Draven Grey

Before I jump in, I do want to say that I like your storyteller style.

I suspect the biggest culprit in your accent for causing problems is your hard "R" at the end of words, whihc is a consonant that is almost crossed with a vowel. It sounds like you pull the tongue up on that consonant. Most people pull the hard "R" to their throat, so you at least are headed in the right direction!

I have a specific exercise to correct this type of issue, but it would be difficult to explain here. I can at least get the most important part here though. It's what I call "relaxed speech." I've used not just to help correct placement and throatiness, but also to change accents. One of my students was from France, where everything is spoken near the back of the tongue. This helped her a LOT. I've also seen it get many people out of their throat when in a tough spot in the recording studio.

First, make a soft "g" into /eh/ (geh), and pay attention to where the tongue hits the roof of the mouth. I call that the "resonant spot". I use it as an anchor or default point for vowels. That anchor can be moved a bit further forward or back for sound color, but in general, the vowels will stay anchored to, pointed at, or move around that one point. It should feel like your vowels are being generated in that point and then only outward from there. Try to stay relaxed and speak a whole line of the song from that point, then sing that line into the exact same spot. At first, your speech might remind you of the priest from The Princess Bride. It sounds ridiculous when speaking, but it makes for a solid singing accent. Now try to say problem words, like ones with hard "R" sounds, into that point. Your "aR" should sound more like /ah/oo/. For "eR", it might ssound more like /uh/ou/. The "R", if sung at all, would be at the very very end, closing the word, and not really sung.

For the pitchiness on high note, it sounds like you might be moving into a grunt mode, where your neck and glottis tense up to try and "hit" the note. I see this a lot. Try humming into a cocktail straw for those lines, relaxing the throat and neck as much as possible so that the only tension you feel is the solar plexus, then the resonant spot (above), and maybe, just maybe a little bit in the TA muscles. There should be very little air coming out of the straw, even if you hold your nose. You might have to start that at lower volumes at first, just to get used to it. Grunting on high notes is difficult to overcome. I've yet to find an onset that immediately releases that particular type of compression. Isolating the note with Pulse & Release, Wind & Release, Contract & Release, Head to Chest only, Relaxed Speech, The Straw, and more, seem to work sometimes and not others. 

Your pitch is spot on for the most part. That is the most difficult thing to train in singing, so you've got a 1-up on most people who haven't taken lessons.

The thinness you're experience is because you need to be training strength and control of your TA muscles (chest-voice musculature) to be able to carry them up into that range. I don't mean just yelling at full force either, but rather training in how to turn them on without strain - which there's a point where they have to taper off. You can train your body to be able to use TA engagement for that "chesty" sound as high as your head voice can go. On top of TA engagement, Chris also used larynx dampening often, really solid acoustic mode and vowel modification as he went higher, incredible bridging and connecting of teh voice, and very solid breath support. He's also a great example of a singer who trained to completely relax his voice no matter what he was singing. 

If you want to be able to sing like that, then get determined to learn and start training. Check out The Four Pillars of Singing. it's an incredible program, and you'll get a ridiculous amount of solid instruction for the price.

You have  a great voice! Good choice of song too. However, most of your singing and resonance is being placed in your throat, in more of a speech mode. This will make higher nd lower notes more difficult, even if your more relaxed chest voice range is easy to control. It's also apparent in some of the dynamics of your plosives, the low level of breath suppport, and some of your curbing vowels (vowels resonating further back). You are, however, always on pitch in the more comfortable parts of that range.

What I hear you need is better resonant placement, more lifted to the soft palate and a bit forward. A bit more push or lockdown in the diaphram area (your solar plexus specifically) will support that better resonant placement and give your voice more body too. But that's only a start. One way to begin training yourself to resonate and support in this way is to start humming songs while buzzing your lips. This is called "Tracking". Another that I teach is to place a finger across your bottom lip and try to sing up and over it.

Are you training? Do you have a teacher? I highly suggest you check out the course, The Four Pillars of Singing, created by the owner of this forum.

