Hey guys, welcome back again to Ken Tamplin Vocal Academy, where the PROOF is in the SINGING.
I got a lot of requests for this one, and that is Ken, can you teach us the chorus lick
from Chris Stapleton’s Tennessee Whiskey?
And I thought, yeah, sure, why not?
But before I do that, I want to talk about Chris.
Chris is just a phenomenal talent.
Chris, hats off to you, man!
You know, it’s good to see just crazy-great talent owning planet earth with their voice.
We need a lot more of that!
And I know that this recent interest of this lick comes off the heels of, you know, him
doing Say Something with Justin Timberlake.
But also, you know, Chris has had some awesome successes, too.
I don’t know, if you get a chance, check out The Jompson Brothers, which is a killer
rock band that he had, you know, before he started doing a lot of the country stuff that
he’s doing now, so, again.
Phenomenal talent.
But let’s get back to the lick.
Now, the lick itself reminds me a lot of an old Sam Cooke song, called A Change Is Gonna Come
In fact if you listen to Steve Perry, from Journey, the lead vocalist, who said that’s
one of his greatest influences.
You can hear a lot of “Oh, Oh, Oh - Oh, oh, oh - Oh, oh, oh...
Like all that kind of inflection in the voice, in the scales themselves and tonality.
Now I’m not sure if that’s where Chris got it, but it reminds me of that.
But then he has his own swag.
I like to work things up really quietly, or in head voice first, really slowly, and break
it down into quadrants or sections, and then speed it up and get the lay of the land and
how it’s supposed to feel in the throat and all that.
So I’m going to do that with you now, and by the way, I have a singing course called
How To Sing Better Than Anyone Else 2.0, where I have an entire section on this kind of stuff,
how to do this.
Because once you learn a few of these kind of licks, and you hear a lick, you can pretty
much dissect it, and, you know, with an exception of a note or two, sort of figure it out on
your own, so you don’t have to keep coming back to me for that information, okay?
So the song is in the key of A, and it’s “You’re as warm…”
Okay?
So, the first vocal is:
You’re as Warm…
We’re just going to start there, okay?
You’re as warm…
Do it with me…
You're as warm…
Speed it up a little bit more…
You’re as warm…
A little faster…
You’re as warm…
Faster still…
You’re as warm…
Faster still, just a little bit more…
You are as warm…
Warm…
And do that a bunch of times, and embed this in your muscle memory, in your throat and
in the intonation of the way you do the lick.
Nothing worse than a vocal lick that’s just out of pitch and all over the road.
So you really want to nail this stuff, okay?
So that’s the first section of it, so…
We’re going to do it slow again, it’s…
You’re as warm…
So… oh,oh, oh, ohm, is what we’re adding to this.
Do it with me… Oh, oh, oh, ohm. Oh, oh, oh, ohm. Oh, oh, oh, ohm. Oh, oh, oh, ohm. Oh, oh,
oh, ohm. Oh, oh, oh, ohm. Oh, oh, oh, ohm.
And keep doing that!
Repeat it!
Get the repetition of it, until you work that out in your throat, and then connect it.
So, You’re as Warm…
Do it again.
You’re as warm…
Right?
Now I’ll slow it down again.
We're going to speed it up so we can bring it up to speed…
You’re as warm…
A little faster…
You’re as warm…
A little faster still…
You’re as warm…
A little faster still…
You’re as warm…
A little faster still…
You’re as warm…
Is basically the lick, right?
And then he adds just a little lick to the end of it just oh,oh, ohm. oh,oh, ohm.
Slower…
Oh, oh, ohm.
Speed it up.
Oh,oh, ohm. Oh, oh, ohm. Oh,oh, ohm. Oh, oh, ohm. Oh, oh, ohm.
Like, do that a bunch of times, so you build the muscle memory, and the lick is crisp and
the intonation is really crisp.
Okay, now let’s add that to the whole lick itself.
We’ll start slow, and then we'll build it up as we’ve done before…
You're as warm…
You’re as warm…
You're as warm…
Right?
So they have all that kind of swagger in the rhythm.
You gotta kinda get that out so it doesn’t sound so stiff.
Okay?
Now let’s go ahead and do the full voice version of this.
Here we go…
You're as wa-ah-ah, ah-ah-ah, ah-ah-ah-ah, ah - ah - ah, ahhh, ah-ahm as a gla-ass of Bran-day…
Peace.
Out.