British guitarist analyses Karen Carpenter's live vocals in 1974!

hello Phil here from wings of pegasus and welcome to another analysis video if you enjoyed this video please give it a thumbs up and subscribe on the agenda tonight we're going to be taking another look at Karen Carpenter and last night we had a look at her drumming prowess but now we're going to be putting her vocals under the spotlight this is going to be coming from 1974 and it's gonna be her performance of goodbye to love so let's get Karen and Richard up on screen and see how they get on [Music] [Applause] [Music] time and time again which is full of has passed me by I just [Music] there are no [Music] reason [Music] Oh [Music] today hi [Music] [Music] sure [Music] [Music] else [Music] [Music] [Music] and there we have it I didn't want to interrupt that one halfway through because there's such a great urban flow to this track and listen to the way that the tempo just rises and falls and it just takes you on such an interesting journey because of the emphasis that we get in that tempo change but also the guitar solo by Tony Peluso because this is one of the host drags that's because it had that's fuzzy guitar solo in there The Carpenters actually got hate mail from fans well I'm not calling them fans because you can't really be a fan if you're sending the banjo supposed to like hate mail but they said that the Carpenters have gone hardrock and have moved away from that pop sound and that's what they got hate mail about so just crazy and because the track was written by Richard and co-written by John Bettis as well it meant that Richard had a good idea of what he wanted from that guitar solo so when Tony initially came into the studio he started to play something baladi and slow whereas Richard said no just play the melody from the vocal in the first half and then just go crazy on the second half because that's what they bought Tony in to do and Tony was in a band who supported the carpenters very early on in their career and they just happened to have remembered him and his guitar playing so when they called him up to ask him to play the solo on this track Tony originally thought it was a hoax call that someone was pretending to be Karen Carpenter so when he asked who it wasn't she repeated her name again he realized oh this is actually Karen Carpenter that I'm actually speaking to and it was an idol of his at the time so must have been great for Tony to get in the studio and lay down this solo so as a composition this is such a great track because you've got so many interesting elements with that guitar solo suddenly coming in and it just makes sense this is the thing when you have a player who knows what he's doing and the technique is of a high standard it means that they can always add something to a track and that's certainly what this guitar solo does it gives it a totally different in there that you're not necessarily expecting but it does add something it doesn't take anything away from the track and that's the markings of a great solo but turning our attention to Karen at the front of the stage and that voice that she had and why it was so unique there are so many elements as to why it was unique and the first of all is the range her contralto range and when I say contralto what I mean is the notes that she's singing in terms of a female range the contralto is the lowest that you can get and I've also analyzed Karen's talking voice and the particular part that I was analyzing everybody talks in notes this is what people don't realize and that's why I think everybody can learn to sing because when you're talking you are talking in notes it's just that you're not aware that you're doing it so when Karen was talking in this particular video she was hitting an a5 and also a g4 and I mentioned in other videos about male singers and the tenor hi-c in terms of hitting that high C for guys which was seen as the Holy Grail they're all reaching up to hit that c5 and that is known in that Mayo tenor range as high C so once we've got that as a reference point a c5 we then go down to a b5 we then go down again to an a5 and now we go down to a g4 which is where we hit in this track but then we also go down to an f4 so talking about these guys that are trying to hit high notes we're going below their range and now we're sitting in this range that for most guys would be maybe at the top of their range but actually quite comfortable and this is where karen is singing and her talking voice is sometimes hitting higher than her singing voice and this for me really sticks out as a rarity in vocalists because what tends to happen is when you start singing you start singing above where you're talking voice is it's just a natural thing and something that a lot of singers fall into the trap of trying to sing too high for their voice where is Karen it seemed like the lowest she went beneath her talking voice the thicker the tone was you got such a rich tone and this is something that I mentioned on the video that I did yesterday where Karen was quoted as saying the money is in the basement in terms of where she sings and where her voice is she goes down low and that's where the money noes are so she knew herself that when she forced her not forced but made her voice go low in her range her tone really thickened up and she got that unique quality and also when Karen leans into that chest voice sound just applies a little bit more pressure that's where we get that classic Karen Carpenter sound and it just thickens up that tone and you can hear in this performance those lighter head voice quality she's got in there but then as soon as she applies a little bit more pressure in that chest voice she gets that tone that we all love and the great thing about it is that she doesn't over saturate it in terms of always singing with that consistent tone all the time she varies that tone from head voice to chest voice and has such a great way of applying that chest voice to give more emotion in the vocal like I said this whole composition is such a masterpiece in ebb and flow and that's something that is mirrored by Karen's voice the way that she changes her tone throughout the track and I mentioned in my video yesterday about Karen's passion being for drumming and she almost fell into singing and it's one thing to have a great tone to your voice and be able to hit the notes but it's another thing entirely to gain control of that voice to have control of vibrato and technical ability these are all the things that she worked on in college when she was singing in the choir with her brother so she had this natural ability for singing but she still worked at it in order to fine tune it into the voice that we heard on all of these hits but let's try and analyze why was her tone so good why she's such a great singer and how could