Here is the article, from several years ago, that is referenced in the title:
Now if you want to sing opera or musical theater, presumably pitch is going to be a major issue for you (unless you are one of the few people who has really good pitch perception without studying). However, how much effort should you put into singing on pitch if you want to be a pop singer? My opinion is that being way off pitch suggests a fundamental problem (which in most cases is probably fixable), and in most cases may be due to trying to sing a difficult (if not humanly impossible “studio magic”) song before the relevant muscles have been develop. Whatever the case may be, you may want to read this:
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vvxg93/the-science-of-why-you-cant-carry-a-tune
I have never used any kind of pitch correction, because I want a “natural” or “old school” sound and in fact sometimes sing deliberately “off” at times (Blues note bending), but if you are interested in singing certain pop songs, you need to ask yourself whether it makes any sense to concern yourself with being off pitch in minor ways. In the book, “Bad Singer,” for example, we learn that:
“Hutchins [a researcher] has also studied what he calls ‘the vocal generosity effect’ and discovered that listeners considered vocals in tune when the singers were within half a semitone of the correct pitch, but were less willing to accept such variations from violinists…”
My approach is to get students singing whatever song they can close to on pitch. If there’s part of the song they have difficulty with, I’ll try to figure that out, but in the meantime they can sing the parts they are reasonably good at, the idea being to develop the right muscles. Also from “Bad Singer:”
“…-pitch singing, as researchers tend to call it—has three main causes. The first is a motor control problem. This is a difficulty co-ordinating the necessary muscles in just the right way to produce an intended note…”
Now I’m no advocate of auto-tune or “click track songs,” but the more you understand the quicker you are likely to attain your goal. Do not assume you are “bad” at singing due to pitch issues. It can be the lack of muscle development, a biological issue (the “Bad Singer” author’s problem is with “pitch processing,” for example), attempting to do something very difficult if not impossible, or perhaps something else. The typical “voice coach” approach (scales and “exercises” like “lip bubbles”) does not make sense to me, at least for beginners, because muscle development has yet to begin, and they might have other issues.
Beyond that, some of these “coaches” don’t even tell their students about “studio magic” but instead go along with their students’ beliefs that any studio recording singing performance can be replicated (of course the coaches themselves rarely demonstrate what they can do with their own singing, if they ever sing). But on the other hand, most of these “coaches” seem to react with horror at the thought of a singer being auto-tuned. To that, I will simply quote some of the article on theverge.com mentioned above:
Since rising to fame as the weird techno-warble effect in the chorus of Cher’s 1998 song, “Believe,” Auto-Tune has become bitchy shorthand for saying somebody can’t sing. But the diss isn’t fair, because everybody’s using it.
For every T-Pain — the R&B artist who uses Auto-Tune as an over-the-top aesthetic choice — there are 100 artists who are Auto-Tuned in subtler ways. Fix a little backing harmony here, bump a flat note up to diva-worthy heights there: smooth everything over so that it’s perfect. You can even use Auto-Tune live, so an artist can sing totally out of tune in concert and be corrected before their flaws ever reach the ears of an audience. (On season 7 of the UK X-Factor, it was used so excessively on contestants’ auditions that viewers got wise, and protested.)
“I’ll be in a studio and hear a singer down the hall and she’s clearly out of tune, and she’ll do one take,” says Drew Waters of Capitol Records. That’s all she needs. Because they can fix it later, in Auto-Tune.
Singer / songwriter Neko Case kvetched about these developments in an interview with online music magazine, Pitchfork. “I’m not a perfect note hitter either but I’m not going to cover it up with auto tune. Everybody uses it, too. I once asked a studio guy in Toronto, ‘How many people don’t use Auto-Tune?’ and he said, ‘You and Nelly Furtado are the only two people who’ve never used it in here.’ Even though I’m not into Nelly Furtado, it kind of made me respect her. It’s cool that she has some integrity.”
That was 2006. This past September [of 2012], Nelly Furtado released the album, The Spirit Indestructible. Its lead single is doused in massive levels of Auto-Tune.
Of course [the Blues] wouldn’t fly in Auto-Tune. It would get corrected. Neil Young, Bob Dylan, many of the classic artists whose voices are less than pitch perfect – they probably would be pitch corrected if they started out today.
But now let’s consider the singers of the past who did not concern themselves with pitch. A good source is “The Great American Popular Singers” (by Henry Pleasants), first published in 1974. Pleasants was classically trained and as a young man held pop music in low regard, actually. Here are some quotations from this book:
He [the popular American singer] may drop notes or add them, introduce appoggiature, slurs, slides, riffs, codas and cadenzas, change note values to accord with the rhythmic reading of the text, and so on, just as singers did in the heyday of Italian opera.
