hi this is Jeremy Fisher from Vocal Process and you're listening to the
musicality podcast ever wondered why some people seem to have a gift for
music have you ever wished that you could play by ear sing in tune improvise
and jam you're in the right place time to turn those wishes into reality
welcome to the musicality podcast with your host Christopher Sutton hi this is
Christopher founder of musical u and welcome to the musicality podcast today
I'm joined by Jeremy Fisher one of the cofounders of vocal process one of the
most impressive and useful websites for learning how to develop your singing
voice and sing better through blog posts live in-person training online webinars
books and even an app vocal process covers all of the most in-demand
topics for singers ranging from how to get started and sing in tune through
extending your vocal range through developing your singing style and even
passing auditions Jeremy himself has had a fascinating
career and one thing that made me particularly keen to speak with him was
that he was an instrumentalist first and foremost and I think that's given him a
particular perspective on the musicality of singing that's distinctive the other
component of that is definitely his focus on the science and analytical
approach to how the human voice works and how to improve your singing there
was a lot that I wanted to quit Jeremy on and I had to hold myself back a bit
so as not to produce an epic 5 hour podcast episode but we still crammed in
a ton of interesting stuff in this conversation we talked about how his
brain works as an expert site reader and the process of learning to do the same
thing yourself the trombone exercise that can help you learn to sing the
right notes and land on them in tune and why wanting to help singers led to
Jeremy discovering a love of having a camera stuck up his nose this is one of
those episodes that packs a whole bunch of different subjects and a ton of
expertise into a short conversation so whether you're an instrumentalist or
singer or a bit of both you're gonna take away at least one and probably
several really useful ideas and insights from this my name is Christopher Sutton
and this is the musicality podcast from musical u
welcome to the show Jeremy thank you for joining us today pleasure I would love
to hear about your early experiences in music because you've become a very well
respected and and well established a vocal coach with a range of fascinating
projects but as I understand it your early beginnings were not so much
focused on the vocal side is that right oh yeah I started as a pianist and so
playing piano and it was a very odd way of me starting to play because I was in
my primary school and the headmistress heard somebody in the corridor playing
the chime bars with all the right rhythms and all the right notes it was
very important to me that it was me very important to me that I got everything in
the right order and that everything was correct and she came out found who it
was and as it happened we lived across the road so she came across the road to
my parents and said if this boy must have piano lessons so my mother bought a
piano that was incredibly cheap and very bad it was six pounds at a time and it
stayed with me all the way through to getting into music college so I had a
terrible peons play I see and what did that piano learning process look like
for you it sounded it sounds like you had a bit of a knack for it from the
beginning I was an experiment so even at six I was an experimenter so I used to
just stand at it and pick tunes out and play notes and my mother wanted me to
have piano lessons with the local teacher and we waited a year for him to
have a vacancy for me when she was getting rather upset about it because
she didn't want me to learn both habits and I was playing quite a lot by then
was playing everything by ear I didn't know anything about reading music and so
she went at one night and she said I'm not coming back until I found you a
piano teacher and so I started piano lessons properly at the age of seven
which for a professional pianist is quite late and when I went for my first
lesson the music teacher said well I normally do 40-minute lessons but
because you're so young I'll just do the 20 minutes and my mother said I think
you'll find he'll want to do the 40 minutes and
and I now have even now I have a 40 minute attention span and was that
weekly lessons how often were you studying
there was weekly lessons and I devoured everything so uninterestingly I didn't
people used to say all you know you must do lots of practice I didn't actually do
practice in this in the usual sense of the word I played all the time I played
as much as I could and it wasn't particularly practicing it was just sort
of fooling around and trying things out and I did learn to read music but I
learned to read it very slowly mainly it was because I wanted to find out what
other people did having wrote music what the music was and I wanted to match what
was on the page with what I thought it might be so I learned to read in fairly
early on and then I just got as many music books out of the library as I
could just to practice reading just to sort of look at what was there and try
and put it onto the piano and try things out Starla's I was talented
I was playing better than artists but I was 12 so that was you know I was a
talented kid but there was certainly most of it was just I used to sit and
play and he never felt like work it never felt like I know how to practice
my scales I'm still not great at scales it was it's just that I really felt that
I wanted to find out what was there and I loved doing it mmm and I found it
interesting that you use the word experiment there that your your process
of learning it sounds like it was very much ear based but it was trial and
error you were experimenting to find the right notes and to find the right way to
play things is that right yeah yeah it's very interesting when I actually finally
got to music college I was 17 and I almost had to undo all the fingering
that I did because I just use anything that came to hand as long as it sounded
good it was fine and your lessons were they kind of traditional classical sheet
music reading lessons that took you through to music college or oh yes very
definitely you know we can do anything of a classic
and because my teacher worked out fairly early on that I liked targets so she put
me in for every exam she could find so it was always here's the example here's
the music learn that is the next piece learn that is the next piece learn that
learn the skills learn you know do all the oral texts do all the sight reading
so there's a very much geared towards exams and targets and in a way I sort of
I didn't do that at home I did the word I did enough work to make the pieces
work but mostly I would not play at home what I was supposed to be playing I
would just you know get other music and find out what it was so yeah it was well
when I started it was very much playing by ear was very much improvising it's
very much trying out by the time I got through to about 13 when I was doing my
exams I said stop - most of the improvising and I actually was doing
reading from then on so really from then on I became a reader I'm sort of I still
kept that going that I know do a lot of sight reading insight understanding
which is different mmm well that's something I'm definitely going to come
back to and ask you more about but for now you have to continue with the story
you got as far as music college and presumably pro piano was your primary
instrument it wasn't my primary instruments of
music College was oboe - that came out of nowhere
when did they ever start when I was doing a level music which was 14 15
the music teacher said the Casey played camera but you need an orchestral
instrument and I said brilliant I'd like to play the flute and they said we don't
have a flute we've got an over play that so I learnt the oboe and I learned it