13 hours ago, Clericsgonewild said:

I guess the biggest thing I'm worried about is the high notes, like in the lines "my mind is racing but my body's in the lead" and "I live all my years in a single minute"

I noticed a bit of strain there too.

Get a cocktail straw and start humming those parts with the straw in your mouth. Don't push. There should be minimal air coming out of teh straw, and it should'nt feel like you're pushing once you can relax those notes properly. To test if you're balancing the air and relaxing well, you can hold your nose. When holding your nose, there shouldn't be a major change in pressure from when not holding your nose. 

I know this sounds really strange, but it does so many great things for you. If you use it on warmups, it cuts down your warmup time to 5 to 10 minutes because of the push-back gently stretching out every muscle you engage. If you use it like I described above, for training a song, it is an incredibly helpful  assitant in getting proper resonant placement, tuning your formant, relaxing any tension, balancing air pressure, and more -- in short, training your body not to push on those higher notes, but just sing them without tension intead. I suggest using it for cooling down after an hour or more of singing too.

However, don't do it for more than 10 minutes at a time. The gentle stretching I talked about will become more like power yoga, and you'll end up wearing yourself out instead of helping.

Before I dive into this, where do you feel you're struggling or want to imrpove?

There's far too little in that recording to determine if singing comes mroe naturally to you or not. However, it's not about talent, rather it's a decision. Unless they have some sort of physical impairment preventing them from doing so, anyone can learn to sing well.

Is it something you want to do? If you want to learn to sing, then do it. There's an incredible program linked on this site called The Four Pillars of Singing. There are also a lot of vocal coaches here, including myself. 

As for choosing a hobby in general: Is there something you really enjoy? Is there something you're naturally attracted to? Is there something you have been told you have a god-given natural talent for? As I said before, it's not really about talent, but rather about making a decision. However, if you have a natural gift for something you know you enjoy, then pursuing that thing can be a real pleasure too.

It's difficult to hear you well in the recording, at least for picking out specific things about your technique. Are there certain parts you feel extra tension on, parts you're not happy with, or anything specific you can point out for us to help you with?

I'm hearing the same thing as Daniel. I especially hear a drastic difference on the higher notes. It's as if you're trying to relax by modifying your placement a lot more towards head voice, and the end result is actually causing even more tension and instabliity on those notes. Edge it forward just a bit. Focus your vowels either right at where your hard and soft palates meet, or just behind that (depending on the sound color you want). If you're feeling a lot of tension in the neck, then you need to be transfering that extra pressure to both your soft palate and pushing into your solar plexus. If you really want balance your air rpessure, relaxation, etc, try singing the song through a cocktail straw while holding your nose andrelaxing (not pushing extra air through the straw). I don't suggest doing it more than 5 minutes at a time, perhaps a few times a day, because it stretches out every single muscle you're using too. But it can be an amazing asistant to singing a great vocal balance.

I agree with Daniel. There's nothing specific to point out in any one part of the song. Overall, however, you tended to yell on the louder higher notes. Finding either a comfortable belt or strong mixed resonance for those parts (which were very prominant at the beginning), would make this song much easier for you to sing and tighten it up quite a bit.

As for not singing as long as you wanted to on the last note, if it's from running out of air, then there is one exercise you can start doing to expand your lung capacity. Breathe in by slightly tightening your abs and focusing the air into your lower back, kidneys, or glutes. This should naturally put most of the air into your obliques or lower ribs. Then make a very strong "sss" sound while pushing the air forward into your solar plexus. The "sss" is meant to be a type of compression that holds back most of the air you're trying to push out. This will compress your lung and open up all the tiny little pockets of air, effectively streching them and giving you more lung gcapacity over time. The idea is, with proper gottal/subglottal pressure balance, you should be able to sing a note at any strength for about as long as you can exhale in the lung capacity exercise. This got me up to being able to belt for 43 seconds. 

