The problem with singing

I would like to say something about the problem with singing. I had always thought that singing was a fun thing to do, something you did when you were happy, like, you know, in a Disney musical, or when Maria runs over the hills in The Sound of Music. I thought it was something everyone and anyone could do, something that I could do. I thought that singers were special only in that they could hold a note and sing in key, or had a voice of a certain type – soprano, baritone, etc. How wrong I was. It has taken me three expensive albums, a LOT of time, and a huge amount of stress and literal headaches, to realize that I’m completely wrong about singers, and singing, and songwriting.

When you don’t know what you don’t know

Until about a month ago, I was an idiot about this. There are things that you don’t know, that you don’t know (unconscious incompetence). And when it finally dawns on you that this thing that you hadn’t known about is going to be a problem, then you are at your wits’ end about how to deal with it. It’s such an elementary problem, so basic, that most people working in the music business have difficulty with lowering their thinking down to my level, and explain it in terms that I can understand.

I asked Luke Garfield, my Sound Engineer – do I write the vocals to fit the singer’s voice, or do I write it to fit the creative aim of the song, or it is both? If so, how? I think he must’ve been stumped at my seemingly disingenuous questions.

I think the supposition is, if you are a songwriter you are also a singer. But I know now that singing is a beast of a different colour. And it’s my beast (below). I have to deal with the problem.

My Music Beast – Kinda sweet, means well, but really, can’t sing worth a damn, despite coughing up flowers.

Here is the conundrum:

Can’t read music so good

I can produce a scoresheet in Logic (thanks, Apple), with notes, and then put the lyrics as text into it, and export it as a pdf. But, I can only read a scoresheet and figure it out slo-o-o-o-o-owly, by counting on my fingers and analyzing each and every note, while checking against a music theory handbook.

But really, I not much good at reading music. That’s problem no. 1.

When you produce music on a DAW, you produce it in the form of audio files. The audio is obviously in .wav or .mp3 or AAC or whatever format, not pdf. Very importantly, it does not contain information about the lyrics, in other words, the how to. (With me so far? OK.)

Don’t want scoresheet – want vocal demo

If I have written a song with lyrics, which was (until recently) my aim, I need someone to sing the vocals, perform them and record them. The problem is, how to provide the singer (who may be based anywhere in the world), with the melody and lyrics, integrated and complete with features.

They, thus far, have told me they don’t want me to send them music scores. I suspect it’s because it takes so long to read and figure out. Time is money for a session singer – this is not academia. Musical notation is a language, I know, same as the Roman alphabet and Maths. But people have found ways of making music by not using the written form of the language – and not reading it.

Regardless of the level of detail that I put into the scoresheet to make sure that they know how to interpret and perform each note, the vocalists want me to give them recordings (demos) of me singing the song that I’ve written. Yes, me, singing.

That’s problem no. 2. I asked around. This is an industry norm. It’s how it works.

I Don’t sing.⇠period

Dear readers: I. Do. Not. Sing. I cannot sing. I know what real singing is, and what I do is not singing. I am a songwriter, not a singer-songwriter. I cannot sing or delivery a vocal performance to save my life. It makes me physically ill to try to sing. All that percussive breathing. All that trying to reach the note. And you have to get the note, the pitch, the word, the pronunciation, timing, and mode-colour-effect all correct, all at the same time! Simultaneously!! (Pant, pant, cough, cough, wheeze, ack!…)

Autotune doesn’t help. Pitch correction plugins don’t help. Literally transposing the recording one millisecond at a time helps a bit. It’s torture! No amount of computer programs will help!

Lol! DAW plugins and effects only help up to a point. (Cartoon by xkcd)

singing is bad for me

When I was younger I thought I could sing, and I’d warble a song and record it, and feel really proud of myself. I thought I could sing in key. I had illusions of having perfect pitch. That my voice, though limited, was a nice little mezzo-soprano. Ha! In fact, it sounds like a cat meowing. A parrot on helium. A drunken seagull.

