Author: musicalitywrld

Kevin specialises in the performance side of singing, meaning what you actually do up on stage or in front of a crowd and how you make sure your singing performance is the best it can be, even though you’re far from the familiar and relaxed environment of the practice room.

As we were preparing for this episode and trying to figure out what part of Kevin’s expertise would be most useful to you all as listeners of the Musicality Podcast, we were really thinking about how some of you are, I’m sure, performing already – and looking for tips on improving. And others are probably too self-conscious or too unsure of your musical abilities to feel comfortable performing or taking center stage.

We think whichever category you might be in, this episode is going to blow your mind a bit – and in a very good way.

In this conversation we talk about:

• Why performance was the big piece he found was missing from all the traditional material for learning to sing.
• One slightly brutal but effective (and ultimately enjoyable) exercise he does with his students who are nervous to perform in front of people.
• And how working as Sir Rod Stewart’s vocal coach revealed a remarkable attitude to performing that we can all learn from.

This conversation was a total pleasure and really illuminating for us, so we hope you’ll love it too.

Listen to the episode:

Links and Resources

• RPM Vocal Studios
• The Vox Shop
• Kevin’s YouTube channel
• Confidence is Overrated video

Transcript

Kevin: Hi, this is Kevin Richards from RPM Vocal Studio and you’re listening to The Musicality Podcast.

Christopher: Very nice. Great. And can you do it in a Mickey Mouse voice?

Kevin: Hi, this is Kevin Richards from RPM Vocal Studios. You’re listening to The Musicality Podcast. All right.

Christopher: Welcome to the show, Kevin. Thank you for joining us today.

Kevin: No problem at all. Glad to be here.

Christopher: I love to begin by asking, I guess, a bit about their own musical background. At this point, you’re a consummate performer and you’ve helped other people up on stage being the best performer and entertainer they can be. Was that natural for you from day one? Did you kind of leap out of the womb with a mic in your hand? Or what were those early music experiences like for you?

Kevin: No, no, no, no, no. As a child, I was extremely introverted, extremely shy, socially shy. As my mother would say, I was kind of the church mouse that you had to kind of coax out from the shadows to say hello to anyone.

I was very socially inept. Very afraid to say the wrong thing in front of adults, because I might get in trouble. I had an older sister who had a very big mouth who had always got in trouble for saying the wrong thing. So I thought, “Well, if I don’t say anything, I won’t get in trouble.”

So I became very invertly shy. It wasn’t until I actually started playing music, starting out as a drummer at the age of 11, that I started to come a little bit more out of my shell. I was behind the drums so I had something at distance between me and people.

Then as I progressed in bands, I kind of graduated from being a drummer to a bass player. I was slowly moving myself forward in front of people. And I got a little more confident as I went along. It was really playing in bands is really what opened up my sort of social confidence towards other people.

It wasn’t until I was really thrust into being a lead singer of my own band that I actually really became more of an outrovert, because I had to be. I now had to talk to a room full of people I didn’t know.

And the first thing I did was I watched a lot of other performers local to my area who were really good at it. I kind of took a lot of pointers. And I asked some of them like, “How are you really good at talking to an audience?”

I had one particular guy give me a really good idea. He goes, “I write everything down. I write everything down I’m going to say between songs and I learn it like a script. And I say it and I kind of repeat it like an actor talking to a … That way I know I have a set thing to say and I have certain cues for the band. When I say this, click the song in. And, boom, we’re right on. So there’s a flow to the show.”

Now that’s a really good idea. So I started to come up with them and we used to rehearse this with the band. “I’m going to say this, this, this, and this. And then you go right into the song.”

It helped me not have to try to improvise in front of people. I knew what I was going to say and the band knew what I was going to say. It cuts down on dead air where you’re kind of standing around staring at people and you don’t know what to say. You have a little bit of it scripted. Yeah, there’s room for improvisation but you kind of know what you’re going to say. That started me sort of more on my role of being more of an active performer towards an audience is thinking about what I’m going to say to them before I get on the stage.

Now some people are really good. They’re outwardly social. They’re really good at just looking at a room full of people and just being able to talk to them. I kind of have to be a bit more scripted in a way. I want to know what I’m going to say but I can improvise around that. I can talk to people in conversation. It doesn’t have to be scripted.

But that’s a learned process. There’s some people that have it very naturally and they’re very good, but most of us kind of have to learn it. It’s something you can practice. It sounds strange to say, “Well, it’s practice improvisation.” But jazz people do it all the time. They practice improvisation. So you can actually do it.

It’s just knowing your audience and the people that you’re going to be talking to generally. I mean, audiences vary from place to place when you play, but they’re pretty much the same demographic most of the time. So you can kind of work up jokes and things to say that will work across the audience and things like that, and it’ll work.

That’s just the start. Then you get just really good at just being able to kind of think off the top of your head. That just happens.

If you knew me in high school when I was like 14, 15, you would never picture me sitting here doing this. Having a podcast with someone because I was so shy. So, to talk to people and to be on YouTube and to be putting videos out and stuff that you would’ve never imagined that person then being who I am today.
And that was just a slow thing that happened over time. People look at me today and they think I was always like this, but no, no, no, no, no, no. I was a very, very shy kid.

Christopher: Interesting. Well, I’m sure that’s really encouraging to a lot of our listeners who, as you say, if they looked at you now, would assume you were just kind of born doing it.

Kevin: Yeah. If I can do it, anyone can do it. I mean, my parents had me going to child psychologists. That’s how bad it was.

Christopher: Let’s dwell for a minute on those early years, aside from the performance aspect that you scripted and practiced. What was your music education like? How were you learning music?

Kevin: Well, I had no real formal musical training except for drums. When I first got into wanting to play the drums, not really sure why. That seemed to be the instrument that called to me first. I liked the kind of rhythmic aspect of it. I was always a kid who kind of always bopped his head to music whenever I heard it. That appealed to me first.

My parents were like, “Okay. Well, if you’re going to learn this, we’re going have you take you to lessons and learn the proper way and all that.”

And I took lessons for a couple years. But in terms of learning every other instrument that I play, like guitar, bass, and piano, and things like that, it’s all self-taught. Just from books and watching people play and have other people show me things and all of that. I learned it and I get a little bit better over a time.

