your belly expands more, but your back seems to be going flat. This would mean that the air just "travels to the belly" and "leaves the back". And that would mean an unnecessary process.
  18.   This is so true. People sometimes do not realize that if you were to REALLY relax your lower muscles you would just fall down to the ground. You need muscle tension even to stand. Not only that, but your muscles have to be in coordination with each other when being tense, applying correct tension to each muscle.   You can make an analogy to a crane or a washing machine. Your washing machine is usually balanced with additional weight (in the old days concrete bricks were used for that). If you were to take away one of those bricks then your washing machine would just "walk" away when working. The same goes for the crane. It has a counter-weight on its back. If you wanted to lift something without that counter-weight, the crane would just flip over, and the more force you would apply to the lifting engine the faster would the crane fall to the ground.   You need balanced tension to keep your body upright and make it work properly.
  19. Thanks guys, I did some research and modified that "fix". I started singing using the SLS technique, which is the most similar way of singing to that "fix". It seems that when using OT I am much worse at singing on pitch. I will increase my skill of nailing pitch with SLS and then I will go back to OT. I need something that is reliable to train my ear->vocal folds coordination, then I can switch.
  20. When I used to rap on stage and I messed up I loved to make fun of how bad it went. I just told people that I got too fat to rap and said stuff like "one way to remember your lyrics is to have none and improvise" just after forgetting 4 last lines of my track. I didn't really care that much about failures.   But rap is different, you don't feel judged, you actually feel that you have to destroy everybody in the room who was and will be on the stage that night. That you have to push yourself to the limits and crush all other rappers. Show that you dominate with your skills. Failing is just part of it, because everybody knows it's just an act and that you are friends with all those rappers that you want to defeat.   Personality really helps, acting is the best way of protecting yourself from stress. That's because when you create a personality (add traits that do not exist in you, for example pretending to be a psycho) you automatically let the blame fall on that character, not you. When you "fail" just stay in your role, for example a psycho who laughs like a mad man after failing and says that it was his crazy plan from the beginning. Though always put fun in it, let people know that you're acting, they will see that you feel awesome on stage. They won't care a bit that you fail at some point. This will relieve you from pressure.   The psycho is of course an extreme example . You wouldn't want to do that while singing something to children. 
  21. I recently posted a topic about my pitch problems, and the fact that I am inconsistent. I started studying what can help me (even bad habits) to improve singing on pitch.   I realized that my pitch problems are at their strongest when singing low notes. It feels like my vocal cords were flapping or opening too much and closing with a riddiculous frequency. It wouldn't let me sustain a proper note, even though I am not running out of breath or I am totally not out of my range. The note goes up and down by 50c when this happens. It feels like there was a bit of the vocal fry, but one that I can't really stop or control. There is absolutely no strain or tension at that point.   On middle notes I don't experience it that much, my voice there isn't perfectly stable, but it's way better. Head voice and falsetto are completely free of that problem.   The fix that worked for me (although I don't treat it as a fix really, just a mean to check what exactly is wrong with my voice) are squeezed vocal folds. It feels like making a bottleneck effect for the air, which most likely brings vocal folds closer together. As I go down the scale my low notes are stable when I do that.   It feels like I was trying to hold my breath only partially. Though it doesn't really make my vocal folds tired or strained, so I am not sure - is that the way I was always supposed to produce my notes?!
  22.   Is this sliding a good habit? I usually just try again, I don't try to slide because I'm worried that I might get a bad habit of not hitting the note and then sliding into it.
  23.     Thank you very much. My biggest problem is the fact that I am unable to be on pitch from the beginning to the end of a song, I have to repeat parts and sometimes look for the note to start off well. I have to improve my skill of matching what I hear with what I sing.   Currently if you played a note on a piano I wouldn't be able to just hit it right away (well, sometimes I would, like 50-60% of the times). I would hear that I am off pitch right away though and would hear when I am on it. I seem to have trouble with feeling which tone to produce.
  24. Thank you, rowns. Yes, I am aware that it's a cover , I am using the Metallica version, because as I am a beginner it is easier for me right now. I try not to push myself too hard before learning more technique.
  25. Hey guys, sorry for another Metallica song, but I started it so I thought I might try to do the whole thing.   Right now I have just the beginning before the chorus and I am not sure what to think about it. Could you please check it out and tell me whether it sounds at least okay? I have some pitch problems here, I suppose I'm off pitch at the beginning of that aggressive part (too high).   But I would rather like to listen to you instead of giving my biased opinions.   I'll be very grateful If you check that out.   Thank you guys!   The recording: https://soundcloud.com/pe-ter/ttp3/s-oNQDH
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