audiot

yay, that’s an easy one. just sing at the volume you feel most comfy with. case closed.

ok, the answer really is that easy but maybe i should get into the surroundings a little. i get this asked a lot, especially by guys who want to sing in a rockband. there’s loud drums, even louder guitars and who knows what else. so they’re trying to sing, find out they’re not loud enough, try to turn up the vocal track on the mixer but it’s already all the way up or the feedback is almost killing them. what now?

believe it or not, my guess is every singer has been through this/has to go through this – at least in loud music. and there really are ways to deal with it. the path most of them choose is to shout as loud as they can into the mic because that damn voice is just too soft. unfortunately that’s not only the most used strategy, but the wrongest as well. this will eat up all your energy in no time, maybe it will make you croaky but it surely is not good, or better: dangerous, for your voice. and by the way, do you really think it will make that much of a difference, loudnesswise? hehehe, that’s too cute….

in certain styles, drums have to be played loud to sound appropriate. i’m not talking about those heavy-hitters who never heard about sound, feel or touch – the good thing about them is, drums can become loud and louder…..to a certain degree. once that point is reached, they won’t get any louder – they’ll just sound bad. with guitars it’s a little different. most decent amps have way more power than one will need. one example, my Laney 100HS (or HL? not sure…) – about 16 years old – is a 100 watts amp top, fully tubed. it’s placed on top of a Laney 4×12 cabinet. the master volume goes up to 10 (surprisingly). i once tried to turn it up to 3.5 and thought i’d die right there on the spot. usually i’m playing it at 0.75 – i know, i know, those things don’t get louder once they’re turned halfway up, just more distorted but i say anything more than 2 is just plain useless because you’ll not be able to stay in the same building. so what about the walls of amps and cabinets you often see on big stages like this one (ha!)? i’m really sorry to destroy your dreams but those are all fake. you’d be amazed and maybe a bit disappointed how clear and soft a really good stage sound is (and how rare as well….). at least i was. on stage you need to hear what you’re doing, not get killed. the power is for the audience – that’s what a p.a. is for.

anyway, my point is as a singer under normal circumstances you’ll simply have no chance of winning the loudness race against your bandmates. an exception might be a professional p.a. in the rehearsal room but that’s hardly the standard i guess. and even then it would not be very wise to turn it up until you’re louder than the others.

you’re facing more than one problem here:

• the voice is the strongest instrument when it comes to expression but regarding volume it’s weak compared to the others.
• it needs to be in front though
• singers usually have the worst equipment of all bandmembers (more on that later)
• the standard rehearsal room sounds like complete crap
• it’s harder for singers to hear themselves
• feedback
• egos (here they are again)

because this category is meant as some kind of a lessons-collection, i want you to think about this first. can you come up with ways to solve those issues? at least try, i’ll prove you wrong tomorrow ;-)

take care

sorry, but sometimes i get the strong urge to just throw something out there:

singers, memorize those lyrics !!!

there’s nothing more ridiculous and shameful than someone on stage reading from a sheet or, even worse, a whole folder. it does not only show that you have no idea what you’re doing, in my opinion it’s also like insulting everybody in the audience, slapping spitting them in the face. maybe they even spent their hard earned money to see you there and you don’t even think it’s worth learning a few lyrics. show them a little respect. and, let’s not forget, you’d only need to learn them once. i’m often amazed that i even remember all those maiden- and priest-songs i learned inside out when i was 15 or even younger. brains are cool.

but besides looking stupid and as so-not-pro as it gets, there’s some other reasons as well. it’s not coincidence that we say ‘to play an instrument’. the idea is to know your part well enough to be able to play with it, improvise, do what you want – this is art, not some freaking reading-out-loud-contest. being yourself is the only way it works (this can be good or bad news ;-) )

being able to play is a wonderful thing but it requires knowing your part (except free improvisation of course) and, even better, the parts of the others as well. this will take you up to the next level.

and to all non-singers and singers who know all of their songs (covers as well…). the next time you see someone who brings a folder to the stage, point at him and laugh out as loud as you can. that’ll teach them!

