#vocal technique

[saintjamboni]

So many people don't realize they'll sing a lot better if they just open their mouths more while singing--it helps give your voice more personality and wiggle room for tone (dark, bright, loose, etc).

Unfortunately, I open my mouth too much, and now my voice has too much personality. There WILL be vocal pops. There WILL be Frank Sinatra impressions. There WILL be screaming.

[yumearcana]

🌀 The Hypnotic voice

A note before crossing this threshold: the cadence here may sway your focus. Step in deliberately. Return when you choose. ✦ ᛉ ᚨ ᚷ ᛟ ✦

There are many types of voice: strong, soft, masculine, feminine. Sweet, harsh, rough, silky. Every quality you can imagine. Some hypnotic subjects, often without realizing it, already have their preferences, even if they don’t admit them.

But the hypnotist can create their hypnotic voice.

From fantasy, from books, from movies, from anime, someone is drawn to a chair, tied, headphones on. That’s all they need. Perhaps a spiral for drama, a flicker of rhythm to hold attention.

Some hypnotists have a natural advantage: an accent, a tone, a cadence that commands attention effortlessly. The instrument of the hypnotist is the voice. It’s a path down toward the drop, a voice that shows character, certainty, authority.

Would you trust someone who seemed unsure of themselves? No.

The hypnotist is an artist. Their audience may be small or a full hall. Know that these creatures under the light of Melopene and Thalia respond to the subtle art of sound.

Scientific reasons show us that lower tones soothe the mind. High-pitched voices trigger the primate brain’s danger alarm. The goal of trance is safety and happiness, a space where thinking isn’t necessary. The subject only needs to follow and trust.

Here’s the fascinating part: the mental component. The hypnotist enters a minor trance themselves, not as deep as the subject’s, but enough to sync with them, to feel the breathing, to speak in rhythm, to use the voice as a current, a gentle, irresistible pull.

The voice softens, becomes a whisper, a silk that wraps around, that binds, that holds, letting the subject surrender and forget to escape.

A hypnotic voice is not just heard. It is felt. It guides, it seduces, it becomes the path itself.

✦ᛉumeᛋᛇ✦

[soprano-sfogato]

Christine’s part is more about the middle voice, not high notes

I’ve written a post about Christine’s technique in Leroux’s novel, but now let’s talk about the role of Christine in ALW’s musical. I can literally write a book about it—before I’ve chosen opera as my career path, I was aiming to play Christine one day (I had taken voice lessons from one of the actresses who played her many years ago, and I nearly auditioned for the London production). But today, I’ll try to write about this part in a nutshell.

High E is not the most important thing

I know that the role of Christine is primarily associated with that high note, but the whole part is more complex than just one note. It’s wonderful if you can sing this note with ease, but it doesn’t mean that you can sing the entire part well, because

Having a good and strong middle voice is crucial

Christine’s part sits mostly in the middle voice, and since that’s often the most challenging part of the soprano range, you need solid technique to manage singing in that tessitura. If you struggle with your middle voice, it would be impossible for you to sing this part. That’s why you should

Work on your chest voice

A developed chest voice is essential for a strong middle voice. It’s also critical if you want to handle the lower notes—Christine sings quite low at times, even below middle C. Chest voice is a must for this part, and it will also help with

A few high notes

Christine sings high during the Think of me cadenza and at the end of the title song (and in the ensemble at the end of Masquerade). That’s it. It’s not difficult if you have strong, proper technique. Regarding the Think of me cadenza, you should also

Be familiar with the opera style

Yes, Phantom is a musical, but Christine is an opera singer, and the score gives you the opportunity to show it! Plus, if you’ve sung some arias before, it will make the Think of me cadenza (in any version) much easier to sing.

To sum up, while Christine’s high notes are impressive, the role requires much more than that. A strong middle and chest voice, and familiarity with operatic style are essential to mastering that part.

[koifishhies]

I've been listening to Will Wood a lot recently and I love the gritty raspy voice he does (I'm talking vampire culture, thermodynamic lawyer, most of self-ish, etc) but as a vocalist myself I do wanna put out a warning to any Will Wood fans who want to try and replicate that when singing along…

FUCKING DON'T

I'm just kidding, you can. But NOT willy-nilly. What he's doing is called vocal distortion and it CAN AND WILL wreck your voice if you do it a lot without proper technique.