really quickly because I already had the theory knowledge I already knew what the
notes were I knew how to read music so it was just a question of learning the
techniques of the instrument and I got into music College as a first study over
list I went to a college where they would let me do piano as well
as a sort of high second study and within two years I thought now but with
the open let's go onto the piano instead so I changed instruments onto the piano
course which is very unusual mostly you don't change onto the piano course most
of the piano courses so college that you change off it but I carried on with that
and then very early on I started playing for people so I started working with
people being a collaborative pianist and I loved that I loved working with other
people and I love making music with other people so I ended up studying that
full-time and when I left college I had graduated as a collaborative pianist hmm
and I love that term and I've been corrected on it before and you were very
polite over working for starting with a living were like I referred to your
career as an accompanist but tell it tell us a bit about why we should take a
laboratory a nurse rather than just accompanist sometimes it's a word thing
when you think about an accompanist you think about somebody who follows so
somebody who's with and subservient to somebody who's sort of trotting behind
the soloist and sort of supporting them the thing about collaborative pianist
when you're doing the work I I don't often accompany people I actually
sometimes I lead sometimes I support sometimes I pulled them back so it's
very much a given type thing and it's very much a zero or a trio or a quartet
ending a quartet concert in a couple of weeks time and so it's there's something
about collaboration where you are equal to your taken sometimes you take the
lead sometimes you accompany sometimes you just go with and I think the
fascinating thing about being a collaborative pianist is quite often you
have to work out what your partner is going to be doing before they do it so
this is sort of extrapolation that you're doing you get the shape of
something that they're doing and you're going in your mind all right they're
doing that shoot so they're going to go here or they're going to make that pause
or they're going to pull this up and I can feel what they're going to
before they do it and if I can do that I can do it with them
this is the thing about an accompanist if you can't feel it before it's going
to happen you're going to be late so it's a very different skill from pretty
much anything else I think and the thing about collaborative pianist is that the
repertoire that you do the choice of music that you do is vast
because even if I'm just playing for singers and I play for instrumentalists
as well if I'm working with singers then I'm working with opera singers I'm
working with concert singers musical theatre singers pop singers RMB I mean
I'm working with a lot of different genres all the time so you have to be a
musician who understands style and genre and then also can tune into people and
what they're going to do I love John yeah fascinating I think that really
paints a vivid picture of why you need such a good ear to be a good
collaborative pianist you know I think some people make the mistake of thinking
if the guy in the corner is playing piano while I sing he's kind of just a
backing track and I'll switch upon and he'll do his thing but as you described
it you know it can and it should be a real collaboration and a real joint
musical creation yeah how much does your co collaborator need to also have a good
ear and appreciate this you know if you're say and helping someone with an
audition and they haven't worked with someone who really understands that
collaborative nature of things and they think they can just stand up and sing
and go and pay no attention to you do they need to be saved into that same
spirit of collaboration ideally yes I have worked on a lot of auditions I
worked on thousands of them and when somebody does do exactly what you've
just described which is they walk in here's my version I'm not listening to
you I'm just gonna stand there and perform and walk off again and my heart
sinks and I just go okay it's the job that's fine I'll play the notes
underneath you thank you bye when you really get excited and when you get
things get interesting is when the person
you're working with comes in with some strong ideas they know what they want to
do but they're listening to what you do and they pick up on what you do and then
you can start to work together and you can start to get a flow going and this
is for me this is when music really works is when you get flow going and
sometimes you really don't know what's going to come out and things happen that
you don't expect and you go hey that was good and that that's when the real
that's when you're really in the flow and flow is very important for me I do a
lot of coaching on flow and how you get there to just briefly describe for
anyone listening who hasn't come across the concept of flow can you explain what
you mean by that yeah flow is okay a whole load of things
it's when the performance feels easy it's when the music is working it's when
what you're doing is working and it's very interesting because a lot of the
and there's more to it when I'm coaching singers in particular what you often get
is people going off of that looks really difficult or I've got a bad phrase here
and they come out of what they're doing and they start worrying about technique
for many technique is the work that you do behind the scenes the work that you
do offstage that you do at home and in a performance for me it's 95 percent flow
performance and five percent technique and what often happens is that people do
have a phrase that they go I'm a bit worried about this that's when you
switch your technique brain on when you're coming up to that phrase and you
go what is it that I need to remember to get this note or to do this particular
bit attuning and you do that you get it and that you can go back into your
performance flow and for me that's fine it doesn't have to be a hundred percent
flow and it doesn't have to be a hundred percent technique it can be a mix and
match so flow is when people sometimes get flow completely without any training
without anything and you know when you're going to when you hear someone
performing and you go that's nice I don't know how she's doing it but it's
amazing I didn't even know how she can do it twice but it's the next and the
thing about flow for me is if you know why you're there
what you want to communicate and what you love about what you're doing that
goes a long way to getting you into the flow State mmm interesting well I think
we'll circle back to this a bit later in the conversation I definitely want to
get your your perspective and expertise on your style as a singing performer in
particular and how you can develop the way you present a song or a performance
but before we move on to that I want to come back to something we were talking
about in terms of collaborative pianists expertise and we talked about how you
need a good ear but the other part of it I suppose is what most people I think
would think of which is you need to be able to sight read whatever is put in
front of you and you mentioned you kind of converted to sheet music reader in
your teenage years you must have become quite expert in it how did how do you
think about sight reading or how did you learn to do it at such an expert level I
think for me it's not about reading all the notes I think and that's really
important is actually about looking for patterns and the thing is that the more
you play and the more you just play around the more you start and noticing
patterns the more you play patterns the more you practice patterns and when
you're reading music I really am not reading the notes I am looking at the
patterns and I'm going is that about my recognize is that pattern in my
catalogue can I just look at glanced at something
