Hey guys, welcome back again to Ken Tamplin Vocal Academy, where the proof is in the singing.
I’d like to discuss how to sing any song.
And this is really important because what you’re going to find is that you think you’re hearing certain vowel sounds, when in fact, you’re actually not when you hear a really great singer.
Here’s what I mean by this.
Um, a lot of times we think of singing, like we speak, SLS singing, like we speak, when in fact, we really don’t sing like we speak.
We sing like we sing, like we should sing well.
And here’s what I mean by that.
If I were to sing a line in a song, and let’s say the line was, you know, Hi, I’m saving a way, setting open costs for the agency. Don’t stick to the song, right?
What you’re gon na learn is now let me sing it like the way Dennis the Young would have sung the song. Hey, I’m selling a way of sitting open costs for the agency, right?
He really pushes the sound into the mascot in front of his face.
He’s a phenomenal singer.
By the way, he’s still out there doing it today, killing it, which is awesome.
But I bring this up because there are what are called vowel transitions.
Now what I like to do is I like to get my students to start off by working up their songs with vowels only first.
But how do we work up songs with vowels only? First, if those vowels don’t understand their relationship to each other, and we’re just going through and singing a song, we overlook those vowels.
Okay, so let’s say if I let you speak that line to you, I’m sailing away, setting an open course for the virgin sea.
Now, when I’m sailing, I set open costs for the virgin sea, right?
Maybe a theater might want to do that, because we’re trying to accentuate the lyrics.
And we want the last person to write in the last row to understand what we’re saying.
But for the most part, we want to break this stuff down a vowel at a time, and we want to actually eliminate consonants all together.
So what I encourage my students to do is to take a song that they love, whatever that song is, and eliminate the consonants all together, now and then, and then we’re going to talk about vowels in a second.
So yay, Oh, yay.
Okay,
Now, there are what I call vowel substitutions.
Now, these vowels and substitutions vary, and they’re not constant.
In fact, I just saw one vocal coach put out some here recently. It’s you know how to sing any song.
I’d like to make some adjustments to this because there’s some incorrect information in it.
And if she’s listening, hopefully she’ll benefit from this because this is 30 years of experience of doing this for a really long time.
And those vowel substitutions are as follows.
In the English language, we have somewhere between 12 and 16 different vowels.
In Belcanto, or in Latin, or in Italian, there are five, all E, or Ooh.
Now, I’ve said e Belcanto.
most of my life, and I like to use that as a premise by which all other vowel sounds happen.
However, it falls very short of the traditional vowels and falls very short of the contemporary vowels that we use in the English language.
So if I go, Oh, yay, see, this is called, I’m going to show you something called vocal tract shaping, where we actually shape the vowels themselves to morph easily from one vowel to the next.
So we want to take the path of least resistance or from one vowel into the next Val, so that when those vowels join together, they can actually have a smooth transition, keeping the maximum space in the mountain, the back of the throat, the least amount of jaw movement, the least amount of tongue movement, and the least amount of over exaggeration of the vowel.
Now the higher we go, and this is where this other coach has given out some information.
good information.
By the way, there’s some good info there for sure.
Absolutely.
It sounded like she was.
Yeah, we somehow cross paths with the same information.
But within this, the higher we go, the smaller those vowel sounds need to happen.
So if I were to do this, do this really high and say, Hey, if I were to go really high, did you notice that there was almost no change in the vowels themselves? They were super subtle.
So the higher up we go up this food chain of these vowels, the more compressed the smaller spaces that we get within the vowel structures themselves, and they take the path of least resistance from one to another.
What do I mean by that?
Well, this is far more than just a simple quick tutorial here.
But there’s something called the family of vowels and the vowels, how they relate to one another when we sing.
So, as we go up, we convert these vowels.
So if we were to sing, I, for example, and this is where the other coaches are correct, I convert all, but not in every case.
So if I go, I don’t go. It’s just kind of weird, right.
And by the way, we talked about diphthongs.
And some other stuff, you don’t necessarily go and close the valve.
At the very end, you can add just a little bit of he and I are off the auto and Id right.
Now, the higher we go, the more
If I say like, then all of a sudden, it takes on the persona, more of an app or in the sound.
So these vowels shift.
And I know that sounds complicated, and it is a little bit, but these values shift, and they change the higher up we go in the food chain, depending on what we’re singing at the intensity, what we’re seeing, and also the vowels themselves.
