Style Part 2

Welcome to Style part 2! Our aim overall for this month is understand more about creating different stylistic effects in your singing. Part of that is to do with note choices, licks, ornaments, what types of note pattern and scale are common in different styles; and part of that is to do with how you can vary your vocal tone on a technical level.

Today our aim is to add an element to the licks and trills we started on in the last session, and to explore the effects of adding nasality and denasality to the vocal tone by changing the placement of the soft palate.

Objectives:

• Understand how the soft palate can be raised or lowered to increase or decrease nasality in the sound
• Experiment with shifting between a nasal and a de-nasal sound and work to build this ability
• Learn which sounds favour a nasal or de-nasal vocal cord coordination
• Add the nasal/de-nasal layer to your arrangements
• Review your ornament/embellishments and add in a slightly longer one. 
• Creativity/Improvisation/pentatonic ear training in a blues/rock style.

The soft palate is the soft tissue you’ll find if you run the tip of your tongue backwards over the roof of your mouth from your upper teeth. This moves when you yawn. imagine a hot egg or hot-potato-in-your-mouth feeling and it will lift up. Awareness of the soft palate allows you to regulate how much nasality you put into your singing. If the soft palate is really high, you get a kind of cartoon type sound, and if it’s too low, the sound can be quite nasal. You ideally want a balance between the two sounds. Nasality isn’t something to be avoided, though – it can add a brightness to your sound, and allow you to move smoothly between your registers. It can also help you to project at higher pitches. Take a listen to your favourite vocalists and listen out for changes in the colour of the tone through the song. 

Another way to think about nasality is how much sound is coming out of the nose vs the mouth. If you make an NG sound and plug your nose, most of the sound will stop, because the sound is coming out of your nose. If you sing ‘ah’ out of your mouth and plug your nose, it makes no difference, because there is no nasality in the sound. The sound is coming out of your mouth.

If you imagine the word ‘hanger’, when you say the first syllable, the soft palate will come down to meet the tongue and the sound will be in the nose. Say this several times noticing the sound moving from nose to mouth. Can you now sing ‘ah’ and move the sound between mouth and nose?

This week:

• Sing your chosen song section by section taking each line and comparing the feeling and sound of using a lot of nasality and then no nasality and then a blend.
• Work on new lick or run, or continue with last week’s. Having one you can use well is more important than many – and you need consistency to build up the muscle memory.
• Record yourself doing the warm ups. You may want to have a mini submission deadline in mind for Monday, to give you an easy appointment for your diary.
• Record yourself working on your song.

You can submit a recording, and/or record yourself into the same soundtrap project as the previous module.

This is your main objective for this week’s material. If you want more, continue!

So now if you want to continue, you can embark on the Pentatonic Creativity Training!

This audio plays the notes from the minor pentatonic in a different way from the start note adding each note one by one until we have the full scale, and then going from the start note to each note in turn and back to the turn.

This activity is going to train your ear, develop your sense of melody, free you to start exploring with your voice and give you some tools to create variations on melodies for songs that you want to compose, arrange or cover. 

All kinds of pop, rock and folk genres use the minor pentatonic scale. . Rather that the major ‘do re mi fa so la ti do’ scale, the pentatonic is a scale that uses notes spaced at slightly different specific distances from each other. The distances, which we call intervals, create an instantly recognisable flavour. If you sing through these intervals, you will start to recognise them in other pieces of music and you will be able to use them effectively in your own improvisations. 

We are going to sing through each interval now, then all of them in a row.  

1. Root – b3
2. Root – b3 – 4
3. Root – b3 – 4 – 5
4. Root – b3 – 4 – 5 – b7

There are some ear-training tracks that play through these online that you can use as a reference. 

1. Root – b3 – root
2. Root – 4 – root
3. Root – 5 root
4. Root – b7 – root
5. Root – octave – root 

The notes of the scale should now be in your ‘inner ear’ and you can experiment with using your voice to create some melodic phrases. If you play guitar or piano you can pick them out as they will most likely use notes from the pentatonic. If you are having trouble getting started, here are some rules you can use:

1. Create a phrase with only two notes.
2. Create a phrase with only three notes.
3. Create a phrase with four notes.
4. Create a phrase using the same rhythm as the words ‘eight-thirty’.
5. Create a phrase using the same rhythm as the words ‘Saturday, Sunday’ (accent falls where the bold type is).

You don’t have to use any of this last list, they are just suggested as creative provocations if you don’t know where to start. You can play an A7 or Am to D7 or Dm, or E7 or Em chord or root note progression. On a keyboard simply playing an A to D or A to E note will give you the right key.

Enjoy!