How to be An Amazing Singer- Singing with Texture

SINGING TIPS: TEXTURE

Once you can sing a riff and run precisely it’s time to add texture. Texture is many things. It can be a tone quality that embodies and represents a particular emotion. It can be phrasing a certain way.

It can be an improvisational riff that sounds like a bird combined with a lyric about birds. In Renaissance music, this is known as word painting. The singer is “painting” the text with voice. Singers are word-painters- they make lyrics come to life by the way they sing them.

Think of the voice as a musical instrument that has many different possibilities for shading and sound choices. The vocal tone, subtext, timbre, volume, dynamics, and phrasing should reflect the meaning and emotion assigned to the lyric.

Adding texture to singing creates a greater expression of emotion. This is where words and notes on a page become the emotional expression known as music!

THE SEVEN TEXTURE CHOICES

The seven texture choices we will be working on in the following exercises include:

• Breathiness
• Dynamics
• Timbre
• Vibrato
• Compression/Press/Intensity
• Distortion (creaks, growls, screams)
• Variations: phrasing, melodic, and rhythmic

BREATHINESS

We work hard to eradicate breathiness in vocal technique. Although we don’t generally advise singers to cultivate a breathy tone, it is often effective to sing a phrase or two with a whispery and breathy quality.

It is also very effective (although vocally challenging) to be able to begin a phrase with a breathy sound and then crescendo into a powerful and clear sound. This takes a lot of control and a great vocal technique!

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