Moving from opera to pop style

Following on from the previous blog:

My opera singer client now puts We'll Meet Again in front of me. It's for the "singalong" part of a performance she's doing, and normally the idea of opera singers and singalong makes me shudder (and trust me, I've worked with enough opera singers to know what "And On The Lighter Side" actually means...)

As it happens, she's doing rather well with it, so I only put in a few style tweaks. The verse needed to be more conversational, so we experimented with shortening long final notes or dropping the volume on them.

One of the biggest and easiest changes you can make as a classically trained singer moving to more contemporary repertoire is to change the shape/volume of a line. Most classical singers are taught that sustaining is the breath of life, and that you meddle with the line on pain of death. That works for music that is written in that style (much of the classical repertoire from Gluck and Handel onwards requires it). But it really doesn't work in text-based music such as western musical theatre or pop.

Back to the Vera Lynn... We changed the volume shapes of each line from long arches to shorter, quicker volume rise-and-fall, for a more colloquial feel. It worked a treat, and she sounded much more real and more direct.

And the final tweak was an odd one. The verse was working fine, but she was sounding too energised in the chorus. So I asked her to imagine that she was singing slower than I was playing, and that the song had more breadth. She took the instruction and ran with it, and the feel changed to one of nostalgia and hope. It was almost like magic.

I always like to find out how people translate my instructions, so I asked her what she had done. She had imagined herself in a much bigger space, singing a broader, slower song "out there".

Fascinating what makes a performance work.

More in the next blog.

The Vocal Process "opening your throat" techniques appear on the new sell-out Constriction and Release Training DVD
The brand new voice training DVD Nasality and the Soft Palate has just been released
The Voicebox Videos DVD goes into its third pressing
The Vocal Process website has 300+ pages, including a series of free articles on vocal technique and style, memorising and different musical genres.

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86 things you never hear a singer say (free ebook)