I’ve had a number of lessons in the last few weeks that needed us to take the time to stop and visit the original melody of the song.
This is completely normal, whether in lessons or outside of lessons. Whether you are an experienced singer or brand-spanking-new to singing, it’s 100% part of the process to have to break down the melody and get it right.
Now some of you will be thinking “well, DUH Mark – of course I know that”… well, just hold on a tick, because I would almost put money on you not doing this to the fullest extent… and robbing your voice of quality in the process.
Trust me, this is a goodie. Keep reading.
The reason I bring this topic up is because in certain lessons, the student was not truly singing the full melody, but they were convincing themselves the melody they were singing was fine, when the reality was anything but.
In some cases, the singer was rushing to get to styling the song. In other cases, the singer had been singing a prep’d song for so long, they thought they had it nailed and had stopped thinking about the melody… and what they were singing had drifted from the actual melody. And in some cases, the singer had just plain-old not learned the melody to the passage they wanted to sing well enough, but had convinced themselves they had.
Why do I bring this up?
In a webinar series I attended with jazz singer Monique Thomas-Ottaviani, Monique talked about the importance of learning jazz standards from the original sheet music. Why? Because there was no definitive version of jazz standards… if you went to listen to a recorded version from a particular artists before learning it from the sheet music, you would not be getting the true melody that was originally written. Every singer imparts their own style, no matter how little they style the song.
Jazz singing has a lot of room for improvisation. Monique will happily tell you this. BUT! One of the biggest things she mentioned was that unless you “sing the damn melody”, unless you RESPECT the original melody, you have NO RIGHT to solo/improvise with your voice. That’s right. Unless you respect the melody, you haven’t earned that right.
When you take this to it’s logical (and correct!) extreme, you need REAL discipline to learn the melody and express it to it’s fullest before you start deviating and styling.
There is real power in singing a simple melody.
This idea of respecting the original melody is something I see a lot in contemporary musicians generally nowadays (not just in singers). Guitarists want to constantly solo without learning chord progressions. Drummers want to play in advanced time signatures without learning how to play ahead or behind the groove in perfect time. Bass players want to slap all their bass lines without ever learning to hold down a simple groove.
And – thanks to X-factor, The Voice, and various top-level solo vocalists – singers want to style the heck out of their songs, before they ever really learned to sing the melody well in the first place.
But when you REALLY learn the melody. When you really commit to singing that melody, and you’re not just hitting the right note in the right place, but sustaining that note with tonal clarity like a great wind instrumentalist would… man, that’s something else entirely.
THE TAKE-HOME MESSAGE
Instead of spending all that time on styling, finding inordinately complex riffs, manipulating the words to enact some Adele-esque style, putting the song in an impossible key, etc, try spending THAT amount of time milking the original melody to eek out every ounce of quality. Sustaining notes, adding vibrato, understanding the power of space when introduced into a melody, experimenting with varying dynamic levels… and these things take ordinary melodies and turn them into something extraordinary.
That level of discipline, that level of serving the song, that level of “non-ego” in working on a song often negates the need for excessive style. All those things that people strive to do, e.g. riffing, extreme range, etc, suddenly become insignificant when you hear someone “sing the damn melody”.
And this does require real discipline. It requires not giving in to ego, or getting distracted by shiny things, and really committing to singing the damn melody. Trust me, when you hear a great singer start to sing, and they do this, you’ll understand why all the other stuff is no substitute for the real thing.