Golden Nuggets for the Week of 31st January 2022

In this new This Is A Voice Golden Nuggets series-within-a-series, we share weekly updates on what inspires us, and how we work with and analyse singing, music and voices.
In the Golden Nuggets Week of 31st January, Jeremy reads some of his book Why Do I Need A Vocal Coach, on "same song, different characters", and Gillyanne shares an inspiring podcast episode from Dr Rangan Chatterjee on the vagus nerve and how to "tone" it in times of crisis.
We share thoughts on song analysis, singing in different genres, changing vocal style, legato line, onsets, pronunciation styles, singing diphthongs, and a host of style features.

Jeremy's on YouTube reading from Why Do I Need A Vocal Coach
The paperback, ebook and audiobook are all available here https://amzn.to/3HgdQHP

The Learning Lounge with over 50 free previews is available here https://bit.ly/VocalProcessLearningLounge

Dr Rangan Chatterjee's episode with Dr Ayan Panja is available here https://podcasts.podinstall.com/dr-rangan-chatterjee-gp-author-feel-better-live-more-dr-rang/202201260000-232-why-disease-isnt-inevitable-dr-ayan-panja.html

Transcript

This Is A Voice, a podcast with Dr. Gillyanne Kayes and Jeremy Fisher. This Is A Voice 

Hello, and welcome to 2022 and the first of a new series. Now, what, what is this new series that we're doing? 

Can I just say we've just made it before the end of January? Yeah.  Well, what we wanted to do with this new series is chat with you a bit more often because you probably noticed that the, the long podcasts are roundabout every two weeks, every three weeks. We know that your time is precious. So we wanted to share with you our thoughts on things voice a little bit more often, because. Well, we have quite a lot to say and quite a lot to share. Don't we?

There's quite a lot going on. 

And we've had a bit of debate about what we're going to call this, you know, should we call it bite-size should we call it This Is A Voice light and we have gone for, This Is A Voice weekly Golden Nuggets. 

Now the weekly Golden Nuggets is a newsletter that we started to send out just before Christmas to our database. Basically talking about some of the things that we've done, focusing on specific techniques. And this is mainly geared towards the Learning Lounge.

If you haven't heard about the Learning Lounge, that's our big resource. There's over 600 videos and resources in there. 

Yeah. And also behind the scenes information, which is fun. 

And the idea is that there's going to be something in this Golden Nuggets pod that you're going to be able to use this week in your practice, either as a teacher or as a choir leader or as a singer.

So the way that it works is we're going to put the Golden Nuggets out every week, possibly on a Friday, possibly on a Monday. We're not sure yet. But this is the first one. So we're trying this out and then we will carry on doing our conversations fortnightly or three weekly. So the conversations that we normally have, or 

The long conversations 

They're very very long!

And also with mini interviews  

Yeah and having our guests on as well. So they will carry on, but they'll be about every two or three weeks. Then the Golden Nuggets will be every week. So, if you don't want to particularly listen to the Golden Nuggets, don't worry. Just look out for different titles. 

We're still here with the longer pods. 

Yeah. And so this Golden Nuggets series will basically be called the Golden Nuggets, plus the week of whichever month it is so that you know where you are.

Cool.

Welcome to the Golden Nuggets newsletter for the week of 31st of January. This week, we're focusing on one of our specialities, one that runs through many of our Learning Lounge resources resource of the week for January the 31st is... long pause plus a close-up of a singing teacher, hoping against hope that we're going to share more on song analysis

Song Analysis! We're very fond of saying first the singer, then the song. We did a whole presentation under that title in Utrecht a few years ago. We're passionate advocators of singing and teaching different genres and the techniques you need to do that successfully. So we're focusing for a second week on song analysis.

Making the song your own. Sting or Evelyn Tubb singing Dowland. Who's right? We analyse style in vowel shapes, diphthong timing, consonant placement, vowel landscape, breathiness. Webinar 4, Finding the YOU in every song. 

So the example that we're going to start with is the Dowland song, sung by Evelyn Tubb and Sting. And we'll go into the real detail of that in a second. 

Two very different performances. 

Very different, yeah. The idea is that you decide once you've heard the original setting, whether you want to keep it, or whether you want to change it, and that's a very conscious decision.

There are always things you can change. Aren't there Jeremy. Even if you're in very much mainstream classical music, there are lots of nuances that you can bring that are personal. 