I think people who have no experience or education with vocal tech and singing don't really think about the fact that you can very much injure yourself by singing. I'm talking, needing surgeries or never being able to talk again. Anyone that does singing professionally or even semi regularly should be well acquainted with vocal care, or they'll eventually have to cut their career short. I'm pretty sure Will himself said it hurt his voice and he doesn't do it live very much.

That being said I know it sounds REALLY fucking cool, but like, just do you your research, yknow?And if anyone wants some general vocal tips let me know!

[greatsabrecatwoman]

PLEASE REBLOG!

Figured I'd post this flyer again without it being tied to any specific fandom. As a reminder, I am a freelance voice teacher working to get students so please refer to the flyer with any questions or any interest. I am also willing to give one free trial lesson to see if you'd be willing to do them long-term.

[voicequills]

do u have voice training tips? ur voice is actually goals

Sure thing!

So the basics I learned are pretty much this (Also just to note, I'm not a speech therapist, this is just stuff I've learned, I'm not a trained professional!)

RESONANCE IS KEY

Resonance is where your voice "sits" when you speak, so hum and feel roughly where your voice is coming from. If you're trans femme, and don't have much experience with voice training, it'll probably be in your throat, it's hard to explain but it's just where your voice feels like it sits. What you wanna do is move that up towards your nose/lips, the best way to practice that is by humming. So take a deep breath, and hum, feel where your voice is now, and try to move it up towards your head, put your fingers on your nose/lips to help get a feel for it being there too!

Once you've got a handle on that, the majority of the work is just practicing that! Try humming a bunch in a row, holding it in your nose/lips as much as you can. Once you've got that down, do sirening. Sirening is starting low down with your resonance, and moving it up to your face, then back down again. You'll make a kinda ambulance siren sound doing this, it's silly, but that's part of it! Do this a few times over to get a feel for it. And that's pretty much it! It's just practicing that over and over! Once you've got a good hold on that, try saying letters and words, then sentences, while holding your resonance in your face, you're kinda relearning how to speak so it takes some practice!

Keep an eye (or ear) out for vocal strain. If at any point you feel like your throat is tight or tired or strained, stop, and take it easy. Last thing you want to do is hurt youself and set yourself back! Drinking lots of water, or tea with honey can help soothe your throat (or try some Nin Jiom Pei Pa Koa, literal miracle solution), as well as doing all that humming each time to help warm up your voice!

Now pitch can play a part, but don't stress about it! The majority of a natural femme voice is in the resonance, not the pitch. This doesn't mean you can't practice a higher pitch to go with your resonance, just don't be worried about it as much! Remember, when you speak, your voice resonates in your skull, making it sound deeper and richer to you than other people hearing you (It's why hearing your voice in a recording sounds weird to you, you're hearing what other people hear, not just what you hear!)

Singing can also help, I usually sing in the car or shower (though if you're doing straight into this with no warmup be careful of vocal strain) to help stretch my range a bit, and ngl I sang a bunch of Sabaton on the way to and from my vocal therapy appointments

One thing you might wanna do, is a kinda transition timeline of your voice! So record your early stuff, reading passages from books or poems or other things you like, and keep your vocal training going, recording as you go, then after a while go back and compare where you are now!

That's pretty much all I can think of, I hope this all helps!!

[faery-snow]

Musical Observations about «Wo Men»

It's been two months since Xiao Zhan dropped Wo Men, and it's high time I post this! When I heard Zhanzhan would release a full album, I expected a high-quality but run-of-the-mill mandopop album. I would no doubt love it, but I would love it because it's his voice.

And then we got THIS.

These are things this vocalist has noticed during my obsessive re-listening. I've used XZS's official pinyin titles (I'm thrown off by the official English translations 😅).

1. Borrowed chords in the first song

The song Wo Men is in minor key, but uses borrowed chords, or chords which it shares with its relative major. This is what makes it sound so eerie. Modal interchange is used for tension; the haunting, unsettled feeling as your brain contends with overlapping patterns from 2 key signatures.