and go oh that's the pattern I played before okay now I know what it is and
it's as fast as that if you reckon and that means that you're not reading a set
of 12 notes what you're reading is a writ of shape and it's a riff shape or a
run shape that I've done before and I know okay I know what that is so I don't
need to focus on it one of the reasons that I read well is I just look at a
page and I go recognize it recognise it recognize it recognize it that's
different and so my whole focus my whole attention goes on to
but I don't recognize and it means that I can read all the rest of it much
faster so that I can sharpen my attention on the bits that I've not seen
before work that out do it and then move on to the next shape and so much music
is about shape well so I guess that's a little bit analogous to what you were
describing in terms of flow where you need two modes one where everything is
easy and smooth and natural and the other way you have to kind of flip into
thinking a bit more carefully and paying attention to how you're doing what
you're doing learn about the examples of patterns you
would be just kind of clicking into and saying yep I know that sure if you think
about classical music then you're thinking about five no scales or eight
no scales so you've got and if I see that then I know what it is I know where
it is I know how it works if you're in beginning classical and you're looking
at something like Rossini it runs then you've got I know that because I've done
it before if you're looking in pot and you're looking at riffs they are based
on five notes girls five notes girls don't really exist in up so you've got
if I'm doing CD I don't play the e at all I've ever seen de or do the F
instead I know that that riff is based on the pentatonic scale I've done it
before I've seen it so I see a riff like that and it goes I know that shape I
don't need to look at I don't need to sit and work out every note one of the
things I think is so interesting and this is very good ear training by the
way is when you hear a singer doing an incredible riff and you go one of the
earth is she singing what an earth of those notes and you slow it down and I
actually do run riffs occasionally through a slow down
just a nap of some kind and you start to work out what the patterns are and every
riff is in groups so even if the person is singing a thirty to no riff it will
be groups of four or groups of six and you take each group by itself and you go
but I recognize that group have done that group before so certainly and in
fact I did a coaching session last week with somebody who said I never sing this
song because I cannot get the opening riff okay
play it play the recording right okay it's five sections each section has four
notes the first on the third section of the same but the second one's different
and that's the one you having trouble with so you break it down into little
component parts and what you normally find is those component parts of things
you already know because anytime you play stuff you're doing you're doing
patterns very cool so I think we can imagine how your brain is working when
you look at you know some complex piano sheet music and you know you're adding
it you're spotting the patterns you've seen them before there's a few that
maybe you need to pay attention to how do you go from zero to that is it purely
you know spending all day every day sight reading is it a conscious process
of thinking oh I'll add that pattern to my toolbox however how do you develop
that here well that I will that's such a great such a great question okay to
start with honestly is playing as much as you can it's just playing
it's not even analyzing it's just play so plaintiff ier
playing stuff from music playing however you want to do listening to the radio
trying to pick out what what the riffs are if you're a guitarist trying to pick
out what what the chord changes are so you're experimenting and the more you do
that the more you start to notice the certain composers have certain styles
certain singers have certain riffs that they do certainly tourists have shapes
that they always use and they may mix and match the shapes but they'll still
use the same shapes and you start even if you thought almost do it
unconsciously you start to pick out patterns that people are using and it's
really interesting because you can then those pants to somebody else and go over
there using the same pattern as well and always if you think about patterns for
me they're small they're little units the units of three four and five notes
they're no bigger than that and any runs any phrases any music has those patterns
in them and they're just sort of mixed around after all there aren't that many
combinations we can do you know music has been written for centuries so we
probably done most of the combinations by now and the same with chords as well
if you're a if you're a guitarist or if you're a keeper player
it's the same with chords there are certain chords that appear in music
styles so in classical music c e g c absolutely standard tonic chord and that
appears a lot and then you just play around with changing one of the notes in
the middle to see what difference that makes and you start to hear and tune in
to sounds and styles and tones and Tamra's a nice word that's for me that's
a great way to build a catalog you can do it consciously but I actually think
doing it unconsciously like that is much better and more fun super cool so you
were developing this particular expertise as a collaborative pianist and
expert sight reader at some point you made the bridge into the world of
focusing on singing how did that happen
was it easy College I was playing a lot for people I was playing for their exams
and I was coaching the singers just really because I could and I used to say
to them I couldn't believe that they couldn't understand how their music
worked so I get really quite cross with them and I could call for heaven's sake
it's it's like this I mean you just just seemed like that and do this pattern and
there you go and they were like oh thank you that's brilliant that works really
well and I thought oh I've just insulted you and you liked it there must be a
career in like so and I love working with zippers and I
started working with singers as a music coach as a vocal coach and I think
there's a difference between a vocal coach and a singing teacher technician
so I started working as a music coach I was coaching them in music and shapes
and understanding and performance stuff and I got more and more involved and
more and more working with sinners but because I was an instrumentalist to
start with and I have an oboe and I could take it all apart and I could undo
the springs on it and my mother came out one day about a whole oboe and on the
patio on the porch front and she was horrified together
I couldn't understand why singers didn't know how their instrument worked and of
course it's obvious because it's inside first of all you can't see it and
secondly you can't take it back to the shop and change it so you have to a lot
of the thing about singing is how it feels to you as well as how exams and
sometimes how things feel to you are not necessarily how other people hear them
so there's a sort of filter that has to go in to go this is how it feels when
it's correct or this is how it feels when it's in the right context I know it
feels odd but this is what people are telling me from outside is working so I
was acting partly as a yes that's working no that isn't and partly as a
this is what actually what you're doing physically and that's working it or the
abort isn't so let's change it and find out what's going on and then I started
studying much more and I started studying vocal anatomy and physiology
and went into the voice clinics and started watching Khurana I love having a
camera up my nose love it because you're my opposite of always get me in the
voice clinic with a camera when I wasn't unhappy