However, the tension you have in your voice on higher notes is an issue, and holding you back a lot. Focus on better placement, relaxing the tension in your neck, and solid breath support from pushing into the solar plexus. The breath support doesn't have to make you super loud. If you balance the pressure correctly, it will simply stablize the note at any volume.

I've never heard this song so light. Very cool!

Watch your diphthongs in your accent. If you focus more on the main vowel to sing out, then pitch, accent, and timbre will lock in more often. Another thing to watch out for is anticipating the next note or over-relaxing at the ends of your phrases, both causing the note to fall. Again, that will start to go away when you focus on singing out your main vowels. What Robert mentioned, singing with a bit more weight, might also help stabilize the issues I mentioned.

Have fun. We tried to help. Let me know when you're serious about getting feedback.

I agree 100% with Robert.

To be straight: You're yelling, not singing, especially on the verses. It doesn't have to be loud to be yelling. Yelling is a vocal configuration/mode. Sometimes you sing out some notes here and there, but it's very inconsistent in placement, timbre, support, and pitch.

What's your goal in singing? Are you just doing this for fun and to sing at Karaoke bars? Or do you want to be taken seriously and sound professional?

If it's the latter, then you need a coach and training routine. Hell, if it's the former, you would still benefit highly from training. You can't simply will yourself into being a good singer. If you think you're good now, start taking feedback seriously (from the audience, your friends, coaches like us, peers, etc), and see what others think. As a performer, it ultimately doesn't matter what you think about yourself, but rather what your audience thinks about you. You can become a MUCH better singer than you are now, but it likely won't happen until you listen to others' feedback and start correctly training proven techniques.

I watched it several times this week and have yet to find anything to critique or help with. This is amazing!

The only thing I oculd offer constructive criticism on is your performance. I coached bands (signed and unsigned) across the world in their performance and career for many years. You lose yourself in the music quite often, which is absolutely perfect. When you lose yourself, you give the audience permission to do the same. Work on your actions following the lyrics rather than anticipating them. For instance, before you sang "It's the only thing that's in my mind", you pointed to your head and had already lowered your hand by the time you sang the line. The emotional impact from the visual can greatly enhance the performance when in sync. This can also be expressed by letting your entire body flow with the music. HOWEVER, I still felt the song, it didn't take away from it at all. 

3 minutes ago, user12345aa said:

Really, most of people can learn how to sing? I thought you must have a gift

I wish it was that easy. Some people do seem gifted, and excel even more with training. Most of us have to train in the hopes of sounding gifted. I've been singing professionally since I was 15, and don't think I even sang fully in key for several years. I don't think I truly had a good singing voice until I was well into my 30's and started to take training seriously. Everything before that I'm guessing was good song-writing, passion, and pure determination. I can't even listen to the stuff I sang 10 years ago without cringing.

It's not terrible, it's not good, but that doesn't matter. Anyone can learn to sing. You need to decide if you want to because you want to, not based upon how you currently sound. Get a pitch training app to get you started. A big part of the problem though is that you're not actually singing, but rather trying to use speech vowels with pitch. Like I Said before, anyone can learn to sing. Do you want to? If you base your decision on whether or not you sound good before even learning how to do it, then you're going to have a very frustrating pursuit of anything.

Same style of singing? Make it our own? What are the terms of this challenge? I've never done one before. I'm not much of a fan of Dickinson's style, even if I do admire his abilities or can sing the same style. Then again, I'm not a fan of Ric Ocasek's style either, but I'm doing a cover of the song, Drive, for someone.

Cool song! Your voice reminds me of the more famous male pop singers of the 80's. Your style of music is perfect for getting placement in movies and TV. That's a very viable and potentially very profitable career path and/or income stream.

I'm curious. Your placement is very much on your throat until you make edgier vowels sounds or go up in pitch. For instance, the first word you pulled up and forward in the song was "make". But in general you didn't lift the voice to the soft palate unless you went to higher notes. It gives an interesting and unique sound to your voice, but also a bit inconsistent. Did you do that on purpose? I'm not saying it's bad, just unique. The singer for Disturbed did very similar placements for their cover of The Sound of Silence.

