hey guys welcome back again to ken tamplin vocal academy where the proof is in the singing
i'm continuing my series on how to sing like next up is whitney houston before we get started if
you wouldn't mind please like and subscribe to my channel that would be really cool don't forget to
ring the bell so i can keep new cool videos coming your way and i have a singing course the course is
called how to sing better than anyone else you can find it right here at kentamplanvocalacademy.com
and i have a free singing form there we can join up kind of kick the tires a little bit and see
uh what level of singing is right for you whether it's beginners intermediate all
the way to the most advanced levels of singing and that's why we're taking on whitney houston
today now uh this is pretty brave to do this and i've actually covered this with a couple of my
ktva vocalists and i want to go through this because it's one thing
to just talk about how to sing like somebody it's another thing to actually demonstrate and prove a
technique to show you how something works now i'm not going to just give you a little tip of
some weird sound to make with your mouth or some some way to kind of start off how to
sound like someone i'm giving you the actual goods on what it really takes to get to this
level of excellence now that's a big statement because i don't know that we're ever going to
get to the same excellence as whitney so i'm not claiming that but what i'm saying is is that we
can certainly understand how she got to where she is and hopefully aspire towards that kind
of greatness so with that said i'm going to get started right away i'm going to go ahead and do
all the man i need and um i had a ktp the vocalist eleona i did this with quite some time ago
and now we're going to dial it right here here we go we'll talk about it as we go
i used to cry myself to sleep at night cool now immediately we have perfect pitch killer
head voice cool runs that aren't overdone and you know again gratuitous where there's
so much of them that they're like okay again that's enough you know
really pretty pretty you know a beautiful uh round tone tubular sounding head voice and then
whitney was just an absolute master ninja at mixed voice i mean you could almost never
tell when she was mixing how much percentage of air she's using in his sound for effect
and back and forth and then that power belting now the reason that uh whitney is so esteemed
is not only because she was an awesome singer she set the bar so high so that whenever you
know all these you know singing shows that okay i'm gonna do you know and i will always love you
well you got tired of hearing that song yes it's true but it's because anyone that could nail that
song the way whitney did or even come close said a lot about that person's ability to sing okay she
set the bar that high so as we're going through this i'm going to point out some things and how do
we get to these different places and show you how this technique works with my students uh in action
say that beautiful perfect vibrato right so now her the way she moves her vocal tract it's
very deceiving because it sounds like she's got a lot of movement in it you know let me
let me go back to this and we've got two tunes to do so i'm gonna pick this apart it sounds
she's moving very little bit in the back of the throat the jaw does move and a lot of people
criticized her vibrato calling it gospel jaw and that's a form of vibrato that people refer to
as non-natural something that's not natural i think that's a bunch of crap whitney had the most
beautiful vibrato it was very natural and yeah she grew up in in the gospel communities where she
probably saw like steve perry did the same thing where they saw their jaws moving they figured that
that little jolt sort of had to help them either start off their vibrato or maintain their vibrato
or give them some extra wiggle to their vibrato not true in whitney's case she used it for effect
for some stage presence and persona and you know stage effect and whatnot but you know navis saying
it kind of gives the imitation as though there's vibrato there but if you listen
to whitney listen what we're doing here with aleona there's there's that a little bit going
on for a visual effect but the vibrato is happening in the back of the throat
and the vocal tract is not moving very much i know that's a lot of information i cover all
this in my singing course again i'm not going to give you just little tips on how to get a
little bit like whitney i'm gonna really discuss a lot of the things that made whitney great so
now if you notice with my ktb vocalist you can always see into the back of their throats it's
like oh it's kind of gross man i could see like a uvula and i could see the soft palate
moving up and down i could literally you know like a doctor can go all the way back
with a flashlight and see the back of the throat exactly that's exactly what we want he fills me up
he gives me love more love than i've ever me never mean wrong lyrics sorry
right and there's very little variation in the vowel the vocal tract is really consistent
and the vowels are very subtle moving from vowel to vowel i cover this thoroughly in my section of
vocal tract shaping in my singing course and why this is so important and how to not over
enunciate so you can have beautiful contiguous a whole long phrase long tail long phrase singing
sometimes she'll use a raised larynx position raise laryngeal position
for a little bit of froggy effect and he's all the man that i need
and then she drops it right so she'll bring in a raised laryngo position to kind of do
something for effect for a sexy vocal effect and then she drops it it's a dangerous position to
have because a lot of people do that by default because that's what happens when we go up to get
notes as the lyrics are raised and it chokes off the trachea and it chokes off the back of
the throat and it really screws with open throat technique but she was so good at it so is maria
collis and other people like that opera amazing opera stars but you know she was so good at it
that she could control her lorenzo position a lot i do it all the time too but you got to learn how
to keep a lowered by the way in my course i talk about this a lot of people um in opera say you you
always have to have a neutral position a neutral laryngeal position that's actually not true um
it is true that in early opera and early belcanto they taught a neutral position but they also took
three to four years to teach vowel sounds before they would ever let you ever even touch an arya
so imagine training vowels for three or four years before you're allowed to sing a song kind of weird
right so very few people want to take that kind of time to do that in fact almost nobody unless
you're studying that kind of purist old belcanto appoggio opera so um what i have come up with is
a different kind of technique that works and is extremely effective especially for rock and
belting pop singing is to start with a lowered laryngo position so that you have control of the
larynx so it doesn't automatically raise up to you get you know make your digastric muscle underneath
the chin drop down and all the crap that you know brings a lot of girth and muscle mass up
into the throat when you can control the larynx in a lowered position and brittany a whitney
whitney not brittany that's a different person does it all the time where she'll ah you know