so you could see inside and now I could see it I could feel it I could hear if I
could record it in film it and so I was starting and then I started using
computer voice analysis so I could start to see on computer what was going on and
it's all to do with how repeatable can you make whatever it is that you're
doing because repeatable means comfortable and repeatable means
confident if you know what's going to come out when you're in your math you're
confident estimating I I'd love to know if you can think of some things you've
learned through having a camera up your nose and doing computer analysis I would
have been totally opaque to you without those tools at your disposal yes
loads okay with the camera nose and one of the things and it's a really
interesting one because it's the difference between what you believe and
we've been told and then what you actually see happen
so in fact on on the vocal British YouTube channel I've got a two octave
slide that I do with a camera up my nose so you can actually see my vocal folds
moving you can see my lair it's changing shape changing Heights doing all sorts
of things and I was always told that you should
for instance keep your larynx very low the high notes and then I did to the two
octave slide and I watched my larynx come up towards the camera and I thought
oh I didn't think that was supposed to happen but it just did so and actually
sounded fine and I was in control so well that's interesting and then there
was another one where I was told that when I flip into falsetto there was a
particular movement that must happen so I did and it didn't and I went oh so
what I'm being told isn't necessarily what's going on and I'd much rather go
with what's going on and what I see and then translating back into what I feel
so some of it was about undoing myths the things that I've been told happen
that actually don't and summit with the computer boys
training one of the fascinating things about doing stuff on computer on screen
is that you get instant feedback because it's analyzing the audio signal so you
can see it the moment you've done it so I was doing things like how you start
and finish your sound which for singers is a big thing
yeah with piano you press the note and that's it and then you let it go and
that's it I mean yes of course there are subtle variations of how much energy you
use that how you press it and how loose your arm is nevertheless you can still
see yourself pressing the Mojo with sinners you actually have to produce the
whole note yourself you make the whole thing it's a combination of vocal fold
vibration and airflow and you have to coordinate it so I started doing
different ways of starting a sound so we've got the glottal offset which
starts with quite a sudden it's not an explosion exactly but it's very clear
and very precise and then I took the breath onset ha ha ha which has breath
before it so that's a completely different feel and then I did the glide
onset which is a sort of little gentle glide up and then I started doing all
the other stuff like the oval which is huge fun and used a lot in only in
country western and started doing the Cree concept which is used a lot in pop
and all of these can be seen on that on the computer screen and it was so
interesting to match them up so using the computer stuff I got really precise
in what I was doing because I could always see what I just done it's great
mmm very cool so you moved into a vocal coaching and you had this expertise
inside reading so I can't miss the opportunity to
you specifically about sight singing because it's a very different skill I
think to sight reading as an instrumentalist how do you approach that
or how do you help singers to approach that it is absolutely a different skill
yes the thing about as I've just said and think about singing is that you
can't see the instruments so you can't put your finger on something you know
you can't hit the right fret or you can't hit the right note you have to
create the whole thing and what I often do with people who are having problems
when they're singing is tap into another skill that they might have so my skill
my sort of basic skill is as a pianist so I will finger the notes on my leg
while I'm singing them I'll actually it's almost like I'm playing the piano
on my leg and this is just the physical aspect of getting the note out of your
head and out of your voice and into another part of your body that really
helps with some people I will actually move them up and down the room so a
higher note goes further forward and a lower note goes further back so against
the physical is the physicality of getting you out of your voice and into
your body and putting it somewhere else if you're
a guitarist I'll get you to finger the fret imaginary fret you playing air
guitar while you're singing it really helps it is bizarre because you're
moving something in a way that you can't do when you're a singer and is that
about kind of giving people and in a calibration for where pictures are in
the scale or why does that work so well I think it is although you've just hit a
very interesting topic which is what is pitching and what's tuning and we can
definitely go there but I think it is I think it's getting something too it's
getting people to physicalize something have a favorite exercise with tuning or
even pitching which is the trombone exercise if you think I've got to set
this one up if you think about a piano and you think about going higher and
lower notes on a piano you are going right
to go higher and left to go lower because the keyboard is in front of you
if you're thinking about playing a wind instrument the higher notes get closer
to you as you raise the fingers and the lower notes get further away from you as
you lower the fingers if you're thinking about a violin the higher notes get
further closer to you as you go off the string and the low notes get further
away from you as you go down string if you're thinking about a cello and the
lower notes get nearer your ear and the higher notes get nearer your chest so
that we're looking at different directions for pitch trim the voice is a
sliding instrument which I know is quite a strong statement to make but because
in a voice what you're doing is increasing the speed of your vocal fold
vibration whenever we sing the middle sim submittals see on piano your vocal
folds are vibrating at two hundred and fifty two hundred and sixty two times a
second anything that place middle C is two
hundred and sixty two times a second anything ruler on the end of the desk
violin string guitar string anything in order to go to a higher pitch you have
to speed up those vibrations when you got vocal folds clapping together you
have to speed those vocal folds up so actually you have to run through every
single note in order to get there now either you slide or you jump but you
still have to speed everything up the voice really is a sliding instrument
that's what it's designed to do it's designed to slide around and when we
want distinct pitches we just stop a sound or we slide really fast so you
don't you the listener don't really hear the slide in between unless you want to
feature the slide which a lot of music starts doing so you're looking at
sliding around and the best instrument for that is the trombone so I work with
people to sing that while they're mining playing the trombone so the lower notes
are further away from you and then you bring the slide up as you
go higher so behind let's get closer to you and that works really well for a lot
of people because again it's physical izing what pitches outside of what
you're doing very occasionally it doesn't work so we reverse the slide
load pictures at the top high pitches further away from you and sometimes that
works to be honest I don't care which direction you think pitch goes in if you
think up-and-down that's fine if you think left to right that's fine I've
done diagonally I've done behind me and in front of me whatever works for you is
fun but pitch really is such an interesting concept because in theory