I’m no virtuoso on any of those instruments. I’m probably best as a drummer because I played that the longest. But I’m competent enough to do what I need to do. You don’t have to be the best guitar player in the world or the best bass player in the world. My thing was just to be a really good song writer. Try to write really good songs. You don’t have to be the best guitar player in the world to write really good songs. You don’t have to be the best piano player in the world or the best singer, even, to write a good song.

It was about learning the craft of songwriting because not every musician that you see out there is the greatest on the planet. Some of them are pretty average, actually. But they do what they do really well and that’s the more important thing. You don’t have to be the best at what you do. You just have to do what you do really, really well. You don’t have to be the best on the planet, I mean. You can just be really good at what you do.

The Beatles themselves, as individual people, were not the greatest musicians on the planet. But together as a team, they worked really, really well. That’s more important in terms of a group dynamic or even a solo dynamic. Do what you do, but do it really, really well.

Christopher: You said something there about being kind of thrust into the position of lead singer.

Kevin: Right.

Christopher: Had you been learning to sing or practicing singing up to that point?

Kevin: Well, I was always a singer. Yeah. I could always sing as a kid. I always had good pitch and a good ear growing up because my father was a really good singer. My mother couldn’t carry a song if it had handles. But my father had a really, really good singing voice. Really nice baritone voice. He was also a championship whistler, oddly enough.

Christopher: Interesting.

Kevin: Yeah, he had really gift for whistling. Do bird calls and things, all that kind of stuff. I learned kind of a little bit from that. My thing was listening to voices and picking out the subtleties and characteristics of individual voices. And at an early age I started to do vocal imitations, vocal impressions of other people. Of my family members, people that I saw on TV and cartoon people.

I picked up on how the voice sounds and how to manipulate your voice to make it sound a certain way. But I never really wanted to be a singer. I wanted to be a musician, really, but I could always sing. And in all the bands I was in before I was a lead singer, I was always doing all the backing vocals. I was doing all the harmony vocals, which was difficult to do from behind the drums. That’s why I kind of moved to being bass player so it was a little bit easier.

But the singer that we had, who was a friend of my girlfriend’s at the time, had this really nice high tenor voice. He could make it growl and scream, so he was perfect for like that ’80s hard rock thing that we were doing. So he was the singer and I was quite happy with writing the songs and letting him sing them. He was a very outward personality, so he was really good at talking to a room full of people. He was the perfect frontman where I could just kind of be in the background and do everything.

But then he left. He got a really good job offer at the age of 21. And he left and moved out of state. The band was basically like, “No one is going to sing these songs better than you, because you wrote them. We’re not going to find somebody else who’s going to come in here and sing the songs the way you want.”
Because he would sing them,the melodies that I came up with, he would just sing them that way. He wouldn’t really, “And I’m going to sing it my way.” He would sing it the way I wrote it.

So, “We’re never going to find anybody like that, so you sing your own songs anyway.”

I got thrust into being the lead singer when I really didn’t want to be. And that was, “Oh my God, I’m thrown into the lion’s pit. I’ve never done this before.”

I found out how really inadequate my vocal ability was in terms of singing my own songs because I keyed them for his voice, which was a tenor voice. And as you can hear, I have more of a heavy, low baritone. It was difficult for me to sing a lot of my own songs because they were keyed higher. I was like, “Mmm, maybe I should go find out how to sing these songs.”

That’s when I started my journey into vocal instruction and research and learning about the voice and all that. This was probably 1987, ’87, ’88. So I’ve been doing this 30 years.

I got my first book in 1988 or ’89. I bought like a book or something with a cassette thing in a bookstore in ’87, which didn’t really help at all because it was geared towards like musical theater people. And it wasn’t into, let’s sing ’80s hard rock. It didn’t really relate.

I didn’t really get much out of that. And the first book that I bought, which I still have, somewhere, is a book by Mark Baxter who’s another good vocal coach out of Boston. And his is The Rock-N-Roll Singer’s Survival Guide, which was the only book I ever saw in a bookstore.

Kids, there was no such things as the internet back then. We actually had to go into a bookstore and look at books on a shelf like a library. And it was the only book I saw that had anything contemporary in it. It said, “Rock-N-Roll Singer’s.”

I was like, “Ah, there we go.”

Mark’s book is great. It’s a great reference if you’re looking for your first book to buy on singing. It’s a great book. It’s very easily written out, nice illustrations, nothing really heavily technical, gives you a good background. That’s a great book for a first time singer looking to get into learning about the voice and technique.

And from there I started to pick up … I have now over 150 books on voice that I’ve accumulated over 30 years, which my wife is not too happy about because it takes up a lot of room on the bookshelves. But they go all the back to like 1900 and stuff. I go to rare bookstores to find way out-of-print books and stuff. And I read them all and I absorb what I think is useful and all of that. That’s part of where I came to how I teach today is that accumulated knowledge distilled down to what I think is important for performers.

Christopher: Interesting. And you’re clearly better positioned than most to answer this, but if you think back to that stage, what kinds of things were you struggling with and what kinds of technique or insight did you need to get to kind of go from being an unsure lead singer thrust into it to someone who was confident and capable doing that role?

Kevin: Right. Well, the very first rehearsal as me as lead singer opened my eyes immensely about how inadequate I was as a singer because I could barely get through 40 minutes. 35, 40 minutes. And I was like this.

Christopher: Mmm.

Kevin: I was like, “Hmm. I should go look maybe up somebody for some instruction.”

And I started to learn about how the voice worked and how to breathe properly. Your diction and your articulation and resonance. I started to learn all about that stuff and I became fascinated with how the voice works. Because I said, I’d always been a listener and observer of people’s voices by imitating them in some way, but I had no really scientific basis of how the structure worked. Once I kind of got a bit more background information in terms of the mechanics of singing, I became fascinated by that. It fueled my curiosity in wanting to be a better singer. Because, “Ooh, if I can learn to do this, this, this, this, and this, and this.”

I also heard about the baritone curse, that if you’re a baritone you can’t sing high and all this. I had a couple of teachers tell me that and they didn’t last long as a teacher with me.

