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. Next up is Pat Benatar. Before we get started if you wouldn't mind, please
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Don't forget to ring the Bell so I can keep new, cool videos coming your way
and I have a singing course and that course is called How to Sing Better Than
Anyone Else, you can find it right here at Ken Tamplin Vocal Academy.com
where the proof is in the singing. Now we're gonna take on Pat. Now we've gotten
a lot of requests for us to take on the most difficult songs to sing in all of
pop and rock history and the most iconic legendary artists and Pat Benatar
certainly fits that bill so we're gonna get started but I want to break Pat up
into two different categorie,s kind of like I did with Ann Wilson.
I think of Pat as the 70s Pat right with all you know all of you know hit
me with your best shot and a bunch of the early stuff she did and then I think
of the more radio-friendly Pat which came along later so we're gonna choose
off both of them but for right now I'm calling up Kati Cher. Kati's worked
really hard and Kati is very diverse in how many different styles she can
sing in. So we're gonna start off and let Kati give it her best shot, here we go.
Cool. Now I am gonna enjoy pointing out the fact that Pat Benatar has come from a
very operatic background. She's very Bel Canto apaggio. She's very open throat
technique oriented and you can really hear that in Pat's stuff and you're
gonna, I'll describe this more as we go along but Pat also had the uniqueness of
the power, here's this little, little girl, real, small gal and yet she had all this
power kinda like to the Ronnie James Dio of you know The Sopranos back on the
rock day for girls right and but she used really good open throat technique
so if you watch Kati you know (sings). It's real open.
Now I'll take these songs and I'll put them
in the description so you can see the full version so how they play out
because I'm just taking snippets so it doesn't you know these videos don't go
over too long but I want to point out too that Pat uses um some very specific
ways she compresses air in the glottis so (sings) she's (sings).
She's got, she compresses back the air, she holds back the air like I cover in my
singing course, while maintaining good open throat technique. So there's an art
to that let me explain this. We first train the vowels to stay open ah a e oh
and ooh ok. Ah a e oh u. So if we were gonna kind of run them in
a train it'd be (sings),
would be the way the vocal tract looks in the back of the throat. Then we train
these vowels in a very specific sequence, in a very specific series on going up
and down different scales during different variations of the vowels,
adding different modifications to control those vowels depending on the
range that you're singing in. That's precisely what Pat Benatar does when she
sings so from a technical standpoint, Pat may be one of the most technically
correct female rock singers of all time. Now I'm not saying you might have you
know Lzzy Hale might be your new favorite, you know rock singer. That's fine
but from a technical standpoint, Pat actually I think takes the cake and has
the trophy for that, even above Ann Wilson as far as technique. So you might
like Ann Wilson as better as a soprano or as a you know as a belted rock singer,
but Pat from a technical standpoint really is very well rounded in in her
approach to using classical training and bringing that into her technique so
let's continue here with Kati.
Cool and she hits all the notes at the end you know just like Pat. Now the other
thing I want to talk about is grit and distortion. So Pat kind of really you
know with "Hell Is For Children" and some of the stuff she did early on, she really
set the precedent, set the bar up pretty high for that and as I've mentioned in
another one of my videos um, it's a lot harder for a female to compress that's
why Janis Joplin became so popular, Etta James became so popular is it was a lot
harder for females to have overdrive or distort their sound, what's called hyper
glottal compression, to to compress air at the glottis to get distortion because
their folds are smaller than men and they vibrate faster so they have to work
extra hard at not only getting the distorted sound in a belted chest sound,
it's also more difficult for them to get that distortion in head voice or a
reinforced falsetto, much more difficult than a guy because guys were
stretching the folds you know with the creak arytenoid and and thyroid, we've got
cartilage and muscle structure as we're stretching them. Our folds are longer so
they vibrate slower so we're able to get into a distorted tone, kind of like, kind
of like rattling you know our voices and and everyone uses Frye as the example,
how to get to distortion. I'm using it as an example of how slow the folds
actually vibrate. I don't necessarily use that as how we get into distortion
though you can in the beginning stages of wanting to learn at a distorted voice,
you can understand the frye concept but you've got to get out of that concept
and you got to get into building big, round, robust vowel sounds first, then
learning how to compress the air correctly while maintaining those big,
raw vowel sounds and then you can start to lean into that sound more and more to
get the desired distorted effect in different percentages of that for tone
and and and growl even all the way to the extension of growl. So alright so we
heard that that tune, so this is the the phase one of Pat Benatar let's say. Now
I'm gonna move on to one of her more later tunes and I'm picking and
choosing different artists that I've worked with that I've done with. This is
Xiomara Crystal, we just did this not that long ago and she did a great job on
this check this out.
Pretty good huh.
It sounds just like Pat but her.
Cool. Now again if you notice there, the similarities of my girls, of everybody
actually but girls and guys and we're doing girls now, the similarity of the
open throat vowels. They just sound like it's so free in the throat.
It's so effortless in the throat and even when they're distorting their
sounds, it still sounds effortless. It doesn't sound like they're straining and
pulling and squeezing, just choking off their vowels to get to that distortion.
The distortion is big and round like Dio or a big, round sound with that
distortion, desired effect, maintaining clarity in the voice and pitch and
control and ease of flexibility, giving up and down these scales and all these
difficult songs to sing you know, it doesn't sound like they're struggling at
all right. That's because we've worked on this. That's what I cover in my singing
course. How to get to all of these places effortlessly and just not denying
yourself the ability of the freedom in the voice that you can have if you know
how to work on this correctly. Now I'm gonna put these in the description again
like I said, so you can check out all of the full-length versions of these. I
don't want to take the time to do that now. I'm gonna pick off one more. This is
Kati again. Check it out. It's "We Belong" you'll know this.
Okay now I want to point something else out. When I work these girls up for
singing these songs, we work up in specific ranges. So if you notice, this
song sounds like it's kind of low in her register right
whereas when Pat does it, it sounds like it's right square in the middle of her
tessitura, the be, the kind of the sweet spot of her singing. Well that's because
we worked on this particular day up some really high stuff. We did some Steelheart,
we did you know some AC/DC, we did you know some crazy like, this girl can sing in a
lot of different styles and we had worked our voice up a lot higher so when
it came down to doing a song like this which may, some girls may think well
it's kind of hard and it seems like it's reaching for some of those note,s it's
effortless in Katies part because we work ourselves up to certain
registrations that we sing in. That's something else I cover in my singing
course on how to be able to take on these different styles so you can set
the voice up for specific songs to sing. Okay let's take a little bit more,
listen a little bit more.
See how low it kinda sounds in her voice.
Cool and also notice again open throat
technique, you can see down the back of her throat because she's got such good
vowel placement that she has no stricture. There's nothing in her throat
constricting anything, her tongue's not going into the back of the throat and
clogging up the back of the vowel sounds that she's creating so. Anyway gang I'm
doing most of this by request so if you've got a request of a singer you
want me to do a takedown of, please put that in the description and definitely
check out my next video.