Tag: singing lessons nottingham

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Meet Mark’s Students – Gon Pan & Down In One

Hello! Welcome to another blog post where we feature one of my awesome students – this week we’re going to meet Gon Pan and his band ‘Down In One’.

When Gon first got in touch to work on his voice, he explained he’d been in a lot of metal bands before, and had often done a lot of screaming duties in those bands. While Gon still loves that music and it’s a big influence on him, he was wanting to become more a singer and less of a screamer… and so we set to work. Continue reading “Meet Mark’s Students – Gon Pan & Down In One”

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A complete artist at work – Ryan Adams Lucky Now

Quick one this time!

I was working with one of my favourite students (Mike) on some guitar-y songs, and how to meld singing and guitar playing together, and we got talking about songwriters who do this really well.

John Mayer is a great one, Chris Cornell is pretty cool too, and there many others too numerous to mention, but today I wanted to highlight Ryan Adams.

Ryan Adams

Way back in the early 00s, I remember my Mum buying a copy of ‘Easy Tiger’, one of Ryan Adams’ earlier albums… and I didn’t ‘get it’ then. I Was more interested in heavy rock and intense guitar solos (rah!) at least at that time.

But now the songwriter scene is MASSIVE. EVERYONE and their Mum is a ‘singer-songwriter’… how many of your friends have ‘singer-songwriter’ on their Twitter account?

I’m not knocking it! It’s just what’s trendy right now.

A seminal singer-songwriter

Yet, despite it being a big thing now, Ryan Adams is (IMO) the earliest example of a true singer-songwriter. Someone who wrote lots of songs (good to great songs) and performed them… and he’s still going. To me, even though I didn’t appreciate him at the time, he is one of the earliest ‘seeds’ of the singer-songwriter ‘movement’ (if you can call it that). Someone who knew what he wanted to produce, didn’t say no, didn’t give up, and kept doing what he wanted. Now loads of others are doing that it’s not quite the pioneering genre it once was (every episode of Scrubs and House ended up having a singer-songwriter song playing it out… now every mobile and energy company advert has a singer-songwriter in the background), but cast your ear back 12-13 years, and you’ll find Ryan Adams doing it all from scratch even then.

As an artist, I think Ryan Adams is the real deal. Someone who knows what he wants, and spends time developing and crafting it.

See for yourself…

Just watch this fab video of his song ‘Lucky Now’. It’s not got the most incredible vocals in the world, it’s not ear-shredding guitar, but it hangs together as a complete piece… and he sells the piece. To me, this is the sign of a complete artist, and beginning singer-songwriters could do far worse than to learn from Ryan Adams and take a leaf out of his book.

Remember to watch this version…

Ryan Adams Lucky Now

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Do you hate the sound of your own voice?

A student brought in some Mika this week – and I hadn’t heard this song in ages! So I bookmarked it for sharing this week… and as I was mulling it over, the following thought dropped out onto the blog post.

So, do you hate the sound of your own voice?

This is a really catchy song but certainly not in vogue with current trends and preferences in popular music. It reminds me of certain Queen songs with the melodies, slight aggression, more pristine vocal quality… while also reminding me of some Take That in terms of the emotive feel and production on the track, and still also reminds me of the Scissor Sisters in terms of the slightly eclectic song writing.

Mika’s Vocal Styling
What I find really interesting about Mika’s vocal styling is his use of a much lighter higher range where most singers then and now go for “RAH! MORE POWER EVERYWHERE” (to quote the Eagles song Life in the Fast Lane ‘everything, all the time’).

It sounds a little quirky (note how I avoided the word ‘funny’ there!), but it definitely works.

So Mika clearly does not sound like many other artists out there, and clearly isn’t copied by many others, and yet he had (has?) a successful career doing his own material – yet I know 99% of singers would feel rubbish about themselves if they sounded that way or as different as Mika does, simply because they don’t sound like singer X, Y or Z.

