Ep 10 Live Q&A – April 24, 2019 Question 4 – How do you develop your own singing style?

Mike Elson: (36:39)
All right. Let’s move onto the next question. Again, this is live, so we’re handling them as they come in. Question four, I want to develop a unique singing style. This is a very open-ended question. This one comes in from Jacob, so this is from one of the men on the list. How do you develop your own up singing style?

Matt Edwards: (37:03)
Here’s the thing, Jacob. People, a lot of times, in all forms of art, think that great artists just somehow magically developed their artistic style in some vacuum. They just lived in their parents’ basement for years and figured out all this great [inaudible 00:37:18]. That’s mostly not true. There might be some crazy geniuses who pull that off, but for the most part, no.

Matt Edwards: (37:25)
The reality of it is we learn from others along the way, and by studying lots of different artists, we start to find things that we’re attracted to, and then we start to put our own twist on those that [inaudible 00:37:36]. There’s a great book called Steal Like an Artist by a guy named Austin Kleon, and it’s an easy read. It’s $7 on Amazon, and I try to get all of my students to pick this book up and read it because it changes your mindset about being creative and finding your voice. What he encourages you to do is find different projects where you take a little bit of what this person did, a little bit of what that person did, and mix them together and create something new. It might be in painting, it might be some sort of collage. It’s basically to get you to play.

Matt Edwards: (38:07)
There’s a vocal coach in LA named Roger Love. He has a process that I really like. It’s written about in Set Your Voice Free. What Roger says is to find an artist that you love, and pick a couple songs by them, and imitate those songs exactly. By exactly, be careful not to try to make your voice sound like Adele if it’s not an Adele voice. But as far as imitating exactly, what he’s really talking about are notes that person slides into, the way they use their diction, the way that they use breathiness, the way they use growls, the way they use fry, how they mess with rhythm along the way.

Matt Edwards: (38:43)
Then do three songs by that artist, and really dissect, dive in deep. Make a week on these songs, trying to master it. Then find another artist that’s similar but different, and do the exact same thing with that person. Keep repeating this process until you’ve gone through three or five different artists that you like. Then pick out a sixth song. In that sixth song, think about how the way the first person would sing it, and take all the little tools that you learned from the first person, and put it into that song. Then, try taking all the tools that you learned from the second person, put them all into that song. Repeat it with the third, fourth, and fifth.

Matt Edwards: (39:21)
Then take that song and decide if maybe you liked person one’s approach for the first half of the verse, but person two’s approach … how they would usually approach a song for the second part of the verse. So the first part might be a little bit, Mariah Carey. The second part might be a little bit more Celine Dion. Or since we’re talking men, the first part might have a little bit more Jason Mraz inside of it, and the second half might have some more Dave Matthews. Then we might put a little Kurt Cobain when we get to the chorus and pick it up a notch, and then maybe put a little bit of Lamb of God death metal scream at the end of it to make it really rock.

Matt Edwards: (39:56)
But the idea is that you’re exploring all of these sounds and learning what your body is capable of. As you make these sounds and try these different approaches, you’re going to find things that speak to you. It might be that, oh wow, when I really do sing up through those final consonants in the right words, it does make some of them pop more. Or I really do sing too clear and clean on everything, I do like scooping. I need to be more free with the way that I’m approaching the notes. Or I do like to add fry, and there’s nothing wrong with that because everybody does it.

Matt Edwards: (40:25)
Then as you start picking up new songs, take all those tools you learned, start integrating them, and work on a song at a time. What you should eventually start to do is find yourself coming up with ideas on the spot, because you’ve listened in so much detail to other performances. Now, the other thing you can do is … I call it the Hallelujah project. When I teach workshops, I give everybody a lead sheet to the song Hallelujah. I give everybody a colored pencil. We listen to Leonard Cohen sing Hallelujah, and I have them with their colored pencil mark every single thing that he does.

Matt Edwards: (40:58)
We then switch colored pencils and we listen to LeAnn Rimes, mark everything she does. We switch colored pencils and then we listen to Bon Jovi, mark everything he does, and then we switch back and listen to Tori Kelly, mark everything she does. We now have four different colors on our page, and we take a fifth color or a highlighter and highlight the things we like.

Matt Edwards: (41:18)
Then what you end up with is your version of Hallelujah that is based on influences by those other four artists. If you ever have any doubt about this being [inaudible 00:41:29], go read up on the Rolling Stones, because the way the Rolling Stones got their start is they would pick up all the blues albums they could get their hands on. They’d go back and they’d learn those blues albums on the record, and then they’d start mixing them together, and they mixed it together with different drum beats that were popular in London at the time or England at the time, and they kept merging things until they discovered their own unique rock voice.

Matt Edwards: (41:51)
If it was good enough for the Rolling Stones to approach it that way, I think we can all do it that way.

Mike Elson: (41:56)
That’s great advice, Matt. You said that Steal Like an Artist by Austin Kleon?

Matt Edwards: (42:03)
Yeah, it’s K-L-E-O-N.

Mike Elson: (42:04)
Okay, great. I found the book, dropping that in here too.

Matt Edwards: (42:06)
Nice.

Mike Elson: (42:06)
It does not have the Amazon affiliate link on it, so please, give Amazon some money, but enjoy the lessons in that book. Highly recommended.

Matt Edwards: (42:16)
He’s got a journal too. If you like his book, he’s got a journal that walks you through exercises every day to help you expand your artistic vision for yourself. So I highly recommend that as well.

Mike Elson: (42:28)
Cool.

Matt Edwards: (42:28)
Then once you’re feeling comfortable, pick up his book Show Your Work. In Show Your Work, he starts giving you ideas about how to start putting yourself out there, and how to not judge yourself and keep yourself from having [inaudible 00:42:39].