Singing and Instrumental LESSONS! :)

Here's a "one take"-done on my phone!
Lovely day in a local park.
Got lucky on it.

Originally/totally Acapella.
I added some kooky 60's Style effects.
(No Autotune )

Then around 2 months later, someone added ALL the Instrumentation!
Chris
P.S. Decided to "keep Tamplin" ($19/month)... For at least a while.
Then supplement free Tips/Hints with Casey and Stoney on their Channels.

Everyone should encourage Vincent R to speak on singing technique and pratice aswell as his experience on youtube! I am certainly hoping for that.

I’ll start with this, I’m not a fan of video programs for lessons. They can certainly help and can be useful, but ultimately you need someone there who can be objective and help to address the issues you personally have. You need that additional set of ears and eyes to catch the things you are not seeing or hearing; posture, tension, etc.  I think you can do fine getting remote lessons through zoom, or in person. I’ve done both.

Studying technique is a bit different than maintaining it.  Once you’re at a place where you understand your core technique you’ll have exercises to help keep you on track when you are just trying to stay in shape between gigs and such.  My wife and I had the same major voice teacher, so I’m lucky. I can run things by her and she can objectively tell me if I’m over covering, or singing too bright, or not bright enough, etc.

I’ll comeback when have more time to discuss vocal pedagogy and my own studies. 

I started my career as a pop singer. The first teachers that I had were my mother, who herself was and still is a fantastic pop singer, and my grandfather was a crooner. Both had professional careers for a time. There are some great photos of my grandfather, Carmine Lombardo, singing with Guy Lombardo, his brother Carmen Lombardo, and their band (no relation, which they all got a kick out of). It also can’t be understated just how good my mom was as a singer. Her voice was a bit of a cross between Linda Ronstadt and Karen Carpenter. My grandfather had the same management team as his friend Vito Rocco did. Vito's stage name was Vic Damone. So my training is a pop vocalist started off strong.

Somewhere in middle school I started to make the shift from singing pop to singing more musical theater. I went to the Long Island High School of the Arts where I studied musical theater. Eventually, I went to Adelphi University where I double majored in theater and music with a focus on vocal performance. It was there I had my first voice teacher who started me off. I also studied with a well-known contralto to who was known for her roles in Gilbert and Sullivan rep for the Doyle Carte opera company.

Despite all that experience, I still had no idea what the heck I was doing as a vocalist. I studied with two wonderful singers, whose lessons really couldn’t sync into my brain. I was basically singing through pure will and natural talent. After college during the early part of my career, I was lucky enough to study all three of the popular Italian styles of singing. If that last phrase, confuses you, welcome to the club. So many people refer to the Italian school and it can often mean very different styles. I apologize for the length of this post, but I wanted to make sure people understand the different styles, and the pros and cons of each.

The Italian School

He learned vocal technique from his father, who was an accomplished tenor. He himself started his career as a baritone and frequent accompanist of his father and his father’s vocal students, before finding his passion for teaching and passing along the technique that his father talked to him. Garcia is noted as the creator of laryngoscope. He used this device to observe the larynx while singing in both himself and his students. He came up with certain determinations based on his research that we still use to this day.

He determined that while it is not harmful to stay in your middle voice while crossing your break, it is much easier to start the cover a little early and move up through your vocal range, than to make the switch higher up. This is why you hear rules like the cover must start on specific notes. The style is characterized by a very relaxed face and a focus on letting the Larynx do the work, and letting the jaw lower to let the sound out. Vowels stay fairly pure without modification in this style until the cover. As we ascend in the style, we use the Italian “i” (ee) and “u” (oo) to cover the sound and allow the voice to continue into our upper range. It is characterized by a warm sound with big round tones. The low and middle voice is very relaxed and has a heft to it, sometimes described as core.  The top voice produces a fast powerful vibrato we call squillo.


The Belcanto School

Lamperti himself was not a singer. He was a vocal pedagogue. You find this trend in the style of singing a lot. Many of the teachers are choir masters, accompanists, and teachers, but not necessarily singers. The style of singing has two main focuses; breath control and forward placement. This style when taught today often combines exercises of forward placement from Lamperti with exercises from the French masque singing. However, with this Italian style, we still always start with the open throat. It is the combination of the open throat position, forward placement, and large breath support that create a smooth and natural sound.

In the style, we start with the breath; the appoggio. Anyone who has studied breathing for voice may have heard of belly breathing or back breathing. In this style we utilize both simultaneously. We breathe deeply into the back, allowing the full expansion of our chest cavity (don’t raise the shoulders. lol), and then use the diaphragm strip at the top of our stomach area to lean (appoggiare) and push the air slowly and controlled in order to support the sound through big high notes and long legato phrases. Lamperti speaks extensively about this type of breathing. This breathing can also be found in the Italian school, but Garcia does not emphasize it as much in his writings as Lamperti did. It is a cornerstone of this style, which needs to be understood in order for it to work.

This style strives to be more of an extension of your speaking voice. Singers of the style often have a very natural, sounding voice without sounding in any way artificial. Lamperti states we sing on the lips. The face is not relaxed as in the Garcia method. The face is often producing a sideways oval or slight smile. Practitioners of the Italian school will note that the sound is more spread, and not as round. This is what this style goes for. We start with the Italian vowel “a” (ah) as in the Italian word “Stai.” English translations of his book use the word “father,” but that world can change drastically in the English language depending on where you are. From the Italian “a” we infuse all other vowel sounds. As we move up through our break the “a” becomes more of an “o” (uh). The rules about when to start the cover are not as stringent. Because we’re keeping a slightly more open sound, it’s easier to sing through the break a bit higher before making the shift.