So I found the one that said, “No, no, no. You can learn to sing high. You won’t sound like the people that you like who are actually really tenors or high baritones, but you can sing the same notes. You can get up there. You’ll just sound slightly different, but you can achieve that.”

And that’s when I finally got some hope into singing the way I wanted to sing. And that’s also a basis of what I get when I teach other people because they come to me and they don’t think they can sing there either. And I’m like, “Oh, no, no. If I can learn how to do it, so can you.”

The voice that you hear now is 20 plus years of accumulated research and training but it didn’t always sound like this. I wish I could find the cassette tape I had of me at like 15 or 16, strumming along on my guitars to some Beatles’ songs and stuff and you could see how awful I sounded trying to sing some high Paul McCartney stuff. And it was really bad. I could barely sing over middle C on the piano at one time. It was really bad. Really bad. My voice would crack. Stuff was horrible.

Christopher: We’ll definitely have some links in the show notes to this episode to specific YouTube videos where people can see and listen to what your voice can do now, because it is quite incredible.

Kevin: It was never a … Oh Lord. I could barely do any of that stuff before, yeah.

Christopher: I feel like we could do an entire two hour conversation about vocal technique and all of the insight and wisdom you have on that front in terms of pitch and range and breathing and dynamics.

Kevin: I definitely could.

Christopher: But the thing I was most keen to pick your brains on is really the performance and charisma side. And I think the next stage in your musical journey, or at least a stage which soon followed, was a tour in Europe in the Far East with a band around ’96. Is that right?

Kevin: Correct. Mm-hmm (affirmative). The band itself had broken up in 1993. But unbeknownst to us, the manager that we had at the time kept submitting our material to independent record labels all over the planet. He just kept pushing it for two years after we had broken up as a band.

And finally, Teichiku Records out of Japan, which was a division of Panasonic, picked us up, or at least wanted to pick us up. And they took what we had already recorded and said, “We want you to go in and record three more songs to add to this so it’s a full thing,” because I think it was six songs on the original thing that we were submitting, “so we have nine, so we can put this out on the label.”

That was an interesting thing because in the interim of those two years where the band had broken up, two guys in the band had become enemies …

Christopher: Oh no.

Kevin: … with each other. They hated each other. Couldn’t stand to be in the same room. I’m not really sure even still to this day how that happened and why they hated each other afterwards, because they were good friends during the band period.

So that was an interesting thing to have to work around, of them trying to get along for this tour. Well, we kind of even sat down. It was like, “For the betterment of this experience, put your personal stuff aside and let’s just work on this.”

And we did. We got picked up and we rehearsed and we went out. They flew us out to Los Angeles first, because we’re here in New York. And we went to Los Angeles. We had three days of rehearsals for the tour where we had a musical director, I guess you could call him a musical director, keeping us under time, make sure we didn’t run over time and all that and listening to the order of the songs and all that kind of stuff. This was from the label.

Then our first show was in Tokyo and we did a show in Osaka and then we played in Seoul, Korea to 13,000 people in an outdoor festival, which is my largest crowd up until that point. From 13 people to 13,000 goes a long way in suddenly thrusting into … And I actually find it easier to sing in front of thousands of people than dozens who are right in front of you staring at you with their arms folded. “Impress me, dude. Go ahead.”

Rather than 13,000 people are just kind of a wash, a sea of people out in the distance. That’s easier to sing to because you don’t have to look anybody directly in the face. I find that a little bit more comforting than … Plus, if I don’t wear my glasses and stuff, they’re all just a fuzz anyway. It was even easier.

I actually found that easier. A larger crowd than a small crowd right in front of you staring in your face where you can look at them. That’s more unnerving to me. But we went through it. It was six weeks. We went through like Manila, in the Philippines, and we came out through all those Pacific Islands into Belgium and then we played in Sweden and Germany and Italy, Greece, France.

Our last show was in London at a small venue there opening for this band called … [inaudible 00:19:09] … It’ll come back to me later. They were on the same label at the time. They’re on a different label now, but at that particular time they were on the label. And we were opening for them.

Through the Asian area there, we were through like Japan and Korea and China and all that. They had another band on the bill who was an Asian band who was on the same label who was big in that market. They were unknown outside of Asia, or the Far East, whatever. So they opened. They were the third act on … The first band on through those dates. Then after, when we got to Europe they jumped off the tour.

That was a huge experience for me because it was … I learned how the business worked in terms of the business of touring. How it worked in terms of your budgeting and time tables and being on time. And soundchecking and not getting a soundcheck. And make sure you’re off here and you’re back in the van and back at the hotel so you can catch the train or catch the flight. Living out of a suitcase. The troubles of air travel and all that kind of stuff in terms of keeping your voice hydrated and moist when traveling on airplanes and things like that and waiting for long …

The change in temperatures and going from a relatively warm Japan and South Korea to going to really, really hot Manila. That was an interesting experience going from that kind of humidity into like the Philippines and stuff on those islands. Then going back to Belgium where it was nice and cool.

Even though this was the summer, it wasn’t that hot. It was June, so it wasn’t a bad … But I learned a lot about the business of touring in terms of money constraints and how much you get to spend each day for food and incidentals and all that kind of stuff.

You’re not really paid while you’re touring. You’re paid afterwards. But they give you like a sort of a stipend kind of a little bit of spending money while you’re around. The tour manager will kind of, “Okay, guys. Here’s like 10 bucks to go out and eat food for the day.”

So you have to make it stretch. And yeah, we’re provided food backstage at the venue but [inaudible 00:21:25] a day off? Mmm, you don’t have a lot of money to go out and gallivant around the city and do a lot of tourist stuff because you’re on a lot of constraints. They weren’t spending a lot of money on the tour because, remember, this wasn’t a giant label or anything like that. So they didn’t have a lot of tour money.

So I learned a lot about budgeting. And I do this with other students of mine who are going out on tour. I have some students here in the States that do small tours where they go out for a week or two and I help them kind of budget out their tour schedule in terms of gas money and hotel money and what you’re going to make from the gig. And how to kind of maximize that expenditure as they go through the process, because you can end up broke very easily at the end of all of that. Even the middle of it, you’ll end up broke.

