The Song Fight Bulletin Board

erik wrote:Ummm, okay (also disokay), I don't understand (that is, I disunderstand) what you are saying. Leonard Cohen sounds bored and passionate. Stephen Malkmus sounds bored and passionate. Johnny Cash. Ian Curtis. Leon Redbone. Rik Ocasek.

I think that maybe the problem with dude's vocals is that they sound boring, not that they sound bored.

I guess we'll have to agree to not agree (that is, disagree). In the case of several of those (eg. Johnny Cash) I don't think he sounds bored, but I agree he sounds passionate. I guess it is, as with most things, a matter of perception.

*My* point was that you don't have to sing loudly to sing passionately, nor to sing interestingly. Prior to my comment, there were many posts that seemed to focus on using volume or "strain" to imitate passion.

Bottom line is that if you're not feeling it, you're faking it.

As everything it's all in how much you practice. Passion to me is striving for a particular feeling and achieving that feeling as the end result of your tune. I suggest finding your limitations. For instance try singing as loud as you can, thats a start. I'm not saying neccesarily record singing as loud as you can, but just practice that way. it will help. (I find the best place to practice singing is in the car.)

Sometimes I find myself not even really singing, as in making some of the goofiest but also cool noises with my vocals (Find your limitations) We can all make a ton of goofy noises and trust me you will sound goofy but you have to accept the fact you will sound shitty when you first start anything. (Practice Practice Practice)

It's hard to explain singing on a forum. First find out what you can do with your vocals ( as in try anything and everything) Then out of those things you can do, pick out the things that you like. I've already said it and I can't stress it enough but the best way to sing more passionately is to Practice.

Screaming Poet wrote:First find out what you can do with your vocals ( as in try anything and everything)

People love this type of specific advice. Really they do.

Be creative, experiment, try different things, use your imagination.

As in imagine that my advice is helping you.

EDIT Now I'm not being helpful either. Here's a trick. Try breaking your parts into seperate tracks. For instance, do all of your verses on one track and all of your chorus parts on a seperate track. This will help with things like running out of breath going from a verse to a chorus. Or maybe the vocals step it up in the chorus, and the transition will be smoother because on that track you're just waiting on it instead of struggling through it.

i think poet is right on the money... it's practice which leads to confidence. that's the elusive ingredient... and soooo hard to attain (well, was for me).

the more comfortable you get with your own style the better it becomes...

You're right Kweep, his point was very insightful. Hmmm..practice?

I never would have thought of that.

heh... i don't mean sitting with a metronome singin' scales (i don't think poet does either)... by practice i mean time... time spent doing the thing you need to build confidence in...

[EDIT - btw, my first post wasn't in response to yours... we submitted at the same time-ish... just fyi]

One man's passion is another man's NIGHTLINE special.


The most important thing is do YOU like what you are doing?

If not, the real trick is to figure out why... and it seems, for me, that it boils down to time, just as it has been suggested.


for example, why do I always seem to identify my spelling errors, but I don't type it properly to begin with, and worse, sometimes get a mental block and can't fix it? The answer is two fold: I didn't practice spelling very much, and I'm too lazy (on this particular topic) to go and fix it. Whenever I do look it up, I ALWAYS go ..."oh yeah, that's how it's spelt".


This analogy is useful because I subscribe to the theory that music is a language. You probably listen to enough music to know something is wrong with what you are doing, but you haven't done enough to be able to know how to correct it.


What sucks about these types of answers JR is that they are frustratingly true!

I remember, 14 years ago, a fellow drummer at Humber was riffin on rudimentary ideas (paradiddles, 5 stroke rolls, flams, ratamacues, etc) and as a young drummer I asked Todd " MAN!!! How do you do that????"

Todd says "uh... practice".

I said " no man!! HOW!!! What do you think? How do you know which thing to put where?"

Todd says " seriously man, it's practice... "


This converstation went on...but the fact is that Todd was totally right. Like many people, I wanted the magic answer, cause I wasn't commited to practicing, I wanted it NOW!!!

After doing the work, I end up having people ask me for the same "magic answer", but it doesn't exist. Asking questions about it are not pointless however, as it shows that you DO want the answer...it's just that sometimes the answer is to put in the time yourself.


Sometimes the answer is simple and straight up and can save you years of effort though, like learning a grip technique that after a week or two will give you the ability to do double stroke rolls...so don't think that there man NOT be shortcuts, but there also may be no shortcuts too!


To conclude my speil; after doing the Nur Ein thing, I realized that the cliche about "write a 100 songs and throw them away".. has tremendous merit... but for a long time I wasn't willing to admit it...cause I wanted it now!!!!

My point about that is, we can always learn... and don't listen to the retards (by definition ) who claim that learning isn't important...they are stuck and are not willing to change... and it's a damn good thing you would start a thread like this and try to find out if you can cheat an answer.


But on this one, if you aren't born with the talent ot do it immediately, you gotta bite the bullet and put in the time your personal situation demands to get to where you want to be.


...and breathe.

you know, your vocal timbre is a large part of whether or not your vocals are going to be listenable, and we are all constrained as to how much that can be changed. if you have a decent voice but just make lots of technical mistakes, that is something you can fix - listen to roymond's archive history, or fluffy, or dr worm.

voice lessons are probably the single best investment you can make if you want to go from crappy singer to better singer, but even that won't make your voice golden.

i guess i'm saying, maybe your voice just sucks ass. learn to live with it and look for what you can do well, rather than worrying to death about pleasing people and their stupid songfight reviews.

my voice sucks ass. i sing with all the passion i can possibly muster, and my voice _still_ sucks ass. so really, passion in most cases is probably just another way of saying "have a better singing voice."

also keep in mind that most people review songs while listening thru the fight for the first time, and should be told to shut their fucking pieholes if the best they can muster is "sing with more passion."

