Tonality, Ear Training and Pitch
And he who lives a hundred years, not seeing the immortal place, a life of one day is better if a man sees the immortal place. And he who lives a hundred years, not seeing the highest law, a life of one day is better if a man sees the highest law.” From the Dhammapada
Linda Ronstadt is known for having a huge fear the audience would talk about her terrible singing while she was on stage. Her manager said, in the documentary The Sound of My Voice, Linda would see someone lean into the person sitting next to them and whisper, and she would think they were saying how terrible she sang.
With a woman who had so much success, and had a voice that could sing anything, it’s crazy to think she didn’t constantly recognize her own talent. That is how it goes though. Sometimes we just can’t get over what we think of ourselves. It wasn’t but a year or two ago while singing that I started to try and meditate, or pray, or connect with something higher; God, the oneness, the universe. For my first years of singing, I would concentrate on anything. My mind would wonder from the audience to the lyrics to the guitar, to what I was wearing, to what I was gonna eat, to what the audience thought to what the band members thought. A million things going on at once.
It was only after I began to try to focus on the song alone that I realized how scattered my mind was while performing. When I start singing, if I find myself at any moment getting outside the song with my thoughts I redirect with a quick prayer, “Bring me back to the song. I’m one with the song” These prayers aren’t said out loud, but in that meta-mind-space; the thinking mind who is watching the acting mind. There you whisper to yourself. It’s the same place all those sporadic thoughts were taking place. “Bring me back to the song. I’m one with the song.” After having done it now for a few years, and for well over 300 shows or so, it’s common place for me now, although I still have to do it what seems like hundreds of times a show. I can feel my ‘self’ slide back in line with the song and with what I’m doing.
Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now is a great introduction to understanding how to truly be present. To be aware of our surroundings and aware of our body and its actions. If, as James Allen says, thoughts crystallize into action, and Eckhart Tolle says, “we are not our thoughts”, then it holds true we are also not our actions. Who are we then? Who is acting? A good place to start would be to ask where thoughts are coming from. Try even to ask this question while singing. It may seem crazy, and you’ll definitely fuck up your song, but at the beginning you have to try to observe the thoughts going through your mind while performing, or while doing any task to see what you are turly thinking about. You can learn where your mind actually is and what you most often think about. In any walk of life this will be hard at first, but with time it will become easy to recognize and control your wandering thoughts, not only while singing, but in any walks of life.
Recently during my trip to Oregon this past September, I took a voice lesson focused on the anatomy and body, posture and breath. The biggest take away was that our vocal folds are directly controlled by the brain. The pitch of the sound coming from your mouth is determined by the differentiating lengths of the vocal folds, which grow longer or shorter while vibrating together to create sound. Funny thing to me is there are no muscles to control these vocal folds, only your mind. The brain sends an electric impulse to the vocal folds with information to make the precise pitch. When getting in the way of myself while singing, I reach for notes, or guess, or try to find them in the tones coming from the guitar. That is why the prayer, “Bring me back to the song. I’m one with the song” is so helpful. When I let go and ‘stop thinking’ and align myself with the song, blocking out, as much as possible, any external stimuli, I can sing very well. I feel the tones resonate with me and my body. It’s so wonderful. So, what should you train if you want to sing better? Well, the only muscles that could help you there are your ear and your brain, and of course your heart. If you’ve ever heard of the singer Charley Crockett and you knew him or listen to the records he recorded before his heart surgery, the video linked above will resonate with you. Charley is the only person I’ve known, seen and heard before and after he received a piece of another person’s heart. He’s different. Not totally, but his music changed. He was already on the way to where he is now, but the slight change in tone and presentation and lyrical content after his heart surgery is noticeable to me. Maybe to you too. Take the songs ‘In the Night’ and ‘Music City USA’ and their distinct nature as further evidence.