Christopher: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Kevin: If you’re not careful.

Christopher: Fascinating. And on the vocal side, were you teaching at this stage? Were you already [crosstalk 00:22:21]?

Kevin: No, no. Uh-uh (negative). Mm-mm (negative), no. No, I didn’t start teaching till around 2002, because in the background of all of this, I was a graphic designer. That was my quote, unquote, “real job.” The one that paid the bills, really.

I was a graphic designer. I was living in California for a bunch of years and I moved back to New York and there just wasn’t really a lot of work, for a lot of full-time work. So I was doing a lot of freelance graphic design. So in the interim when I wasn’t freelancing, I was teaching.

I was kind of doing part-time both. And then around 2007, 2008, even the freelance work started to drop off, so I started to teach more. And I became basically then a full-time teacher around 2008.

Christopher: And you touched on a couple of times your particular specialty is kind of performance oriented vocal coaching.

Kevin: Right.

Christopher: It’s really about this question of being onstage, not just kind of singing each note correctly. Where did that come from? Why is it that you went in that direction?

Kevin: Well, in my research of singing methodologies, I found most of the work geared towards doing the method really well. Doing the actual technique really well. Doing the scales and the exercises really well. Not a lot of it was … or had a lot of it in the methodology.

In terms of like other people’s vocal course and books that I read, it was a lot about … There are books out there, especially in the classical community, about performance, which I thought was really good. But not a lot of it in terms of contemporary. There are a lot of books for classical singers about performance. And I thought it was very lacking in terms of the contemporary scene. It was all about, “Well, I have my method. This is my method. This is my method. This is my pedagogy.”

I bought everybody’s book and everybody’s vocal course and all that to see, and not really a lot of them had any sort of sections based on, “Well, how does this now relate to when I’m singing in front of people on a stage?”

It was, “Well, no. Get the exercises really well. Do the exercises really well and you’ll learn how to sing on stage.”

Eh, not really. There’s a difference between training your voice and then performing with your voice. There’s a big difference in those two. A lot of what you do in the training gets actually thrown out the window once you hit the stage because there’s only certain things that you can do while you’re performing.

When you’re standing in your house and you’re training, you’re going … You can pay full attention to what you’re doing. You can listen to your voice and you can pay attention to what your body is doing. And you can do it over and over and over again. You hit the stage, you got one time to get it right.

And you have to be performing. You have to be engaging the audience. So you can’t be paying that much attention to what you’re doing physically. And yeah, you’re listening and you’re feeling what your body is doing but it’s kind of more in the background. And you have to have a lot of stuff kind of set in to that.
My performance stuff is I try to eliminate all the things out of the training that aren’t relative to what you have to do when you sing songs in front of people. I train towards that goal rather than doing the exercises or the method properly.

Christopher: Very cool. I’m reminded of something my singing teacher in high school told me when we were talking about breathing. And she was saying it’s all very well to be stood here in the practice, carefully monitoring your posturing, getting your diaphragm just right.

Kevin: Right.

Christopher: But if you’re going to sing an opera aria and in the scene you’re lying on a bench, you’re not going to be able to do it that way.

Kevin: Right. How is that relevant? Right. Those two things aren’t related now. You have to be able to sing in every position. The idea of like, well, I have to have perfect posture and my breathing has to be … How about if you’re Quasimodo in a thing?

Christopher: Exactly, yeah.

Kevin: Or in, what is it, Faust, who is the Devil. Half the performance he’s hunched over to look menacing. He’s not in perfect posture, but he still has to be able to sing. So you have to learn how to do that as well. I have to be able to sing in every position and be loose with my body. Not perfectly standing up straight.

The idea of posture comes from how it looks on stage. The heroic stance of the hero in the opera, he stands very straight and he looks very heroic with posture. But there lots of … In Rigoletto, the jester, whatever, is hunched over most of the time he’s performing. He has to be able to sing in that position. Where does any of his posture come in?

That’s what I mean. That’s why I said some of the methodology doesn’t always apply to actual singing on a stage. It’s all well and good in the studio, but in real world application a lot of that doesn’t apply, so you have to have alternate ways of training to kind of cover all the various aspects of what you’ll do on a stage.

Christopher: Let’s unpack that a little. I think if we were going to talk about technique, it would be easy for either of us to reel off a list of the stuff we talk about. Breathing and posture and dynamics and phrasing and range and all of that good stuff.

If we talk about the performance side, what are the various aspects there that you’d be digging into with a student or helping them with?

Kevin: Well, yeah. There’d be the aspect of the tonality of their voice. The idea is that you’re not going for a perfect performance. You’re going for an optimal performance. You’re going into the pit, so to speak, as I like to call it. You’re kind of being thrust into the pit, into the firefight knowing that things are going to go wrong and that it’s okay that they go wrong. You try to minimize them as much as possible and you don’t let them bother you while you’re performing. You just know that’s going to happen. Things are going to happen. Things are going to go wrong. It’s okay.

You talked a little bit pre-interview, before we got on the air, about one of my videos about confidence is overrated. And a lot of people put this, “Well, I have to be confident in front of people.”

Well, how do you be confident? It’s not a light switch you just flick on. Now I’m confident. You have to have belief in your abilities. You have to actually be training for the stage so when you go out on the stage, you’re comfortable in that position. If all you’re doing is training and standing straight and doing singing exercises in a studio and you’re thrust on this … They’re two totally different environments.

I train people to perform on the stage. I have them hold their microphone with the stand. If they’re a guitar player, I have the guitar on them while they’re singing, so they’re kind of more in that element. And I look at how their body is moving, how their posture is in terms of when they’re holding an instrument or how they’re standing with the microphone, if they’re hunched over. Do they look confident? Do they look scared? How do they move around the stage? There’s a craft to sort of covering the entire length of the stage and hitting all the people in the audience with eye contact and all that.

And how long do you look at somebody before it gets too creepy? Two second rule. You look at them for one second, two second, boom, move on. Look at somebody else. After that, it’s going to look … It’s a little weird.

