What's more important in singing: style or ability?

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by Joshua277456, Dec 19, 2014.

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  1. Joshua277456

    Joshua277456 Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    USA
    Idk = "I don't know"

    I thought everybody who used the internet knew that!
     
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  2. Michael

    Michael I LOVE WIDE S-T-E-R-E-O!

    LOL! I guess I missed that one...well OK, he's coming back with a vengeance!
     
    Joshua277456, Aftermath and willied like this.
  3. Joshua277456

    Joshua277456 Forum Resident Thread Starter

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    USA
    Lol. Who is the guy in your avatar anyway?
     
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  4. Michael

    Michael I LOVE WIDE S-T-E-R-E-O!


    Ragnar Lothbrok...
     
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  5. gregorya

    gregorya I approve of this message

    Writing has nothing to do with the original premise of the thread, but perhaps reciting poetry... ;)

    I just meant to say that when a song truly connects with me, I don't tend to be overly aware of the technique or style, just the musical experience.
     
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  6. Atmospheric

    Atmospheric Forum Resident

    Location:
    Eugene
    Sincerity.

    Nothing is more boring to me personally than great ability with zero emotion. That's just a stupid pet trick IMO.
     
  7. Joshua277456

    Joshua277456 Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    USA
    Sorry man, I was unfamiliar :(
     
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  8. Michael

    Michael I LOVE WIDE S-T-E-R-E-O!

  9. mwheelerk

    mwheelerk Sorry, I can't talk now, I'm listening to music...

    Location:
    Gilbert Arizona
    Style. There are millions of great voices mostly indistinguishable
     
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  10. Joshua277456

    Joshua277456 Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    USA
  11. Lucidae

    Lucidae AAD

    Location:
    Australia
    I suppose I have more appreciation for singers with real ability, because it's not often you come across one.
     
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  12. rockledge

    rockledge Forum Resident

    Location:
    right here
    NATURAL ability.
    Style too often implies some contrived singing tactic.

    The best singers are the ones who have wonderful voices and sing naturally without being concious of trying to develop some "style".
    Harry Nilsson.
    Steve Perry.
    Robert Plant.
    Paul Rodgers
    Jon Anderson
    B.W. Stevenson
    Robin Zander


    The two things all of these guys have in common is that they have/had wonderful voices and they sound like themselves because they sang like they sang. And some of them had a great many who copied them.
     
  13. rockledge

    rockledge Forum Resident

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    right here
    Supermans magical imp tried to start a band, and that was the singers name.
     
  14. EdgardV

    EdgardV ®

    Location:
    USA
    Style of voice and style of music are often more important than ability.

    I respect the heck out of Barbra Streisand and Whitney Houston for their ability; but don't care for the sound of Streisand's voice or her music, and I don't care for Whitney's music and find her singing a little one dimensional. I sometimes wondered if she would have been good at singing in another genre like jazz. But I'd rather listen to Tom Waits, Muddy Waters or John Lee Hooker than Whitney.

    Then there was Peter Cetera, who's voice was great in early Chicago, but by their 8th album, some of the music style and Cetera's singing style had changed — it became way too sappy. But he definitely had the chops.
     
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  15. Michael

    Michael I LOVE WIDE S-T-E-R-E-O!

    are you sure? I beg to differ...
     
  16. Michael

    Michael I LOVE WIDE S-T-E-R-E-O!

    you're welcome...not a movie...a weekly TV show.
     
  17. Joshua277456

    Joshua277456 Forum Resident Thread Starter

    Location:
    USA
    Oh wow, now I feel embarrassed...I looked at it for 5 seconds and assumed it was a movie. I don't really keep up with TV either. Hell, I don't even own a TV...
     
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  18. mpayan

    mpayan A Tad Rolled Off

    Im a vocalist with a background in choral and opera. At one time I would have said technicality, purity, ablity, little vibrato, perfect pitch etc etc. But now I lean much more towards style, uniqueness and originality. I see just as much validity and meaning in a Dylan vocal line as I would in a Sinatra vocal line.
     
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  19. Andy Smith

    Andy Smith .....Like a good pinch of snuff......

    Style. The 'singers' I was drawn to as a kid - Ian Hunter, Dylan, Kid Strange, Alex Harvey, Steve Harley... - were, in my mind, not singers at all but entertainers who found the best way they could to articulate their material. To me, a singer is someone like Julie London or Frank Sinatra. Individuals who, frankly, can hold a note. Alas, those I placed on a pedestal couldn't. But they expressed magnificently.
     