Taking ear training classes, where you practice identifying note intervals, will help you and your brain work together to create the right pitch when singing. Another thing I find hilarious is that your brain and vocal folds already know all the pitches and can make them at will, if only you weren’t in the way; whatever the YOU is. You have to train your consciousness to hear better and that will make you a better singer. You can also attempt to move your thinking from your brain to your heart or even move your thinking down to another ‘brain’ the body has, the gut. Taking into consideration the whole ‘gut’ system, from the mouth to the anus, doesn’t require the brain to function at all, we’d all be wise to take a second go at ‘listening to our gut’.
As we often do, when subconsciously using our gut-brain, we base our actions on feeling. Feeling isn’t the only tool we have to become better singers, we also have so much great technology. When working with a good engineer in a studio, one can learn many things about their voice and what’s actually happening while singing. You can see down to the 1/100 of a note and each 1/10 interval between two distinct pitches are called points. A great engineer can recognize by ear when you are even just a couple ‘points’ off from hitting the targeted note. Using autotuning software, the engineer can manually correct the pitch. This technology, in at least a primitive form, has been around since the 1990s. In its youth, autotuning was used very sparsely, and only in dire straits in which the vocalist just couldn’t hit a certain note in the melody. Back then, the subtle use of these technological advances didn’t distort the nature of the tone to an overall performance and was hardly noticeable. Over the years, autotuning has grown in use and is now a necessity to compete in the industry. There are very few vocalists who can sing a whole song without missing a note, I think imagining hitting all notes on the guitar to a Paco de Lucia track. In fact, nearly all instruments without frets are, today, tuned using a program called Melodine, before a mixing engineer will even touch them. Don’t get me wrong, there is still a debate going on about killing the essence of tonality possessed by a vocalist when overusing autotune, and I’ve even heard stories from stuido owners and engineers saying some kids, even in country genre, come in and ask, “Can you just run the auto tune while we are tracking. Keep it on the whole song.” T-Pain comes immediately to mind.
Going to the studio so often, I have finally learned I sing sharp. That is to say, when I miss a note, I usually over shoot it. For the longest time, due to my thoughts of lack and self-defeating patterns, I always assumed I wasn’t hitting the note, that I physically wasn’t able to sing those notes. I had no reference or theory training to understand even where the note might be. Watching a producer or engineer auto tune your vocal tracks is a great way to visualize what is happening when you are singing. All my life I thought I couldn’t hit certain notes, and now I know I’ve been hitting them all along, just going past them.
I have had little to no ear training in my life time, and it’s something I’m becoming more and more invested in. Music theory is definitely needed as well. It provides a framework or map to which my mind visualizes where to place the notes when I’m singing them. Before I took Theory One in 2019, I was just guessing, letting my subconscious do all the work. It’s really amazing that most everyone can hear music and know when it sounds good and when it sounds bad. Of course, there is a depth to this debate understood by no mortal, although I encourage anyone to engage.
Where do the tones come from? Not just physically where are the tones made, but how were the tones originally produced? What about certain tones cause us to say, “Oh, I like that.” or, “No, no, no. That’s all wrong”? Could it be familiarity alone? Because we are born in the west listening to the western scale? But don’t you find beauty in all music? It seems to me the arrangement of the notes is important to the beauty, but then how is music so organized? Who made it that way? Here’s a great video of the Entire History of Music. If you clicked that video, I hope you got a laugh. But in all seriousness, we have Guido d’Arezzo to thank for the western scale. Shape Note notation is still used in some churches around the states, and I imagine across the world.
While walking the Camino de Santiago in May 2019, I stayed a night in a monastery and attended all 9 prayer sessions throughout the day. The monks who live there retire to cloister between each prayer session and while together sing the most beautiful hymns with harmonies out of this world, The old churches are designed to carry pitch for extended periods of time and so the layering of voices singing chords is breath taking.
I talked with a monk before leaving and he informed me that in Christianity, the highest offering to the lord is a song. I was blown away. My walk was one with the question, “Is singing what I’m meant to do?”. In March 2022, I’m traveling to walk the El Camino once more, and this time, having my question answered with a resounding yes, you are here to sing, my quest is one of giving. How can I give more?