it's about icing this number of vibrations per second and I mean to you
but is so much more complex about because if you think about where the
vocal folds are there in your larynx or voice box and then at the bottom of you
throats basically they can be vibrating 262 times a second but if you're holding
the wrong shape in your mouth you can make them sound flat if your shape is
too big it's going to boost all the dark harmonics in the sand and it will sound
flat you're not singing flat you're just making the wrong shape this is the other
thing about a voice and it's it's different from every other instrument a
voice can change its shape and size while it's making the sound and that's
astounding so so much of what you're doing is about finding the shape that's
right for the sound right for the pitch right the way you are in your range
right for the music and there's lots of things that's why in a way pitch is
contextual it's got a context so for instance an f-sharp in D major is the
3rd of the chord it's got a particular tuning but you play that or play or sing
that F sharp in G major and it's the leading note and it's got a different
feel so different context is different feelings actually different tuning
as a singer if you're singing in opera the f-sharp will have a particular
tuning in G major but if you're in barbershop is flutter because barbershop
has a completely different tuning system to classical Western music and so on and
so on and it's like that's when it gets really interesting so the moral of the
tale is you may not be in tune you just may be singing the wrong genre I like
that way of looking at it I'm good after to hold back from there
to go out with me because I my Master's dissertation was on automatic
transcription of vocal melodies a big part of that was how do you pick apart
the voice from a pop song when you've got all of the instruments in the mix
how do you tell which one is the voice when you're a computer program it was
very much about what you just described that you know the human voice is
compared to any other instrument it's pretty much never on pitch in a
scientific sense you know it's always sliding up what sliding down or wobbling
up and down or it's a bit below where it should be where it's even an instrument
that's out of tune typically will be systematically out of tune yeah the
human voice is so unpredictable and yeah it turned out that was the most
distinctive thing when you're trying to pick out what is the voice doing but I
think that's really interesting because funnily enough I think I better not to
go on this one of the things about sing as being distinctive is all the things
that go wrong apparently and I'm using wrongly berta commas it's the things
that stand out is the things that don't quite work it's that it's the flattening
it's the it's the strange shapes it's the strange sound that's one of the
things that makes thing is so distinctive so I don't really see them
as problems unless they really are working in that particular context mmm
so before we move on and talk I think a little bit about singing in tune in
general I do just want to push you for a little more detail on a fascinating
thing you said there which was that the tuning can depend on the genre we had an
episode recently with Ben Perry who directs the National Youth choirs or his
musical director for the National Youth choirs and he made this point that you
know trying to get a choir to tune to a piano is a little bit nonsensical
because really the human voice should be to the human voice and so in a cappella
for example he was saying you know your your harmony tuning is very different
than it would be with the equal temperament of a piano and is that the
kind of thing you're referring to when you say a barbershop would be tuned
differently to classical music very much and this I want to unpack that statement
because there's lots of great stuff in there right the first of all tuning a
tuning of voice to a piano is really difficult because and also by the way
when you're learning to sing trying to play try to teach from a piano is also
not a terribly good idea because the harmonic setup of a piano doesn't match
the voice so often in singing lessons when the teacher is playing the note on
the piano and the singer cannot get it it's because they're hearing harmonics
instead of the fundamental so they're trying to change is something that is a
harmonic part of the of the chord instead of the verbage and they can't
find it so the whole business of teaching singing from a piano is dodgy
to start with what's also interesting is when you go when you start changing
genres okay let's deal with choral music first I think he's absolutely spot-on
that singers tune with singers what you often find is if you then go and play
the piano they get to the end of the song and is that's great you can go okay
guys you've gone down a semitone he's fine
it also depends on the it's the complexity of the of the harmonic series
that that choir is producing so for instance wealth male voice choirs which
are very bass heavy will pull the tuning downwards so rare that you actually find
a Welsh male voice choir that will stay bang in tune on the piano because they
love that dark rich sonorous sound likewise Russian choirs same thing when
you're talking barbershop they're very geared to sevenths so a lot of
barbershop harmony has sevenths in it and then they hit calls that will read
so the cord oh and by the way the cord ringing is where you've got four singers
but you hear a fifth note it's extraordinary when you hear it you go up
what on earth is that so it's when the harm on behalf the forcing of lock in
tune so well that you hear extra notes so you hear 526 notes I used to work
with an odd company who had a soprano and mezzo who worked some together for
years and they were so experienced at this they could lock voices instantly
mr. sing the black made the flower song from Lakme which was used as the British
Airways out for four years and they locked so well that they kept getting
third notes in it it was just quite extraordinary you think I'll miss it not
a trio and I'm totally worthy as I was playing at the time I turned to the
others with my mouth closed just to just to demonstrate that I wasn't singing the
top soprano line and so yeah I mean if you go to rock so much of rock
particularly in the high notes and they're going to hate me for this the
rock singers but some rock notes are some flat deliberately because what you
want is you want to give the audience the experience that you are working so
hard that you can't quite get for those it's like weightlifting to get the high
notes and that seems to be a feature of some of the rock and the heavy metal
stuff so I think it's also interesting when you when you hear singers crossing
genres so you get a country-western singer singing pop stuff and sometimes
you go doesn't quite work well isn't quite found right
and often it's because they're used to a particular tuning set up to their genre
and when you cross your nose it's different that is fascinating and just
to come back and clarify to make sure we everyone is following when you're
talking about you know a certain number of singers producing extra notes that's
because each singer has multiple harmonics in the know they're producing
and what the combination of harmonics creates extra perceived fundamentals it
sounds like there's an extra note buried in there somewhere is that right yeah
sort of every
has fundamental and harmonics in it so every time you produce a note you are
you are producing the fundamental which is the pitch we hear and there's a whole
load of harmonics above and that's what produces part of what gives you tone
what happens when you lock a chord is that it depends the way that you build
the chord whose louder whose softer and also who's in tomb who's really you know
spot on with with what's going on underneath then your heart all the
harmonics lock and they boost other harmonics so other harmonics get louder
