General Music Chat

This really has nothing to do with your vocals, but in your picture you kinda look like Woody from Cheers.

LMAO - Woody ----must be my overdeveloped jaw muscles. Hey, I'll take any kind of feedback I can get. A guitar player who saw me in person actually said recently I looked like Freddie Mercury (go figure). If only he'd said I SOUNDED like him...oh well not much chance of that.

Back to the subject at hand... wow posting here was the best thing I've done in a long time. I've posted other places and gotten dissed and discouraged, but you guys are great at keeping it constructive. Everyone who gave me feedback, you don't know how much I appreciate it. I have studied everything closely... and the comments about the valve should be half open and I sound like I'm yelling -- those were especially helpful. That would probably explain why I sound my best when I first start out a session. I always wondered why that was and now thanks to you guys I think the light just went on: I am clearly forcing too much air on my cords and after a while my tone starts to deteriorate as a result. I've got to remember less is more and also what I've read recently in this one book that was really helpful -- that most of the power has got to come from amplification due to achieving good resonance (keeping an open throat and focusing/placing the voice correctly), not from air pressure. I've been concentrating so much on adducting the cords to get higher notes I'm probably closing off my throat too much, which in turn is dampening my resonance and making me force more air, and then it's a downward spiral. Control, control, control. Back off, ease up, ratchet it down...except at certain exclamation points. Great stuff, I can do something with all of it.

I'm going to digest and assimilate all this, along with the books I got back off the shelf and give it another go here soon. And will post the results again of course. Got an audition for a local rock start-up band Sunday... Not doing any of these songs though. Probably a good thing for now! If nothing else it'll be good experience...

Thanks again everyone who commented, I am going to have to start visiting this board more!

Good luck Tom211