One of the more eclectic blogs I read is that of New York City vocal coach Claudia Friedlander. Recently she has been posting on the topic of vibrato and building it naturally.
She has hit on something that I have heard and disliked from so many singers. Fake vibrato has annoyed me so much that I actually work to avoid it altogether. Now, it seems avoiding isn’t good, either. I wish I had time with a coach.
I sing differently from the balcony of Zion than I do for the podcast. If the song’s range is right, I will open the voice up at Zion and project from a slightly lower register, and it can be heard throughout the whole sanctuary and sound good.
When I try to do that with the podcast and check the pitch with an auto-tuning plug-in, one of two things will happen. Often, the auto-tuner will bend my singing down a half-step from where I intended, which basically means I’m singing flat. The other thing is that if I am singing a pitch or two above middle C, the auto-tuner makes a screeching noise, which I interpret as that I’m stressing.
So the voice you get on Time Out is of a little higher register and softer, one that the auto-tuner doesn’t mark as stressed or flat. I’m also singing into a microphone, so I don’t need to be loud. Your comments on that philosophy are welcome.
