How to Sing Any Song

I’d like to discuss how to sing any song. This is really important because what you’re going to find is that you think you are hearing certain vowel sounds, when in fact you’re actually not when you hear a really great singer.

Here’s what I mean by this. A lot of times we think of singing like we speak. In fact, we really don’t sing like we speak. We sing like we sing. Like we should sing well. And here’s what I mean by that.
If I were to sing a line in a song, "I’m sailing a-way, set an open course for the virgin sea. " It’s an old Styx song. What you’re going to learn is, how to sing it like Dennis De Young would’ve sung the song. He really pushes the sound into the front of the face. He’s a phenomenal singer, by the way, and still out there doing it today, killing it, which is awesome! But I bring this up because there are what are called vowel transitions.

Now what I like to do is get my students to start off working up their songs with vowels only first.

But for the most part, we want to break this stuff down a vowel at a time.

And we want to actually cut consonants altogether. So what I encourage my students to do is to take a song that they love, whatever that song is, and drop the consonants altogether. And then we’re going to talk about vowels in a second, so… (singing in vowels only). Okay. Now, there is what I call vowel substitutions. Now, these vowel substitutions vary, and they’re not constant. In fact I just saw one vocal coach put out something here recently, it’s “how to sing any song”. I’d like to make some adjustments to this because there’s some incorrect information in that, and if she’s reading, hopefully she’ll benefit from this, because this is 30 years of experience. And those vowel substitutions are as follows: In the English language, we have somewhere between 12 and 16 different vowels. In Bel Canto or in Latin, and Italian, there are five. Ah, Aa, Ee, Oh, Ooh. Now, I’ve studied Bel Canto most of my life, and I like to use that first as a premise by which all other vowel sounds happen.

However, it falls very short of, the traditional vowels of Bel Canto fall very short of contemporary vowels that we use in the English language. So if I go La, Ah, Ah, Ooh, Oh, Ah, Aye, Ee, Ee, Ee, Eeeee…This is called, I’m going to show you something called Vocal Tract Shaping, where we actually shape the vowels themselves to morph easily from one vowel to the next. So we want to take the path of least resistance, or from one vowel into the next vowel so that when those vowels join, or are married together to each other, you can actually have a smooth transition, keeping the greatest space in the back of the throat, the least amount of jaw movement, the least amount of tongue movement, and the least amount of over – exaggeration of the vowel.

Now, the higher up we go, and this is where this other coach has given out some information– good information, by the way, there’s some good info there for sure, absolutely…It sounded like she, we somehow crossed paths with the same information. Now we are getting to a place where anyone can learn to sing. But within this, the higher up we go, the smaller those vowel sounds need to happen.

So if I were to go to do this really high, instead of when I just went Lah, ah, ah, Ooh,Oh, Ah, Eh, Ee, Ee, Eeeee…You know, Ooh, Oh, Ah, Eh, Ee? If I were to go really high, Lah, ah, ah, Ooh, Oh, Ah, Eh, Ee, Ee, Eeee…Did you notice that there was almost no change in the vowels themselves? They were super-subtle. So the higher up we go up this food chain of these vowels, the more compressed, or the smaller spaces that we get within the vowel structures themselves. And we take the path of least resistance from one vowel to another. What do I mean by that? Well, this is far more than just a simple quick tutorial here. But there’s something called the Family Of Vowels, and the vowels, how they relate to one another when we sing. So as we go up, we convert these vowels. So if we were to sing “I” for example, and this is where this other coach is correct. “I” converts to Ah, but not in every case. So if I go, I don’t go “I-eee”. It’s just kinda weird, right? And, by the way, we talked about diphthongs and some other stuff.

You don’t necessarily go “I-eee” and close the vowel there, you go “I-e”…at the very end you can add just a little bit of the EE and I, or Ah. The Ah vowel and I-Ee, right? Now, the higher up we go, if I sing “I” then all of a sudden, it takes on the Persona more of an Aa, or Aa-Aye in the sound.
So these vowel shift. And I know this sounds complicated, and it is a little bit, but these vowels shift, and they change the higher up we go in the food chain, depending on what we’re singing, and the intensity of what we’re singing, and also the vowels themselves. So I would never sing a pure EE.

Now let me demonstrate this in a different kind of way.

We talk about a vowel holding its shape, right? The shape of the vowel, and then having a quick diphthong at the end, and then curving into the “speaking level sound” of the vowel. But actually there’s vowels as we go up top we don’t ever sing in the purity of the vowel itself. I don’t go (high pitch) “EEEEE”.

