Hey guys, welcome back again to Ken Tamplin
Vocal Academy. How do you go from bad singer to good singer? Well, I have a saying, and the saying is “A
singer is only a singer, because they have the guts to be one!” You heard me right. A singer is only a singer because they have
the guts to be one. Now, there’s a lot of speculation of
what a good singer is and a bad singer, and obviously a lot of percentages there in between. But I’d like to bring up some pretty popular
names. Now this is arguably, people can differ on
how they feel about this, but a lot of people would argue that someone like Bob Dylan doesn’t
have a great voice, right? And yet he may have been probably the greatest
musical inspiration in the last 50 years of any artist alive! This is true for Bruce Springsteen. A lot of people, you know, say that they don’t
necessarily think that Bruce Springsteen has a great voice, but I’m going to talk to
you guys about some things that are consistent with these singers I’m about to mention that
helps make them not only great, but phenomenal. Let’s talk about John Mellencamp, or maybe
David Bowie. There you go. Neil Young. Or maybe Annie Lennox. How about Madonna? Or Cyndi Lauper? Or Duran Duran’s Simon Le Bon or Robbie
Williams for that matter? Chrissy Hynde from the pretenders… Gosh, even the Beatles weren’t necessarily
virtuoso singers, right? But what did these singers all have in common? Well, first thing is a singer is only a singer
because they have the guts to be one, so they have the confidence to get up and tell their
story. Now, they obviously had some amazing character
voices, everybody from Mick Jagger to whomever, where the minute you hear them sing you go
hey, I know who that is! And you like them for their character, you
like them for their charisma. Well, I’d like to, you know, go through
a couple of scales and things with you that will help you to at least identify some good
tone and some pitch and stuff. But before I do that, I just want to talk
to you guys. The very first thing you should think about
is what story do you have to tell? What makes you unique? And I don’t mean just because your hair
is crazy and I don’t mean just because you can do some calisthenic thing or something
weird. I mean what unique thing do you have to offer
that you believe people could benefit from? Now I don’t believe any of these guys had
a contrived thing. I mean, David Bowie, for example, ironically
was a street mime, and if you think about that you can kind of see his evolution from
Ziggy Stardust all the way to the end here recently, all due respect. And he was just amazing charisma! And just always reinventing himself, and his
style was phenomenal, just everything he did was just… Wow! So what do you have that’s “wow”? Now, to go from bad singer to good singer,
first you’ve got to try to be able to try to sing something, right? But even in the case of Bob Dylan, you know,
“You’re gonna have to serve somebody,” you know. He doesn’t have, he has this kind of small,
froggy voice. And what he was able to do, and the stories
he was able to tell is that every one of the singers here were able to re-present a story,
in a way that the minute you heard them sing, you’re engaged in the story. Okay? So that’s really, really important. Well, how do we do that? Well, the first thing we do is we start, we
see things that are really simple. Pick a simple melody. I don’t care what it is, but something very
very simple, that’s well within your range, and just start to sing it, and just start
to live in the story, like think about what the lyrics are saying. Think about how as you’re almost like acting,
because you are in the story, you know how that person was feeling in that song or if
it was your own song that you wrote, you know how you can give emotion or communicate the
emotion of the story. So anyway, that’s one thing. The other thing, too is yes. We want to grow our voices, and we want a
good tone, and good pitch, and good range, and good stamina. So I’ve got a bunch of videos out on that,
and I’m going to be doing more, but I just want to encourage you. A singer is only a singer because they have
the guts to be one. With that said, I just want to do a really
simple scale with you guys. Now for those of you that have seen my videos
on The Five Laws of Singing, and Tone and Pitch, Ping is King! Ping and Brightness of Timbre is King, in
order to be able to grow a nice, clear sounding voice, so you don’t sound like
you have cotton in your throat. So we’re just going to do a really simple
scale, Lah…. It’s just a major scale. Now, if it’s too fast we’ll slow it down. I’d love to get Lah… And speed it up in time. But we’ll start real slow. Ladies you can do the octave of this. Let’s do it again. I’ll do it real slow at first. And get a real nice bright ah! La! Ah! Ah! Ping in the sound. La… Next one… La… Next one… La… Next one… Lah… Try to relax the chest, the neck, and the
throat… La… Now what we can do is you go through all
your vowel sounds. That’s the ah… You can go to aye… Lay… You can go to EE… EE… You can go to oh… Oh… You can go to ooh… ooh… And make sure that you get all of these different
vowels down, so you can feel what it feels like in your throat. Now the vowels themselves shouldn’t be big
changes: Ah AA, Aye, EE, Oh, ooh… It would be: Lah, ah, ah, ooh, oh, ah, Aa,
Aye, Ee… It should be really small spaces, so that they’re
kind of compressed, even though the throat is kind of nice and open, you don’t want
to jump from one vowel to another and have big jumps between the vowels themselves. Okay? Hopefully this was helpful to you guys! And if you like, please like and subscribe
to my channel, and I’ve got more on your way!