…where were we? making a plan, right? i hope that was clear enough because it’s really important and, by the way, producers do that as well. it’s not just a rookie-thing.

i mentioned discipline and calmness as good habits already and i’d like to get more into this. i wanted to title this entry (part I to be precise) ‘good manners cost nothing’ but then i drifted off (again)…

i found out that one of the most important things in a studio is to be nice and easy to work with. no ego at all! no ego at all! no ego at all! maybe i’m repeating myself myself. the studio people work there. for you it might be anything but for them it’s work. so try to make things easy for them and they will be thankful. they have the power to make it sound good (or bad for that matter), so becoming friends is a good thing. and one more thing: they do this every day, so who knows better how it works? ask them about recommendations, maybe they want to do a certain song first, maybe they don’t like the take you really dig. another take would take about 5 minutes, discussing about it could easily take 10… as long as you’re not a pro yourself, who really knows about studio work (in which case you might not have read this post anyway…), let them do their thing – it will pay off…

and of course rule #1: relax !!!

recording in a pro studio can be a cool experience or it can be stress for anyone involved. i’m no star and i haven’t been to pro studios hundredth (is that even a word?) of times. but when i was there it was just great. we all had lots of fun and enjoyed ourselves the whole time. now, why’s that you ask. many musicians remember studiowork as something terrible. they go in and panic because it’s something new or different and every minute costs money. every take costs money, every mistake costs money, every break costs money…

it seems to me many musicians have no plan when they go into a studio. so they start with maybe the drums and want to make everything right – it’s gonna be a record so it has to be perfect, right? then they realize this takes way too much time already, so they hurry up with the next drumtakes – no more perfectionism, that first take wasn’t too bad… the later it gets, the worse it becomes and in the end they spent their money, they have a recording they don’t like, everybody’s angry – maybe even the band falls apart – and none of them wants to see a studio again. never – ever. i’ve been through this as well…once. but it wasn’t a pro studio, i was still impressed though. it was my first recording experience at the age of 16 or 17. it looked like a pro studio to me then but today i know the cd would not have been better even if we had a plan… but these things happen so we can learn something.

back to the plan. you should be sure about what you’re doing in there. you could rehearse the whole thing. sounds silly? well, it’s your money… practice it so you get an idea of how long it might take. this can only be an approximation of course but that’s ok. you need an idea. setting up the drums takes time. they’ve got a drumkit there? fine, but it still takes time to adjust it to your drummer. maybe it needs tuning, maybe there’s a problem with the mic placement, maybe…

does your guitarplayer know what he/she wants to play? i mean really know? including solos? and is he/she able to nail the solo in 2 takes? some guys absolutely want to throw in that fancy lick and think that they’ll mysteriously manage to do so although it never worked before. i will not even bother writing about guitar sound…

now might be the right time to discover that bass and keyboards don’t work together the way they should? think again, figuring out new parts definitely doesn’t belong here. make sure your arrangements work not only in your muddy sounding practice shed. you might be surprised how different it sounds when you suddenly can hear everything. practice somewhere else for a few times and – most important of all – tape yourself !!!

once again, time ran out – so we’ll meet again for part II

this is one thing i already mentioned in this entry. but it’s so important i thought to write something about it again.

no sweat, this will be a short one. once again it doesn’t really matter if you’re making music yourself or if you’re ‘just’ a listener. in the first case getting into it will make you a much better bandmate and musician as well. if you’re the latter, looking into different instruments, one at a time, makes you able to get the most out of any performance.