The Lesson to be Learned
A lesson to be learned here is that even if you don’t quite sound like singer X, Y or Z, you should NEVER dismiss what you are doing as artistically unuseable. You may not have found exactly your niche or style just yet, but if you keep developing and trialling what you’ve got going on, you’ll start to develop something all your own.

This lesson is a really useful one even for me. As someone who hears a LOT of singers every day of every week, I encounter singers with voices that I am tonally envious of. Seriously. It’s the ‘grass is always greener’ syndrome. And it’s 100% normal to feel like this from time to time. The challenge is to not be discouraged by this, but to harness that into pure motivation to keep working on our voices, developing strengths AND weaknesses to create something wholly your own… much like Mika has done – unique and standing apart from many other singers, where others may well have given up.

So, are you going to give up? Or are you going to keep going?

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Meet Mark’s Students:

John Jeacock & Merrick’s Tusk

In 2013, I got the chance to work (and continue working with!) some fantastic vocalists (like John Jeacock, who you’ll meet about below!). I’ve had the chance to help fix some issues for them, and often help them capitalise on some great things they are already doing. So I thought it would be fun to ‘meet’ some of these guys… so this week, it’s time for something a little different.

Let me introduce you to one of the fantastic singers I’ve been working with over the last year. Continue reading “Meet Mark’s Students:

John Jeacock & Merrick’s Tusk”

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Quickest Route to Your Goal

Want to find the Quickest Route to Your Goal? Let’s get a plan together first

I attended the National Entrepreneur’s Convention at the end of this week, and it was jam-packed full of stuff to make your head hurt and your business grow. I love what I do, and I’m always looking for ways to make it better. One of the things that was discussed was ‘quickest routes’ or rather is this ‘the quickest route to your goal’.

In business the goal is to do stuff better to make money, but the key to this is to find what people REALLY want and give it to them – better, bigger, and faster. And you can apply this in your work as an artist or songwriter, hell, even musicians can learn from this!

Here’s a key phrase for you that has been in billboards everywhere this summer promoting educational institutions.

A dream without a plan is just a wish.

When someone starts up a company, the successful ones do so having already defined where they want their business to be in the long term. They then work backwards and work out what steps need to be taken to get to where they want to be. Not only that, but the goal is to engineer it so that each step isn’t immensely difficult, and so that each step takes them the QUICKEST possible route to their goal, step by step.

A key thing that comes out of this principle is:

A person without an ongoing plan is just playing at running their own business.

And in our world of music, I would say this:

An artist or songwriter without an ongoing plan is just playing at being an artist or songwriter.

Any success is hit or miss, and unfixable failure is rife. They don’t learn or grow from their mistakes, quite frankly because they often don’t know they are making them. They think that ‘working hard and hoping for the best’ is … well…. the best they can hope for.

What utter nonsense.

Wherever you are, whatever your skills, whatever your dreams. You NEED a concrete plan. This gives you a scalpel to cut away the nonsense that is encumbering you, enables you to say ‘yes’ to the right things, ‘no’ to the wrong things, and get up and move forward again in the wake of failure. It really is your most powerful tool, knowing what your goal is. Without it, you have no destination, and (therefore), no direction (i.e. you’ll be going nowhere fast without one!).

You need to sit down and work out what you think success needs to be for you… because it’s this that will nail down what you really want from your artistry.

What happens once you understand your goal?

Once you define and understand your goal, you can break that (perhaps) seemingly impossible journey into achievable progressive steps. From there, you can identify what step 1 is. And with every step you should be asking myself – ‘is this the quickest route to your goal?’ – what one step will take the minimum amount of effort for maximum gain? step 1 should to be that simple step, but that takes you the furthest distance from step 0 (i.e. nowhere!) towards your goal.

What is the quickest route to your goal? Only you can tell (though give me a shout if you think I can help – I do this pretty often!), but you need to understand your goal before you can craft a plan! But always ask yourself:

So ask yourself, what is the quickest route to my goal?