Leaf wrote:One man's passion is another man's NIGHTLINE special.

hah!

Re: what blue said...

It's true, not all of us are born with naturally good voices, and even through endless amounts of practice, I'm never going to be as good as Thom Yorke or endless amounts of other great singers I adminre. I am however quite a bit better than I used to be. And keep in mind too that for every Thom Yorke there's also a Tom Waits or Tom Petty or countless others who are not "good singers" but whose voices many people love anyway.

Leaf wrote:the gospel according to Leaf

Amen, brutha. That was a sweet read!

Leaf wrote:...and breathe.

And relax your wrist.

deshead wrote: And relax your wrist.

seriously des. this is the best piece of advice you could give to a guitarist.

and let your freak flag fly on occasion. listen to leaf's music. he is the perfect example of someone here who writes, plays, and sings with passion and makes it work. his passion gives me a chub.

Poet is right - Practice, practice, practice
JB is right - loud isn't passion
Poet is right - Practice, practice, practice
Leaf is right - One mans passion is another mans something else
Poet is right - Practice, practice, practice
and Blue is especially right - kill the long guitar intros


and remember - a bad review is better than no review. If someone says your stuff is boring, you have 2 options:
1) ignore him, or
2) try to be less boring

either way - you've learnt something. Use it.

BTW: I like your stuff JR - keep going and learn from bad reviews.

My tip for you - get peoples attention early and try not to lose it. Most Caravan Ray songs have no intro and go for less than 2 minutes. I often get told I'm crap - but I rarely get told I lack passion

All this stuff is really awesome! Thanks everyone. There's only a few problems, all of which have to do with me not knowing terms. What are "compressors"? What are the "arpeggios" that people say not to do. Last, someone mentioned a pitch fixer or something. If you guys could explain those, it would be awesome.

Compressors are a gift from God.


It's a tool that control's an audio signal's output at a set level. While I have slowly learned how to use them better, I certainly can't at this second properly explain teh term...but perhaps a seperate thread has this info? Or a compressor's thread should be started? This is the "passion and originality" thread.

By the way... as silly as this sounds, you should think about looking at the oxford or websters definitions of those words, to really grasp the definitive perspective on it... like, when I looked up the word "groove", and realized that grooves are little slots, or a "long narrow channel", it started to occur to me that "groovey" could be intrepreted as sitting in the musical space the tune and parts that the other musicians are playing; and that to spill out of that with unrelated information would overflow the groove... but from a mental imagery perspective, it was ... kinda neat. The music is this defined space, and you fill it up together... if someone is (or some part) too intense...


Sometimes I think of music as if it were water, and the wires are pipes, and the song is a big pipe that you fill with music. Too much water in either a wire or pipe, and you get a lousy groove, or distortion.

Something like that...


uh.. that's the kinda stuff I think about.

kill_me_sarah wrote:And keep in mind too that for every Thom Yorke there's also a Tom Waits or Tom Petty or countless others who are not "good singers" but whose voices many people love anyway.

Also, keep in mind that for every Tom Waits there's also a Thom Yorke who is not a "good singer" but whose voice many people love anyways.

Saying Tom Waits isn't a good singer is like saying Picasso isn't a good painter.

if i had to name one singer who brings passion to his music, it would be tom waits.

Leaf wrote: Sometimes I think of music as if it were water, and the wires are pipes, and the song is a big pipe that you fill with music. Too much water in either a wire or pipe, and you get a lousy groove, or distortion.

Something like that...

Actually the groove is like the Reynold's Number (ie. the ratio of inertial forces to viscous forces in the fluid)

In the low Reynold's Number range, the flow is laminar - hence the music is 'smooth', or 'mellow' or perhaps 'groovy'. If you increase the velocity of the music (ie. the tempo) or decrease the kinematic viscosity of the fluid (errr...turn the guitars up?) then the R Number increases and the flow becomes turbulent, and the music could be described as "RAWWK" (the number of W's is inversely proportionate to the 'density' of the fluid - or in other words, how dumb the drummer is)

Hey, who said 2 years of studying fluid mechanics would never come in useful!

Caravan Ray wrote:

Leaf wrote: Sometimes I think of music as if it were water, and the wires are pipes, and the song is a big pipe that you fill with music. Too much water in either a wire or pipe, and you get a lousy groove, or distortion.

Something like that...

Actually the groove is like the Reynold's Number (ie. the ratio of inertial forces to viscous forces in the fluid)

In the low Reynold's Number range, the flow is laminar - hence the music is 'smooth', or 'mellow' or perhaps 'groovy'. If you increase the velocity of the music (ie. the tempo) or decrease the kinematic viscosity of the fluid (errr...turn the guitars up?) then the R Number increases and the flow becomes turbulent, and the music could be described as "RAWWK" (the number of W's is inversely proportionate to the 'density' of the fluid - or in other words, how dumb the drummer is)

Hey, who said 2 years of studying fluid mechanics would never come in useful!

sweet! that's damn funny.

I think that's a cool analogy.

i don't get the people who say someone like stephen merritt just sounds bored. are we listening to the same band? that's just his voice. if you don't hear him singing passionately, you must not be listening very closely.