Hey guys, welcome back again to Ken Tamplin Vocal Academy, where the PROOF is in the singing!
I’m continuing my series on songs and artists that have inspired me, in hopes to be able
to inspire you, and I’ve chosen a group called The Hollies, and the song is called
Long Cool Woman. We’ll do it first, we’ll talk about it after, like we always do. Let’s Rock!
Okay. So, the
goal for this is not so much to teach all the technicalities, and I do that in my course.
I have a singing course called How To Sing Better Than Anyone Else. The idea is that
we’re taking some of these timeless classic pieces that you may or may not have ever heard
before, but they certainly are icon and sort of epic standards where they’ve set the
bar for certain pieces and kinds and styles of music, and it’s a great way to grade
your self to see how you’re doing in the course or how you’re doing with your own
singing to see how you stack up to some of the originals. So, I challenge you to go back
to the originals, listen to those, it’s called Long Cool Woman, it’s by the band
called The Hollies, and see how I stacked up to this song. In fact do that to all of
my stuff, because you might be pleasantly surprised at, you know, kind of what I’m
showing you guys, and then do yourself a favor. Sing a cover yourself, or what ever, and see
how you stack up and how you set the bar for yourself. Do you exceed it? Or do you almost
hit it? Because it’s a good barometer to tell how you’re really doing rather than
kind of deceiving yourself and thinking I’m doing great or terrible or whatever that is
so…
Okay, I wanted to add an addendum to this “How to Belt” song and series, because
I’m going to do a few of these and that is this: It’s one thing to be able to just
shout, or belt, or yell out a few lines in a song, and people can refer to that and call
that quality belting, and that in fact is absolutely not the case. What I’m about
to tell you is imperative that you really understand the process of this. The first
thing is strength in the abdomen, and doing enough strength training in the abdomen, so
that you can relax the chest, the neck, and the throat. I cover all of this in my singing
course. The second thing is to understand how much breath control to use, and how to
manage that breath control. The third thing is, especially with a lot of these smaller
phrases, instead of taking large breaths like (demonstrates) , we take short breaths (demonstrates).
In order to be able to have quick strength in the sound without having these gargantuan,
big movements within the abdomen, so we can keep our, I call it the Porsche of singing, our
moves really small. And last as we strength train to these things, what we do is we actually
strength train scales and whatnot, that are within the range of the songs that we’re
planning on singing, so that we can maintain a level of that, and kind of govern the sound,
so were not just killing it constantly, but we can actually have and manage total control
of the sound. Now we do this with different vowels and vowel modifications, and I cover
this again in my course, but I wanted to emphasize the importance first of the strength training
of the core first, to build up stamina, so that you will not develop strain in the chest,
neck, and throat. The amount of controlling the breath, or air, open throat technique,
keeping the throat open so you don’t regurgitate in the back of the throat, and
have the consonants constantly closing down the back of the throat, to give you freedom
in the vowels themselves. And then the vowel modifications that you’ve strength trained
through good quality scale training. Okay? So, that’s it! I hope you guys enjoyed it!
God bless, and we’ve got more coming your way.