I go “Aye” quickly, like A-y-e, “Aye-eeeee”, and I can gently roll into the Aye-EE, into that vowel, and then all of a sudden, I’m making you think I sang EE the whole time. Buy I used “Aye” as the portal, or the tunnel, the portal, the bridge to get to that.

This is true for “ooh”also. If I’m on the bottom and I sang “Oooohhhh” I could do that on the bottom, but the higher up I go “Oh-oooooh” I go “Oh-oooh” and the higher up the food chain I go even than that is “Oh-oooooooo”, right? I don’t go pure “Oooh!”I could never get there.
So I use oh to get to ooh, and I roll into ooh.

And I don’t wait to the very end to give a diphthong at the end, it’s: “Oh-oooooh” because I want to get to the purity of that vowel, and I want to find that placement of that cool little amphitheatre that we hit that perfect little pocket in the back of the throat, right? So this becomes really important, how we relate these vowels.

So let’s get back to how we can sing any song in any style, is we start out, again: I’m sailing away. Right? We started with just the vowels and no consonants.

As we translate those vowels from one vowel to another, we find vowels that have the path of least resistance. So an excellent way, and I mean an excellent way to practice this is to practice ooh, oh,ah, aye, and EE, as transitional vowels, and I’m going to do a scale here in a minute, how you can practice this.

And reverse those vowels in a different kind of way and sing aye, ee, ah, oh, and ooh. Now what we really need to remember is EE, as we continue to go higher, can be translated to eh, like “led” or Aye-EE, like the number Eight. This other vocal coach says to sing “ih” on certain vowels.

That is patently false, and absolutely dead wrong. In the lower registration you can do that. The higher up we go, we actually avoid “ih” like ih, like Lid. Or oo like hook, if we go up too high. “Ih”, goes to “eh”, e-h, like “ehhhh”. I don’t go “ihhhhhhh”… ih,ih,ih,ih!It pulls too much tension.

So if I sing “I’m gonna flip my lid”… “gonnah fl-ehp mah L-ehd” You hear the Aye, Aye-EE, like the number Eight come in? I didn’t go “I’m gonna flip my lid”, right? It’s too much tension, in fact you’ll start to notice that your larynx will start to want to raise on you. So there’s a lot of little nuances. I cover all of this in my singing course. But there’s a lot of these little nuances that will help you like crazy when you’re going to sing your song. But I want to do just a couple of quick scales where you can identify how closely these vowels are related in the throat, and how we can build this vowel structure. Now, there’s a lot more to it than this but this is an awesome start. So we’re going to start by going lah on the bottom, like the Doctor wants to see your tonsils, keeping the greatest space, remembering the breath and the engine that drives your car, and were going to go Ooh, Oh, Ah, Aye, EE. Lah, ah, ah, Ooh, Oh, Ah, Aye, Ee, Ee, Ee, Eeeee Now, the higher up I go, the smaller the spaces.

Now, the space is the big in the throat, in that we want to create the most space as possible, but we actually want to compress the vowels to make them smaller, the higher up we go. Lah, ah, ah, Ooh, Oh, Ah, Aye, Ee, Ee, Ee, Eeeee Hear me doing it smaller? Lah, ah, ah, Ooh, Oh, Ah, Aye, Ee, Ee, Ee, Eeeee Do you hear the higher up the food chain it goes, the smaller I make the space? Now, the higher I go up from here, the more I bring mask into the sound, and I push the sound into the front. Lah, ah, ah, Ooh, Oh, Ah, Aye, Ee, Ee, Ee, Eeeee So I’m not carrying so much girth or mass up in the throat with me, and I compress the sounds and make them smaller.

When we combine this with the songs that you’re singing, you’re going to notice that all of a sudden you’re going to have all of this freedom in the throat that you never knew you had, and then gently, little by little, you start to reintroduce the consonant sounds as you can, to keep that throat open. Now there’s something called glottal stops, which are “guh, guh, guh…”Any time that the glottis closes down and air stops the flow. So, Um, buh, things that close down. “Maybe”. You can substitute those consonants with different consonants.

Like, instead of going “maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe…”You can use small things like a ”v”. “vavy, vavy, vavy, vavy…”Until you can force the throat to stay open, because in the back of the epiglottis is closing across the trachea and allowing air to come up, and in the case of diphthongs that we talked about a minute ago, it’s trying to differentiate airflow coming out of the mouth or out of the nose. And the back of the throat’s going “Hey could you make up your mind, here? Do you want air to come out of the mouth, or do you want it to come out of the nose? Or a combination thereof?