  20. Freedom Rider

    Freedom Rider Senior Member

    Location:
    Russia
    Style and charisma.
     
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  21. No argument here. What you have with the likes of the Whitneys, Mariahs and Barbras of this world are voices. They are lauded more often than not because they possess a gift that the right marketing can turn into a phenomenon. The trouble is they lack empathy ..and a story. Put a weather report in front of Mariah and you would get that same voice making that same sound. Put a weather report in front of Tom Waits and you get more than just the weather, you would feel that cold, that heat, that humidity.
    Waits, Muddy and John Lee Hooker will always be great singers in my book because they can tell a story. They are songwriters, they care about what they are singing about. That's far more likely to make me care. If you can't tell a story, if you can't connect, you got nothing. Houston and Mariah are one dimensional because beyond that great voice there is essentially nothing very much.

    Edit I don't think Whitney would have been much of a jazz singer, she was clueless when it came to nuance, pacing, light and shade. It was just Whitney at full bore all the time. Then again, not all jazz vocalists these days are anything special.
     
    Last edited: Dec 20, 2014
  22. chervokas

    chervokas Senior Member

    For me, the most important thing for a singer to do is be a good storyteller -- delivering a lyric, drawing me into the narrative of a song, or if the song has no specific sense of beginning middle and end, no sense that something's happening, at least drawing me into the emotional meaning and visual imagery of the song. I don't know if that's a matter of style exactly, it's certainly not a matter of timbre or tone (which is more of an innate quality it seems to me), but for me everything else comes after that: How well does the singer sell the lyric and the emotion and meaning of the song? Basically, is the singer a great actor?

    The second most important thing is personality -- I guess that goes to style. Is there something distinctive, individual, personal in the singer's phrasing or approach? Just like with, say, a jazz musician, when you can recognize their solos just by their sound and phrasing -- that kind of individuality.

    The thing I least care about is vocal range, pitch control or the technical aspects of "good" singing. I mean, the singers I think are the greatest of the great had it all -- captivating storytelling ability, strong sonic personalities, great natural instruments and great vocal control: singers like Sam Cooke, Sarah Vaughan, Frank Sinatra, Placido Domingo. But those who have primo ability in all those areas are rare singers. As a corollary, most singers who have made a living singing have all of these attributes in some measure. It's not that say, Dylan had lousy pitch and vocal strength -- at least through the '80s he was a strong singer who doesn't miss pitches on those albums (now of course he's getting by on guile). But he has the nasal timbre and the idiosyncratic phrasing and those are the primary characteristics of his singing. So all singers have some mix of these attributes and their singing exists on a kind of matrix -- more this kind of singer than that.

    But I'd much rather listen to a singer with a gruff or squeaky timbre and idiosyncratic style who can really sell me a lyric, like Dylan or Billie Holiday or Willie Nelson, than a singer with a beautiful natural instrument with great strength and control who never really inhabits a lyric (I kind think of Ella Fitzgerald that way: the most beautiful recorded vocal timbre I've ever heard, amazing musical imagination, but when she sings a song with any kind of depth or irony or anything other than a superficial kind of novelty, mostly I think she fails to deliver at an emotional and semantic level; but dang, it always sounds beautiful). And my least favorite singers seem to be male singers with pure, pretty, high tenor voices: the Steve Winwoods of the world, or a pushing towards alto, like Steve Perry. Those guys undoubtedly have great natural instruments and pitch and control, but that kind of voice is, more often than not, nails on a blackboard to me.
     
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  23. chervokas

    chervokas Senior Member

    I don't think that's true of Houston. I think some of her best recorded performances were the ones where she keeps it mostly at a slow simmer building great tension so when and if she does goes full power it's a brief moment of release, like "Exhale" or "It's Not Right but It's Okay." "Exhale" is a masterful example of control and restraint with only the brief few bars of belting at the end just before the retrained-again outro. She definitely could sing with great nuance.
     
    Last edited: Dec 20, 2014
  24. I demand style and ability (plus fine musicianship and good looks too).

     
    Last edited: Dec 20, 2014
  25. onionmaster

    onionmaster Tropical new waver from the future

    Mike Patton defines what a singer should be for me.

    He can croon well and knows about operatic and theatrical techniques and everything, but he is also completely eccentric and can do a load of crazy voices which give the songs a theatrical character. He remembers, unlike most singers, that he is as important an instrument as any of the other elements.

    I think Faith No More's The Gentle Art Of Making Enemies exemplifies that really well - he uses a different singing style for each part and the way the song builds is largely due to that.

     
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