I think working on keeping your vowels lifted more to the soft palate (possibly edged towards the hard palate) and away from speech vowels will make your voice more consistent in sound across the board. It would still go deeper into the soft palate as the pitch raises, but your tone, timbre, and breath support would be more consistent. The quickest way to tell the difference would be to smile (which naturally supports lifting of the voice) and also place a finger on your bottom lip and try to sing up and over it.

I listened to Perfume. I tried Jar of Hearts, but it's hard to hear you over the other voice.

You had an ear for pitch and a natural pleasant tone to your voice, but your fundamentals are all a bit off for singing. I'll get to that more in a minute. Yuo have a lot of great potential, and I can hear a great singing voice in there just waiting to be utilized in full. Please don't take my review as harsh. Text alone can feel that way very easily. My hope is to help you, not critisize you.

You need to be training your voice. Not doing so is holding back a lot of your potential. I highly recommend starting with The Four Pillars of Singing and seeking a vocal coach with student success in the style you're going for. Not success as in career success necessarily, but in learning to sing that style well - contenporary rather than classical.

There's only so much I can address in text without you having a coach or doing a lesson with me, Robert, or other coaches here. The first thing I hear is your placement is lending itself to more speech vowels than singing vowels. There are a couple of ways to get you started toward proper placement of singing vowels. Start by making a soft "K" sound while breathing in. That spot your tongue hits the roof of your mouth is where you want to point your vowels, letting the soft palate do most of the work for you. Higher notes will feel like they go deeper into the soft palate as well, and if it makes sense in text, you want to allow your vowels to shade back from that soft "K" spot, adding deeper vowels in the soft palate along with the deeper note (deeper in the soft palate, but higher in pitch). Besides willing them into the soft "K" spot, you can also bare your teeth, or smile. This helps naturally lift the voice. Additionally, when first starting to do this "lift" of the voice resonance and vowels, it may help to place a finger on your lower lip and try to make your voice go up and over it. This is called "over the pencil", as it's modified from putting a pencil between your teeth and sing up and over it with only vowels.

Your TA (chest voice musculature) strength and breath support are a bit weak, which is a HUGE area holding back your voice. GRanted, without proper placement, trying to add these in will only get you yelling, rather than singing with more power. There are ways to strengthen these but it would likely take a lesson to really show you how, since you need get a proper feeling for the basics befroe we can truly help with adjustments.

One thing you can do right now is bridging and connecting. This will help you gain better control over the musculature, placement, and movement of the voice. It's arguably the most important thing to learn for singing besides pitch. I talk mroe about that in the video below. To predicate my videos, I truly only put these out there to help people get a feel for proper sensations of the voice. There are things to do from there that make it even easier. For instance, instead of opening the jaw wide to help TA engagement, this is better for a more controlled vowel: raise the embouchure (lift and bite), narrow vertically, and push the tongue slightly forward into the bottom teeth (which gives extra support to the TA muscles). OPening the jaw may help you learn to turn on the TA muscles and sing higher notes, but narrowing is what allows you control from there.

Can you pick one song for us to review your voice on? Most of us, if not all of the coaches here, don't have time to go through 5 songs. I was going to try, but had to keep pushinng it back in my schedule.

His videos are okay. Lots to ponder. But a lot of what he teaches doesn't apply to contemporary voice or get the results that Robert does. "Appoggio" directly translates to lean, prop, bolster, support, and the like. Simply knowing the full meaning of the word in Italian helps better imagine how to use it. The idea can help you quickly get better support while training through Robert's breathing and training exercises and learning how to do it betetr and more naturally.

