Hey guys welcome back again to Ken Tamplin Vocal Academy where the proof
is in the singing. I'm continuing my series on How to Sing Like
and next up is Ian Gillan from Deep Purple.
Now before we get started if you wouldn't mind, please like and subscribe
to my channel, that'd be really cool. Don't forget to ring that Bell so I
can keep new, cool videos coming your way and I have a singing course that singing
course is called How to Sing Better Than Anyone Else
and you can find it right here at Ken Tamplin Vocal Academy.com
So with that said I want to dive right into Ian. Now Ian is one of the most
influential rock singers of all time. Let's face it
right and some of us remember him all the way back
even as early as Jesus Christ Superstar, I know I mentioned,
I just did What Makes This Singer Great and I did one on Ian and we talked about
"Gethsemane" and some of the other amazing pieces that he did throughout that. One
of the originals actually of Jesus Christ Superstar but I want to
focus on kind of two eras of him
and the first is going to be the "Child In Time" era
and then you know again "Highway Star" so I've got a couple of those queued up.
Now again I think that it's absolutely as important as important can
be that if you're looking to get a
mentor, any mentor, in any discipline, I don't
care what it is. In my case it's singing so I'm mentoring
you in singing. No matter where you get a mentor, make
sure that mentor can do it and do it well themselves and
can display other students doing it. This is really important.
I love one of my students that said you know he, in his life, he felt
that a mentor can only take you as far as they have gone themselves. So if you
see some other coach on the internet or some fancy advertising or something
just remember that that coach can only take you
as far as they've gone themselves and no further. So just remember that, it's a
really important concept so with that said I, I do this, so I do it by
demonstration and I think that demonstration isn't a way
to teach, it's the only way to teach. So I'm going
to fire up right now. This is "Child And Time". Play some of it and
then we'll talk about it as we go.
Now I'm pointing something out. Now I add a little Ken Tamplin in this, I'm not trying to sound exactly like
Ian Gillan but he's very theatrical in the way he does, presents this song so
you know (sings)
sorry is that..crossed (sings) right.
So he's very theatrical I could just literally see him
you know in Jesus Christ Superstar or Hair or some other play somewhere
and, and presenting this story you know as a theatrical
artist so to speak so. Now as we're going through more of this though I,
I add kind of a little bit more Ken Tamplin, Dio, Coverdale
to Ian because Ian kind of stays a little thin on his sound and I actually
like to have a bigger, girthier sound so just know that that's coming in I'm
not looking to sing it exactly like him but I will explain
his technique along the way, here we go.
(sings) right.
He has a fantastic grasp on mixed voice. If you really listen through that song,
a lot of times he's going from chest to mixed, to head to mixed to chest to mixed
to head and he's going back and forth and so you've got to be
really careful not to over sing parts if you don't want to like overstate the
song or overstate the section in the song that you're singing
so you know (sings) right (sings) right.
You've got to be able to get in through the passaggio seamlessly, to where you
can't hear the break and then you never really know is he in
chest is he head, is he pulling up chest, is he in mixed voice which is a really
amazing, amazing art, it's very difficult to do that and I do that quite a bit
throughout the song in honor of him and trying to match at
least the energy and not like oversing it
so much. I do oversing it because I like that but not so much. Here we go.
And he uses a lot of falsetto, a lot of reinforced falsetto.
especially on the high screams coming up.
OK. Before i get to this next section, I want to point out that his falsetto
if you go, it's really bright and tubular. It's really pointed
and, and has a really nice punch to it so (sings)
right. Now a lot of people when they first start out and they want to sing
with, through using their falsetto, they'll go (sings)
and have that really hooty, fluty sound and they're like ah I can never do this because
that's not what my falsetto sounds like. Well
actually that's the way my falsetto used to sound before I started to work it.
So I cover all that, that's in the head voice portion of my singing course but
if you get it bright so start small. Hold it real, hold your breath (sings)
and you can sing as little volumed as possible
in order to be able to get this so if you add too much volume, you may over
bloat the cords with too much air and blow them out and
that's where you get, end up with a hoodie, flutie sound.
So you start smaller (sings)
and as soon as the cords can handle it, you add a little more weight (sings)
and as soon as I can handle a little bit more (sings)
right. Now I've grown my fold so much in my head voice,
that I can sing where you don't even really know if I'm in chest or head right
and that's sort of the genius of being a baritone and understanding how
to grow that part of my voice so I can sing a lot of registrations where it
sounds like I'm pulling chest up really high. I do that too but I will, I'll find,
I'll pace myself to find ways to mix as I'm going through this
kind of stuff so. Here we go, next one.
Now as you're going a little higher you'll notice the higher up you go the
easier it is to get bright on the sound so in the lower registration you have
to work that and we have to work the folds to come down into,
you know your upper belting register to get that robust and strong and powerful
and bright and brassy but (sings)
right. So as I go up a little bit higher, I can be a little brighter on that tone
and I can work that tone so I'm showing you that here
but now the interesting thing too about Ian is that he has
kind of gutted his mid voice, like he didn't have a lot of belting mid voice,
he had his lower mid, lower register and then
nothing really belty around the maybe A5 to the B even
into the C excuse me A4 to the B4 to the C5
somewhere right in there, he didn't really belt that much at all
through that section and we're going to talk about that more when we get to "Highway
Star" and, but then what's interesting is
kind of later in life when he did "Perfect Strangers",
he did do that so, he somehow along the way decided he was either
could, had it all along and we didn't know it or he grew it and grew that over time.
