The most important part of the site is this one: everyone should everyone should follow these instructions and learn how to sing. For the greater good, the betterment of the clan, the most meaningful synergy, the most helpful interaction, the most soothing of behaviors, I wish everyone…the best in reading this. I’ll start with a number of key experiences that should give you some basic idea of what is going on with this thing called “singing”, and then later we’ll talk about some more specific techniques you need to master.
Back in the late seventies, I was hooked on the nightly news. Particularly the Huntley -Brinkley report, and then later with the man himself, David Brinkley. At the end of the telecast, they would feature a story about somebody or something that was interesting and thought-provoking. And one night they did a story about a bunch of office people who worked together, and they had all decided to learn to sing. Like somebody had asked, why can’t everybody sing? Can you learn to do it? They all did.
What it was, there was a congressional hearing of some kind where the lawmakers interviewed these people, and I don’t remember why. But they paraded them in, and they all looked like somebody you’d see in the mall, regular as can be. But they all could just completely sing, and they did it a capela of course, and I thought it was really something. Because I always thought singing would be a cool thing to be able to do, but I knew I wasn’t born with the ability and I wasn’t so sure you could learn to do it. But look at these people! They couldn’t, and decided to learn and now they can do it. Could I learn?
Then one night I was watching a commercial on TV, and there were about four different people in it, and they all had a real brief part where they were saying like one or two words, and really dragging them out as a long held note, and what amazed me is that they really sounded like they were singing, and they only said one word or two. What was it? They were holding a note, with a steady stream of air coming out of their self. See, that’s not how we talk, because when we talk we just say a sound, and put them together as words, but we do it in emphatic utterances. In singing it is a steady and even flow of air, a steady noise. And you hear those professionals with their use of vibrato, where their stream of air for a note is steady, but simply and purposely vibrated to allow for a more comfortable steady flow of air. For years I thought you could only vibrate like that, or you weren’t making the sound properly. But no. Any style that generates a steady flow of air to hold those notes, that, somehow, is singing.
So I decided to take lessons. It was about 5 years later, and I’d started banging on pianos, and after three years or so I could move around enough to keep a rhythm, and while I wailed away with myself, I didn’t sound to myself like I was singing. And that story about those people all learning to do it was still in my mind. So anyway, I looked in the yellow pages, and I found this ad about this lady who gave singing lessons at her home. So I show up at my first lesson, and she comes around the corner with one leg that’s about a foot short and she wore a real long shoe to make up for it. And despite this stigma, guess what, she’s over it and can flat do the hardest thing there is to do, which is sing. There in her self, that lesson. To sing is a very humbling thing, so if you’re already humble, doing this is maybe easier. Or maybe because singing is such a cool thing to be able to do, maybe some people learn to do it because it’s quite the esteem builder. So away we go, and I just tried to absorb what she said, even though it would be many years before I felt like I could put it all into action.
Lesson one: It has to come from your thorax. However you can find it, in order for your being to be making this noise, it is not coming from your talk box. You take a breath, and as if you’re slowly letting the air out of a balloon, your voice box is that narrowing, but it is your whole chest that is making the noise. She would have me try to generate this sound and every now and then I’d do something and she would jump and say, “There it is!” And then I’d try to “sing”, and I guess I was “saying” the note, rather than singing the note, and she’d shake her head and say no, you’ve lost it. I now know that at times I was letting it out of my thorax, like those people in that commercial.
Lesson two: If you’re popping veins out of your neck, you’re inhibiting the flow of the air, and the voice box is trying to “say” the note, rather than letting the thorax do it. This “choking” of the note both quiets it, and flattens it. And everyone in the room knows it. That is all so important. You cannot strain, ever. Because if you do, those muscles fatigue, and when they fail, you embarrass yourself enough to question ever trying to do it again. She would look at my neck, and when the veins would pop out, she’d shake her head and turn away.
These both finally led to what becomes the MOST IMPORTANT lesson of them all, the thing called “getting” warmed up. When after perhaps 5 or 8 minutes of actually singing, the chest muscles and neck and voice box all get to know each other, and she said it was blood flow to the muscles, and that’s probably it. I mean, if you’re an athlete you see this. The legs and shoulders, and the circulatory system’s adjustment to these demands, and the nervous system’s input, all get, well, warmed up. She would say that when this happens, now the teeth and lips are just “chopping” off the sounds, the words, and so forth.
