For the past couple of days, I’ve been doing a little research on harmonizing in music so I can learn how to do it with my own songs. I learned that you can still do harmonizing with or without back-up vocals. You don’t always have to sing in octave of the chord you’re playing, you can sing higher or lower in any of the notes in that chord. This could be experimental stuff with my own singing. I need to learn to not sing in octave of the chord/riffs all of the time. I need to learn to be more melodic in my vocals and learn to be a lead singer. Harmonizing requires music theory and a good ear so if you don’t have either of those, then there’s no point in doing it.

If you’re in a band or in an acoustic duo that do a lot of back-up vocals, harmonizing can be pretty important and I need to learn that more in my songs as well. I need to practice harmonizing and experiment with it myself. Harmonizing could take my songs to the next level. If I want my original music to be catchy and memorable, gotta learn harmonizing. Don’t wanna sing everything in octave all the time, people will get bored with it. Gotta be creative and different.

I’m gonna try to write a whole song with nothing but my vocals sometime in the future, an acepella song using my voice as instruments kind of like what they do in the movie, “Pitch Perfect”.

I kind of want to stay away from the dark acoustic rock songs and really focus on the songwriting. Get serious with it.

Kev

So after watching a few youtube instructional videos on vocal harmony… it really seems like a piece of cake really. What vocal harmony is when a singer is singing in tune with a certain chord like say a C chord for example, the back-up singers would sing higher notes that are in that chord. Like in a C chord is a 1 3 5 so the notes would be C E G. If a singer is singing on the root note C, the back-up singers would sing a little higher either E or G. You could come up with all kinds of vocal harmonies for back-ups like “oooohhs”, “Aaaahhs”, “mmmmmmm”, “Sha lalalala”, etc. Whatever you can come up with… just be creative. I’m gonna give this a try by practicing in garageband and then I’ll try it for another song. Should be easy.

Some of you may ask how did I improve myself with the singing? Well, the only secret to that is… practicing. That’s all there is to it. The goal is you want the voice to give that buzzing sensation in your head… get all of that sound out of your mouth. After listening to my older songs, I felt I really needed to improve myself. I wanted to become an actual “singer”. Really sing good and not sing like I’m using my speaking voice if you know what I mean.

Singing is fun. I enjoy it so much. You’ll never see me audition for “The Voice” or “American Idol”… I’m gonna be doing my own thing.

I wanna try doing some acepella singing… see what kind of feedback I can get of me singing without an instrument.

If your voice sucks and if you don’t like the way it sounds, you can always improve yourself. Don’t always think you can’t. I taught myself how to sing. I prefer to teach myself instead of working with a vocal coach. Teaching yourself is better. You don’t wanna get anybody else’s style. You want to develop your own.

Kev

I didn’t buy too many albums this year in 2013. Music industry gets worse every year so there’s not much good music anymore. Once in a while a good album will come out but not much. Looking through my CD collection, I only bought 7 albums this year. For all those other new albums I wanna hear, I’ll just listen to them all in spotify this week and then I’ll make my picks for the list. If I like the album enough, I’ll buy my own copy on CD. That’s what I use spotify for. If there’s an album I wanna hear, I’ll listen to it in spotify first to see if I like it enough.

I don’t subscribe to spotify… I just listen to the free service. I don’t mind commercials and advertisements. It’s just like listening to the radio, ya know?

I’ll be honest that it hasn’t been a good year for music but the big plus’s are that Black Sabbath and David Bowie both made comebacks. I’ll have this list up sometime at the end of this week.

Kev