Now Steven Tyler did the same thing, he used
to be the same. He used to just kind of sing in lower parts and the screamin
demon they used to call him, singing up high
and he really had no mid voice and then later in life he got a lot of mid voice
through a lot of this, especially in the post Run DMC "Walk This Way Era",
you know he used a lot of mid-voice stuff so let's get into the really high
notes here.
So ok (sings)
right. I'm just stretching and I'm yawning and I'm getting my uvula
and my soft palate to rise so I can create more space
to get up, I think it's a G or whatever I'd have to go back and look but, G sharp, G
and, and so I'm creating more space to get to those high notes. Now a lot of
people say I can never get to those notes.
I used to think the same thing too and I would just, I, I'd work it and work it and
I'd add on a note and I'd be happy with that and I'd just
keep going back, make sure I got that note,
didn't lose that note, cool. Then I work it a little bit more and then I'd add
another note and this comes like in a gym like working out with weights I mean
stretching and stretching and you know getting the tone and all that stuff,
to the extent that you knowIi go through this whole thing, now I don't want to,
I've got more songs on what stuff I want to cover here
but I want to go through the end of this here because I wind up, I
think I take this to a C6 if I'm not mistaken, I wanted to go a lot higher
than Ian because everyone brags about how high the G
is and I thought well let's, let's ramp it, ratchet it up even one more notch to take it a
little higher. Check this out.
Here we go.
Ok that's the original and there's some higher.
Okay so like I said I think I went to a C6 which is quite a bit higher than
the original and like I said this is all about
technique. I wasn't born with this voice guys, I had to work at it. That's why I
said I cover all of this in my singing course and it's not something that
happened to me overnight you know, it took me years to be able to do this so.
I want to move on to "Highway Star" because it's awesome
but, and then I want to show you about the gutting out of the mid voice thing
that I was talking about, check this out.
Now right there.
The (sings)
right. He's able to go through the passaggio and you don't hear the
register break right and that's what was cool about him
as you never quite knew, oh my gosh you know, he's able to do that. Well
that's sort of the beginnings of understanding how to get to good mixed
voice and have that a usable part of your
range. This is really important guys because a lot of people, I want this
range and I want to sound like this, well this is
how we do it, we start building chest voice,
then we build head voice and then we slowly fuse them together for one long,
powerful note like what you just heard and using this in different styles
and timbres of registrations of our range.
Now I want to point out one more thing when I went to record this,
and I, this is a no no guys so I don't recommend this unless you know what
you're doing. His voice in the original was really
dirty in the low end and when I warm up for a long period of
time, my voice gets kind of like golden voice and I don't mean that to
congratulate myself, I mean it like sometimes it almost becomes too sanitary
for it being really kind of carbuncly and dirty like his sound.
Now that's not to say I can't get distorted on a sound or I'm warmed up. Of
course I have amazing control of it but it's not quite
that, donkey on the edge you know distortion
where it's like, you know what it's gonna, I wanted it to be
a little dirtier in, in a street singing kind of way. So on this
particular day I just said I'm gonna go in and sing this
and not warm up at all so it sounds real throaty and dirty
right and I'll you, I'll do things like that for effect, oftentimes I'll set my
voice up or I almost always will set my voice up for
a specific song that I'm going to sing if I'm going
to sing clean like you know Paul Mccartney or something
then I'll, I'll warm up a real clean sound like Elton John or whatever
and if I'm going to sing dirty like this or in this case I won't warm up at all
so it's really dirty or if I'm gonna sing Coverdale or something like that
then I'll warm up to a certain extent to get
different sounds and tonal quality so. I wanted to bring that up. Again I'll put
all these in the description so you can watch the whole songs because you know
they came out pretty cool but I want to get to "Perfect Strangers"
because this is one that really fascinates me because when I took on
this tune, there's a lot of stuff that he did in
his mid voice, upper mid voice, that he never did way back in the early Purple
days and yet he does it here and did a
fantastic job. Now I, again Ken Tamplined it up and
Coverdaled it up a little bit more, a little bit of Ronnie James Dio because I
like that sound so bear with me because I just like a
bigger sound in that. However nonetheless I feel like I, I hit all of the the
main points of it. Check it out.
Now he didn't do any of those notes guys so I'm kind of like,
I'm just enjoying the song and in some sense I
almost sang it kind of like melodically like
you know "Kashmir" or some..(sings) you know (sings)
you know. So I'm adding this whole psychedelic you know era
to this music that wasn't necessarily there but it's done in the spirit of it
so it's like oh wow, he could have done that I could see, I could have seen him
doing that right. That's how I think about it when I do,
when I go off on it. I don't try to take it so left field that people are going
oh gosh you know he added Justin Bieber to
oh, a Deep Purple song. (sounds)
It's terrible.
So anyway.
More Robert Plant right.
And you know (sings) right, there's some Paul Rodgers comes in like,
these are all my bros man, these are all my, my icons that I just you know,
mentors to me, remember we talked about mentors and so
i just looked up to them and I just incorporate a lot of that in my
different singing styles so. Anyway gang I'm doing most of this by
request so if you've got a request for me, please put it in the description
and check out my next video.