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Jun 26
2010
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It wasn’t that long ago that I was sending for karaoke catalogues to find material for my students who wanted to sing pop. You’d look up a song and find it on a CD with 10 other songs you couldn’t care less about, so your song track ended up costing $20 plus shipping. Then some companies started advertising custom karaoke CDs. You’d send them a list of the songs you wanted and they would make up your custom CD at $5 a song, minimum 5 songs, plus shipping. Forget about getting anything that was currently popular - the tracks weren’t available yet.
Now we’re not even dealing with CDs at all. Everyone just downloads a song on itunes at .99 a pop, no shipping, and you have it instantly on your ipod. And everything is available. So here is the new protocol for working on pop music with karaoke tracks at Christina Rovics Vocal Studio: the student downloads the track on their ipod at home and we work with the I pod at the lesson, hooking it up to our sound system. It is possible for us to download the track here and make a CD for you and charge you for the download and the CD, but that wastes valuable lesson time. Also, it is important to bring printouts of the lyrics, as printing lyrics on lesson time in the studio also wastes lesson time.
What is not a waste of lesson time is the time we spend exploring You Tube for various performances of a song. Recently I was working with an adult student on a standard and I found the 1950s version of it by Frank Sinatra with orchestral accompaniment. The song was sung very much as written, in the big band style. I drew the student’s attention to the side bar, where there were various renditions of the song throughout the decades since then. Particularly interesting were the renditions by various jazz musicians who were not vocalists. This kind of research and listening expands musical awareness and historical perspective. It is invaluable and it is free of charge.
I make use of many different kinds of music to train the voice in my studio, including belting Broadway tunes and singing classical music (legit). I have a huge library of music, but when it comes to pop, I rely on my students to keep me current. I want to know what they are listening to so that I can understand what they are aspiring to and help them to achieve it. The pop music scene changes very quickly, so I don’t tend to keep a library of it as I do the classics. There is a lot of value to working on pop concurrently with other forms and styles. There are significant challenges both musically and vocally in pop music that we can address together in the studio. Often it is in pop that the personality of the student and the character of the voice emerges.
One issue that sometimes comes up is a girl wanting to sing a guy song. She doesn’t understand why it is so uncomfortable for her. The reason is that it is in the wrong key for her and needs to be transposed into a comfortable key. There is practically no chance she is going to find karaoke tracks in anything but the original key. All we can do is order the sheet music on line, transposed into whatever key we have determined is appropriate for the student. If it’s a new song the music may not be available at all. If it’s only available in the original key, Howard can transpose it on the synthesizer and we can make a track from that.
Some students are only interested in popular music but many embrace the whole field including the classics. Pop music is categorized by decades over the last half-century or so. Styles or interpretations of songs become associated with the performer who made the rendition popular. By contrast, the classics date back hundreds of years and songs are classified by composers. Here the study of music broadens into diverse cultures and languages, i.e. English, French, Italian, German and Spanish. Maturing as a singer is infinitely fascinating and it all depends on how much you are willing to explore and take in. Never before have the resources been greater and more accessible.
One issue that sometimes comes up is a girl wanting to sing a guy song. She doesn’t understand why it is so uncomfortable for her. The reason is that it is in the wrong key for her and needs to be transposed into a comfortable key. There is practically no chance she is going to find karaoke tracks in anything but the original key. All we can do is order the sheet music on line, transposed into whatever key we have determined is appropriate for the student. If it’s a new song the music may not be available at all. If it’s only available in the original key, Howard can transpose it on the synthesizer and we can make a track from that.
Some students are only interested in popular music but many embrace the whole field including the classics. Pop music is categorized by decades over the last half-century or so. Styles or interpretations of songs become associated with the performer who made the rendition popular. By contrast, the classics date back hundreds of years and songs are classified by composers. Here the study of music broadens into diverse cultures and languages, i.e. English, French, Italian, German and Spanish. Maturing as a singer is infinitely fascinating and it all depends on how much you are willing to explore and take in. Never before have the resources been greater and more accessible.
Christina Rovics
June 26, 2010
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