Premeditate a conversation
- Fully enter the scene
- Fully claim the reaction you want
Choose your sound
- Choose the type of sentence you want to use (question, exclamation, statement).
- Intend the length of your line. This tells your automatic nervous system how much breath to take and use. (Good vocal training makes this a lot more efficient!)
- Choose the tone color, volume, inflection and clarity of articulation you’ll use to deliver your words. (Again, with good training the pool of possibilities to choose from will be a lot bigger)
- Intend the pitch you want to use. For speakers, this means the area of your vocal range you center your voice in, and the shape of the curves of your speaking melody line. For singers, of course, it will mean the exact pitch of your intended notes. If you fully intend to hit those notes, you’ll actually aim and be much more likely to hit them!
Imagine you are someone else
- You want to learn a new style.
- You want to learn a new language.
- You want to do a ‘sound-alike’… sounding just like another lead singer for fun at a Karaoke event, or for commercial purposes when the jingle client wants a specific kind of voice.
- You want to sing tight harmony with another lead singer as their background singer for stage or studio. This may entail really changing your vocal tone and inflections to match another’s perfectly.
- You want to mimic your vocal coach to learn a new technique. (A good coach will be very careful to help you find your own voice for your own reasons in the technique being learned.)
- You want to mimic your dialect coach to change your accent.
Bottom line:
Want to watch video versions of All Things Vocal posts?
Check out my vocal training playlist on Youtube!
Here’s this one…
Ron Calabrese says
Hi Judy. As usual your blog reveals a very interesting, not always evident truth! Communication when speaking and singing requires at least momentary forethought before the vocal emission. There are many examples of singers with beautiful voices who could not communicate. One that comes to mind was Vic Damone, who had a silky voice, that at least in my opinion, became very boring after a few songs. Sinatra is the opposite. He sang every word with the clear intention of communicating an EXPERIENCED TRUTH. You can listen to Sinatra over his extremely long career and notice the loss of clarity in his voice, (in the later years), but the communication is always there. In fact, Frank Sinatra often criticized Andy Williams for not using his extraordinary instrument to communicate.
Now that I sing mainly in church, I have to temper my Italian emotions when singing religious music. However, when the meaning of the words call for a variance in volume, sustaining a note, a crescendo, I can’t always help myself! Singing like a robot should be left to the robots.
Billy Wright says
Enjoyed this one too!
Your blog posts are always wonderful, Judy!
Judy Rodman says
Thank you Ron, and unknown… it means the world to get your feedback. Ron… I think you're absolutely right… Sinatra was the communicator. Love 'singing like a robot should be left to the robots"… indeed!!