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To illustrate what makes a truly great song, I want to use an analogy.

Jimmy Carr

There’s a comedian in the UK called Jimmy Carr. He is a one-liner comedian, and while his comedy tends to be quite crass, he had something very relatable to say about crafting great jokes.

In an interview, he commented that there are certain comedians whose material is quite lack-lustre, but that they work their butts off with on-stage antics to make it funny. These are the often highly energetic comedians, typically a bit slapstick. They rush about onstage, imitate the actions in their jokes, etc. They generally put on a highly physical performance and energetic output to generate the laughs. If the person just stood still on stage, no laughs would be generated.

Build the comedy INTO the joke
Carr’s preference however, is for building the humour into the structure of the joke itself.

In his view, a well-crafted joke is one that you could write down on a slip of paper, pass to someone who is a non-comedian, and they could read it out with no knowledge of the punchline, and everyone would laugh. Continue reading “What Makes a Truly Great Song”

Well, it’s that time of year again. Illnesses of all shapes and sizes are going round. I’m on my second consecutive weekend by being wiped out by something or other.

I only recently sent out this regular article on how to bounce back after illness. I don’t like re-sending articles so I thought we’d go over the different illnesses that you can catch that affect your voice, how to distinguish them, and some suggestions for attending to them.

CAVEAT/NOTE: I am not a medical doctor, and I’m also trying to cover a lot in a very short space. As such, I’m going to talk in broad generalities to get the message across. We’ll group more similar things together, and discuss the range of symptoms you’ll generally get. Almost all of these will benefit from paracetamol to take down infection/inflammation.

1. Colds / Sinusitis

We’ve all had colds, so I don’t need to linger on this. Runny nose, snot/mucus either out the nostrils, or down the back of your throat (post-nasal drip). Some facial pain, swollen eyes, etc. If it lasts a while or gets bad, it can become sinusitis, i.e. an infection of the sinuses. This can sometimes requires antibiotics to aid recovery. Continue reading “How different illnesses affect the voice”

I wrote this article a little while ago on how sleep benefits your voice and your brain.

I thought it also worth discussing how poor sleep can impact negatively upon your voice, so you can recognise the signs. I’ve copied the relevant bits from my other article, so we can make reference to the consequences that occur when we don’t sleep well.

1. Mucus

When we use our voice every day, it suffers wear and tear. A bit like if you work in a job that keeps you on your feet all day every day, your legs acclimatise, but they are tired by the end of the day.

The vocal folds are remarkably small, so the tiniest tear or swelling can yield a tremendous difference in vocal quality and (most importantly) how your voice feels to you. If you want to reach high notes with no strain or difficulty, even a little bit of swelling or vocal fatigue that hasn’t recovered from the day before can just shut down any chance of that.

The chief protection mechanism our body deploys against wear and tear, is mucus. The vocal folds are meant to have a thin layer of mucus on them to protect them during normal wear and tear, but if we don’t get the necessary recovery, the body deploys MORE mucus.

This is why after even one night’s poor sleep, you may notice your voice is gunkier than normal the next day. Continue reading “How Poor Sleep Impacts Your Voice”

This was a topic I covered with a client recently, so I wanted to share the discussion with you here.

With some singers, if I add even half an octave of range to their voice, they naturally sing into that range as a matter of course. But with other singers, I can add an octave of useable range, but they sing more or less exactly where they did before. Why would this be? Does this imply there’s more to singing high than JUST range extension?

The short answer is ‘yes’. Here’s the longer version.

Brief Summary

The way the technique I teach works is this: by improving someone’s vocal function, the automatic by-product is extending range, better tone, stamina, etc.

Here’s a brief summary of what I mean by good vocal function, so that you don’t need to read a myriad of other articles I’ve written on this:
– To sing low notes the vocal folds need to contract and thicken; and to sing high notes they need to stretch and thin.
– The vocal tract also needs to shape the vowels precisely to enable good interaction between the folds and the tract.
– The more precisely and smoothly these two aspects are co-ordinated by a singer, the more range/tone/stamina arise as a natural result.

There’s a little more to it than that, but this covers the basic underpinnings.

Here’s the rub

Improving the instrument is a huge part of the battle, obviously. If the notes aren’t available, you can’t sing them. If they don’t feel easy or good to sing, you then don’t want to sing them. By improving range, making singing feel easy to do, the singer is free to explore singing as they wish to do it.

What generally happens as we remove their vocal ability (or lack thereof), the sensibilities of that particular singer tend to reveal themselves. Like teaching an aspiring painter better techniques and fluidity in their painting, the more they can express whatever is deep within them.

This is where we can see divergent outcomes from singer to singer, as so much of this is down to their personality and their internal sense of aesthetic. Continue reading “Why some never learn to sing higher, even if they increase their range”

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”