she connect so well with an audience and a lot of those things firstly the connection is helped by the fact that it's such a low range it is like talking she's telling a story and she's controlling her voice so well like I said the expression in there just draws you in because it's so dynamic the way that Karen's saying but the tone how did she get that tone and we can start to analyze this in a little bit of detail why two guys watching this video why does my voice sound different to your voice we've both got vocal cords and if we want to when we sing we can still hit the same note but why do we sound different and that is all to do with the fact that we all look different my face my head is different to your head in your face which means that the vocal cords when they make the sound it goes into the resonance chamber which is the thing that amplifies the sound and the shape of my resonance chamber is different to yours because we look different so it means that the sound is going to be a different sound try to think of it as a guitar player playing an acoustic guitar when they play those strings the sound goes into the resonance chamber of the body of that acoustic guitar and then it comes out the sound is amplified is made louder and the shape of that will determine what kind of tone you get and it's the reason why over tens and hundreds of years the design of the guitar body changed because they just manipulated to the shape of the body to get the best sound possible the richest tone so that's why all of the acoustic guitars nowadays all have the same shape because that is the shape that gives you the best tone so bringing this back to Karen it meant that when she hit these really connected chest voice notes in her vocal range her resonance chamber made these notes resonate with such a great tonal quality and it also meant that other female singers at the time when they hit these same notes because they didn't have the res chamber they weren't getting the same tonal quality so it is something that Karen was born with in terms of her arrangement in her head to get these tones and it meant that you've got a great tone from her voice a unique tone but of course she had to work at her voice as well to now control that tone into a voice into vibrato into technical ability and she absolutely did that and just to highlight this point you might see vocal coaches on YouTube who have videos and they say how to sing like and then they put in the artists name and whenever there is a demonstration of how to sing like another singer it is not like you are listening to that other singer and it's a miraculous change from the vocal coaches voice they show you the techniques of how to put on say for example distortion onto your own voice they don't magically sing like that other person and that's because of the resonance chamber they don't look exactly like that other singer facially so they can't get exactly the same tone some singers can manipulate their voice to get really close to it and it takes a lot of manipulation and a hell of a lot of practice and generally tens of years to get to that point so the reason that Karen could connect with so many people was because of her range her tonal quality but also of course the fact that the songs were written in this range so it maximized Karen's ability and that vocal quality and a lot of singers try and sing too high outside their range especially with guys they're always searching for that high range and I think it's a trap that everyone falls into it's so much better to just take your range down to where you are comfortable and sound good that as the whole point of music is making a connection to an audience and if the audience think that you're straining and you can't reach the nose they can't get into the story they're focusing on the straining and not the message of the song and this for me applies to music across the board whether you play an instrument whether you sing just try and sound like yourself because then you will be you Niq you won't sound like a watered-down version of another artist or somebody trying to be somebody else and Karen is the shining example of how to do it just work with what you've got because that will make you unique and it will make you stand out and talking about Karen's technical ability as a singer back in the 70s and the early 80s when Karen was singing there was no auto-tune so the perfect pitch that she had was just her own ear it was natural to a certain extent and I do hesitate to use the term perfect pitch because nowadays that is auto-tune the computer will snap a note to that pitch and it will do it perfectly so that you hear almost a mechanical sound to the vocal and back in these days the inaccuracies in the singing was what made it human and it gave it expression like we have with Karen here you can imagine Karen deciding to slide up to a particular note where nowadays that would be snapped to the note without that sliding expression into it to a certain extent nowadays with lesser singers you lose all the human expression because the computer snaps it to the note and that's something that Karen was so good at was applying such great expression to every single vocal phrase that she sang and I know that we have been getting a little bit technical in this video mentioning contralto and other terms resonance chambers Karen was a one-off in terms of the physical makeup she had naturally gave her the ability to access these tones and then through hard work and training the voice in men that she could then expand her voice to three octaves like she did when she was a college but it gave us all this unique quality that men you could just listen to her voice and it was just such a great voice that was set apart from anything else at the time and he knew instantly when it was Karen Carpenter singing but - thank you so much for suggesting this video for me to take a look at I thought this is a good just to put it in there because I featured Karen playing the drums last night and it was good to feature what she's really known for that incredible voice and keep their suggestions coming in the comments below let me know what you guys think if you like this video please give it a thumbs up and subscribe and I'll see you guys and the next one rock

Channel: Wings of Pegasus

Views: 300,880

Keywords: carpenters, lagu, live concert, the carpenters, the carpenters goodbye to love, the carpenters goodbye to love live, karen carpenter goodbye to love live, karen carpenter songs, karen carpenter, wings of pegasus, wingsofpegasus, british guitarist reacts, british guitarist analysis, British guitarist analyses Karen Carpenter's vocals live in 1974!, richard carpenter, richard carpenter goodbye to love

Id: rfdh9x743Vw

Length: 17min 44sec (1064 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 24 2019