All things like that. So I have them do this while they’re actually doing the training exercises. They’re looking around the room. They’re walking. They’re walking in circles. They’re doing back and forth. They’re moving their body in a loose way. So they feel that they’re moving their body. They’re actually using their body to sing with and it’s how they look. And I film a lot of them so they can see what they look like, because a lot of the time, you don’t know.

And in a mirror, you’re a little self-conscious, so you’ll kind of try to look cool if you’re looking at yourself in a mirror while you’re doing this. But if you just have someone film you and then you look back, you’re apt to catch things that you’re not really aware of that you’re doing. And you’ll go, “Oh, that looks cool,” or, “Oh my God, let’s not do that anymore. That looks terrible.”

That’s something I stress with a lot of bands, also. If they do shows, film them. Video yourself on a stage and have everybody in the band look at it so they can all look about how they look. If they’re moving too much or not enough, things like that.

I do this with people in the studio. I try to put them in a performance mode so that they’re combining all the elements of training their voice and also performing with it at the same time.

Christopher: That’s super fascinating. I think one of the really great practical tips in that video you mentioned was you talked about kind of training beyond what’s required. If you do it in perfect environment, you just need to hit each note and get it right. But you were talking about knowing, for example, that you can sing beyond the range that’s required so that when it comes down to it in a performance situation, you can trust yourself in the level of performance that you need.

Kevin: Correct, right. I have students that come in to me. It’s like, “Well, I write my own material. The G above middle C is the highest note in all my songs. So that’s as far as I need to learn how to sing.”

And I’m like, “Well, no, no, no, no. You want to learn how to sing to the high C, the C above that. So that G that’s in your songs there is always working for you. It’s always there. You’re always confident that that’s going to come out of your mouth. It’s not the end note in your range. It’s kind of three-quarters of the way up. And your confidence is more on that note because you know you can sing higher than that. You want to have more range than you actually need to sing with.”

I mean, if I have a good warm up day, I can do five octaves. The C1 to the C6. Do I need all of that range to sing with? No. I sing pretty much within a two octave range. But in knowing that I have that extra buffer range on the outside gives me confidence that the range that I do sing in will always be there for me and will always work. Or at least with minimum amount of effort or warmup for me, I know I can get that voice to work for me because I have more of it. I’m more confident with it because I know I can do more than actually is required of me to do it.

And that’s what I mean by just saying, “Well, just be confident,” is overrated. You have to know and have a belief in your abilities to be … And confident people aren’t really confident. What they are is they understand that mistakes will be made and they don’t let that bother them. And they know what they can and cannot do. They know their limitations. And they don’t go beyond them. They’re always working within their limitation. That gives them a confidence to do what they do really well. So anyone that you see is really confident can do a lot more than they’re showing you.

Christopher: [crosstalk 00:33:07]

Kevin: And that’s the real secret of confidence.

Christopher: What I loved about hearing you describe the kind of exercises you do with your students there was that it started to kind of demystify this stage charisma or stage presence thing.

I’m sure all of our listeners have been to a gig where you see the frontman and he’s rocking the microphone. The crowd is enthralled. He seems to be a natural-born performer. But, clearly, hearing you talk about that, there’s a lot of thought and preparation and kind of methodology that goes into, or certainly can go into, preparing for being that frontman.

Kevin: Right. There’s a great story told by the bass player for Prince. He talks about, people see Prince … They saw Prince later on. He could do all these great things with a mic stand. And he would twirl it around and kick his leg over the top of it and threw his legs and all that kind of stuff. He said, “At one time, he had none of that in his stage performance.”

What he did is he locked himself away in his rehearsal studio for three days. Locked himself in, brought a cot in, slept in there. With him and a mic stand. And all he did was work out exactly what he wanted to do with that mic stand for three days. And when he came out he had everything you now see him doing. He had a singular focus. He was like, “I want to be really good. I want to do something different with a mic stand that no one’s doing before.”

So he had a singular focus and for three days straight he did nothing but work on that. There’s a craft in that. And this was something I touched upon with Sir Rod Stewart when I was traveling with him for a couple days, was about that I teach people about this stuff. He was like, “Oh, I’ve got that covered,” with using a mic stand and stuff.

Which, actually, he stole from Sam Cooke, the use of a mic stand and tilting his head back and stuff when he sings. He saw Sam Cooke do that and he stole that idea. It’s okay to sort of steal some ideas from other people. And that’s what I used to do. I used to go and see other guys that were really good at being frontmen and kind of nick little ideas here and there about how they stood and how they looked at a crowd and how they use a microphone and a mic stand.

You just pick up these little ideas and incorporate them into what you do. And you just practice with them and you kind of make it your own. I practice this with students in the studio. I have them hold the mic stand and hold the mic and work it as an additional prop on the stage.

Actually holding something can give you a little bit more confidence that you’re not just bare out in front of people. You actually have something kind of between you and the audience that you can kind of work … It becomes a dance partner with you. And you kind of learn to move with it and use it and all of that. And it gives you something, a little bit of security. You have something to grab onto and all that.

I work on that with students. It helps them relate more to an audience and bridge that gap of confidence. It helps them learn to become confident and not just … You can’t just switch on a light and become confident.

Christopher: You’ve mentioned a couple world famous names there, Prince and Sir Rod Stewart. And I want to ask you kind of double-ended question which is, do you think all of the kind of pro-performers have been this kind of conscious and intentional about it versus just kind of doing it instinctively? And contrariwise, do you think there are amateurs who just can never learn this because they don’t have what it takes?

Kevin: Well, it’s all down to your mindset. Anyone can learn to do it. It’s how natural you’ll look when you do it. If you look at very early live performance clips of Bono and U2, and then you look at it throughout the years, you’ll see that his stage performance and his stage persona changed as the years went on. It became a little less flamboyant and a little more measured, a little more thought out in how he moves across the stage. It’s a bit more performance orientated. You see he’s really planned it out of where I’m going to walk to and how I’m going to look at the stage.

Whereas in the early ’80s, he was pretty much just going on adrenaline and improvising. Like, “I’m going to run over here now. Now I’m going to run over there and I’m going to climb the scaffolding and wave a flag.” Whatever off the top of his head. And over the years, he kind of crafted it and became more of a frontman rather than a lead singer. And he became and he started to evoke that.

