audiot

a while back i wrote something about imitating your favourite artists to gain insight and learn from them. one thing i should add is that you should never be afraid of ‘losing yourself’. you will always sound like you, so it’s just cool to figure others out, add them to your toolbox and therefore create an own style out of all sorts of mixtures between the tools you already have.

i’ll give you an example. Tuck Andress (one half of Tuck & Patti), an amazing guitarplayer with a completely unique style and sound developed this very style by trying to imitate whole band arrangements on his guitar – not with freaky sound effects but just his way of playing.

enjoy and become motivated :-)

…and check out his/their other stuff as well. it’s really worth it…

hopefully, yesterday’s entry was understandable to you. i’d like to add some points though. it’s possible that you encounter a song well within your range but you still have problems singing it. maybe you play this song at the wrong position in the set, you might still be recovering from the one before… maybe it’s a new song for the band, so you play it five times in a row during rehearsals and that’s why it becomes a problem… maybe the band plays the song higher as planned because it’s easier to do for the others and you might not even know this – it’s been known to happen. or maybe the song itself is just hard to do, apart from the height. there’s a bunch of songs that are very hard for me heightwise although other, even higher, songs are a piece of cake…

you can try to eliminate as much problems as possible by simply drink enough (water!) while you’re singing, take deep and calm breaths during guitar solos, between songs etc., by not forgetting to breathe in the song’s rhythm, by wisely placing the song at a good position inside the set. make sure you play the song in the key planned. find ways to pitch a song a few steps up- and downwards without changing it’s tempo (today that can easily be done on a computer) to be able to provide correct material for your bandmates. it’s a lot easier to hand them a copy of the song in the key to be played than giving them the original version and telling them what to change. musicians are stupid, so make it as easy as possible for them :-)

it sometimes can help to pick the highest note of a problem-song and compare it to the highest note of a song you’re able to do. use a guitar, keyboard or whatever to identify the note. you might find out that the problem-note is lower than the other one and that can be a motivation. as i mentioned, some songs seem to be very high but compared to others they aren’t, they’re just hard to do…

certainly, this doesn’t work for every song. sometimes a song really is too high and then you have no other choice than to sing it your way or not at all. come to think of it, finding your way should have its own entry sometime.