just go through your record collection, pick an album and listen closely to one song. then pick one instrument and make the second time you listen to the song about this instrument only. pretend, it’s only this one instrument that plays the song, the others are background noise (not much of a teamwork advice now, is it?). this should help you separate the single sound-sources. if you picked the drums, you can even go further into concentrating only on the hihat for example…

the idea is getting to know the single ‘voices’ that make the choir. did you know that a bell (those big thingies hanging around in churches) does not make the sound you hear? it creates all sorts of frequencies and the mixture of those is interpreted as the tone you think to hear by your brain. so the whole is more than the sum of its parts. and the same goes for music. but to really get into it, understand it and to be able to create it yourself, requires knowing the single parts. i’m not a bell-builder (or however these guys are called) but i’m pretty sure you need to know how that specific sound is achieved in order to design such a thing, especially if there’s more than one bell in the same tower. so get to know the parts to understand how it becomes the whole. think about the decisions the musicians made while recording that song and about how a change in those decisions would affect the song (what would happen if the bassplayer would lay down smooth long notes instead of slapping through that part?). this will teach you a whole lot about music…

so there’s differences between playing live and in the studio. another example: while playing guitar, i tend to pick/strum too hard. live it’s ok, it adds a little something i like to the sound but it also is kind of a bad habit that gets me in trouble when i’m trying to record my playing. if i didn’t mention it already (and if you haven’t figured it out yet), i’m not a very good guitar player. live i get by, but recording is quite a challenge for me. so i’m really glad i developed some good habits too over the years. one of them is discipline, another one ease or calmness. there will be entries about good and bad habits in the future, so i’ll leave it at that for now. my point is, it’s very important to deal with the fact that different situations require different strategies. this might be something everyone has to experience on his/her own but there’s at least some things that work for all of us. and the most important one: tape yourself !!! maybe you heard that one before, i heard it lots of times. if there is such thing as a single most important aspect in becoming a good musician, this one might be it. come to think of it, taping oneself should receive it’s own entry as well…

i’d like to end this series of posts with a suggestion, or call it an exercise: if you’re a musician, try to figure out what differences in your playing do you make between live and recording? do you make any at all? and if yes, why? if no, are you sure it works that way? listen carefully.

if you’re a listener only you could become a much better one making the same exercise by listening to albums. compare studio- and live-recordings of the same artists. dynamics and precision should make a good starting point. see what you can come up with…

alright. what i wanted this series of entries to be about simply was the fact that different situations (studio vs. live) require different ways of playing/singing. on a stage for example, a singer often tries to brim over with power (or better: tries to appear so), even at the expense of precision. the audience loves power and in a live situation, usually, no one realizes if a note was a few cents sharp (shhhh, let’s keep this a secret). saving energy is another very important factor on stage (as well as in everyday’s life – please do care about our world !!!!!) because the singer needs to be able to make it through a long evening. while in a studio it’s all about precision and you can waste as much energy as you want (if it helps the sound), because you just can take a short break a few minutes later. and again this applies to other instruments. drummers tend to hit harder on stage – and play a bit faster – because of the adrenaline…and to the crowd it just looks better. but during recording, hitting too hard is not the way to go – it kind of kills the sound.

so studio would mean jekyll – live would mean hyde, right?

hmmmm, that seems too easy. when i’m on stage doing covers for instance, it usually is a set of 4 hours. so while trying to provide seemingly endless amounts of power, i need to be aware of how much energy every single word costs if i want to keep it up til the end of the last song. practiced long enough, this pretty much happens automatically but is still a rational (can something be automatic and rational at the same time?) process, seems not very hyde-ish. and of course, a recording of pure sanity might not be very catching…

this entry has no conclusion, i guess, but hopefully still provokes some thoughts.

i can’t really explain why a sound works when you’re right there but not anymore when you hear it on a record. maybe it has to do with the fact that microphones ‘hear’ things a lot different than the human ear does. every time i tried to record some guitar and this problem occured, which pretty much means every time i tried to record some guitar in a somehow distorted way, the solution was simple: less distortion. this always worked and i have no idea why. it didn’t really sink in yet because i’m still making the same mistake over and over again and maybe always will… if it’s distorted guitar, i want it to sound bad, really bad. so i turn the distortion knobs hard right….and soon become frustrated because it just doesn’t work that way. going for a mid-position provides a usable sound but somehow that doesn’t satisfy me.

