Singing -- innate or learned?

More in the spirit of the original question, one thing that can definitely be trained is your ear, and in turn you will become a better singer simply because you can hear yourself singing off-key. When I tried to learn the guitar and was playing a bit every day, after a few months I started noticing mistakes in songs on the radio that I had never heard before.

H.

To that end:

…someone in another thread posted this link and I noodled around with it. I think it is a pretty darn resource. Well constructed, too.

I’ve been trying to convince my students to waste their time online with this program rather than handing over all of their productive hours to Facebook.

…with mixed results.

I understand your rationale, spacemonkey, and it may well be that it’s a fine way to approach singing in a class setting. As I said, my reservations about focusing attention on the soft palate mainly come from my own bad experience with it as an advanced adult student. I am in full agreement about the importance of the concept.

so, not to be overly reductive…or overly snarky…

…but did you just have a really crummy voice teacher once? They are awfully easy to find, after all (and I hope like hell that I’m not yet another one).

Unless you are one of those unlucky people who are completely and utterly tone deaf. I happen to know one of these people, no matter what she sings, she thinks she is singing it well, but it is just… off…

But, my opinion on the matter, being a bit of a singing fool myself, is that it is a bit of both. There are wacko cases like Julie Andrews, who could belt an aria at age 7, where all you need is a bit of work to learn the basics, and then there are people who don’t know a thing, that can find their voice. But, you can’t change your vocal range or natural pitch too much. Range is somewhat flexible, but your pitch and timbre you are stuck with. I can sing well personally, but I have my problems, I have a very weird baritone range, I have a hard time hitting low notes (depending on the time of day) and a hard time hitting the high ones (depending on how much I warm up) but I have been told that I have an extremely pleasing natural pitch and timbre (from my vocal coach).

So, it is a bit like most abilities, you can be born with it, you can work hard to get it, or you could be out of luck and unable to do it at all.

Jon,

The “peculiarities” of your case are actually not all that peculiar at all. It is extremely normal for baritone-types such as yourself to have significant gaps in the top and bottom of your vocal registers. You say (if I do not presume) that is your genetic lot in life and cannot be altered significantly, I’m saying that these gaps are precisely what vocal training can fill in and strengthen.

…so, yeah, this is partly a terminology and a personal taste thing. Can your range and timbre be changed to the extent that you are suddenly a heldentenor? Very unlikely. Can a couple years of singing lessons (say, one every couple of weeks with lots of practice on your own) add four or five consistently resonant notes to either end of your current vocal range? You bet. Voice lessons will probably not render your voice unrecognizable, but they can make a surprising difference.

Here’s the number to call!! (okay, I’ll stop)

So what do you look under in Google/YP to find a voice/singing teacher? Is there a particular job description title for this I should look for? And is this the kind of thing you have to stick with for years or can you get a crash course and get learn the basics and practice on your own?

I’m by no means a professional, but as far as I’m concerned, if you learned a few proper breathing techniques, learned a thing or two about proper “alignment,” and warmed up properly, you’d probably do okay.

Apparently, my Word of the Day is “proper.”

Well, BTG, I’m showing my bias once again, but if I were you I would start by looking at the local universities (you’re in Dallas, right? I know of some good folks at UNT, at least). You might even find that members of the vocal faculty will respond to your emails and point you in the right direction (then again, they might be jerks…or too busy…difficult to see…always in motion is the faculty).

Well yeah, pretty much. I wasted a good 2-3 years of my music degree studying with the guy, and I didn’t know any better at the time. He had a doctorate, he knew all the pedagogical theory, spouted terminology like you wouldn’t believe, but in the end he simply wasn’t a good singer and lacked the basic sense of sympathy to tell whether or not I was singing properly or just manufacturing sounds to approximate the things he was telling me.

It illustrates the dangers of teaching elevation of the soft palate as a goal in and of itself, rather than as a natural result of good breathing, dropped jaw and relaxed production. The same goes for any number of symptoms of good singing: vibrato, a stable, lowered larynx, and so on. As I’m sure you know, removing any of those elements from the overall picture of healthy vocal production and pursuing them as some sort of separate goal post can lead to serious problems in inexperienced students. My point is basically that if it can happen in private instruction to an advanced classical singer in a university vocal performance program, it can easily happen to a beginning student in a class setting. It can happen regardless of the quality of the instruction because a beginning singer has no baseline by which to determine whether he or she is actually raising the soft palate or manipulating something else in the vicinity.

Let me ask you this: you say the soft palate is an area of which students are “dangerously unaware.” Why? No one is going to cause themselves long term vocal damage by singing without a raised soft palate. I’d say it figures pretty low on the list of critical concepts to which beginning students should be introduced in order to sing without hurting themselves.

