hey gang. welcome back again to ken tamplin vocal academy where the proof is in the singing. i am
continuing my dimashathon from Huatulco, Oaxaca, Mexico, and next up is ave maria.
now this is not the typical ave maria we think of pavarotti doing or you know beyonce and there's
a lot of people talking about from all around the world, different spectrums i should say,
but this is vowels only for the most part, a reinterpretation of ava maria, and i just want to
dive right in. now this is a really popular piece i got asked a lot by you guys to do this we had to
do some magic as far as just doing some visuals that were different than the concert that he did
because we kept getting it rejected no matter how many times i tried to do it uh it got rejected by
youtube because of the publishing so we were able to use the audio portion and add our own video
footage which are just pictures etc but i didn't wanted that to preclude our ability or eclipse our
ability to be able to do the song so we're going to dive right in here we go dimash ave mariah
oh
now we have crazy sensitivity extraordinary passion incredible command of the voice you know
right
right so this ebb and flow and look back and forth the crescendo diminuendo crescendo
it goes in piano forte piano forte back and forth is absolutely extraordinary you know we did um
uh singers then and now if you guys remember uh and we did um
lucha paparatti which is one and i wanted to get to placer domingo and you know and
maria collis and some others but he's got this command i want to i want to do this one more
time because i want to show you something that you may or may not have noticed but watch this
now what you probably didn't notice is the vowel exchanges we talk about this in my course like
crazy within the vowel exchanges you can get different colors of the vowel
okay which connells or knuckles but gives you the ability to have
different sensitivities in the way the vowel projects so he starts oh says
so it goes oh
oh
right so he's able to color those sounds in such a way that it gives a different dimension for the
passion and sensitivity the volume the projection the color and the warmth of the sound but you
probably don't know that all that's going on but there's a lot of technicality behind what he's
singing he's not just singing one the ah vowel going all the way through and the reason this is
extraordinary is because for you singers out there what you're gonna find is there is a very specific
rule of how to sing in belcanto and how to get to particular vowel sounds now you've heard me say
this a million times all vowel sounds stem from it's but that vowel ah has a vowel exchange so
it starts big on on the bottom and as we're going up the food chain meaning height in in the scale
here we go blah as i went up the pyramid of the vowel and then i reopened that vowel on the way
back down well that is precisely what's going on here now if you get really good at this you
can actually make different do these different vowel exchanges in different vocal fox different
registrations so he's doing that here and he's using a soprano approach we cover this in my
course also on how to get to these different vowel exchanges as a tenor singing in the soprano range
okay i do it all the time i got whenever you see me sitting up top i have to because if the vowel's
too big up top it splats or becomes top-heavy it's not tenable or not sustainable now i might do it
for an effect sometimes and a rock song to keep the vowel open like dio but um when i go really
high like he does i have to pair the vowel down and close it off so if i were to do this vowel
on just an ah vowel you probably thought you heard only one vowel it would sound like this
really one dimensional kind of annoying right but he doesn't do that he goes right and you hear
this beauty of one vowel how much that one vowel can morph and have all these different exchanges
in the context of just singing a single vowel through a whole um you know passage in this
case right so i wanted to mention that as we're moving along so we don't just glaze right over
this stuff by the way something else i'm not looking to bag on other vocal coaches but i'm
just not hearing anybody talk about this stuff and physically demonstrating this on the internet
and i do this in my course i do with my students and and and the only way you're really going to
learn this stuff is someone that really knows it can demonstrate it prove it out with their
students so if you think you're going to get your youtube degree in singing like this
that ain't going to happen unless you understand how all these vowel exchanges
actually work okay so i'm not trying to burst your bubble i'm thinking okay i'm going to take
a little from this guy and that guy and then you know just find someone that actually knows how to
do this stuff and then you'll get farther along in it so anyway here we go next phrase whoops
oh
and i'm not trying to destroy the song but we can all just play the song and listen to it so
if that's your thing and you think i'm talking too much i could be like you talk too much like
wow and go somewhere else we don't want to learn you know how to sing like this or need to give an
analytic on this um there is a certain amount of compression that he's using in his voice also so i
want to be clear about this too so within a vowel exchange it's not just the shape of the vowel
but it's also the amount of air that you're using now you've heard me talk about global compression
usually in the context of distortion hyperglottal compression glottal compression i've been talking
about this for 20 something years finally people are starting to talk about this how many people
know about this well he's actually using it in in the true el cantos sense so if you hear when
he goes bright on the sound he's pulling back the air and using a bright timber on the sun so