this time it was a bit different though. instead of miking an amp i recorded a clean track and tried to apply some lots of distortion afterwards. and again it didn’t work, even worse, it already sounded horrible before there were any other instruments. and again, less distortion – cool sound…

i’m not sure if this goes for all instruments, it sure does for vocals. with the voice, though, it’s another kind of ‘distortion’. it’s more like pressing too hard, trying to force the voice into sounding like you spent the whole night drinking whiskey and smoking cirgarettes. and this can be a cool sound if you know what you’re doing. if not, it’s just stupid. it causes damage to legions of singers every day and it doesn’t sound cool at all – more like ridiculous. if i had a nickel for every time i laughed out loud into another singer’s face who tried to do that. it just appears to me that this is rather unpolite, is it not? wow, i seem to be a real p in the a sometimes :-|

now i realize i’m drifting way off. although this is an important point as well, i think, it’s not what i wanted this entry to be about :-) duh. but at least it was quite a journey from playboy models in supermarkets to not enough distortion in singer’s faces. ha!

so there’ll be a third part to this as soon as i finish collecting my thoughts…..

did you know that playing an instrument and playing an instrument (the voice is an instrument too of course) can be two very different things? and i’m not talking about different types of music here. think about a guitar player in a band for example. can you imagine that he/she’s playing the same part of the same song in two completely different ways? sure, you may think, the normal and the unplugged version. you’re thinking, i like that, but it’s not what i meant. i’m referring to the good old difference between playing and recording. some of you might think ‘what difference?’, some ‘only beginners make a difference there’ and some maybe ‘wow, that online-picture of this playboy model sure looks sweet’. well, it’s not that easy. and the ‘online-picture-guys’ have the perfect example right there. because believe it or not, that girl looks a lot different when she’s on a trip to her local supermarket. ‘how the hell does he know what picture i’m looking at?’ you might think now but that’s ok. it’s the internet, everybody knows everything about you, get used to it.

but back to the music. when the guitarist i mentioned above plays a song during rehearsals or maybe on stage, it’s different from the way he/she plays in a studio. i came across this many times as a singer but never really realized it. the first time i was in a professional studio the recording guy told me about dos and don’ts, what i should care about and so on. i was quite nervous so i payed attention, didn’t try anything and just layed it down – as simple as i could and that made him very happy. he then talked a lot about others who came in, played the star and tried to impress him with all sorts of things that usually went terribly wrong and sounded like crap afterwards. i didn’t think about that too much back then because it was a great experience and i just felt overloaded with impressions. but even without thinking i kind of adapted to this. on a subconscious level i knew that singing in recording situations requires something else than shouting out to the crowd.

through the years i thought about this every now and then and yesterday i experienced it again while recording a dry piece of guitar for re-amping. for my new project i’m messing around with sounds right now so i recorded some guitar piece without any amp or effect (but with some noise reduction and compressing) into the mac and then tried to apply different ways of distortion etc. to it. it took a while to discover that i was going at it the wrong way. it’s a hardrock tune, so i wanted a hardrock sound – as tough as it gets. when i’m playing live or during rehearsals the gain and the drive knobs are always on ten. i’m not using any effects though, just a tube amp with a separate overdrive channel. and i loooooove the sound. but i tried to record it on different occasions and it sucked to ridiculous lengths. when we taped the whole band with one mic hanging from the ceiling it sounded great (the whole band, not just me…) but recording that same guitar sound in better quality and mixing it together with the other instruments makes it terrible. but ‘why’ i asked myself – why?

damn, i can’t finish this entry now because time slipped away even faster as usually – so you’ll have to bear with me. i’ll be back tomorrow….

alright, that’s a tough one.

first of all, a blog can’t teach you how to breathe in all it’s details. now you may think ‘there he goes again with all that get-a-teacher-stuff’ but since you already seem to understand i’ll skip it.