I have realized this. It is depressing, but true. I am not being self-deprecating. Facts are facts. I do not have a voice for singing. Can I be trained to do it better? Can I learn some breathing and projection techniques? Sure. But the real limitation is those little vocal cords (cords not chords) with which we are born. They are nothing but small folds of membranous tissue that project inward from the sides of the larynx, to form a slit across the glottis in the throat, and whose edges vibrate in the airstream to (voilá!) produce the voice. Tiny li’ll membranes that make all that sound. Amazing.

I write the song, then I “sing” the song, and suffer for it. These types of recordings are also called scratch vocals. They are meant to be replaced by the real thing and are seen as a rough guide for how the parts of the song hang together.

A fundamental problem, no. 3, then arises: the level of proficiency or complexity at which I composed the piece.

I wrote the melody and the lyrics so that I can sing it, not so that the singers, with their much greater range and skills, can sing it. Sometimes I just can’t. I end up recording large parts in something like an off-key groan. I send the files off to the singers and by some miracle they figure out how it goes and it comes back and it’s perfect and lovely. But, could it have been different? Better? More complex? More expressive? Yep. Definitely. The quality of the song is constrained by my lack of singing ability.

Every time I send off those demo or scratch recordings, I shudder at the thought that someone else has to listen to them on repeat. My mother always said, “Oh, please don’t sing at me!” Well, yes. My parents must have endured years of torture at my banging away on the piano and yowling along in my flat-as-pancake voice. (Sorry, Ma and Pa.)

Alas, I am like Florence Foster Jenkins, only with less range and volume.

The gifs are from the movie “Florence Foster Jenkins”, starring Meryl Streep as the very bad singer, Florence Foster Jenkins, and her pianist, portrayed by Simon Helberg. Her screech could peel the paint off walls. I thought perhaps the film exaggerated it. Then I listened to a recording of her made in the 1940s. She really was that bad. In the film Meryl Streep *was* *able to imitate Florence Foster Jenkins’s extremely bad singing. To sound that horrible, so precisely, when you are actually a good vocalist, takes serious talent.*

A musical catch-22

It is about more than my physical discomfort. I know now what the vocalists who I work with regularly can do. I know their range, their comfort zone, whether they can do falsetto or baritone, whether they can do harmonies, or rap, or triples (triple tracking), or vocal percussion, etc. I can think of a million ways in which I can write a song that makes use of any of these techniques. But, back to square 1 – if I can’t demo it, they can’t demo and record it.

Maybe they’re born with it, maybe it’s vocal technique…?

I had a spate of really bad wake-up calls about this recently. In one instance, the vocalist had to perform the lead vocals, plus whatever, and I left it up to him to decide how to do that. I simply had no idea how that could pan out, so I did not prescribe. He came back to me with no less than 7 different recorded tracks running simultaneously: lead, dubbing (same thing but with different timing and effects), harmonies including falsetto, and triples. My oh my, did I ever feel like an idiot – and greedy – client.

Since then, I’ve learned that there are 4 basic aspects to vocal technique that a professional must master, and that you, as the composer, can work with and manipulate:

Principles – the physical aspects (stance, twanging, breathing, jaw position, etc.)
Vocal modes (neutral, curbing, overdrive, edge)
Sound colour (dark to light)
Effects (vocal breaks, vibration, air, etc.)¹

When I listen to the vocalists’ demos, and to any album, I can hear these elements, and now, I know what I’m hearing. I know what the singers are doing. And I am in awe.

Sing to me, Chat GPT ♬🎶🎶

Ultimately, I will have to find a way to “sing” these vocal demos while pushing the range and skills of my vocalists to the max, because, after all the work done on the piano performance, the strings, guitars, even the woodwinds and percussion, the most important, and the most beautiful instrument, is the human voice. Instruments by themselves can communicate quite a bit of feeling and context, but only the human voice, singing your words, can communicate everything.

I hope the day will come when the A.I. of script-to-speech transformers will also be able to transform script to sung vocals. (Hurry up already!) So that I can get the machine to output some semblance of the song and deliver a scratch vocal track. Until then, I’m stuck.

Does anyone have any suggestions for how to solve this problem? Do drop me a comment.