you hear him lean into that sound right he's actually cutting back the air and
getting bright on the tone chiaro oscuro which means brightness of the center
with warmth around it so he's actually using a warmer tone but then you can hear him back off
and then he adds this hair
right and so he adds the air for effect for that bedroom voice articulating bedroom voice
and then he cuts back the air real quick and then he leans back into sound to give you this really
big you know again going from piano to forte piano or giving you like a crescendo diminuen back
so it's really interesting because that alone even within one vowel has a technique on how to make
the vowel brighter while maintaining the warmth not adding too much air and projecting that sound
now we've also talked about vibrato and this is also very interesting so his command of vibrato
is really interesting because he can do it at any time now if you listen to a freddie mercury
it's kind of like you know a hit or miss like sometimes he brought bottles sometimes he doesn't
i i get the feeling he just had no command of his vibrato really much at all uh whereas steve
perry did or someone else like the mickey thomas does but he knows him he goes oh
and he can have total command now we just did a singer's uh then and now um we of him like
when he was age 12 and anando 27 or whatever it was and if you listen to his earlier stuff as
a kid he had a very caprino vibrato which is a very fast goat's wiggle as they say in italian
right but whereas here you can actually hear him manipulating the speed of the vibrato you go
right he can actually manipulate the vibrato because that actually gives you the ability to
have a different tension in the sound now we've talked about vibrato where's vibrato what is
vibrato guys let's ask all my singer friends out there it's the landing of a whole tone of
a strongly supported whole tone so meaning good breath good strength in this sound
into a new what's called a for an oscillation like if you were to look at a heart monitor bleep
bleep a form of oscillation it's relaxing into a state of oscillation
to create resonance let me give you an example of this so if i on an eval if i go
i can relax into that vowel without force without forcing it in the throat and
resonance and volume takes over now can i diminuendo pull the sound back yes of course
like i go in and out of this you know and we did this on a cup we talked a lot about
this on a couple other videos so i don't want to belabor this too much look up my you know i have
a course a single course how to sing better than anyone else you can get the course so
you can see all my different videos i have on vibrato on youtube but i bring this up because
his command is a lot like maria kalas and some of the greats where he can go in and out of different
um wave forms of vibrato now one more thing that's really important when we talk about vibrato
if it's truly a state of relaxation right if it's truly a relaxation response oscillating
into a state of relaxation on a whole tone that's been placed a whole tone vowel
then it must oscillate underneath the tone what do i mean by that a lot of technical
stuff it means that it must drop below the flat line if it was a heart monitor so
right rather than
and kind of a shaking sort of sound now we've talked about this too we've just mentioned freddie
mercury he vibrates above the fold or above the flat line elton john vibrates above the flat line
whitney houston is below the line mariah carey is below the
line ariana grande is below the line steve perry is below the line nikki
thomas is below the line but some of the other ones aaron neville is
right is this giant tremolo vibrato well his command
or or let's take manhattan transfer you know
this is real fast trumpet likes it
real fast almost caprino but controlled vibrato and deliberate too by the way
so i wanted to mention that all this technicality is going on and all of
this stuff and you would never know it unless you knew how to dissect it and do
a takedown of this stuff okay let's continue long-winded thing here but i thought it's
important because uh it's such a beautiful piece and it is only one vowel so here we go
oh
wow
incredible just absolutely spectacular wow man just this kind of singing doesn't get
any better than this folks in fact he's kind of singing everybody's parts you know it's like
being a goalie a defender a midfielder and a forward all at once in the same song
um the other thing i wanted to mention is i'm capping off talking about vibrato is that
in opera a lot of times people you know a lot of opera singers overuse their vibrato and it gives
you a sense of nervousness or at least it does for me and the other thing what i love about dimash is
that he doesn't overuse his vibrato like he knows when to land it he knows when to use it when not
to use it it's kind of like a person that can speak well just even in a language they know
when to drop a 50 cent word or to have a you know i like to say apples of gold in settings of silver
it's that appropriate word for the right time that's just very fitting and appropriate to what
the the you know the extra conversation is about so in this case this is a conversation with beauty
he really reinterpreted ave maria again there's only one dimash folks and he's probably gonna
be one of the greatest tenors that's ever lived i can't imagine someone else spending more time on
their voice you know there'll be different colors and maybe a bigger warmer sound because there's
he doesn't have as much earth maybe as a you know as luciano vibrati or you know plaster
domingo or martin lonzo or other people we've talked about but uh you see boiling
but anyway um those are some of my favorites i keep mentioning them because i like them a lot
but um all right so uh definitely stick around for my next video i've got more
demashivan coming your way and god bless all you guys and until next time peace out