Hey guys, Ken Tamplin here, and I’m here at Costa Mesa Studios with my mix engineer
Nick Fainbarg, and we’re going to take on Freddie Mercury for our vocal demonstration
today. He’s probably the most requested vocalist to date, and it goes like this. Roll it!
Okay. Whew! So
here we have, like I said, just, you know, not just a singer. And guys, I want to say some things.
I wrote some things down here and I don’t want to belabor this, but… I get so many
requests from people saying I want to sing like Freddie Mercury. How did Freddie Mercury
sing, you know, and, and, and… First of all Freddie Mercury, I don’t think
even ever had ever had a single vocal lesson as far as I know. Now I know he studied in
a lot of music schools early on for piano, and actually art, believe it or not. But you’re
talking about a guy who was actually, I think, born, in Tanzania. He was of Asian descent
or Indian descent, I should say, and grew up in India, you know, grew up in Tanzania. He
didn’t actually make it to England until eight, nine, ten, or something like that when
some big war in Tanzania took place. I have it here: “He was a British musician,
singer, songwriter best known as the lead vocalist for the rock band Queen." Now, I think
even Freddie would think of himself more as a musician or a composer or someone that
was into musicals, in fact I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the second album was
named “A Night at the Opera.” So you have a guy who is a composer, a musician
and does things in a very orchestral kind of way. And I say that, too, because he even
admitted at one point that he could barely read music, so how interesting that he went
to all of these music schools and yet the thing he found most important was truly having
a passion and selling what he believed. And I think a lot of us want the quick and easy
road out. You know, Freddie had a tough life, and he worked really hard, and you can even
hear it from all of his singing, you know “I work hard every day of my life, I work till I ache,
my bones, at the end of the day I take home my hard earned pay all on my own. I get down
on my knees and I start to pray, till the tears run down from my eyes. Lord, somebody find me
somebody to love.” So you see this expression of overcoming and
working hard, and frustration and anguish and joy. You know “We Are The Champions”,
“We Will Rock You”. You know, these anthemic things, and yet at the same time he can come
and he can take this natural God-given, four octave range, and then he can sing like kind
of an Elvis-ish sort of song we just heard, which is “Find Me Somebody To Love”, and
also “Crazy Little Thing Called Love.” So anyway, you take “Crazy Little Thing
Called Love,” and he was into Cliff Richards, he was into Little Richard, you know some
of these old-school guys. But anyway, I also wanted to point out a couple of things here,
again. He says “His childhood in India he began taking piano lessons at the age of seven.
In 1954 at the age of eight, Mercury was also sent to study at St. Peter’s school, a British
style boarding school for boys. So the guy got stuck in a boarding school, right? When
he finally meets… He goes through several bands, too, I want to add. I think he went
through maybe seven or eight bands before he actually landed Queen. At an early, early
age, I hear so many people complaining about two or three bands that they’ve gone through,
you know, right? So he goes through band, after band, after band, and ironically, when
he finally lands, you know, the few players that we see in Queen… Guess what? Brian
May contracts hepatitis, and I think he’s out of the band for the first year or so.
My, one of my all–time favorite guitar players almost didn’t make the band, right? But then, as
fate would have it, you know, later this all came together, and again, we know them as
Queen. But I also want to emphasize one thing. He got nodes towards about the middle or three
quarters of the way into his career, and he went from being able to sing F6, you know,
way above high C, all the way down to around a B or an A, because he developed nodules
on his cords, and he refused to get surgery. So, we see, you know, that it would have been
cool had he maybe taken some lessons, and had he done some things the right way, you know we
might have had a much better performance towards the end of his life as we saw at the beginning
of his life. So, anyway, I felt it necessary to do a little extra on Freddie. There’s
not a lot of technicality that I want to share with you.
You know he’s all these very Broadway, operatic sort of things, so, he was able to take that
and turn it into also a rock voice, and Elvis, and all these different things we mentioned.
So, thank you for joining me. Ken Tamplin Vocal Academy, and I hope you enjoyed it.