Author: Mark JW Graham

It struck me that I have recommended quite a few songs to singers this week. Some of these I only came across as clients have been working on them, others through my own listening.

If you’re looking for some new song ideas or just to experience some new music – enjoy!

1. Rainy Days and Mondays – The Carpenters

Karen Carpenter was a wonderful vocalist with an excellent mixed voice. Her and other singers of yesteryear like Barbra Streisand demonstrate how good singers of that era were. Many of today’s singers would do well to tune into what they were doing to improve their own quality. Continue reading “Five Songs I Recommended This Week”

I go to a reasonable number of music events. I listen to a wide variety of different performers, at different skill levels.

What astounds me, is how often a crowd goes wild for something that is really not that great, and remains silent for music that is out of this world.

To be clear, I’m not talking about my own taste. It’s cross-genre, and not primarily about music I like. It’s the stark contrast between people who have clearly spent years crafting an exquisite sound, versus those who are just screaming loudly from a platform, and the disparity between how those are often received.

Joshua Bell

With that in mind, I want to share a short story from this article:

“Joshua Bell is one of the world’s great virtuosos, and one of the biggest names in classical music.

“And in 2007 he did some anonymous busking, as a little social experiment to see what might happen.

“It was 7.51am on Friday 12 January 2007, in the middle of the morning rush hour, when baseball-capped Bell opened his violin case and started playing, just inside L’Enfant Plaza Metro entrance in the busy centre of Washington DC. Watch what happened below:

Continue reading “Genuine Validation is Hard to Find”

I came across this video recently. It’s from an interview with author and investor, Morgan Housel.

There’s lots of good advice and insight within the video, but there’s one minute that I think is absolute gold – not just for investors, but also for singers. I’ve time-stamped it for the most relevant minute, but here’s a paraphrased transcript for you:

“My strategy is to be average, but for an above average period of time. Not only will it achieve the goals that I have, but over a long period of time it will put me in the top 10%. Continue reading “Being Average for Above-Average Length of Time = Results”

I was having a conversation with a client this week about finding songs that sound good in their voice, and making them sound good. While we targeting songs specific to them, I wanted to try and collate my general thoughts on this into one article for them and others.

The Harsh Reality

There’s no easy way to say this, so I’m just going to say it.

Most people pick songs that are initially too hard for them.

What does ‘too hard’ mean? It’s much like someone trying to lift a weight that is too heavy for them. Sure, they might be able to force their body to lift the weight once or twice, or maybe make it feel OK once in each session. But in the long run it generally feels highly variable. Progress may also seem inconsistent, with a lot of two steps forward, three steps back moments.

In the same way, every song places it’s own unique demands on your voice. When those demands exceed your vocal capacity (i.e. what your voice can actually handle for sustained periods), you will encounter disappointment and frustration. Not every time, but often enough you can’t trust your voice.

This is generally a sign that the songs you are picking are outside of your capacity, at least at present. Continue reading “Making Songs Sound Good”

This topic is one that is discussed more or less every week in sessions. We do an exercise with a singer or work on a song, and the singer’s perception is wildly out of kilter with how it actually sounds.

Sometimes this is because they sang amazingly but the internal sensations seemed unusual. Other times they think they did a great job, and it really didn’t sound as good as they perceived it to be out front.

Why is this?

The voice is a tricky instrument to master, because it’s the only instrument in the world where the musician IS the instrument. The sound actually comes from inside our bodies. We hear not just the final sound out front, but we experience it with all the internal sensations as well.

It’s like being sat inside a piano as it’s being played. We are getting WAY more sound than the listeners. Some frequencies are accentuated more than the final sound, and some are diminished. It can be quite a difference compared to recording yourself and listening back. Continue reading “Your voice sounds different inside vs outside your head”

I had a discussion with a singer recently, regarding some issues they struggle with in their voice, and what they were looking to achieve.

In particular, this singer was struggling with the very basics of their voice. Yet they were frustrated that, after only a few months of vocal training, they weren’t just able to launch into Whitney Houston songs, without even warming up their voice beforehand – THAT’S an unrealistic expectation.

Many singers have these obscenely unrealistic expectations. These chiefly centre around:
a) what they think voices in general should be able to do
b) what they expect THEIR voice to be able to do
c) how much work it should take / how quickly they think they should be able to achieve such skill

Now, the obvious question that arises could well be “what makes their expectations so outlandish?“. Well, let me give you a look behind the scenes. If I give you a brief rundown on how voices actually function, what it takes to build a voice, and we are trying to do in sessions with clients, I think you’ll understand.

How the voice works (Abridged)

Basics
Your vocal folds are two flaps of muscle, mucus and ligament in your larynx (Adam’s apple). They generate all the sound you hear. To sing low notes they contract and thicken, to sing high notes they stretch and thin. At the base level, the ability to move smoothly from a shorter, more contracted state to a longer, more stretched state determines how smoothly one can traverse their range.

Next, the sound your vocal folds generate travels into your vocal tract. This is the portion of the throat between your larynx and your mouth, and is responsible for focusing and shaping all the generated sound into vowels. The more precisely one can shape the vocal tract into respective vowels, and the more smoothly that behaviour can be handled between vowels, the smoother one is able to sing across one’s range. Continue reading “Singers and Unrealistic Expectations”