So I’ve never seen a pure email. Let me demonstrate this in a different kind of way. We talked about a valve holding its shape, the shape of the valve, and then having a quick dip down at the end, and then curving into the speaking level sound of the valve.
But actually, there are valves as we go up top. We don’t ever sink into the pure rest of the purity of the valve itself.
He is a good example.
So I don’t go. I go quickly, like a ye.
And I can gently roll into the A e into that valve.
And then all of a sudden, I make you think I think the whole time, but I use the portal or the tunnel, the portal or the bridge to get to this. This is true for UI.
Also, if I’m on the bottom, and I say, Oh, I can do that on the bottom.
But the higher up I go, Oh, I go Oh, and the higher up the food chain I go, Oh, I go Oh, and that is right, I don’t go pure Oh, I can never get there.
So I use Oh, to get to and I roll into it and I don’t wait until the very end to give a diphthong.
Again, it’s because I want to get to the purity of that bow.
And I want to find that placement of that cool little amphitheater where we hit that perfect little pocket in the back of the throat, right.
So it becomes really important how we relate these vowels.
So let’s get back to how we can sing any song in any style. We start out again like, hey, I’m selling a way. We started with just the vowels with no content.
Yay.
Oh, yay.
And as we translate those vowels from one value to another, we find vowels that have the path of least resistance.
So it is an excellent way.
And I mean, an excellent way to practice this is to practice Ooh, oh, ah, E, as transitional bells.
I’m gon na do a scale here in a minute on how you can practice and then reverse those vowels in a different kind of way and sing a e o N mu.
Now what we really need to remember is that E as we go higher can be translated as like lead, or e like the number eight.
This other vocal coach says to sync it on certain vowels. That is patently false and absolutely dead, dead wrong.
In the lower registration, you can do that. The higher up we go, we actually avoid it like lead or like cooking.
If we go up too high, it goes to eat like it pulls too much tension.
So if I think I’m gon na flip my lid, he likes the number eight. I’m gon na go.
Right, there’s too much tension.
In fact, you’ll start to notice that your larynx will start to want to raise on you.
So there are a lot of little nuances.
I cover all of this in my singing course.
But there are a lot of these little nuances that will help you like crazy when you’re going to sing your songs.
But I want to do just a couple quick scales where you can identify how closely these vowels are related in the throat and how we can build this vowel structure.
Now, there’s a lot more to it than this, but this is an awesome start.
So we’re going to start going a lot on the bottom, like the doctor wants to see your tonsils keep the maximum space remembering the breath and the engine that drives your car.
And we’re going to go ooh, oh, ah yay.
Oh, yay.
Yay.
Now, the higher up I go, the smaller the spaces become.
Now space is big in the throat because we want to create the most space possible.
But we actually want to compress the vowels and make them smaller the higher we go.
See me doing it smaller.
Yay.
Yay.
Yay, you’re higher up the food chain, the smaller you make the space.
Now, the higher up I go from here, the more I bring mass into the sound, and I push the sound into the front.
Yay.
So I’m not carrying so much girth or mass in my throat with me, and I compress the sounds and make them smaller.
When you combine this with the songs that you’re singing, you’re going to notice that, all of a sudden, you’re gon na have all this freedom in your throat that you never knew you had.
And then gently, little by little, you start to reintroduce the consonant sounds as much as you can to keep that throat open.
Now there’s something called glottal stops, which are anytime that the glottis closes down, and air stops the flow.
So unbar things that close.
Maybe you can substitute those consonants with different vowels, different constants, like I said, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe you can use small things like a V, baby, baby, baby, baby until you can force the throat to stay open.
Because in the back, the epiglottis says it’s closing across the trachea and allowing air to come up.
And this is in the case of diphthongs that we talked about a minute ago.
It’s trying to differentiate airflow coming out of the mouth, or out of the nose and the back of the throat going, Hey, can you make up your mouth here?
Do you want air to come out of your mouth?
Or do you want to come out of the nose or a combination thereof?
Now I’m going to cover this again. There’s actually a whole other subject that has to do with glottal stops.
We’ll get to that.
And then, since I cover all this in my scene course, guys, if you liked what you heard, please like and subscribe to my channel.
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And I go through step by step how you can build muscle memory for all of this stuff to put you guys on the fast track to awesome sight.
Okay, thank you for joining me.
Until next time at Temple Book Academy, peace