Heard of Josh Groban, hired gun singer? He’s totally figured it out. And I was reading something where he said his warm up routine was two different drills lasting something like 20 minutes, and then he would drink two drinks and go on stage. When I go to shows I’m always amazed, usually in the second song or so, the singer warms up, and it gets way good. I always thought Gregg Allman, one of the greatest singers of all time, screamed his way to a warm up. It usually took half a song. And lastly, the first time I saw Steely Dan, Donald Fagan wasn’t warmed up for thirst song, and I thought they’d lost it. And then bingo. He warmed up and killed it.
So for me the first time I warmed up myself was about a year and a half later. It was Friday night around 6 pm, and I was headed home to hit some bar and hopefully get lucky. So I opened a beer and set it on my speaker, and sat down for a song or two and with home an hour and a half away I could maybe make happy hour. Well, I must have hit a groove or something, but I just really thought I was singing for the first time, and I just stayed there and played on and on. Finally. What a relief! I was there until 12:30 and never got up. And I hadn’t had another sip of the beer I’d opened. Six straight hours. I knew something unusual was happening. But it was getting late, and I finally split out of there and tried to make a bar before closing time.
I hope you are seeing some key lessons in there. Here’s another one. It was about ten years later, and I wouldn’t over estimate my ability to sing. But I’d bought a sound system, and I decided to get up the nerve to go to a local pub in my town, and I said I’d set up and do a gig for free. Gulp. So I set up the rig and away we go. I remember some people from work came, and sat right in front of me, and immediately requested a song I didn’t know. Then I played one that had no magic at all, and I was a little flustered, and turned up my monitor a little bit. And about half way through the second song, I warmed up. I mean, that was the whole plan, to get set up and warmed up, and it was finally happening. By this time I’d learned a bunch of tunes, and it’s so weird, it was like the piano was playing itself. I played Billy Joel and Jackson Brown and The Eagles, and people were leaning out of their chairs and I just had a ball. I remember these two guys in their forties rolled in together and stood at the stand up bar about 20 feet away and watched the whole show, and barely said anything to each other. I never did take a break, and then quit at about one thirty. When I was done the guy who owned the bar up the street asked me if I’d play there. I thought ,gee this is fun, getting warmed up. We later started playing as a band, our basement players from the “Café Elite”, and the Friday nighters. And to this day, getting warmed up is all I can think about, starting with simple songs, where high hard notes are not required.
So this rambling description you have just been through, that’s my discovery of “singing”. It’s where, physically, a warmed up, blood supplied thorax slurps a in a big volume of breath, and lets out a steady flow of air through an unstrained voice box, the words themselves chopped off at the mouth and lips. And you can learn to do it, whether that’s by just working on note generation long enough to get warmed up, and to recognize when that warm up has occurred, and ride it. Or taking lessons where someone can guide you to making this noise happen. To do it well however, is yet another matter. So we move on to these important other details.
Sounds are largely vowel sounds. So, singing is a series of vowel sounds, long “A”s and “E”s or “I”s, those are embarrassing noises if you make them badly. They may be correct and totally painful. There are the “OHs” and ooohhs, like in the word “soup”, and so forth. Remember then in singing, you must learn to make these notes beautifully. With experience, you must learn to chop these notes beautifully, and believe your voice box is fancy enough to do this. You must be self aware enough, and allow this beautifulness to flow through these sounds. So when real singers sing, emotion is there in facial expression, and in being and in delivering right from their soul to your soul. So again, the beauty of singing is that once you learn to warm up, and generate these sounds properly from the center of your self, you can learn to make them beautiful.
Keep this in mind also. The sound is drastically different when your mouth is open, and with singing being basically a controlled scream, the mouth must open for the noise to come out. Open, and chop with the teeth and or lips. Try to see that.
For me, I remember Billy Joel on “Piano Man”, where he does the “Oooh, la, la la, dee dee dah” part, it’s so heartfelt and earnest. To be an effective singer, you must both make the sound properly, but it must be appropriately beautiful. It takes a lot of guts.
Isn’t this fun. It’s all so easy, and everyone must learn to do it. And there are still a few more points to be made.
Phrasing: When a singer has warmed up, the actual process of singing involves taking a good breath and singing tunes one phrase at a time. For example, in Roger Miller’s classic “King of the Road”, the first “phrase” of the song is obviously, “Trailers for sail or rent…”. When the delivery of this phrase is complete, another good breath is taken, and the singer proceeds to, “Rooms to let fifty cents”. So, as soon as any phrase is delivered, a breath is taken and the singer prepares to deliver the next phrase. Simple, right?
