♬
So David you’ve had a background in classical singing
and contemporary singing,
and lots of different styles,
Can you tell us how you navigate singing style to style?
Yes, so first of all when I think of where
I am stylistically, I am really a stylist.
That’s really the category that I would fall into.
I heard Linda Ronstadt say,
she said “I never sang anything as a professional that I didn’t hear as a kid.”
I thought that is very true.
And my family listened very eclectically.
My parents had season tickets to the opera.
But we never missed Dolly Parton when she came to town.
And, you know, everything in between.
I love Journey, and I listened to a lot of
contemporary Christian music back then.
So all of that has made me who I am
and gives me kind of the understanding
that you hear in my artistry.
In my stylist approach to that.
So, it is difficult.
We’ve all heard people who don’t really have that handled
trying to step into another genre.
And sometimes it feels a little stilted.
I think of that Linda Ronstadt quote and I think
that’s just not something they heard when they were a kid.
It’s not something that was fed into them
So, the process really is a natural thing to me.
I love classical music. I went to school for that.
I heard it when I was a kid.
I remember getting a casette tape,
I know that show’s my age,
of Pavarotti singing Nessun dorma.
And I pulled over to the side of the road.
I thought oh my gosh, this is amazing.
Just phenomenal.
And you know there are so many approaches to music.
The bottom line here is that we’re trying
to communicate something.
And I think that’s so important for
people who are working on technique
and trying to make their way through
to contemporary or mixing genres,
what are you communicating?
The end result has to be that you’re communicating something.
And for me that’s why I went into more of a
conversational tone in the first place.
Because it helps me to be able to communicate an idea.
So if it works for that then by all means, do it.
But if it doesn’t, don’t just do it because you can.
But there are different techniques
that you have to incorporate in order to do that,
in order to be viable in contemporary music
and to be able to pull off the mixed singing
that it’s more known for.
One of the techniques that I learned early on,
you know I mentioned earlier my teacher who said
you can do anything but it will cost you,
what I learned is how to make my voice-
which is naturally more approximated-
to make an airy tone.
And so I learned early on how to hold
my vocal cords open in order to communicate an idea.
Because I don’t always want something communicated like this.
Sometimes I want things communicated like this.
And that’s mirrored in the way that I would sing it.
So we were just looking at “America The Beautiful”,
that I have recorded.
At the beginning of that…
♪ Oh beautiful for spacious skies for amber waves of grain ♪
You know it is a softer approach,
it’s a “lean in and listen” kind of thing
and that’s what you’re trying to get your audience to do.
And then as it get’s more into the energy and emotion of it…
♪ America, America ♪
You know, that stuff.
So my vocal cords are approximating more.
And I’m letting less air through and I’m more intense.
And you know that is only reflective of the way that
I’m trying to communicate the idea of that.
And then as things grow and get bigger
I would go through probably a belting register.
And then at some point, like I mentioned to you earlier,
when I hit like a B and above
you can ask me to do it different ways
but I’m gonna mix.
I mean there’s only a couple of times that I have
belted up to a C.
And that’s very purposeful and very rare
because that’s just not something that I can do.
You spend your vocal cash pretty fast that way.
I spend my vocal cash. Right.
And so once I get to that B,
actually this one ends in...
this ends in G flat.
So it’d go…
♪ God bless ♪
So that’d be the belted thing.
But when I go up…
♪ God bless America ♪
You know that thing, there’s no like
should I belt this?
It just is what it is.
That’s the way that I hit the note, you know?
And part of my journey has been,
how do I combine these things.
You know?
You know because it’s not like we can stop and press pause
and go now I’ve got to get these gears changed.
Part of the job of being a stylist and vocalist like that
is okay, how to I go from a first to fifth
without stripping things?
And then from fifth back down to first
without doing that as well.
So it’s a little bit of a juggling act.
It’s knowing what I have to do to
make those things happen.
Fantastic demonstrations.
So you’ve got your decompression which are your breathy sounds,
you’ve got your compression which are your solid sounds,
and then you go up to the top, B4, C5 and up
and then you’re going into what feels
like a mix, is a mix.
Did you learn that more from your classical days,
or your contemporary days, or both?
My classical days is where I learned to mix.
And I will say first of all, if I’m having a bad night,
if I’ve gotten sick,
you know in doing what we do, I’ve had to go out
with pneumonia and sing a concert before.
God bless the classical singers who go,
I have a tickle in my throat tonight I’m taking it off.
Because that’s not been the world that I have lived in.
But I’ve had to go out and sing with pneumonia before
and at that point I go this is going to be all that tonight.
I am going back to that training that taught me
how to do all of those things that tax the voice less.
I am not going to withdraw much from
my vocal cash tonight because there’s not as much to spend.
So that’s what I kind of fall back on.
♬