Vocalist Notes

This article contains bits an pieces of thoughts that relate to the same topic area, but are hard to organize under a specific heading. All are important.

Anytime that you can get up in front of an audience and sing, you are being a vocalist. Expand on it to gain experience. Try to find ways to get onto stages and sing.

Warm your voice up before a job. This is often done by lightly singing scales. If you have congestion or a mild cold, make sure that you have decongestants with you and something to control coughing. You may be singing the better part of the next 5 hours, be prepared. For mild sore throats, often hot tea with lemon helps. Never stress out or do anything to damage your vocal cords - as a singer thats your instrument.

No matter how good you are, you need to get out and watch other singers in action. Think in terms about the entire audience experience, and not just your vocals. While you are out checking out places (no matter what type of music, even if its not the style that you are interested in), pay close attention to what the vocalists do when they are not singing - vocals occur during about 60% of a song - the other 40% of the time, what are the vocalists doing? A singer is an entertainer - there is much more to the effort than just singing. Trends change and you may be creating one, or riding one right now - rest assured that the more versatility that you have, the better off you will be in the long run.

You may have to travel a bit to find live music that matches your singing goals. You need to start networking with people and acts that may be able to use your skills. Band jobs sometimes drop out of thin air and they may need someone who can respond at the drop of a hat - this is just the nature of the business.

Not everyone likes the same things or types of music. Please respect that all musical styles require skill and a lot of practice. Anyone working as a singer and being successful at it is doing something right. Even if you don't personally care for the type of music when you watch performers, you can study their approach to entertainment and pick up on how they interact with an audience.

If there are any music shops in the cities around you, visit them. Its likely that they have a board up someplace that people can advertise for band members. There will be a lot of dead ends in doing this, but occasionally, some of these people will know someone looking for a person of your skills. Networking is very important in the music industry - you need to get to know people in order to get anything done.

If you don't already own a Microphone, you really need to buy one, including at least one cable - If you have no experience in this area, I would suggest the Shure SM58 - its probably the most commonly used vocal microphone by professionals. If you look online, you can usually find one for around $100.00 (without a cable). Not many bands will take you serious if you don't own your own microphone, or if the one you have is not a good brand. If all you do is sing, then you need to consider what you will be doing during a song while there is no singing occurring. If you move around quite a bit, dance, or plan to wander into the audience, you might consider a wireless microphone, or a headset wireless microphone. There are a lot of choices in wireless microphones, and they tend to be very expensive depending on what you want - Its hard to know what is a good fit for anyones unique style, so I really can't recommend anything specific.

If you are a female vocalist and you join a band that is not already working with a female vocalist, it may not have much material that can be directly adapted to your voice. I would guess that at least 50% of the material they have will not be workable for you to sing. This becomes a challenge for you to be doing something during that time. You can't simply stand there. I've worked with vocalists that thought that they did not need to do anything, and the audience reaction was very poor toward them. You can't ask a working band to add more than 1 new song a week, so it will take a while to round out 4 to 5 hours worth of sets (45 min on 15 min off each set) with music that you can be a part of. Even if you are singing backup vocals or harmony in many songs, you still have to be doing something that does not detract from the music. If you played an instrument of any type, this would allow you to blend into the rest of the band when you were not singing.

If you are a female vocalist and you want to transform some of the songs that are normally sung by males, its often not that complex to simply change the occurrences of 'she' to 'he', 'woman' to 'man', etc. Obviously, this doesn't always work, but you might be surprised at how simple it can be to swap the gender bias of a song. Know your key - the band may have to transpose the song so that you can sing it.

If there is more than 1 vocalist, learn to sing in harmony. This can be very challenging when you first start, but it gets easier as you gain experience in the skill.

If you also play an instrument, you will find that singing and playing at the same time is not the simplest of skills to master. And of course, members of the audience may want to ask you something while you are playing the instrument - You will find that (at least initially), you will only be able to have conversations with other people on stage in time to the rhythm of music as it pertains to the instrument you are playing. In general you will have to focus on any type of solo that you do, at the expense of being able to converse with someone at the same time. A lot of people who come up to talk to a band member during a song may not realize that you simply can't respond to them at the moment. Over time, your mind will make a lot of these actions more instinctual, and as a result, your ability to converse with people at the same time will improve.

Band members who have performed together for a long time often cue each other visually. You, as as singer, will need to learn about this non-verbal communication that is going on and understand what it means. The singer needs to pay attention to everyone else in stage to stay in sync with the whole band. Many bands can follow a singer, however even when that happens, its more like a relay race where control is handed off back and forth until the song is completed. Its a lot of give and take as well as knowing how to hand control to each other. Sometimes during a live performance a song end will unexpectedly, right in the middle of a verse or chorus, and all the band members will have a lost look on their face - this is what happens when control was passed to someone who did not realize that they were driving things.

People always talk about how egos can cause problems in any entertainment effort - the issue is not that people have egos, its more an issue of being successful and allowing everyones ego to feel that they are doing something special. If you don't have an ego and are not aggressive, you will not get very far in the music industry. All of the biggest stars have huge egos and as a result, they are always looking out for themselves. There is nothing wrong with that, expect it as normal. You need to believe in yourself completely - in a sense, become an egomaniac that knows how to work with other egomaniacs so that you all will pull together in your success.

As a member of a band, you need to participate in the Setup/Tear Down ritual. This means that you need to become versed in the tasks involved in helping the band get things set up before a performance and when finished, help get everything taken apart and put back into the vehicles that brought everything to the job. Band equipment is expensive and you will be helping move other peoples gear. Always ask how you can help first before start taking things apart or moving things. There is often a sequence to the activity. In some cases, someone needs to stay outside by the vehicles as they are getting loaded to prevent theft. Never allow well meaning people from the audience to assist in this effort - people who do not know the process often damage things by accident. Bands are team efforts, do what you can to be the best team player you can be.

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