Nothing is simple, of course, but singing, at its most fundamental, is just that. After proper warm up has occurred, the concentration mainly involves remembering to take nice deep breaths and prepare for the next bit of whole-body bellowing we call “singing”. So, every break in the song is but another opportunity to fill the lungs again with air. And if you watch real singers, there is emotion on the face, and maybe the arms are extended, and the hands opened, and raising with the note and notes that are delivered. At the end of the phrase, especially at certain parts of the song, a “big note” is delivered, often held much longer and much more convincingly than the ones in the rest of the phrase.
But the magic of singing is in the phrasing. And not only is there a steady flow of air coming from the singer, but how much time is spent on each syllable of the phrase is what makes the singer sound like he is actually singing. I mean, how many ways can you phrase something? It depends on how many total syllables are in the phrase, and the possible amount of time available to spend on them. An extreme might be Willie Nelson, who sort of talks his way through songs, and then hits and holds a syllable and it reminds you why he’s so famous. It’s like those people in that commercial, they were just holding one syllable of one word in a very brief phrase, and of course this is the essence of singing.
I asked my brother, a drummer, who’d studied music in college, what the most important part of singing was, and he hesitated a moment and said “syncopation”, which I had to look up. In singing, syncopation is where the emphasis (by the singer) is placed on the “off” notes, or what you might consider the less important syllables of words. It is the holding of those notes that make it sound like you’re singing. (The word “syncopation” is used most by musicians when talking about beats, or syncopated rhythms. In that case there is emphasis on the beats you don’t usually think about, and this makes the drumming more colorful and interesting.)
So, syncopation in the Roger Miller song might be where you emphasize the “ers” part of “Trailers”, and by holding the second syllable of that song with your steady flow of air maybe twice as long as the “trail” part of the word, it’s more interesting and sounds like you’re singing. But remember this: it must all be done in rhythm. No matter what, at the end of any phrase, the some total number of notes, and time spent on the phrase is the same as that spent by the musicians playing the song. This is also called “singing within the beat”, but there is exactly the same amount of time elapsed. You must absolutely sing in rhythm, just like any other instrument must be done in rhythm. People mainly notice rhythm, and feel rhythm, and when there isn’t rhythm there can be no magic.
Back to vowel sounds: It has been said that singing is a matter of making a series of vowel sounds, and to a large extent this is true. And some are much easier to make than others, so singers might make a long “e” sound for anything from a long “a” or “i” sounds, because with these latter two you really have to open your mouth to let them out, and it’s hard to master that without making everyone in the room cringe and want to go home. So for sounds where you really have to open your mouth to let them out, like “i” and “a”, it’s harder than “o”, “u”, “e”, and that’s what makes great singers great, they can do those notes too.
But it is vowel sounds that, in singing, are the noises you make. And when you make them with your steady flow of air, you create a signal for the microphone and the sound guy to have something that they can send to the speakers. Most good singers make a lot of noise when they sing, and generate a good solid “signal”.
And then there’s the whole idea of doing all this into a microphone, a separate trick that you simply must practice. If you’re real close to the microphone, and maybe your lips are even touching it, you can have a good signal generated without that much air. But for big notes, the singer will generally pull away from the microphone a little, depending on how much of a scream he or she plans to make. You have probably seen the professional singer do this. It is something that can only be done with experience.
Of course, it’s one thing to sing in the shower, and another thing to have it recorded, and then be confronted with it. Most people who have heard themselves in a recorder of some kind will universally say, “Wow, I sound like that?” Well, yes, that’s what we’re all hearing. So with all this in mind, yours truly set out to do the hardest thing of them all: to not only compose songs that you yourself would like and want to sing, but to then get a band to learn them, book studio time, and sing so that others would want to hear you. I personally never thought it would happen for me. People don’t really like to tell you how your singing is, and that feedback is hard to come by. But we did it, and in 1996 went into a friend of mine’s studio and recorded “This Elite Band”. There is a litmus test where you give the CDs out, and see what happens. Now, I’m not a great singer, whatever that is, but we made the discs and gave them out, and what happened was astonishing, and still happens when I give the disc out to strangers now: they like it and listen to it repeatedly. Still. Now, if people put on your recording and listen to it repeatedly, or they tell you their kid “won’t stop listening to it”, you arrived as a singer. Like famously The Grateful Dead, who weren’t great singers, but sung together well. And plain and simply, Jerry Garcia sung those songs right into your heart. Ultimately that’s what all of these techniques and recommendations about singing must achieve: communicating music and tune to another soul. You can’t just hide behind technique and tricks. The final ingredient is this realness. And you can’t do it without the fundamentals.
OK?