Now you have some people like Freddie Mercury who seem to have it right from the get-go. But he also kind of developed his stage performance as he went on. His mannerisms became more measured, more tight, more thought out.

He knew what certain body postures got a crowd excited. He knew if he raised his fists and the arm, he’d get most of the audience to raise their fist as well. And if he clapped, he could get them to clap.

When you go from smaller audiences to larger audiences, you start to learn what body movements work more for the size of the audience. The larger the audience you sing to, the more exaggerated your body movements have to be because people way in the back have to see this tiny little figure moving. Your movements become bigger and less frantic. They have to be a bit more measured.

And you watch these guys. Freddie sort of seemed to have it from the beginning, but he developed it over the years because he learned at each concert what works and what doesn’t work. And he threw away the things that didn’t seem to work or looked goofy to him, and then what worked and what seemed to look cool.
His body posture became different. He stood more straight and he thrust his air. He made Xs a lot, if you notice. He spread his legs wide and he put his arms out. He made an X. That looks really good from the stage from a distance. He used half a mic stand kind of a thing and all that kind of stuff, which was a unique thing that nobody was doing before that.

Like I said, and Bono’s become more measured in the way that he kind of struts across the stage now. He doesn’t run anymore, because now he’s a little bit older, but … He’s not running, but he does run a little bit. Not as much as he did when he was in his 20s.

But now he kind of struts. It’s more of a confidence thing rather than a maniacal, crazy person lead singer. It’s more like, “I’m a confident frontman and I’m going to command the audience.”

He projects that. But that was learned over time. Anyone can learn to do that.

Christopher: Nice. And you provide one-on-one training in this kind of thing, both in person and online.

Kevin: Yes.

Christopher: If we imagine the kind of church mouse 16-year-old that you mentioned you were yourself and they came to you and said, “Listen. In two months time, I’ve got to front this band going on a little tour.”
What kind of stuff might you have them doing to bring that out of them and to give them that confidence and that kind of well-rounded confidence [crosstalk 00:40:16]?

Kevin: Funny you should ask, because this is something I do with them. I don’t want to give the secret away too much, but with some of these people, I’ve actually taken … Now, I teach two blocks from Times Square. So it’s a very busy area with lots of people on a street. And I’ll say, “Well, if you want to not be afraid of doing something in front of people, let’s go do it in front of people.”

I take them downstairs, out of the studio, down and onto the street. I say, “We’re going to stand here and we’re going to sing a scale in front of people as they pass by.”

I just do it. I just go … I just do it right in the middle of the street because New York City people don’t care. That’s the least crazy thing to see somebody doing on the street anyway. So I just do it. And I’m like, “See that? See, I just did that. When I was 16, when I was your age, I couldn’t do that. But I can do that now. So you do it.”

And I goad them to do it. And I’m like, “See? Nothing happened. The world didn’t end. You didn’t die. The earth didn’t stop spinning on its axis and we flew off into space. The world didn’t end. So it’s okay. You can do it. Nothing bad is going to happen to you.”

And that’s the first step. The brain, your mind needs to learn that nothing really bad is going to happen. Somebody might look at you really weird but they kept right on walking. They’re not really all that concerned. It’s your mindset of it is you’re afraid of it.

Like I said, I was afraid to talk to people and I had an irrational fear of that. And I don’t know why I had it. Over time, I learned that nothing bad is going to happen if I talk to people. But I didn’t know that at that age. I had to learn it over time.

My experience in terms of how I learned to not be that introverted, that shy, I help them realize this. It’s like, “Listen. I wasn’t always this way. I was like you at one time. So if I can do it, you can do it. Here are the steps that I took to be that person. And I can streamline it for you so you don’t have to take to 20-odd years to get to that. You can take two months to get to that because I learned and I can actually take all the stuff that isn’t really relevant and just give you the bullet points. And now you can work on that.”

And we work on that together in the studio. Now I have them go to open mic nights and perform in front of people. I say, “Yeah. You’re going to be nervous. You’re going to be sweating like you have never sweat before. But you’re going to get over it. And the more you do it, the better you get at it.”

And that’s the one thing, a lot of people, they don’t want to take that first step to do it. And I’m like, “No. You have to get out there and get in front of people. If you don’t do it, you never learn.”

Christopher: Very cool. So I think that gives us a glimpse of what you do at RPM Vocal Studio, but tell us more. You provide online courses as well. Is that right?

Kevin: I have a couple courses. Yeah. I have one called Breaking the Chains, which is kind of an intermediate … I didn’t really see a lot of courses out … When I put it out, there weren’t a lot of vocal courses out there for people that didn’t sing like classical or Broadway or jazz. There were a couple, but not geared towards sort of more high-pitched or higher range singing. So I came up with one.

Again, it’s a very simplistic course. It’s not really a ton of stuff involved. But it’s very geared towards performance. And it’s very simplistic exercises. Nothing really complicated in there because singing doesn’t have to be really complicated. It could be very simplistic. You can learn very complicated things to do with your voice in a very simplistic way.

Then I have kind of a warmup which is called Vocal Fire. You can use it either as a warmup or you can use it kind of as a beginners’ course. It’s kind of an intro into learning how to use your voice in a very light way and kind of learning how to work the inner mechanics of it all.

And they’re all inexpensive. You can get both of them for a hundred bucks as a digital download. You don’t have to spend a month’s rent to buy one course. Because I don’t think a course needs to have like 9 CDs and 55 videos and stuff to learn. You can get a lot of the very basic concepts that you can keep using in a very quick way.

That’s at thevoxshop.com. It’s linked to it on RPM Vocal Studio. But, yeah. I have a couple of those.
And then I teach people online and here in the studio in New York City all the techniques in those things and more. I’ve kind of expanded on those courses over the years because that was 10 years ago. And I’ve added to it and things like that and things that are more relevant. Like I said, I do a lot of relative training for people.

Most of the people that come to me are usually active performers already. So I help them do what they already do better. A lot of people ask me, “Well, do you teach beginners?”

Because they see Sir Rod Stewart and they see Bette Midler and they see all these other professionals on my website. “Do you teach beginners?”