and therefore as a group you can hear perceive more high stuff then you know
you get more notes than there are voices amazing well let's step back from this
fairly enhanced coverage of pitch tuning and talk about something that is a hot
topic I know a lot of our listeners will be instrument players and not consider
themselves singers or maybe they're in the shoes of someone like myself who has
a young child or two and is thinking about their music education and so I'd
love to talk about just singing in tune from from the beginning like you know if
you're starting out thinking I can't sing or you're a little kid learning to
sing what's your perspective on that how do we go from not being able to produce
the pictures we intend to reliably standing up on stage and performing in
perfect accurate tune just before we go there I wanna talk about different there
are four stages of pitch matching that children go through and we wrote about
this in their singing Express series which was specifically
music for singing music for kids okay so phase one is the words the words
are the interest the melody is often sung like a child it's a restricted
pitch range there's not many note changes going on
but they get the get words Phase two they're starting to be a bit more
conscious of pitch so they can follow the general shape of the melody but it's
still not very accurate and they can maybe stay in tune for one phrase and
then the next phrase is in a completely different key
and you hear that a lot then stage 3 is you get more accurate but they can still
change a key so you might get two or three phrases that roughly stay in the
key that they start in and then they start a next phrase and it's somewhere
completely different and by stage four you've got mainly accurate no errors
particularly and you're basically in the right key and what I think is so
interesting about this is that there are adults who have not gone through all
four stages they've got stuck somewhere so often
sometimes they've been told when they're kids they can't seen so they they don't
develop any further very very rare that you can't hear differences in pitch but
hearing them and singing them are two different things is two different skills
so we developed something for singing Express which was gliding and landing
because we think the voice is a sliding instrument gliding sliding between the
notes is very useful because you can start to teach your voice where the
notes live you cannot see them you can't feel them necessarily you have to learn
where they are so we start by unfriendly enough I hope I mean I don't know when
this looking to be was going out but I am literally about to publish an e-book
next week which includes singing legato and it includes an exercise that does
exactly this so if you're taking and this folk song called my Bonnie lies
over the ocean and the tune is my Bonnie lies over the ocean my Bonnie lies over
the sea is an octave there already so if you slide around in roughly without even
singing the notes necessarily
ours literally smearing my way through the whole phrase and if it is slowly
enough my voice goes okay so you need to go here and you need to go here and you
start to find and feel where they are that's the gliding bit then you do the
gliding and landing so you're still sliding but you're just hovering on
roughly where you think notice that's the gliding and landing thing then you
start to speed it up so you glide a little faster only then can you jump
because you know where you're jumping - making sense as I listen to you yeah as
I listen to you you can loop and glide your way into
each note I could feel my old choir director cringing that is such a
valuable exercise and having said earlier that you know we're trying to
match pitch with a piano can be really challenging what are people listening
for what's gonna tell them that they've fully delete what's the potential and it
allows it to the right now well ironically apps like yours and I think
what's so interesting is that if you know if you're aiming for a be a bit of
the note B because this isn't G major just to have that app set up to go okay
I'm aiming for this note and you slide around and glide around it to you until
the app says and that's of any that's the note that you're going for and
you've got like a line on yours that tells you whether you're underneath it
or above it I know because I've been playing with it and it's really
interesting because again you've got a visual representation of something that
you're producing and it's in real time so you can see you and the interesting
thing for me is if you see that visual feedback and then you go back inside and
go what does it feel like what does it sound like how am I doing this what
sensations do I have you can start to match up what you see
outside what you're hearing outside and inside and what you're feeling and I do
just want to talk about hearing because as a singer you are probably the only
instrument that has internal hearing as well as externally because you are
producing the sound deep in the throat that's where the vocal folds are your
ears the other end of this eustachian tube is actually comes out of the back
of your mouth so you genuinely have some sound that goes up the station tube and
on to the other side of your of your eardrum so you've got internal hearing
and external hearing I'm wearing headphones at the moment so I'm very
reliant on my internal hearing I have no idea how loud I'm smoking I'm just aware
that I'm producing some volume but I'm really relying on the interim period
because both my ears are covered so you are having to match up internal and
external hearing and it's often why when people hear their singing voice is
recorded for the first time they go but that sounds nothing like me because
they're so easy at the internal hearing an internal hearing tends to boost the
lower harmonics are not the battle opps mmm so let's touch on that because it's
come up a couple of times on the podcast before I think first of all when we had
Gerald click steam on the show the author of the musicians way he was
talking about the value of recording yourself and how that can help you
improve so much faster but the catch is if you're a singer it can be incredibly
what's the word you can be incredibly self-conscious about it when you hear
your voice recorded and I think that goes even for speaking to I have a vivid
memory of when I was a child the first time I heard my spoken voice recorded
and it horrified me can you talk a bit about speaking voice and singing voice
and how we can get past this visceral dislike of hearing our own voice on a
recording I think you're so used to hearing your own voice from inside that
you have a very clear idea of how it is and how you come across and your
speaking voice in particular your singing voice as well but your speaking
voice in particular is so tied up with your own
personality and your understanding of your own personality in your belief in
work that's naughty so that when you hear something that you know is you but
he doesn't sound anything like you it's very weird and honestly my advice is get
over yourself because it's so useful when you are when you have it good it
genuinely there will be the first two or three times when you go that's terrible
I hate it I can't do this it's horrible it's really upsetting
I don't going yak about yourself because it's really important that you get that
type of feedback from outside as a vocal coach I give that type of feedback to
the people at work it and that's fine but there is nothing faster than
actually hearing the recording and I think one of the things that people
don't do when they're using recordings or lessons for instance or recordings of
rehearsals or recordings of practice sessions they don't know what to listen
for so they listen to the whole thing and ago I hate that sound it's like art
saying oh it's terrible but then they're listening to the whole performance
rather than something specific so if you just practiced something and you've