Another of the key techniques in this style, particularly for tenors, is the use of voce faringea (pharyngeal voice), or mixed voice. The mixed voice is a head voice coordination where we can utilize placement and support to produce a full voice quality sound. For tenors, as we ascend to our very high notes we can make this shift on say a Bb, B, or C which will allow us to sing super high notes with relative ease. It’s important to keep the sound forward, the support from your breath, and to drop the jaw. Something to note, because we are keeping more open quality to the sound and forward placement, the larynx will rise as we enter this coordination. This connection to the head voice is very evident in singers of this style, especially in the top voice. Singers of the Italian school use a similar coordination as well; Pavarotti, Gigli, etc, but it’s a key component of the Belcanto school and worth mentioning about it particularly.

These days this style tends to be used by more lyrical voices. It seems to lend itself to that sound. It tends to sound smooth and sweet, but also be very loud and cutting through the orchestra.



The Melocchi Method

In this method which shares a lot of the Italian school technique, the key is the vowel modification. In our low middle voice we keep the relaxed face and we lean the sound toward the “o” (aw). As we ascend into the cover, the vowel becomes an “u” (oo). While in the covered sound, we also try to create a square mouth with a low jaw and snarl. Overall, the sound of this technique is extremely heroic and dramatic. It lends itself well to the heavier Italian rep.


I’ll follow up this post with some references where people can get information about each of these styles, and to talk about who I trained with for each of these styles.

My vote is primarily Lamperti for you.
Chris

Thanks again.
This stuff is great!

I "like" my Voice.
But LOVE to sing.
Especially live.

Live Webinar with Tamplin on Zoom soon.
Will let you guys know how it went.

EDIT: Tamplin's lean is "Ah" and Forward singing. For Popular Music orientation.
He's way into Vowel Modification.
Chris
P.S. Overall good group meeting.
He's planning 4 more...
First Saturday each month.
11AM to Noon Pacific Time.
For his Monthly Subscribers.

I’m not sure how much you’ve experimented with AI voices, but I feel bad for my pop and rock singer friends.  It’s pretty scary, particularly because of the industry’s acceptance and over reliance on Autotune.  So far, I’ve only heard one operatic AI I that made me stop. My guess is it only worked because they recorded it first with someone like me, and then had the AI make it sound like Pavarotti. 

I come at this from the opposite end. My first vocal “lesson” was on my first day in school. I had just turned five years old two days before, and the music teacher tested students for vocal ability. She played a scale, I sang that scale back to her. Within a year I became a soloist in my school’s choral group. What was cool about it, was we actually did gigs. We traveled to other schools to perform. During our first rehearsal I was up on the stage and she was nearby. After singing for a little while, she said “ sing to the back row”. I did that and learned how to project my voice that way, long before microphones were being used.

Two decades later I was writing and producing music for radio and television commercials. I had hired some back up vocalists for a project, I felt a little embarrassed by my lack of experience, because one of the vocalists had worked with David Bowie many times and it was clear I didn’t know exactly what I was doing.

Fortunately, it took only 4 months to fill in the gaps I needed to fill musically by studying with Dennis Anderson. Dennis was a protégé of Leonard Bernstein’s, and first trumpet in the New York City orchestra that Bernstein conducted. He had decided to become a piano teacher and live a simpler life and raise a family.

Simultaneously I tried sessions with many of the big shot vocal teachers in New York at that time. I kept a few tips from each of them. One was Kaity Agresta, she has become well known for coaching Bon Jovi and Annie Lennox. Mostly she just passed along a few exercises she learned in college and bullshitted her way through sessions.I learned everything valuable she had to offer in 15 minutes and then decided to drop the whole idea of seeing a vocal coach. So for many years I would just do some of the simple exercises before having to sing on any tracks, and it served me well.

When I came to learn many many years later was that it was the quality of communication and not the sound of your voice that mattered the most. The greatest singers were in fact the ones you believed. You can’t really say singers like Bob Dylan, Robert Plant, Neil Young, Johnny Cash or Tom Petty were “good” singers, but in a way they were the best singers because you believe what they were singing. So if I have any goal when doing tracks now it is to communicate the feeling I want to communicate, I don’t use any pitch correction because it’s all about connecting to other peoples hearts isn’t it.

Wow, thank you so much for sharing. And showing us with the same piece of music definitely helps!

If I were to guess, I will guess Melocchi method. Listening to the maestro himself Mario Del Monaco, he reminds me of you. But what do I know! Certainly have the chance to learn now though, haha!

I will revisit this tomorrow.

Btw, very last video is unavailable to me. Maybe restricted in my country or something.

I have a whole practice routine that I'm planing to share through a video. I've taken lessons in the past for several years, I've also did the Brett Manning stuff for years which also helped.

I did decide to try to improve my singing like 1 1/5y ago. I had a warm-up routine that took me an hour (or more) and after that I had a "record ready" voice where I felt that I could perform more then think about singing haha. With kids, full-time job etc that was simply not sustainable, I needed to be able to perform within half an hour atleast otherwise I would never get anything done.

It's so easy to get caught in exercises which is of course good but you really need to put it into practice. There are so many vocal coaches out there that might be good at doing liprolls, runs and whatnot but has quite bad singing voices haha..

My routine is that I have a DAW template where I have a few songs loaded. Two tracks with vocals. One is muted but has a waves tuning plugin on so I can actually see in real time how I perform and then I adjust and experiment on the tone, how to approach certain notes etc when I sing songs. I've figured out allot through this, mainly where to start mixing headvoice and transition the voice. One main issue that I've solved is my second bridge which feels quite solid now and I also think I've improved my overall tone quality.


Ps. Vincent was kind enough to lend me some tips which helped last year. I still don't think I will ever be a real tenor haha.. ds.