He [the popular singer] wants to talk, to phrase conversationally, easily, and intimately. He wants to tell you what is on his mind or in his heart, not to show you what a great voice he has, or what tremendous things he can do with it. He chooses keys, or tonalities, accordingly.
The release from the requirement of a big tone and a concern for distinct, musical enunciation have encouraged him to cultivate a lighter, more “forward” vocal production.
Popular singers sing on and through the consonants, especially ms, ns, ngs, and ls, without any interruption of melodic line or inhibition of legato. They also employ the coup de glotte, or glottis stroke, to set off words beginning with vowels, especially the vowel e as in ever and ending.
His discussion of the singing of Bessie Smith brings out some more interesting points:
There is little on any record [Bessie Smith] ever made that sounds like shouting in the common sense of the term. Indeed, she would seem, by thte recorded evidence, to have been incapable of making a strident or otherwise unseemly sound. Her contemporaries made many. Bessie’s tone, except on some of her last records, is always rich, full, round, and warm. The placement is wonderfully forward, the production natural, easy and fluent.
The refinements of her vocal art – and there were many – were not dynamic. They were melodic. Within a limited range from top to bottom, they called upon a limitless variety of pitch and color. Melody, for her, had little to do with do re me, or with tune, which is why she excelled in self-made or custom-made material. When she sang popular songs she altered tune and time to suit her.
Bessie’s art lay not in the seamless movement from one pitch to another in the diatonic major and minor modes, but in her discovery and exploitation of the uncharted microtonal areas between pitches. That is why her shortness of range, in singing the blues, was no handicap. In terms of what she was saying and how, she had all the range she needed.
She had no reservations about changing vowels to suit the melodic context. She added syllables and left syllables out, added or repeated a word here or there, and so on…
And in the book, “Really the Blues,” we are told that Bessie Smith was a master at, “making the vowels come out the right length, dropping consonants that might trip up her story, putting just enough emphasis on each syllable to make you really know what she was getting at.” Thus, not only is fixation on pitch potentially harmful to the aspiring singer’s development and vocal cords, but also may be contrary to his/her long-term goals! Moreover, unlike in Bessie Smith’s day, today there is so much “studio magic” that can be applied, one has to decide how much of it to use. Here’s a good example of a singer who doesn’t seem interested in vocal acrobatics or traditional concerns, but who is using some very expensive technology:
If you fast forward to 1:11 you will hear what he sounds like without all the “bells and whistles” (though he’s still using a quality microphone), and it isn’t pleasant in any traditional sense. Perhaps a huge part of the problem is that so many “voice coaches” were trained along classical lines, directly or indirectly, and so they have no been able to figure out what is best for their students, relative to their students’ long-term goals (it’s my sense that few voice coaches even ask their students what their goals are!). By contrast, I investigated Bel Canto after understanding the different that Pleasants discusses, and I decided to choose what was worth keeping and what was not.
One example is singing in the original key – why do that if you don’t sound your best? Are you looking to impress friends or become a singer (as opposed to so many “vocalists” who shriek and need the help of audio engineers to clean up the mess)? I understand you may want to go the route of the vocalist who tries to be like everyone else and is willing to risk the health of your vocal cords in order to become a “star,” but I teach singing, the kind Henry Pleasants talks about, and that is reflected in my own singing, examples of which are to be found at:
In fact, it may be that many people are actually training not to sing but to make certain sounds that they know can be cleaned up by the audio engineers! It’s almost like what happened to opera singers is somewhat happening to pop stars; that is, the pop stars have to learn certain types of vocal acrobatics and adopt a rigid formula for “success.” The obvious difference is that opera stars are still vocalizing in a way that is singing, in a traditional sense. But there is that other avenue for singing that is not opera and does not conform to the current fashion for pop hits. I have been criticized for this type of singing, and unfortunately it seems that people who do the criticizing are so ignorant of the history of singing that it is not worth arguing with them. This is one reason I thought this blog post might be very important to create.
NOTE: As of this date I am still offering a free assessment with absolutely no obligation of any kind. Just email me: nickspinner55@gmail.com. Also, I won’t give your personal information to anyone else. I might reference your singing on some blog posts if you provide me with audio clips, so let me know if you don’t want me to do that, but remember that the idea is to help aspiring singers! If you have publicly posted on sites like Youtube or Soundcloud, I’ll assume it’s okay to link to those in my blog post. I can’t guarantee that there is room for you in my schedule at any given time, but I should be able to provide you with some advice that might be helpful, after getting a sense of where you’re at.
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