recorded it and you play the recording back decide that you are going to listen
for one thing like do I hit the center of the note each time and if I don't hit
the center of the 9th each time just mentally put a cross on that note and go
that's the jump that I need to do because the other thing about music and
singing is that it's movement between notes there isn't a single song that I
can think of that stays on one note in fact there isn't a single piece of music
that I can think of that stays on one note so you're always moving and
therefore you're always jumping or gliding or sliding you're always
actually accessing something away from where you started and if you like
there's something that you can focus on is did I make that jump successfully did
I move far enough to get that note did I did I do the slide slowly enough fast
enough did I hit the center of that note that's something very specific to focus
on and it's when you do that type of focus
that you learn really quickly really fast it's almost like a shortcut to
learning because you're not trying to take in you don't have so many focuses
you're not trying to take in something that you couldn't possibly deal with
because there are 15 things wrong with it that's not the way that you learn or
that's that's just the way you get depressed the way that you learn is to
focus on one thing and learn it and just going right back to what we're talking
where earlier about being a sight reader one of the things that when I'm learning
new pieces and I'm learning a lot of complicated stuff at the moment I don't
focus on I need to be able to play all the calls and I need to be able to do
this and I need to cooperate I don't do that I do there are certain specific
things that I do and it makes me an expert practicer so I will do one run at
super slow speed much much slower than you would normally play it but my focus
is not to stop so I will get through that piece really really slowly but I
will not stop anywhere and if I do stop or I stumble I just make a mental note
of that's the place I need to work and if it's a if it's a note I'll go to that
note and I'll get to back from it and practice that so I'll go to notes back
and then two notes past it some I'm working five notes or and then I'll go
five notes back so I'm always working that note but I'm looking across the
period and working across the phrase so I'm not just practicing the note I'm
practicing the approach and the release and if you do that genuinely that takes
minutes it doesn't take years it takes minutes and then you are you know what
you're doing you know where it is you've got a good idea of what needs the
repetition and you know how it works and I'm all
for knowing how things work that's what I do
there is a really fabulous description of you know the power of focused and
intentional practice and really thinking about what you should be listening out
for and paying attention to given that your voice is such a personal thing to
you and we need to get past that emotional aspect of hearing ourselves on
a recording how much value is there in unpacking kind of the speaking voice
from the singing voice and in treating them separately or addressing the
different aspects of each it's a great question because you use your singing
voice far more in the day than you use your speaking voice that tends to be
where your habits are formed and again it depends what style you're singing if
you listen to lots of the pop R&B gospel some of the more contemporary Styles
certainly Canterbury musical theater the aim really is to sound like you speak
and there's a lot of singers who they sing something and then you give them in
interviews and they sound exactly the same Jessie J a great example my
goodness she can hit some high notes and of course she's just won the the
competition in China which is amazing and good for her when you hear her
speaking voice that speaking voice it's very high so it's high bright it's quite
strong and then you hear her sing and you go yeah but absolutely matches so
speaking voice becomes the fundamental area to work with when you're singing if
there is a problem with your speaking voice it's likely to carry over into
your scene it's actually one of the reasons we created the one-minute voice
warm-up app and it's the one and this specific app is on speaking voice and
it's getting your speaking voice is clear and easy and comfortable and
efficient as possible to make the singing easier we we are going to be
doing in the future a singing voice app but we wanted to do
speaking voice one first because you use it so much more antastic well I I've
really enjoyed playing around with that app and I think there are a few apps
which so quickly present you with such useful material you really cut to the
heart of it and I think any singer or indeed someone who does public speaking
or needs to give a presentation will immediately appreciate the usefulness of
this thank you you touched on an area there that I really wanted to get your
perspective on and I'm conscious we're coming up on time here so I should be
respectful to let you go but before we do maybe we could talk just briefly
about the question of style in singing and you know in the context of the way
your app picks apart the speaking voice in this different aspects and how to
refine and and as you put it make more efficient your process of speaking or
singing how does a singer go about adapting to a new genre or developing
the way they sing in a particular genre
if you can give a brief overview and we will definitely link to several things
in the show notes for people to learn more because this is definitely an
expertise for you yeah I wrote a blog called certain ways to change your style
and in fact we have a webinar as well called how to change your style without
losing your sound and actually for singers that's really important because
so many singers have all want a signature sound that is identifiable and
it's certainly in the commercial world that is absolutely vital that you can
instantly recognize the singer the moment they open their mouth so in the
changing style there's a whole thing as well about do you change the sound that
you make or just or do you just change the way you move between the notes and
are a whole article on different ways to move between the notes so when you slide
or glide with John I just demonstrated some of the on sets that you can do
little breath glide Creek flip there are also note approaches that you can do so
if I was going to do
Amazing Grace if you're going to do smooth it's very smooth it's very even
I'm moving quite cleanly between the notes if you want to change the style
I've got a lot of extra things put in so I'm not moving cleanly I am not matching
volume I actually put a breath in the middle of the word amazing that's very
close to the LeAnn Rimes version of Amazing Grace where she genuinely puts
the breath in the middle of the word amazing it's like it's the first word
you sing and you still put a breath in because she can so a lot of rules change
when you start changing style and line changes so whether you join things
together or whether you cut them the way you pronounce the words changes that's
really important because lots of genres have pronunciation styles and they're
recognizable so if you sang a classical Aria in the way that you pronounce and
ro-beast on that would sound really weird and the other way around as well
so um pronunciation line attack on sets there's all sorts of things that you can
play with and actually in the article I list them and in the webinar we go
through them so the lots of exercises that we do to get people to experiment
with what they're doing and actually I am a great experimenter I think it's
really important that you experiment that you play green one of the things
that you can do is is find an artist that you don't normally like and listen
to them going what is it that they're doing how are they starting their notes