Actually, I believe that singing without good awareness of a high soft palate (which, as you quite rightly point out, is one of many ingredients of healthful voice production) actually can lead to vocal damage. The greatest likelihood of doing so comes when singers enter the upper limits of their range.

Even singers who are developing a decent idea of breath support can strain for high notes without a vocal tract configured (for lack of a better word) in such a way as to maximize their resonance. A larynx that doesn’t shoot way up in the throat and a highly placed velum (soft palate) are a big part of this. Even smart singers will, from their perspective, hear enough decent, aesthetically pleasing sound during their attempts to sing high notes in this manner that they often keep pushing and pushing, unaware of the strain that they are putting on their vocal folds.

Without getting into too much anatomy here…in the higher reaches of the voice, laryngeal function changes in small but highly significant ways. However, many won’t let this change take place (you can think of this change as like when a cam kicks over on a compound bow or an old-school nautilus weight machine, if that makes any sense) and push the limits of their “first mode” of phonation, essentially doing the vocal equivalent of driving 55 in 2nd gear.

How the soft palate comes back into this: if one does allow the larynx to do its new trick without maximizing the resonance capabilities of their vocal tract by raising the velum (and yes, it is crucial to maintain VERY strong and consistent breath support and…well…as little tension anywhere else in the body as is possible during this point), the laws of acoustics just plain won’t let things happen.

My use of the word “dangerous” is more than a little melodramatic, of course. As you say, a high soft palate is just a good idea–better vowels, more overall resonance, part of good, balanced breathing (and part of this balanced, nutritious breakfast!). My penchant for hyperbole is mostly on account of how pretty much every student I’ve ever taught is COMPLETELY unaware that they even have a soft palate, let alone how they can move it, how it is an essential part of a free, resonant tone…and, yes, how they can hurt themselves “up there” if they do not learn how to properly manipulate it.

I understand the physiology of it. I think you and I simply differ on the potential for harm that can come from asking a student to directly manipulate the soft palate versus inducing them to elevate the soft palate as more of a symptom of correct application of strong breath support, relaxing tension, dropping the jaw, actions that are all more easily grasped and gauged by a beginning singer.

It’s true that blasting through a registrational change with no modification can ultimately cause long term vocal damage, but as you say, the soft palate is just one small piece of that puzzle. You also mention a larynx that doesn’t shoot up into the throat as another key element, but you wouldn’t directly instruct a beginning student to lower their larynx because they are likely to end up lowering it through extrinsic musculature rather than lowering it through strong support and vowel modification. The external result–a lowered larynx–is the same, and a beginning singer does not have the tools to realize the difference between the correct approach and one that generates more tension, short-circuits supports, and can ultimately lead to long term damage. I would treat elevation of the soft palate in a similar way: in my opinion it is best to mainly treat it as a result of good production, approached through concepts that are easier for the student to grasp and easier for the instructor to assess.

But as I said, these are just differences in pedagogical approach. I am perhaps more sensitive than most to those issues because of my experience as a student. I’m sure we’ve lost most everyone else from the thread, but I am enjoying the discussion. :)

I can’t carry a tune with a damn, but in music appreciation class in college, I was able to identify notes with 100% accuracy.

So I’m hoping that means that I can be helped. I enjoy singing, but I have to do it in solitary situations. :)

Don’t guess anyone here has used a voice teacher in the Seattle/Eastside area?

The damn karaoke games only reinforce what I always suspected about myself. I can keep pitch almost perfectly (thus 100% on the games on expert many times) however I still sound like complete ass while singing (since I have a crap voice)

That’s something I’ve never liked about those karaoke games… As you indicated, they reward good pitch, but totally screw you if you sing with any panache.

You score more points in Rock Band for singing “Dead or Alive” like some robotic choirboy than you do for singing anything even remotely similar to Bon Jovi.

Yeah, that bothers me too. Dead or Alive is the perfect example, actually. I sing it an octave lower so that I can 100% it, but then I sound like a drone. I can reach the other notes (though I may not be using my soft palate correctly, so now I’m a bit afraid!), but often I get a bit growly when I do. The microphone chops out a bunch if you growl at all (one reason I hate singing Enter Sandman with RB, actually).

Yeah, it’s like they want you singing “Enter Sandman” in the style of Pat Boone.

This sounds like a great party theme! ;)

I’ve studied with Davida Kagen for years and highly recommend her. If you’re interested PM me and I’ll hook you up with her number.

Arise thread!!

So I said screw it and decided to try some intro vocal lessons at a place near me in Kirkland. Figure 30 mins/week for a month to see what’s up is a worthwhile risk.

Spacemonkey gets my vote for Most Awesome Lurker – 89 posts over like 7 years, and I think most of those were in this thread.