It's not really tightening, it's leaning in and out. It has a similar feel and function to the push downward, but the mentality of it changes the structure enough that it tends to stablilize more and not put undue pressure on the pelvic floor. When I want to get really loud, I still push down, but even then I think about it differently than I used to and mentally push more into the abs than I do downward. Either way, you end up moving the diaphram much more slowly and controlled than ignoring the abdominal pressure altogether. I don't think it's contrary to the way TFPOS teaches it, I think it's complimentary. In many ways, it's a matter of semantics. But I think it's a crucial distinction of semantics for a better visualization and thus better support when a student is simply just pushing as hard as they can downward. See the video below. I don't like Trimble's vocal style, and there are many things he's doing to the contrary of contemporary singing. But this way of achieving breath support is someting to consider when learning Robert's method. Again, not cnotrary to, but to help adjust your sensations, visualization, and technique to achieve the end result faster.

I teach a few things differently than Robert, but again, not to the contrary. For instance, I have my students use a stirring straw for warmups, cool downs, and even when trying to get the sensation of tuning the formant, proper pressure balance, and relaxation of compression. IT's just another way to achieve the same sensation that has helped my students learn the TVS methodology faster.

I'm glad I brought you here! I'm glad to help however I can!

I often go full appoggio, but it's not always necessary. There are definitely softer parts of songs. However, even on softer parts, proper respiratory balance is a must for longevity and consistency. I use extrinsic anchoring a lot too, but I'm training to rely more on intrinsic anchoring (especially in embouchure, since my tendency is to open vertically on higher notes which isn't the most pleasant sound, haha!). As for "the push" for volume. I have a couple of students who are Yoga teachers and refused to do it that way. I had to search for a better way, especially given their explanation of the horrible things that can do to the pelvic floor and your internal organs. Now I teach to pull in or tighten the stomach slightly when breathing in to the kidneys or lwoer, which causes the air to expand the obliques instead. Then when colume is needed, "lean the ladder" the other way. In other words, lean into the abs, even while keeping the slightly tightened. It makes the lungs work more like bellows, and give much more diaphramal control than breathing with the stomach out and pushing down for volume/support.

I would put respiratory support at a 5 out of 5. Different techniques require a bit different of a balance (glottal and subglottal pressure), but havign the "external" or "third-party" support effecting glottal closure without having to directly squeeze down on the glottis helps immensely. As an example. The last 20-minute set I did on television, I decided I didn't want to be loud, so I backed off in repiratory support. The room was small, I could easily clip the mics, and I wanted to play it safe. Normally, I can sing 2 to 3 hours at full volume before I get tired and need a break. Without the good rspiratory support to help me through it, I barely made it to the end of our last song. In fact, even 15 minutes in I starting struggling. The rest of my phonation package was worn out very quickly simply from not having that extra help from appoggio.

I'm hearing a few different things making you a bit pitchy and strained, especially on higher notes. The one thing I think will help the most is lifting the voice out of the throat and onto the soft palate more. You have a great voice, but not having that extra lift is causing you to go flat on certain notes. Learn good embouchure. The easiest way to describe that over text is to smile or bare your teeth (horizontal embouchure), narrow how wide you are vertically, and push your tongue straight into your bottom teeth to help lock in your chest voice musculature especially on higher notes. A simple way to feel this lift is (1) make a soft "K" sound while inhaling. Where that hits the roof of your mouth is where you want to point your vowels. Vowels will modify to include shades that are deeper into the soft palate as you go higher, but simply trying to relax into that "resonant spot" or "soft K spot" will help immensely. (2) "Over the pencil", instead of using a pencil, just place a finger on your bottom lip, bare your teeth (engage embouchure), and then sing up and over your finger.  This new "lift" of the voice will correct a lot of issues and start to get you to where you're not singing in your throat as much, which in turn makes singing more effortless and consistent. The idea is to relax the pressure upward and then out, taking the strain off the throat.

I'm not sure about the $10, but since I didn't get a chance to say anything teh first time, I'll go ahead and give you some feedback. You're more consistent in the last recording, which tells me you put more focus on breath support.

Are you afraid to be louder? It seems like you're holding back on purpose, which is contributing to the lack of twang, compression, and breath support. Push a bit more from your abs, just not from the neck. It feels counterintuitive, but that slight psh downward will not only raise your volume, it will also correct some of your support and compression issues.