Absolutely. I absolutely love a beginner because I want to show them the path that I took. And that they can take a similar path and achieve the same thing I have. Because I said if I did it, anyone can do it. I was not gifted as a singer. What you see now is an end-result of a lot of training and a lot of knowledge and a lot of talking to a lot of other people about their voice. Getting to know other singers and what they do.

It’s a never-ending thing. It never stops. I mean, the fact that I’m doing this podcast is one of them. I want people to learn. I want to learn from other people. It’s a never-ending process. All of that is incorporated in my online and in-person lessons. It’s all relative training to performance.

Christopher: Fantastic. And on that front, I think our listeners are going to yell at me if I don’t cycle back and ask you to talk a little bit more about working with Sir Rod Stewart before we wrap things up.

Kevin: Sure.

Christopher: Are there any kind of standout highlights or lessons learned from working with him?

Kevin: Yes. To have fun.

Christopher: Really?

Kevin: Yeah. When I first met him, because I had only corresponded with him through email first. When I first met him, they flew me out to Chicago and put me up in his hotel with him to travel with him. It was a nice, five star hotel, which I’d never been in before.

The first time he met me, he hugged me. He gave me a hug. I never met this guy before in my life. “How you doing, mate?”

And all that kind of stuff, like this. And he asked his tour manager, “Where am I going?”

He had no idea which city he was going to, which was Cincinnati. And he said, “Oh, good. Let’s go have some fun.”

Now he talked about this in the car to the private jet, and then in private jet to Cincinnati. And I asked him about how is he still doing this at 72 years of age. He’s now 73, but back then he was 72. And he’s like, “I got to have fun. Have fun, fun, fun. It’s the greatest job in the world. And when I go out there, I try to have as much fun as possible.”

And that’s his thing. He loves what he does. I said to him, “A lot of people at your sort of stage in career could kind of coast through and just kind of show up and do a show. And there will be enough people because of your name.”

He goes, “Nope.”

He tries to put on the best show he possibly can from the people that he hires to the musicians that back him, to the songs that he chooses, the setlist that he comes up with to how he performs, what he wears onstage. It’s always calculated to giving people the best show possible.

But all at the same time, he wants to have fun. And that’s his whole … The fact that he still has fun is why he’s still doing it and why he doesn’t see himself retiring anytime soon. Because he’s having too much fun. He loves what he does. That’s the thing that I’ve taken away with this is that. He goes, “Yeah, it’s a lot of hard work and a lot of hours involved, but in the end that performance comes and that’s when I have my fun. And it’s all worth it.”

And that’s why you have to perform, because that’s the end result of all this training and going through all hours of tedious exercises is the performance and that’s where you have the fun and that’s where it pays off.

The whole process here is that to understand that what I learned from Sir Rod Stewart, and actually … I also consulted with Bette Midler was that she likes to have a lot of fun. She’s a very funny person when you meet her. She looks at performing and singing as an exercise in having a good time. She loves it. She loves performing. That’s why she does it. And most performers do. Most singers do. They love performing.
You kind of have to understand that the tedious process is to get that end result of the fun. But you can have fun along the way. I mean, it’s all in terms of the teacher that you have and stuff, and they can make it fun for you. That was one of the things I liked about a couple of teachers that I had is that they made the experience fun. I didn’t dread going there. “Oh my God, this is going to be so boring.”

They were fun teachers. And that’s what I liked about when I traveled with Rod Stewart is everywhere he went he was trying to have fun. He said hello to people. How you doing? He had a joke for them and things like that. He just enjoys life.

And I said, “Well, if someone at that stage of their game can still be having fun and still look at it as having fun, someone just beginning the process or in the middle or even three-quarters of the way through the process should be looking at it the same way.”

My main thing coming out of Sir Rod Stewart was make the process fun for yourself. Look for ways that you can make it enjoyable. And not just drudgery. Challenge yourself in different ways to make it fun. Stand out in the middle of Times Square and sing a scale or sing a song. And give yourself that adrenaline rush. It’s like riding a roller coaster for the first time. It’s like, “Oh, I got over it. Yay.”

No, but you’re petrified before that, but afterwards, it’s exhilarating. And that’s what singers need learn and performers need to learn is you have to do it and you want to go out and do it and have a lot of fun.

Christopher: Tremendous. Well, this has been such a fascinating glimpse into the world of performance and performance-based training. Thank you so much for joining us today, Kevin.

Kevin: Oh, you’re very welcome. I enjoyed it immensely. “I had a lot of fun,” to quote Sir Rod Stewart.

The post Learning to Rock the Stage, with Kevin Richards appeared first on Musical U.

Listen to the episode:

Links and Resources

• Music Entrepreneur HQ
• Special Membership Offer for podcast listeners
• Finding and Sustaining Creativity, with David Andrew Wiebe

Transcript

Christopher: I’ve got something special and a bit different for you today. Recently we had David Andrew Wiebe from Music Entrepreneur HQ come in to Musical U to present a masterclass, on the topic of “Entrepreneurial Essentials for Musicians”, and he covered some really fantastic stuff around mindset, and following through on projects, motivation, and in short how to really be as effective as possible in your musical life.

Today I wanted to share a particularly great section of that presentation where David was talking about taking a long-term mindset to music, and the importance of nurturing your love of music itself. It’s a bit that really stuck with me, and although there were a bunch of really great lessons before and after this bit of the presentation, I think it also stands alone okay and you’ll be able to really get something from it.

Fittingly, you might need to take a long-term mindset, because this may not be something that knocks your socks off immediately, but let it sit with you and over the next few days I think you’ll really start to see some of the wisdom that’s packed into this short section.

David: All right. Okay. So next, adopting a long-term mindset. I’ve taught hundreds of guitar, bass, ukulele and piano students through the years and that just happens as you continue to follow that path of being a music instructor. People come and go, you work for different studios, you teach people in their homes, and over the time that number of people just continues to add up, so it’s been hundreds of students to this point. The difference between someone who stuck with it, and this is what I’ve noticed, and improved versus someone who rarely practiced and didn’t improve, was a love of music. That’s not something I can foster in you. It wasn’t something I was able to foster in any of my students. They had to foster it within themselves.