And in fact, we are going to do some exercises on the nuances in a moment. Um, so the first one, the Evelyn Tubb version.

Um, these are the things that we noticed. You may have noticed other things, pronunciation, her pronunciation is quite posh English, and specifically she does the tapped R. Thy graces that refrain.

And it's not a rolled r, it's not grrrrraces. It's just gRa, gRa.

I did do a double tap. Sorry. Shame on you! So it's quite posh English.

She mostly uses linked diphthongs. So when you have a diphthong, you have two vowels to get round, and usually, um, in this style, you will do a hold the first vowel, and then do the second vowel late and quite fast 

Do die for us. 

Die!  

Yeah. 

So I hold the first vowel longer. Warm clear, lyrical tone. 

It's a very sweet tone isn't it?. 

Lovely, very beautiful and very neat and precise phrasing.

Poised feel. Very poised what she's doing and carefully graded volume landscapes. She doesn't do any very sudden volume changes. It's all beautifully graded. Breathiness is used as a word colouring tool. And she does a messa di voce on the long notes. So those of you who come from a contemporary background, a messa di voce is where you hold a long note and you grow in volume and then you die again.

So you get louder and softer, and it's a way of featuring a note or warming it and extra vowels after certain consonants. And this is really fascinating. 

Yes, she does "sweetah love"  

Sweetah love. 

Can you hear that little ah, in-between because she wants to, it's almost, it's like an elision really. She wants to get a very smooth transition between the sweet and the love.

The reason that we're picking all of these ads is because we have Sting to compare with, and comparison is really, really useful because you might think oh, yes, that's perfectly normal. And then you hear somebody else do it in a different style and you realise that it's part of the style

well also 

I think one of the reasons why we chose to do this, we tend to do this a lot, which is a contrast and compare.

But for you guys, it also. It gets you out of your own particular mindset of how something should go and you know, all the baggage that we sometimes carry with us about certain types of performance. So, um, that's the sense in which we're really listening? 

Yes. Um, so the Sting version, and by the way, we love both of these versions.

We think that both great. Pronunciation, pop vowel shapes very much pop vowel shapes that not posh English. Now he does early diphthongs. And he also uses his diphthongs to alter the volume on long notes. Um, so he will do "invite"  and he will go to the second vowel very quickly. The vowel resonances don't match, and that means that there are different volumes, even within words.

Um, he also does a breathy speechy tone and the breathiness is used as a vocal quality and as an expressive tool, he does come out of the breathy tone but on the whole that's his sound, it's very chatty chatty feel detailed volume landscape, lots of ups and downs. 

Yeah I noticed that he says touch. And again, I presume that comes from his own uh, you know, his own speech pattern. So it's very different from the Evelyn Tubb, which is much more kind of received pronunciation English, posh

and he does 

extra passing notes. Now she does extra vowels, but he does extra passing notes. He does "to do me due delight". To do me.

So it's more 

obvious, isn't it? 

And also there are longer gaps between the words and the phrases

You can find this on the Learning Lounge: https://bit.ly/VocalProcessLearningLounge. 

Same song, different style. We analyze Celine Dion, Josh Groban and Luciano Pavarotti singing Schubert's Ave Maria for four core elements: onsets, breath, line, and energy. This is how we help singers change their style without losing their voice.  Music is a language. Musical styles are a series of "accents" in that language. It's likely you have a go-to singing style, like you speak in a particular way. That's cool, but you need to know what it is before you can change it. Recognising your own style is the first step. We spend the whole of webinar 4 showing you what to listen for and how to change your vocal style without necessarily changing the sound you make. Top tip, use these tools in a master class to help your singers learn and change fast without losing their vocal identity.

Do you even need to change your style to sing something out of your home genre? How much does it matter? Two singers with a great following -Andrea Bocelli and Leslie Garrett- make different choices. As a listener you're influenced by your own aesthetic and how you think that genre "should" sound.

If your audience loves you for singing in an accessible classical way, why shouldn't you sing "I Dreamed a Dream" out of context of the original? In a higher key? How much does the original context matter? My vocal coaching includes taking the context of the performer and the performance into account when singing anything  and sometimes deliberately singing against context, creates something startlingly original. 

