Bad and Wrong Singing Lessons
The "salt fat acid heat" approach to singing
I’m recording a lot of vocals this week. So this is what’s on my mind.
I’ve noticed more and more how people often will fixate unnecessarily on certain aspects of vocal performance, and not in a way that’s very useful.
Recording engineers tend to get obsessed with mic choice and vocal chain, because those are the easiest things to control. Good singers tend to obsess over whether or not each note is in tune. People who are not really good singers like me tend to obsess over whether the take feels “emotional” enough. The truth is: all of these perspectives are right, but none of them are right on their own.
I’ve often seen the “good rule” repeated online, which goes something like: good song + good performance + good room + good mic = good recording, or in other words all of these applicable factors should be taken into account when recording. Which, sure, is pretty much true, although taken as a “rule” it kind of misses the whole point, which is that at every stage your job is not to select the best mic, book the best-sounding recording room, etc. but instead make choices that are workable for the end result, i.e. choosing a mic that’s right for the singer, recording in a sub-par room that might feel better to perform in, and so on.
Anyway, what I want to talk about today is the most important part of the “chain”: the performance. Because everything else is fairly controllable and concrete. The performance, however, especially with vocals, is like 90% psychological and maybe 10% technical (that 10% does matter though, and don’t let anyone tell you differently). And how can you possibly control that? What should you focus on: pitch? Emotion? Timbre? Tone? Was that last note flat or was I pushing too much air and sounding too harsh? Do I need to work on my ear-training to recognize pitch better? Do I need to practice scales? Do I need a more expensive microphone?
I think this kind of evaluative thinking, which more or less works for everything else in the chain (which recording gear, room, mic, etc.) instead leads directly to hell when applied to performing. But there are ways to circumvent this. You may be thinking, yes, I know all about this! You just have to trick the singer into “letting go” or whatever. Tell them to think about what the song is about and really feel it. And sometimes, if the singer is technically solid, i.e. they have good control over their pitch and tone, this can work. At the higher levels of the music industry this probably works every time.
But what if the singer is, like me, someone who can’t deliver a solid, well-intonated performance every time? If you tell them to focus on pitch, they’re going to laser-focus on being in tune to the exclusion of everything else, leading to a less inspired performance (and probably overshoot and wind up being more out of tune than before). If you tell them to focus on the emotion (which is basically the conventional wisdom nowadays), you might get an inspired performance, but without some clear pitch information to anchor the ear a lot of times that performance will fall flat. It’ll sound okay, but you won’t know why it doesn’t quite feel good.
Here’s a rough blueprint of a better way to think about singing into the mic: think of it like mixing on an old sound board (or cooking, maybe, if you’re not familiar with a sound board).
Think of your vocal as not one singular thing, but several ingredients that you can mix in together. Start with a basic, unforced version of whatever you’re singing. Sounds pretty good. But—could we get some of those notes a little more in tune?
We don’t need them all to be in tune. But record yourself and listen, not for bad intonation, but for where the notes seem less believable—less present, almost as if you’ve moved back from the mic. Those are the ones you need to pull into pitch.
How to do this? Easy. Find those notes on the piano, and match each one with your voice, one at a time. If you don’t have a piano, use a guitar (and tune it! Please!). Even if you don’t know where the notes are on the guitar or the piano, you can still do this with trial and error. Practice singing each syllable/note of the line against the piano/guitar until the notes lock together in unison (if they’re not “locked,” you’ll hear a sort of tension—beating).
I find it helps to hear if I’m in tune or not if I sing very nasally. Like, Bugs Bunny territory: “nyeahhh”. Obviously I’m not going to sing like that when I do my recording, but do this while you’re learning the notes of your melody and you’ll find it much easier to tell when you’re in and when you’re out. Remember, you’re just teaching your body the muscle memory of where those notes are—the action is happening down in your throat, in your vocal cords. Don’t worry about tone while you do this.
Practice going from one note to the next until the notes that were previously not believable feel anchored. It should feel like you can lightly touch on those notes without reaching or pushing too hard, and they will start to come out more easily.1
Okay, now to work on tone. It’s a story for another time, but in this day and age, singing really loud in an untreated bedroom is probably not going to sound very good—all the reflections of voice on drywall get harsh really quickly. One option is to treat the room or construct a vocal booth with blankets.2 Another option is to change how you sing.