how are they finishing that notes are they singing smoothly or is it jagged
you know is the volume the same all the way through okay sometimes this is done
in the recording studio but are they on the front foot as in in your
face or do they take some time to step back and does that happen in the phrase
or is it just the general feel you know something like this that's heavy metal
is going to stay completely different to something that's trance
for obvious reasons it's got a completely different purpose there's
lots and lots of style things that I could go into for hours terrific well we
will definitely link in the show notes to that blog post you mentioned as well
as your webinars page where people can check that out
I think we'll also link to your book this is a voice which I think has the
most exciting table of contents and it is very much you know as it says in the
subtitle 99 exercises it's really a toolbox for you to experiment with a lot
of different ways with your voice and so I think if anyone's curious about this
and wants to explore what their voice can do that book is a tremendous
resource as well as the webinars we mentioned cool well I think all that
remains to say is just a big thank you it's been a fascinating conversation and
I've so enjoyed having the chance to pick your brains a little bit thank you
again Jeremy for joining us on the show today my pleasure with musical you
membership amazing there was so much packed into that conversation you might
just want to listen back to the whole thing again but I'll do my best to
summarize what stood out for me despite his huge success as a vocal coach Jeremy
actually started out as a pianist he was a natural experimenter and
enjoyed figuring things out by ear which helped him to get to an impressive level
of performance at an early age working with a teacher he filled in the note
reading side of things and went on to become an expert sight reader although
he studied music at university it was the oboe which was this primary
instrument at least to start with he had found it easy to pick up the oboe as a
second instrument because he already knew the theory and had a good ear for
music but he found himself drawn back to piano and took the unusual step of
switching to piano during his degree course
he discovered that he really enjoyed collaborative piano and I loved how he
explained the difference between merely accompanying a performer as we often
assume the piano player behind a soloist is doing and truly collaborating with
them to work together and create something special musically it was clear
how good an ear and instinct you need to have developed for music to do this well
in that role he needed to be able to sight-read whatever was put in front of
him and it was fascinating to hear about the way he approaches this it's
something we touched on in our recent episode about sight-reading music how
music ality training can help you really understand the music on the page and see
it in meaningful chunks and patterns rather than just a scattering of
seemingly random notes Jeremy explained how you don't
necessarily need to be very methodical and conscientious about building up your
knowledge of these patterns to look for it's really about taking a mindset of
curiosity and exploration and examining each thing you play or here to see if
you can find any common trends or patterns across songs artists or genres
during his career as a collaborative pianist Jeremy found himself
increasingly helping and coaching the singers he worked with and discovered he
had a particular ability to help them see things in the music which to him
were obvious but they hadn't understood or hadn't been able to see over time he
drew on tools and techniques such as endoscopy cameras and computer audio
analysis to help him really dig into what's going on physically when we sing
and pick apart the facts from the fiction in singing technique we talked
about the difference between sight reading and sight singing how as a
singer we have the unique challenge that our instrument is inside us and we can't
see it or take it apart or bring it back to the shop if we're not happy with how
it sounds when sight singing it's entirely on us to produce the right
pictures and stay in tune however as we dug into a little bit the human voice is
almost never totally exactly perfectly in tune or if it is it doesn't stay that
way for long whether it's vibrato change at the start or end of a note
gliding in pitch between notes or even a whole a cappella group or choir drifting
off key during a piece the human voice loves to ignore the strict system of
notes each having a single specific pitch and being separated by exact
distances while this can be challenging when you're first starting out in
singing it's also potentially a useful tool as was made clear by Jeremy's
trombone exercise of helping singers glide their way to the target pitches in
a melody and do check out his new ebook how to sing legato for the exercise he
mentioned and more on this idea of moving smoothly between note pitches
that flexibility of pitch can also be a powerful tool for a singer after they
master the basic ability to sing in tune because the inconsistencies and apparent
errors of pitching are actually a huge part of what defines a style of singing
and it was so cool to hear Jeremy talk about that with particular examples such
as rock singers pitching the seventh degree of the scale flat to make it seem
like they were having to really strain for it of course that's just one aspect
of what characterizes a style of singing and in the show notes for this episode
you'll find links to Jeremy's blog post on seven ways to change your style
without changing your sound as well as the webinar he mentioned and his fun and
fascinating book this is a voice which lets you experiment your way through
every dimension of what your voice can do to be able to alter your style and
experiment in that way you're probably going to need to record yourself and it
was good to hear Jeremy's firm but fair advice to just get over it if you're
shying away from this because you're sheepish about how your voice sounds on
a recording you're missing out on a hugely valuable tool that can accelerate
your learning process and whether it's our speaking voice or our singing voice
we all think we sound weird on a recording check out our previous podcast
episode about your voice sounding weird for more about that and then check out
Jeremy's book this is a voice and his one-minute voice warm-up app for plenty
of fun and interesting ways to develop and refine your voice oh and remember
Jeremy's advice to just focus on one aspect of your
performance when you listen back to a recording to avoid the overwhelm and
subjective judgemental reactions that can otherwise cause trouble if you try
to evaluate the performance as a whole it was terrific to get to talk to Jeremy
because I've really admired the way vocal process presents the solid nuts
and bolts of true voice science in a down-to-earth and relatable way and he
is clearly a man who understands musicality whether that's in the
importance and Universal impact of developing your musical ear the
collaborative spirit and the flow that make for the best musical performances
or the Nitty Gritty of understanding exactly what your first instrument your
singing voice can do across every style and genre of music we made reference to
lots of further resources in this episode so be sure to check out the show
notes at musicalitypodcast.com for all the details and the links thanks for
listening to this episode stay tuned for our next one where we'll be picking up
on what Jeremy was saying about tone and Tamara to finish up our two-part episode
on the many meanings of the word tone thank you for listening to the
musicality podcast this episode has ended but your musical journey continues
head over to musicalitypodcast.com where you will find the links and
resources mentioned in this episode as well as bonus content
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