02/06/2024
THINK YOU’RE A GOOD SINGER?
Some people call themselves singers and are convinced that they are really good, mainly because nobody ever told them otherwise:
In Germany and the whole DACH REGION, there is a culture of complementing, rarely criticising,
this happens on every level: at school (because god forbid someone criticise a child and discourage them), during their professional training (because in many of them students pay high fees), and even at auditions: casting managers are simply afraid to directly criticise, preferring to use ambiguous phrases like “you’re not the type for this role..” Yaddi yaddi yaddi.
There is also a gross misconception of what good singing actually is, with many so-called singers argue that it is the ‘feeling’ that is the most important factor. To this i often use the analogy of learning a language - you need the grammar, vocabulary, diction and pronunciation, to be able to express yourself correctly, BEFORE you can put a feeling to it. Otherwise you will sound like a babbling Neanderthal. Similarly, singers must learn breathing, tone, intonation, vocal control, and STYLE of vocals they perform in.
Alas, in the past - Germany had not produced many good pop-rock vocalist to serve as a benchmark, Johannes Oerding might be the only exception I can think of.
Many singers I’ve worked with came from music schools where they were taught ‘musical’ vocal styles, with predominantly quasi-classical training, with emphasis on word pronunciation and diction, but absolutely no tonal control, terrible intonation, and thinking that belting Should sound like a strangled alpaca. Such singers naturally had no experience as pop-rock singers and always struggled singing shows that had English language Pop and rock songs. It was de facto like listening to a strangled alpaca.
The most surprising thing was that a lot of these so-called vocalist had zero vocal control, s**te phrasing, terrible English pronunciation, thinking that what they doing ‘cabaret Sprechgesang’ would also work for an Adele ballad or a Bon Jovi classic.
Some of the absolute worst ‘graduates’ usually came from either Vienna or ‘the stage school’.
For the latter we even had a running gag amongst colleagues, and usually putting stage school in Hamburg on your cv was enough for a rejection.
Luckily nobody is going to read this post, so it’s more of a rant to myself, otherwise this could have caused a bit of a s**t storm.
To be continued…
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