Instead of volume, think attitude. I promise you can get all the intensity you’re going for if you a) anchor yourself in pitch as described above and b) practice mixing in a little bit of attitude, or emotional intensity. For me, that actually sometimes means getting quieter and breathier, but in a way that produces a more exciting (to me) texture. For you that might mean something completely different. I also think about blending in a bit of nasal tone (but not too much). This can take a few tries to get right—at first it’ll seem too intense.
Start with your natural voice, just singing in a way that’s pretty close to how you speak, unaffected. Then, as if pulling a fader up on a board, mix in a little bit of pitch. A little bit of attitude. A little bit of nasal tone. Too much? Back it off until it feels right.3 Try adding a little bit more chest if your voice is feeling too thin. With practice (try changing one thing, then listen back) you’ll be able to feel each of these adjustments in your body and you’ll start knowing whether a take was right before you even listen back (which is great, because playback is bad and will make you obsess over details! The less you do the better).
When it starts to get good, you’ll feel warm. I’m afraid to say the things people say about “warming up” are TRUE, and you won’t get to your best performance until you’ve been singing for 20 minutes. But the good news is that if you spend this time shaping your vocal subtly by mixing in little bits of the elements you want it to have, by the time you’re warm you’ll pretty much have it together and you’ll be able to get where you’re going (instead of hyperfocusing on pitch or “emotionality” and straining your voice, after which it’s impossible to recover until the next day).
After you get your final vocal comp together, put the song aside for the day. You’ve done good work and you can’t do any more right now. Don’t bother mixing it in perfectly yet. You can start on another song instead if you have it in you.
The next day, listen back—just once ideally—and then mute those vocals and do it all again, this time with a lot less thinking. Now you can “let go” and just think about what the song is about. Because you’ve practiced and you’ve done the work to sculpt the vocal sound you want. By the end of this new set of vocal takes you should sound, if not the way you’ve dreamed of sounding, at least like you’re fully engaged and communicating the song.
One more thing to add, and this is crucial, is that if you ever get lost in any of this, just throw everything else out the window and focus on groove. Vocal groove is incredibly real, and important. The best singers in the business are not the ones with the best pitch or tone but the ones with the best pocket, who understand intuitively how to push and pull on the beat to produce a dynamic and engaging performance that locks with the rhythm section. A good singer can make the band sound better. Even if your pitch is a little out and your tone is a little thin, or harsh, if you’re singing in the pocket (which to me feels a bit like “riding” the song: never too far out in front, never too far behind, just moving around on the beat a little to keep things moving) your vocal will sound more connected to the music.4
The key is to defocus any one thing and forget about getting any part of the performance to be perfect—instead, center your natural voice and use your peripheral awareness to briefly focus on the other elements you want to bring in. Don’t worry about your pitch, just check in with it, and mix in a little more (or less!) as needed. Once you have the notes down and in your body, it’s just another ingredient you can play with.
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Thanks for reading. I hope this is useful to anyone who’s trying to put the pieces together. Sorry it’s so long—I thought about breaking it into two halves, but I didn’t want to leave you hanging since I don’t get into the actual “how to” until the second half.
Next week… more new music? More instructional bullshit?
To me it feels like I’m drawing an angular shape in the air with my voice, and I want all the lines (notes) to be parallel and an equal distance from each other. If that visual helps, great. If not, maybe you have one that works better.
Depending on the style of music, that might be the way to go—there are some things that just demand a certain amount of volume and sound pressure. For indie rock, though, you can probably get away with singing a little softer.
If the fader metaphor isn’t working for you, think of it as seasoning. You start with a broth, you add little bits of flavors you like. Remember: dead-on pitch is a flavor. Not a necessity. There are some great out-of-tune moments in lots of songs that have become hits. That said, if you haven’t ever thought much about pitch, it might be something to work on.
A lot of times this is what sound engineers are going for when they add delays and reverbs—to connect the vocal to the music by way of rhythm.