I think it also works particularly well with the song's theme, this crossroads between hope and despair, questions about whether cruelty is an inescapable state for humanity.

I also love that this is the first song. We start with unsettling questions and end the album with gratitude as the night ends. He ordered the songs very deliberately, and it makes so much sense that Zhanzhan would organize it this way, a journey toward hope.

2. Diverse vocal techniques

The songs of this album give him a variety of vocal contexts, to show different versions of himself. He is a singer who can take advantage of that, and he's shown it.

For instance, in Douyi Yang there are a lot of opportunities for embellishment that he didn't take, on purpose, and the execution is beautiful. He leans into more sustained straight tones instead of vibrato. Showing us that vocal control.

Lemme talk about pitch correction for a second. One of my roommates overheard me listening and joked "his voice sounds like Michael Bubble." I don't listen to much pop music, but I do know Michael Bubble has a reputation for being autotuned, so I was a little offended. 😅

But Xiao Zhan's vocal quality is smooth without synthetic help, and we know that for several reasons.

For one, his live performances are smooth, which is not a result of corrections because he has a tendency to start half a tone off. If they were correcting anything, that would be easy to do and the first thing to change.

(It's a common struggle to start half a step off when performing live. Singing is done both by ear and by feel; but your instrument feels different when you have a burst of adrenaline tightening your muscles and changing the length of your larynx, altering its resonance. Back before he knew how to adjust his in-ear correctly, he often took the left ear out so he could quickly fix his key. He still does this sometimes; it always makes me fond.)

Another reason is that you can hear small vocal anomalies -- the natural blips of a human voice. Everyone has these and it's the reason why skilled singers may choose to autotune. (Personally, I think this is unnecessary, but that's a Whole Essay.) Those vocal anomalies show up in his previous songs and performances, and also in this album.

All that to say, his voice really is that smooth.

Which isn't to say they didn't do any pitch correction. I could see it going either way:

Pitch correction is the current trend in music production

On the other hand, he hasn't used elsewhere that we're aware

On the other other hand, he's never done a project where he had this much control

If there is pitch correction, it is minor. Douyi Yang is a potential candidate to me, not because of the straight tones, but because of how perfectly matched his harmony is in the chorus, where the timbre he's using could sound sharp if the harmonies were at odds. Either Zhanzhan absolutely nailed it (possible!), or they used pitch correction on the harmony line.

I really like the "realness" to Xiao Zhan's voice. In Yexingren Dezibai and Guiling, for example, you can hear small hiccups in the lower notes. They didn't correct those. I really appreciate that.

It lets his talent come through.

3. Syncopation

In Huan Yuan, he does a lot of releasing on the half-beat. Syncopation is a common technique, but doing it through an entire song is hard. Holding through every half-note, counter to the song's rhythm over and over, takes focus.

4. His own backup vocals!

I LOVE THAT HE DOES HIS OWN BACKUPS AND HARMONIES. You could tell in some songs right away. There were others like Piaoliu and Dengta where I wasn't sure, and then we got the 20min of bts footage which confirmed it.

They're beautiful: he's good at harmonizing after all! (I love BTS set videos where he makes harmony up on the fly, SUCH a choir kid thing.) Another way for him to show his vocal chops. It also makes this album all about him; I don't mean in an arrogant way, rather that this is him showing what he wants to show.

5. Lyricism

He's credited for partnering on lyrics for Wo Men, Piaoliu, and Buyao Huitou, and it's possible he worked on other songs to a lesser extent. Which makes sense: of course he would do his own lyrics for a passionate project like this.

(Translation credit to @izanyizhan, ty so much for your hard work!)

Wo Men: This is not the song I expected from him! It's complicated and dark. There is SO MUCH about this album where he defied our expectations.

Piaoliu: This is an extremely vulnerable song, wow. A brave song, going against expectations and against social niceties and standing up for what you really want. Xiao Zhan is a polite person and it's cool to get a song from him that's so bold.

Buyao Huitou: "I'll take my stubbornness and go towards the center of the light" - Enough said. The lyrics of this song are so determined and hopeful. And the vocals crescendo beautifully. It's my favorite song.* I love that he said it's written to himself.