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How to practice singing: Part 1 – The Mind-instrument connection

How to practice singing?

It’s been a while since I did a series, so here is a 3 parter to help you understand how to better work on your voice.

Every student I teach asks me how to practice singing, and which songs they should work on… and it seems quite straightforward a question, and sensible to ask such a thing. The difficulty is, the answer isn’t always helpful unless you understand how effective voice training works.

The difference between the voice and every other instrument.

There IS a big difference between the voice and every other instrument that most singers and musicians alike don’t fully appreciate.

How to practice singing - the voice is different from guitar...

When someone wants to take up guitar, they go and buy a guitar. When they buy that guitar, the guitar itself has already been built – it’s finished, end of. There are some adjustable elements, but the instrument itself is ready to go from day 1 to make the right sounds.

The work that a student of guitar (or piano, trumpet, any other instrument you care to name) is almost exclusively directed at establishing a mind-instrument connection, whereby their musical thoughts are translated into notes played by the instrument. They need to learn the right movements to make the instrument play the right notes in the way they desire. The instrument is not a part of our body, so we need to learn how to approach it and respect what it can do. We don’t have any similar movements in our day to day lives to map over to the way we need to approach guitar or other instruments. We are learning these from scratch to develop that mind-instrument connection.

But no work is expended by the student in order to ‘finish’ the instrument – it’s already done! If there is a problem with the instrument, the student buys a new one or finds a professional to fix the instrument. The instrument itself is already complete and (barring any modifications) the sound of the instrument is the sound of the instrument.

The voice is the opposite.

The voice, on the other hand, is NOT a finished instrument. It requires work to develop. Sure, some people have voices/instruments that sound pretty good almost from the moment they open their mouth, but EVERYONE needs to work on their voice to make it better than it already is.

With the voice – unlike guitar or other instruments – we already possess that mind-instrument connection – we use it every day and it is part of our bodies. There are no mechanical hand movements or the like that are alien to normal every day use that we must incorporate into muscle memory, but we operate the voice every day regardless of whether we are singers or not. This gives us unparalleled connection and control over our voices when compared with other instruments, even when we are unskilled singers.

But the voice as an instrument itself is not actually fully built when we start, or even as we progress as singers – it is a never ending process. The voice is an instrument formed of muscles, cartilage, and various other bodily components. The challenge lies in co-ordinating the voice efficiently for use in singing. As such, we are actually building the instrument at the same time as learning to play the instrument. We must learn to co-ordinate our vocal cords in a predictable and repeatable fashion, across a range of pitches, volumes, styles, and to be able to produce a great tone every time.

Like a master luthier making a guitar, it takes time to learn how this works, and it takes dedication to ingrain co-ordination and tone into your voice as an instrument.

So how does that affect the way we should practice?

The real question should be (in my opinion) ‘how do I effectively train my voice’, and the answer, like anything to do with muscles in your body, is with prescribed exercises. If you go to the gym and consult a personal trainer, you will be given a prescribed set of exercises based on the condition of your body when measured against your goals. You can do exercises without a personal trainer, but serious athletes and gym-rats know that only amateurs do it themselves without ever consulting a skilled personal trainer. Personal trainers know their way around different people’s bodies and how such body types will respond to particular exercises. They can help you achieve your goals often many times quicker than when a gym attendee would go by themselves.

The same truth is applicable to training your voice. You need exercises that are geared up for your voice, and you need to practice those exercises regularly. These are not just random scales to improve musicality (though these can be helpful), but are prescribed by skilled voice trainers based on the state of your voice and your desired goals. These tools act as spanners, screwdrivers and wrenches to get inside and tweak the very muscles of your instrument… to co-ordinate them better, to enable you to sing with more ease, less strain, and better tone across your range.

So when you practice, it’s important that WHAT you are practicing is leading you to a state where the condition of voice further enables you to deliver the vocal performance you are after.

If you have any questions about this, just leave a comment below and contribute! Stay tuned for part 2!