SOUND OFF
Welcome to The Voice Connection Sound Off; a forum for users of books like Raise Your Voice, Melody to Madness, The Ultimate Breathing Workout, and Unleash Your Creative Mindset, as well as a place for Vendera Vocal Academy members to interact.
This message board was created so that singers could come together and "sound off" to help support each other during vocal development and the creative process of unleashing the creative spark that occurs when writing and producing music. Currently, myself and vocal coaches Ben Valen, Ray West, and Ryan Wall are here to respond periodicially to your questions, with new vocal coaches coming soon. But, feel free to help each other too:)
This board is here for you to ask questions about my and my fellow coach's books, videos, and MP3 programs, as well as offer others help with our vocal techniques. You may also post videos of yourself and your band to share your music and ask for critiques.
Please refrain from negative comments, profanities, spamming, and inappropriate criticisms of vocal methodologies, vocal coaches, and singers. All negative posts will be deleted and subject to banning without question. I will not respond to negative posts, because, as Mark Twain once said, “Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.” With that said, positive criticism is welcome because that is how you'll grow as a singer during the training process.
Okay, okay. About the smoking, I get it. Jaime and I had a myspace messaging battle back and forth discussing this very issue. While I appreciate everyones' concerns, I've made decisions about the smoking. I won't go into detail right now, but I'm working on a very specific regiment toward quitting. So PLEASE no more smoking comments! It was MY fault for putting the one clip of us online where I'm smoking on camera. I know that's not really the issue, but I just really loved the way the sound came through on that particular clip of us. Everything else we had recorded to that point seemed somewhat lack luster, OR I just wasn't fully pleased with my vocal performance.
Jordan, I know you don't HATE Tool. The last time I made a comment about it, I put a disclaimer comment behind it saying that I was only joking. I know how you feel about Tool and I'm completely okay with it. To each, his/her own.
Secondly, Joey (camera man) has A.D.D. So I apologize about that, too. We asked him to control the camera better on the stuff he recorded tonight. Hopefully, it'll be on youtube by the wee hours of the morning. It's actually THREE videos going up this time...cigarrette free;)
Thanx to everyone for the nice comments you made. Even beyond my smoking, you all still separated that from my singing long enough to critique the sound and quality of my voice, and I thank you for that.
I'll post a new bulletin as soon as those other videos surface on youtube.
I can't exactly correct you on my scale choices. Middle Eastern scales are very interesting in that you can legitimately apply as many flats and sharps as you like whilst still making them cohesive with the sounds of the actual chord progressions.
For example, I told Danny to play a D followed by a Cm. This sounds incorrect to some people and that's okay. I use a LOT of odd chord progressions in the music I write. I get tired quickly of those "poppy" chord progressions that people beat into the ground. You wanna challenge? Play this progression and see if you can make it work. Fm, Ab, Fm, C, E. That's a portion of one of my originals. (I hope my saying this is coming across as nothing more than a challenge and an interesting way of viewing the possibilities within an odd progression. I mean no arrogance. HELL, I'm barely confident in myself half the time. I think it' physically impossible to be arrogant;)
Regardless, there were times when I literally chose to just let my voice slide down without aiming for precise and specific notes. It was just a spur-of-the-moment creative choice. I thank yuo for the compliment, though.
