How to Sing Better by Listening to Great Singers

Video Transcript

" Hey! I am Mark Black and welcome to expertvillage.com. We are going to be talking about vocal performance. I think the last thing I want to tell you is that they say, I think there is some science fiction movie back in the 60s, and basically these people ate this food and they turned into giants and so, maybe a C. S. Lewis book, the point is if you eat the food of giants, you become a giant. So, one of the ways to prime the pump and get you going in terms of being a great vocalist is to listen to great vocalist and I don’t think you necessarily, I don’t think you should say or everybody tells me Frank Sinatra is a great vocalist or Barbara Streisand, don’t worry about that. Just pick people you like. You know, the people whose albums you think are cool from a vocal standpoint. Now and they will be like I love what he does. Now another thing to consider, some people, I am not going to name any names, but some artists that I would say “Man, I love how he hits these licks, and I love his range, but his tone I don’t really care for that” and somebody else would be the opposite, “Oh! I just can hear him sing one note for all day, you know, but he is really not that skilled when it comes to this other aspect.” So, I am not saying that we are looking for a perfect vocalist, but I am saying a great way to feed your spirit, feed your ideas on what you are doing and to you give your ideas for the future is to listen to great musicians. You have an internal and I have an internal picture of what my voice is supposed to look like, sound like when I sing, I am trying to match somebody. For me, you because of when I grew up, it’s probably John Denver and James Taylor with little Randy Travis and people like that stuck in there. And it’s a background image, and I don’t mean I can say who it is, but when you listen to me sing if you listen to me along that if you say he kind of sings like this and that, you got that too. And so one of the ways to move your voice is to listen, to a different place, is to listen more intently to great artist to great people and again it just slightly changes the direction of what you are thinking of and over time it can make a big change. So, if you’ll feed on the food of giants, you will become a giant."