Today we worked on simplifying our style for our low notes. When singing a contemporary pop song, our brain often times adds to much - muddying up the sound with heavy vibrato, and stylistic choices better suited to other genres in an attempt to enhance the song and make it sound better. Because the song is a hard song - our brains think that it needs to feel hard. Adding all of this unnecessary style often times makes us fall behind the music - or pushes us out of the pocket, puts too much bass in our sound giving our cords less space to scat and move through words quickly, and gives the sound a harsher feel.
Today, as we simplified our style, giving our song a new dynamic range, the sound was more clear and Erin had more control over it!
The key was to talk the sound as much as possible - smoothing out any vibrato or unnecessary heaviness, while softening the pronunciation of our words by singing through a widened pop box (adding an "ah" sound whenever possible). We also softened the end of our words to take out harsh consonants (especially "er" sounds) - giving the song a all over more controlled and relaxed feel.
Widening vowels for a bigger belt sound
Because our new song is a Carrie Underwood song, it requires us to stay in high belt for a good portion of it (because Carrie just wails). In approaching our high belt in this song, we took our musical theater wide belt and softened it a little bit - keeping our vowels nice and wide without making them so round.
As we widened these high belt notes it allowed our sound to get bigger without adding unhealthy pressure to our cords. It also made the song sound, again, more in control and more natural.