*(Look, I have 3 favorites, 6 second-favorites, and 2 that I "only" love. This album is everything I ever wanted musically. Not lying, my 10 most-listened-to songs of 2024 were this album, even though it came out in Nov. 😅)

(And of course those of us with turtle minds got caught on, "As long as there's a single glance waiting for me to start the show." That hit me hard. The feeling of having my S.O. in the audience, when there's that one person I'm excited to perform for. Wow. I imagine when you're a superstar with millions of fans, this takes on even deeper meaning.)

6. Live orchestra

You can tell the difference and it is yet another thing elevating the quality of this album. (I feel like I have a personal stake in this because one of my parents is a professional musician haha! But also, it really does make a difference.)

Next time I want to (lovingly) complain about waiting a long time for things, I will remind myself of this album, which is incredible precisely because he spent 3 years on it and worked with such high-quality people.

7. Vocal range

If I had to pick 2, Guiling and Buyao Huitou are my favorite songs, and it's because he effortlessly transitions across his range through chest voice, head voice, and falsetto.

I cannot express how much work over multiple years it took me to learn to do this, and you can get out of practice (although we know Xiao-laoshi is always singing on his sets!). Navigating those transitions is (in my not-professional opinion) one of the hardest skills for a vocalist; I'll back that up with the fact that plenty of professional vocalists (including Wang Yibo) struggle with it.

Another part of why it sounds so good is that Xiao Zhan knows how to make the weaknesses of his voice work for him. Not only can he use vocal break as an effect, he is also aware of where his voice breaks naturally and uses that.

Take Piaoliu, where he uses the edges of each register to actually put more emotion in.

There are many great singers out there, and there are singers with more training than him, but he showed he has a solid foundation in a wide range of techniques.

8. Storyline

I won't talk too much about this because I would just be reiterating what Zhanzhan wrote about each song for the release. But I appreciate that it tells a thematic story, and of course it's a story characteristic of him: (a) contemplating the human condition (b) on a hopeful trajectory.

I might also be interpreting this through my decade in western publishing for my day job. Storytelling looks different across times and cultures, but I noticed that the album follows the three-act structure typical of a lot of modern fiction -- he even released it like that. It could easily be coincidence, though.

(Western publishing likes to hold up things like three-act structure as "universals," but, like. With no actual evidence. 😂)

9. Composition

There are some things in this album which would be unusual for "run-of-the-mill mandopop," such as the heavy use of borrowed chords, the intro/outro, the discordant strings in Wan'an (which I have mixed feelings about personally lol!), etc. He didn't play it safe; at points, it feels almost avant-garde.

Considering this is his first album, I think more outside the norm is better, especially if he wants to be taken seriously as an artist. Meaningful art involves risk and breaking expectations! (Therefore, I forgive the purposeful discordance. 😂) ((I would anyway because we got 10 full songs of his voice!!!!))

There are a lot of good reasons that «Wo Men» is rating so highly. I'm not the only person who expected him to release something more commonplace. And then he released ART instead.

It feels similar to what Xiao Zhan and Wang Yibo have been doing to transition away from traffic stars to serious film actors. He's moved away from boy-group popstar to establish himself firmly as a serious singer.

10. Ta & Ta

I always notice when songs refer to someone's gender. It was very inclusive of Xiao-laoshi to refer to both very specifically like this. 🌈 My LGBT self really super appreciated that.

Ten songs, so ten bullet points for verisimilitude! It's just a random thing, but this line in Wan'an:

"You xiangqi ta (她) huoshi ta (他)"

(Reminded again of her, or of him)

晚安

I really love that the «Wo Men» Outro ends with some spatial tuning as the strings fade out, then the footsteps, and then his voice is panned left, like you're passing one another on the road. Like the album's theme of passing others on life's journey. And it makes me think of every time he's said he's just a normal person like everyone else.

Plus Xiao Zhan saying goodnight to us gives us emotions. What a way to end the album.

(All images from Official Weibo accounts of Xiao Zhan and XZS.)

[ofmagicandmusic]

trying to learn how to fry scream but my technique is too good