Hello. It's Jeremy Fisher here reading from my book. Why do I need a vocal coach? Stories, tips, and hacks from the studio of a voice expert. Fitting the song to the singer. I spend a good deal of my time as a musical theatre vocal coach, helping my clients adapt the song to the audition. After we'd sorted out, dealing with the pianist, see previous section help my accompanist isn't listening,

I decided to work on matching the song to the client and her casting. This client has quite a wide range of casting possibilities. It's impossible to find one song that will fit all those characters, but this song can work in more than one way. The Cockney, the American than the Jamaican. Bearing in mind that the rhythm and speed of the song are pretty much set in advance, we changed the character who was singing it. The first version was the one she'd used in the previous audition. The Cockney the director had given her a clue as to where he wanted to go with the casting. So my client picked up the information and ran with it. Changing the accent to proper Cockney east London, born within the sound of bow bells, made her characterization sharper, slightly more upfront and sassier.

With this client, it also had the effect of changing the body posture and body language and the sound she made. It doesn't always work that well for the technically minded among you. She used a thicker fold mass for a stronger, slightly darker version of her standard chest voice, slightly more edgy brightness, less breath flow, and more pitch drop offsets with shorter notes.

The second version was American businesswoman. More brightness, slightly thinner, folds, more clipped delivery and a completely different body language, tighter, more upright, and a higher energy. The third version, my personal favorite, was the Jamaican nurse. The Jamaican accent caused the words to have a different accentuation.

Almost as many glottals as the Cockney, ironically. The body language became heavier and more into the ground and the sound got slightly thicker and more relaxed with a wide vocal tract with more underlying humour. I chose these three types because I've heard her audition speeches, and I wanted to match her sung performances with her spoken ones.

I believe it's important in an audition to give a matching package, beware of the "I can do this, I can do that" auditionee, showing everything can end up causing confusion. Because we've done this type of work before in lessons, when the director gave her completely different acting cues to work with, she was able to change in an instant, the vocal characterization she had prepared without either throwing her concentration or upsetting the feel of the song itself.

I'm doing a lot of this work with my clients now. And the recall rate in auditions has certainly increased.

To find out more, get yourself a copy of why do I need a vocal coach in ebook, paperback, or audio book format, or to work with me in person go to bit.ly/workwithJeremy

 

We were publishing on mix nine years ago. Webinar 13 contains detailed instructions on how to achieve different mixes and analyses many different singers on what mix they're using. 

Can we say it loudly for the people at the back? There's not just one mix. In this webinar we look at variations of head voice for men and women, and it might surprise you how they sound. There are some fantastic modeling exercises for you to practice or use in your own teaching. We've had great feedback on both our Head Voice webinars, 12 and 13. Here are a couple of examples.

Hollie says "clear, concise, easy to follow instructions. Enlightening, enjoyable, clears up any misconceptions about head voice and falsetto. Elizabeth says "extremely informative, detailed, easy to understand, easy to apply, great teaching techniques. You feel welcome no matter what your previous knowledge". All our webinars are available and included in the Learning Lounge.

In Webinar 13, we invite you to play our favorite game: listen to the singer, imagine how they would speak if they spoke like they sang, do it in your voice, then sing it in your voice without changing a thing. 

Top tip, use a comfortable pitch and start on one note, then sing their song, then sing another song they haven't yet recorded. How would that sound? It's a fantastic exercise for group classes. You could even spend half a term on it. You can access the Learning Lounge and more than 50 free previews at bit.ly/VocalProcessLearningLounge

 

so we thought as well as a telling you about what we do, we'd also tell you about what others do that has inspired us. And we both were avid podcast listeners, aren't we? 

Yes 

Yeah. So this week's inspirational moment is from the podcast of Dr. Rangan Chatterjee. And he is interviewing his colleague, Dr. Ayan Panja, both of them have their own podcasts, which maybe you'll put in the notes here Jeremy? 

 We'll put them in the show notes


What's very interesting about this. If you hop into 32 minutes in, Dr. Panja is talking about having had almost a panic attack that morning and what he did about it, how he used an anchoring technique , which includes sort of going into a meditative state and also humming.

And I think this is really worth listening to, because there's loads of stuff about the vagus out there, isn't there, but you know, this is coming from two doctors. And for those of you who may be suffering from anxiety and certain social situations, particularly at the moment or your students, this is a great technique to learn about.

So 32 minutes in, and the title of the pod is "Why disease isn't inevitable". 

Love that. 

Enjoy!

 

This Is A Voice, a podcast with Dr. Gillyanne Kayes and Jeremy Fisher. "This Is A Voice".