so why am i writing about breathing? because there are simple aspects you can learn by reading this entry and practicing a bit:

1. breathe deeply into your belly

if you’re looking pregnant – way to go! down there the air has the most room, no bones in the way. breathing into the ribcage is not that efficient because of…well…the ribcage. look into the mirror, if your shoulders move while you breathe, you’re doing it wrong. the shoulders need to be relaxed. by the way, that’s the reason why so many people who work in sitting positions at desks, computers etc. get problems with their neck muscles being hard as stone in the evening. think about it, we’re breathing about 21.000 times a day (it depends of course, but that’s a number to work with…). that means, if you’re working 8 hours, you move your shoulders up and down about 7.000 times. do it 100 times right now, come on….notice something? so keep the shoulders relaxed, you don’t need them to breathe.

2. breathe in through the mouth (yes, i know…)

you’re right of course. usually breathing in through the nose and out through the mouth is the best way, because inside the nose the air gets cleaned, becomes warmer and a little wet – preparations for better use later. but for starters it’s a little trick to see (or hear actually…) if you’re breathing calmly and steady. open your mouth just a bit and suck the air in. the idea is to make a little breathing sound. that way you have perfect feedback about how calm and relaxed your breathing is. if it sounds like you’re freezing to death, no good. it should be more like a smoking-a-joint-sound, not that i would know how that sounds – someone told me once. and by the way, smoking is just plain stupid. as soon as you’re familiar with breathing, you can use your nose because from then on it really is better.

3. the correct rhythm to breathe

this depends on the song. but it’s not really complicated. think of it this way, every songwriter has to breathe as well. so there are breathing gaps all over the place, usually more than you need. there’s exceptions of course but listen carefully, look at the lyrics and you will find enough breathing pauses. singing is a way of exhalation, so it’s natural to have a good balance between in- and exhaling, amountwise. for example you sing for three measures and then you inhale for one measure, so exhaling is slower but the amount of air should be about the same. this would be one exercise: listen to many, many songs and find out when the singer breathes. if you have the lyrics of the song, mark those breathing points so you can see if there’s a pattern (hint: there is). if you find even more gaps where breathing would be possible, mark them as well (maybe in a different color so it doesn’t blur the pattern) visualizing is a good thing. there’s about seven patterns that fit onto (almost) every song but let’s not get too technical. i only show my students those patterns to let them know how to think breathing. as soon as they get the idea, those seven patterns aren’t mentioned anymore – they’re just a stepping stone.

4. how much air

when my students start, they usually get short of breath very quickly, but as soon as they start to think and breathe in patterns, it gets the other way around – they have too much air inside their lungs and don’t know how to get rid of it. it’s all a matter of efficiency. the more efficient you manage to turn air into a tone, the less air you need. and if you breathe regularly throughout a song a lot of air gets accumulated and that’s a problem. having not enough air only means you have to sing a word shorter or maybe leave out one ‘baby’ or ‘yeah’ and there you go. having too much air could soon result in not being able to sing anymore. you’re feeling like a balloon ready to blow. so always before you breathe in, get rid of the air still inside you. imagine the air can only be used once and then becomes spoiled. so if there’s air left after you sang a line, breathe out first and then in again. you can get the air-rest out with the last word you’re singing as well, just sing this last word more ‘breathy’. soon you will be able to inhale the exact amount of air needed to get you to the next gap plus a little reserve. don’t ask me how, your body just knows…

one more tip: use the whole breathing pause for breathing. if you finished inhaling and there’s time left, inhale slower. don’t stop breathing, inhaling and exhaling (aka singing) need to become a constant circular motion.

i don’t want to go over the top with this subject, so that’s it for now. remember those are just some simple rules and tricks. check them out and if you’re running into any problems, just ask through a comment right here – this will help others as well. i kept this quite general so it’s of course no learn-to-breathe-right-in-five-easy-steps-guide but it should get you started nonetheless.

go breathe