Hey guys, welcome back again to Ken Tamplin Vocal Academy where the proof is in the singing.
I decided to go ahead and do a vocal reaction to lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper.
It's the 2019 Oscars.
It just happened, and obviously the song is called Shallow, so I'm gonna go ahead and
do it first and we'll make our comments along the way.
Okay, let's rock.
Here we go..
Man, they got that grand piano on stage quickly.
Wow.
Setting up the mic and everything.
I wish I had a road crew like that when I was touring.
That would have been awesome.
Okay.
Here they come up on stage from the front row. Really cool.
Nice intro.
Okay.
Before the whole song even starts, obviously this is extremely rehearsed.
Man, like I said, to get that many guys to put in position to grab piano with a mic and
this and that.
So obviously all of this has been choreographed and really, you know, rehearsed.
So I want to point that out right up front.
It's not some impromptu kind of thing.
And I know that they said in the movie that I think they said, that they did like all
the stage stuff live.
So this will be the proof if they really did, cause we'll be able to hear it here if they
do this live.
So let's check it out.
It's a little pitchy there.
Oohf.
Oh. Ouch.
Okay.
Couple of things.
Just from a vocal coach thing.
By the way, I know there's going to be a lot of lady Gaga love out there.
So I'm going to give a very fair evaluation.
I'm not going to ingratiate one thing and play something up.
And say Oh, Gosh! Did you hear
hear that little R that she made?
Oh, it was fantastic.
I'm just going to give a really honest evaluation.
So again, if there's a lot of Bradley Cooper love or Lady Gaga love, don't hate me.
I'm just going to be real, guys.
Okay?
So I'm right out the gate.
He's probably nervous.
Certainly not the performances that I heard in the movie, that's for sure.
But you know, your friend or your peers, you're on national television, nerves are up, whatever,
but right out of the gate he was really pitchy and he just cracked, and we're not even 30
seconds of him singing into the song.
I'd like to hear more strength come from his abdomen.
And I'm not hearing that at all.
It sounds real thin and small, and kind of scared, actually.
But anyway, let's continue.
Okay, one more thing real quick.
I actually like how Gaga was able to kind of shut out the world.
I got the feeling that he's kind of, you know, there's some nerves going on in, and by the
way, too.
It takes doing this in front of a lot of people at a lot of different levels of prestige and
echelon or whatnot, to be able to do this over, and like, Stevie Wonder status to be that
good, where you don't care who's out there, you're just going to sing and play and have
a good time.
So, you know, maybe he doesn't have quite the same experience.
Gaga has a lot of experience, so I'm expecting a lot from her now, but I just wanted to make
that little side note along the way because it is really hard, man, when the adrenaline's
pumping and you know, whatever.
So I'll give him that for now.
It's a good song too, by the way.
So it helps a lot to have a good song.
Nice Tone.
That's pretty cool.
That's nice. Good pitch.
Okay. Before we go on, I'm noticing a couple of things here.
Right off the gate?
I'm not seeing any in-ears monitors on either one of them.
So I'm trying to figure out how they're able to hear themselves in pitch.
So there could be that issue going on here, but I'm not seeing it.
Item didn't see any floor wedges any there.
I'm not seeing any side stage monitors.
So somehow they're able to hear themselves.
We're in a big room, that's hard to do.
So I don't know.
They could have something else.
I don't know.
But I'm looking closely.
I do see, you know, some earrings and whatnot, but I'm looking at both of their ears and
I don't know where they're getting, hearing their sound from, but I wanted to point that
out along the way.
So here we go.
Did you guys notice something that she just did?
Do you guys remember talking to you guys about, how we kind of slur our vowels if we want
to keep good open throat technique?
That is exactly what she just did.
She slurred right through the vowels to maintain good open throat technique.
Now she's covering the sound a little on the dark side for me.
So I would open up the sound and bring it into the front of the face a little bit more to
get more clarity and instead of being so long in the vowel, but you know, cool.
But did you notice that? Go back and check out some of my videos.
I cover all this stuff in my singing course called How To Sing Better Than Anyone Else.
And she's using the same technique I teach.
So it's cool.
That's a little sharp...
Good emotion.
A little pitchy there, for both of them.
Okay.
And again, I gotta add one more thing guys.
'm sorry to keep stopping, but it's really important.
It is really hard to do a duet like this with just a piano, a guitar and a couple of voices.
You're naked in December, snow.
You are just exposing yourself like crazy.
So we, you know, here I am pointing out all the little nuances of problems, and good
stuff and bad stuff.
You're just naked out there guys.
So bear with me.
I'm just sharing with you my heart, exactly how, play by play, how I see this coming out.
Nice passion.
A little pitchy...
Good power.
Nice. Very intimate.
Cool.
All Right, nice.
Alright. Yeah, I love the ending. The ending was cool.
The intimacy in that was awesome, in that, you know, it's, again, it's
hard, there's some acting, but there seems some chemistry there, too.
I don’t know, it's like "Wooh...".
But anyway, I challenge you guys too, to watch the original.
This is a remake, not the song, but the movie, is a remake of a Barbara Streisand movie,
obviously called A Star Is Born.
It was, Gosh, back in mid-70, 75, 76 towards the end of the year, like November, December,
I think it was.
But you owe it to yourself to see the Barbara Streisand version of this, too,
because she does a video, I think it's called Evergreen.
And watch the video because you can see she's using an AKG 414, and she's singing live and
there's no doubt about that.
She's live.
And then Chris Christopherson, which is the other guy in the movie or the person in the
movie, comes in and sings with her too, very identical to what they're doing here.
and it's very moving too. It's a little sappy cause it's a long time ago.
So it's a lot more early Broadway, kind of in the way that the song itself was written.
But again, good song.
Now I want to make a couple more comments.
Do I think that this was just the magnum opus of the greatest song of the year for
the Oscars and all that stuff.
I really don't guys, I think it's really good, but I don't think it's like crazy-amazing.
So I don't know if it's just because I'm old and I've seen a lot of music over the years,
where I feel like we've dumbed down things so much, that we praise things that are
good or decent or you know, even in some cases mediocre.
And we hail them as super-awesome.
Examples of that.
Again, I'm not trying to bag on Maroon five and you know, what happened at the Superbowl,
but let's face it, their performance was pretty lackluster.
When in fact Bruno Mars, you know, just prior to that, killed it when he did the Superbowl.
And then, you know, we see this in a lot of other things that have happened lately where,
and I'm again, I liked the band, so bear with me, but, I'm going to call them, you know,
Zeppelin part two, which they deny and they say they're more like Aerosmith, but
Gretna van fleet, you know, comes out and they win a Grammy.
And I don't think Zepplin ever won a Grammy for any of their songs.
So I think what that says is that music was at a level that was, the bar was raised so
high back then that even Led Zepplin didn't get a Grammy.
But then, you know, seeing younger guys coming in that sound like led Zeppelin,
they win a Grammy.
So let's put all this in context.
Good, decent performance. Not stellar.
But the song brought it over the top, good song.
You know, Gaga is just lady Gaga.
She's got a crazy-great stage presence.
She just oozes with the charisma.
And so, you know, she carries a lot of it, even when she sings bad notes, a lot like P!nk.
I mean P!nk is one of those, artists where, you know, even if she's a little bit off
she's so on, she's so 110% leaving it all in the field that
we kind of look the other way and just say, wow, it's P!nk. Wow.
It's lady Gaga.
Wow.
It's so and so.
So anyway, thank you for joining me. Ken Tamplin Vocal Academy where the proof is in the singing
and we have more on your way.
All right.
Until next time. Peace. Out.
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