so stay right you're going to hear this and i will always love you i might remember to talk about it
when i get to the beginning of that um but anyway so a lowered position so that when you relax
the throat you relax the larynx into a neutral position and then that feels
natural if we start in a neutral position then what happens is
typically we can't control it and it raises to a raised position and we get caught in the
throat that's why we feel like we're gagging on our vowels there's a lot of constriction in the
throat so we talk about all this in my singing course and whitney was a master at this so i
just a little sidebar i thought i'd bring that up since we're talking technical right
one of my favorite whitney songs by the way is this
now i want to point that out she did a good job on this one this is
one of her better pieces for for what i like about aliona's voice
so the other thing that whitney was awesome at doing so is maria kalas
i keep bringing her up because she's killer too and doing stuff like this
maria would have like all these different vibrato she'd use for different you know emotion and
passion and you know whatever whitney did the same thing she brought it into the front of the face
right she brings some nasality into the sound again for a fact she doesn't do it all the time
she's not like jennifer hudson or someone who kind of always sings with that tonality
she's actually uses it brings it in pulls it back raises the laryngeal position
drops the larynx and she goes back and forth and uses all of these calisthenics and you have no
idea she's doing all this stuff right maybe she didn't even know she was doing all this
stuff but from technical you know breakdown of everything we're doing and trying to describe this
teach it and show you how to do it we have to go through all the technicality of this not
to mention her just incredible natural gift and passion which was off the charts great so he felt
okay now so there's that and it's one thing to have one student do it right or it's another thing
i pride myself on the fact that i demonstrate this not just myself but with most of my students
we do we sing in all kinds of different styles so alliana sings all kinds of rock stuff pop stuff r
b stuff you know sarah all kinds of rock stuff pops of r b stuff so we sing in multi-temporal
different styles to show that no we're not one trick ponies and doing something one-dimensional
and that the technique only works for one thing rock singing or or belting or whatever no it works
it's great technique is great technique and it gives you the toolbox to free you up to
do whatever you sing anything you want so let's move on to uh to sarah this i don't
this i don't even think this is released yet so we'll release this soon but check this
be out your way
so i'll go but i know i'll think of you every step of the way before we go on
really hard to go and sing that long in pitch and and maintain pitch without kind of you know
varying um or going up and down and getting in and out of pitch all the way through a
whole phrase like that in fact it's you know when when what i teach in ktva is that once you hear
the anchor note of a song or the root note of a song you should be able to sing a song end-to-end
acapella and not deviate from the pitch up or down uh even two or three cents it should be
consistent all the way through and you should be able to lock that pitch into your brain it's
something i cover in my singing course as far as identifying good hard rock solid pitch so
now back and forth now this is a little different
always
she's going in and out of little nasality now a little back off the nasality back into nasality
a little bit of mixed voice a little bit of chest a little percentage variation therein
we cover all of this in my singing course how to do this
by dropping the vibrato at the right time
that is all i'm taking with me
so goodbye please don't cry
now notice too the consistency whether it was aleona whether it's sarah whether
it's gabriella whether it's you know all my different students you know katie um we all
they're extremely consistent it's kind of funny um i see people saying this to me all the time
whether it's on facebook or instagram or they're saying guy all your singers kind of sound the
same but different in other words you know i can't quite put my finger on it but they all have this
power and they can all sing in these different styles and they all can dancing with distortion or
not with distortion or they can sing a ballad or a rock song but they're all this kind of tubular
round powerful non-constricted sound but they have their own unique identity to their voices how do
you do that i'm glad you asked it's called open throat technique and i cover this in my singing
course where we start by maintaining good open throat vowel sounds and once we build muscle
memory for those sounds and non-constricting throat keeping the throat open i should say um and
good diaphragmatic support we can do anything we want with a voice it doesn't it could be a ballad
or you can hear sarah sing a rock song for crying out loud we just did deal with sarah you look at
gabriella we do iron maiden and deal and all these heavy rock bands you know guns and roses and then
we turn around and we do some r b song you know like yeah i mean just go you can look at all the
different stuff that we do back and forth that's true with aleona that's true for the katie it's
true for sarah it's true for you know pretty and all our guys same thing you know where we work out
this open throat technique to sing in all these different styles but she's going to
hit the chorus here and i want you to pay special attention to the open throat vowels here we go
we'll always love you
i will always love you
we're very consistent with the vowels and we're not shifting those vowels so big as we lose
control of them or they become so top-heavy now there's another really really important component
to this it's not just the vowels themselves at one um key you know where we're singing in one key or
one note value in this case this is i think an a or this a and it modulates to b i'd have to look
i'm not sure but i'm pretty sure right um anyway the important thing about this is is that as we go
up and down our scales or up and down a passage or in different ranges of singing those vowels have
to be modified in different ways up and down the vocal tract now this is important because we have
to train these vowels that as we go higher and higher we have to close down the vowel sounds and
they have to be more closely related to each other now this may sound complicated and to some degree
it is if you don't know it you don't know how to do it and you're kind of just shooting in the dark
trying to figure this stuff out but in my singing course i cover how we get to these vowel sounds
and how is the higher up we sing the more closely related they they are and how um what what the
position of those vowels are as we come back down the uh you know the a pitch or a range
then we can open up those vowel sounds and we can be a little bit more uh liberal with how big
we can make the vowels themselves so anyway gang i'm doing most of this by request so if you've got
someone you'd like me to do a takedown on how to sing like definitely do it for sure check out my
scene course at kentamplinvocalacademy.com and check out my next video