Sing It In Seven! Ungodly Hour
Here we are again! It’s been a bit too theoretical on this blog recently, so I thought it was about time we got back to some hard graft. If you’re not familiar with the concept of ‘Sing It In Seven!’, I’d recommend you read my first blog post about it here (gotta get those clicks in). This time, I’ve opted for a song that’s going to result in a little less public humiliation.
Why Ungodly Hour?
Listening to my ‘before’ version of this song, I’m not horrified. I’d be happy enough for people to hear that live. However, as I’ve mentioned before, Chloe X Halle have a special way of weaving subtle, intricate details into their go-hard bops. It’s quite frustrating to put on their album whilst cooking dinner and finding that I can’t sing along as easily as I want to. This song is all about taking tricky details and fine-tuning them to be able to show it off.
Goals
This song flags up every one of my downfalls. There are a lot of words that need to get out fast and the melody is not as simple as you’d assume, first time round. I had to take real care in working on articulation, pitch accuracy (intonation), rhythm, breath control and, as someone who naturally drags, maintaining the forward movement feel of the song.
My main focus when practicing this song was articulation - making sure every word was pronounced clearly - so I made sure to include some specific exercises in my warm up. In particular, I found the ‘Mamma Mey’ exercise on The Vocal Coach App really helpful. The exercise is difficult enough in itself for me, but I decided to level up a bit and use different consonants that I know tend to trip me up (e.g. ‘G’ and ’T’) and different vowel combinations. I’ve exhausted all the exercises I have on my computer/phone, so making slight variations like this just helps keep my favourites fun and fresh. It also forces me to focus and think about how my body feels, rather than singing on autopilot.
It was important for me to make sure that the time I spent practicing was efficient - that ‘singing on autopilot’ thing is a danger I fall prey to, far too often. It’s really easy to lose focus when you’re just practicing the same thing, over and over again, day after day. I found it really helpful to interject a bit of organised fun into my practice - including different, high-energy songs, after I was warmed up and before moving onto Ungodly Hour, that share similar characteristics. For what I was working on (mainly articulation, intonation and breath control), songs by Kirk Franklin and Destiny’s Child worked so well. I didn’t take this too seriously - just singing for the joy of it - and it helped me stay more engaged with my practice session, whilst quietly exercising parts of my voice I wanted to improve. It meant that that daily 30-45mins didn’t become too stale.
Because I was concentrating on finer details, I decided to take away the backing track when I sang the song and just use a metronome. I wanted to leave no stone unturned. It’s awful exposing your voice like that, even when it’s only yourself hearing it, but it revealed so many little things that could be polished and made better. Singing the song at a slower tempo got my lips, tongue and jaw used to all the different shapes they had to switch between and it also gave me the time to make sure I knew what every single note was supposed to be - I didn’t give myself the chance to quickly skip over anything. Throughout the week, I increased the tempo. Slowing the song down allows you to micro manage every detail and refine it; speeding it up tests your muscle memory. The original song sits around 105 bpm and, by the end of the week, I just about got up to 120 bpm. Although I didn’t need to sing the song that fast, it tricked my brain into thinking that the original bpm is relatively slow and allowed for a calmer, less panicked performance in the end.
Something I’ve been doing in general with my singing practice lately is to share out my time exercising different registers a little more fairly. I think a lot of singers’ default stance is to use chest voice until they absolutely cannot hold on any longer and then use head voice as a ‘last resort’. For reasons that are a little complicated to explain in a post that isn’t about this specifically, a strong chest voice depends on a strong head voice and vice versa. It only ever helps to explore and exercise all parts of your voice. Bearing this in mind, I had a go at singing the “when you decide you need someone …” section of the song (what is it - the chorus? Post-chorus? Hook? Songs just aren’t as simple as they used to be.) all in chest voice a few times and then all in head voice, as that part sounded so weak when I first sang it. Initially, I had planned to copy and paste what Chloe X Halle do, in terms of which registers they’re singing in, but I found that I reached some sort of magical equilibrium after trying the section a few times in both of these registers and my voice ended up falling into place and doing what it wanted to do; it felt low effort, but it sounded strong. I held onto this pattern of where my voice fell in and out of head and chest during this section throughout the week, but interestingly enough, found that I started to lose the pattern towards the last few days. It was almost as if the more often I sang with it, the cockier my chest voice got and wanted to budge in on other parts of that section. Those with more knowledge on these types of things might have other ideas, but I think it’s because my brain/voice is so used to striving to sing everything in chest voice, that the more I get used to singing something, that’s where it instinctively wants to go. In my ‘after’ version of the song, I’m having to concentrate quite hard to maintain my head voice and that section felt much easier to sing in the middle of the week, during my practice, than it does in that clip.
It’s really frustrating to have the goal of ‘fine tuning’ the performance of a song, as so many other factors can get in the way. Even just the awareness that I was recording myself meant that this ‘after’ clip isn’t as ‘perfect’ as I’d like it to be, or even as I know it can be (at least, when nobody’s listening). However, I definitely notice a difference and feel that the way I sang the second version compliments the songwriting and arrangement much more effectively. It’s a lot crisper and more defined. I’m not running out of breath every few phrases. Luckily, singing is not a linear process and once you exercise one part of the voice, you’ll (hopefully) find that other things start to fall into place. I didn’t do too many exercises focusing on breath this past week, but making words snapper and more staccato meant that I had more time to breathe which, in turn, meant that I had enough air to support my pitching. Everything goes hand in hand and helps each other out. This week has been a really nice reminder of how quickly the voice can adapt and improve and makes me feel really excited to keep working on these areas of my voice (until I have a bad few days, fall out of the habit of practicing and inevitably go through this whole epiphany again!).
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For anyone who’s interested, the beaut backing track I used is from JustAcoustic.