So here’s a little challenge, if you can’t list your favorite artists in the heads off the top of your head, you might be in trouble. You may not be as passionate or have as much of a love of music that you need to be able to improve on your instrument, and so what I would do is I would develop a genuine interest in music and begin to follow your impulses. Get a magazine subscription or join an online community, or begin reading about the artists that fascinate you and pitch your interest. This is exactly what I did. For instance, when I first started playing guitar, I was listening to quite a bit of rap and hip hop music and one of my favorite groups at the time was The Beastie Boys and you might know Adam Yauch or MCA. He talked about how he’d become obsessed with Jimi Hendrix at different points in his career and I found that intriguing, so it wasn’t long before I started listening to Jimi Hendrix and then learning his songs on guitar.

But none of that would’ve happened if I didn’t pick up the guitar to begin with and I didn’t have a teacher helping me along and show me how to play guitar, but as I began to follow that track, I started developing a love for classic rock and rock music in general. Of course the blues too was pretty significant, because in a way Jimi Hendrix was kind of a blues player, depends who you ask. Some people say he was more rock, or funkadelia or psychedelia and what have you, but that was definitely at the core of his playing, was blues. So I started going down that path as well.

So your love of music will carry you through any disillusionment or setbacks you might experience in trying to learn an instrument. Like I talked about, most of my bands that I’ve been a part of broke up within a year to a year and a half. Those were at times pretty heartbreaking experiences because I could see us going somewhere. There’s one band called Angels Breaking Silence, we were getting the types of gigs that I hadn’t been getting in any other group or even solo such as cap gigs and skate park gigs and outdoor gigs and things like that, to where I thought, “There’s real potential here. We just have to keep honing our craft and make some great shows,” but unfortunately, people in the band had different ideas. So there’s something to be said for vetting the people you work with, but until you have some of those experiences, sometimes it’s hard to know what people are looking for, so it is going to be a little bit of trial and error and hunting around for the right people.

Now, many people overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can do in 10 years. That’s kind of classic Tony Robbins, but it is very true. Don’t think about what you can do today or in a year, keep at it and begin thinking about what’s possible, three years, five years, seven years, or even 10 years down the line, and then work daily towards the achievement of what you envisioned in your mind. The mind is a very powerful tool we’re ever capable of visualizing and seeing a future for ourselves, and so utilize that. Take advantage of that.

There is something magical about that number, 10 years, just look at the Beatles, Metallica, or even Billy Talent. It took them 10 years to break through in their careers, as it’s often been said, every overnight success has been 10 years in the making. If it even took the best bands that long to get to where they want to go, why would it be any different for you and I? So no matter what it is you’re looking to accomplish and you don’t need to aspire to be the Beatles or Metallica or Billy Talent, you can start at whatever level that you want your career to be, or even just learning an instrument, whatever level, but think about what feels good tomorrow, not just today, and that helps you make longterm decisions around that.

Now we’re going to talk a little bit about taking responsibility for your own growth. Unfortunately, I think it’s something that a lot of people don’t do.

Christopher: I hope you enjoyed that short excerpt from our Musical U masterclass with David Andrew Wiebe.

Now if you’re wanting more of David’s insights, please check out his website musicentrepreneurhq.com.

Of course if you’re a member of Musical U you’ll find the full masterclass waiting for you inside the members website. And if you’re not yet a member head to musicalitypodcast.com/join for a special podcast listeners offer on membership. At the time of recording that actually lets you try Musical U in full for free for 7 days, so you could watch this masterclass plus a dozen others, as well as getting full access to our 50+ training modules and a lot more. This offer may change or expire in future so if you’re curious then do head on over to musicalitypodcast.com/join and dive in. And I’ll see you in there!

The post About Taking a Long-Term Mindset appeared first on Musical U.

In fact, you can begin your improvisation with just one, two, or three notes.

The most magical thing about learning three-note improv is that this exercise isn’t just for beginners – in fact, many competent shredders have found new meaning in their improv by breaking it down to just a few notes, and focusing intently on the rhythm, dynamics, articulation, and other musical dimensions that can be lost when trying to squeeze too many notes into too little space.

And for singers…

Singers, on the other hand, are often used to some extent of playing improvisationally with their voices. However, a musical topic that mystifies many singers is harmonies. Why do some singers seem to naturally sink right into those sweet sounds, while others are totally baffled?

So while in this month’s Instrument Packs the Guitar, Bass, and Piano Pros will show just how deep you can go with just three notes, Singing Pro Clare Wheeler shows how a little dose of music theory takes the mystery out of creating beautiful harmonies.

Singing

In this Resource Pack, Resident Singing Pro Clare Wheeler looks at one of the ways we can create our own harmony lines to a melody. There are several different ways we can do this, but this particular video is about using parallel harmony in thirds. This means that we need to understand which scale degree the melody is on, and go up a third from there:

Including:

• Recap on scale degrees
• Identify the scale degrees of a simple melody
• Learning about triads
• Working out a harmony using the parallel approach
• MP3s that illustrate the exercises

Clare demonstrates clearly that just a little music theory can be a singer’s best friend – especially when it comes to creating beautiful harmonies.

Guitar

When learning to improvise, it’s alarmingly easy to put all of your focus onto note choice and scale work. While important, this sort of work is only the tip of the iceberg. There are many other facets that need to be developed if you want to sound like a true master of the instrument. Resident Pro Dylan Welsh demonstrates how three little notes can open up a world of musicality for guitar players:

Including:

• The most important individual elements to develop outside of note choice.
• How to work on each element individually and in isolation, so nothing gets left out of your routine.
• How to combine all of the elements while still limiting note choice, thus allowing you to experience just how much freedom you have even when only using 1, 2, or 3 notes.
• MP3 backing tracks in two different keys and time signatures

This kind of practice is very, very structured and targeted. It may feel like work, but if you put the time in, it will make a massive difference in your improvising (as well as in all other aspects of your guitar playing).

Piano

Improvisation can be scary when we think about the 88 different options on the piano.

The truly scary thing is that there are even more options than that! When we improvise we’re not just thinking about which notes to play, but when we play them, how long we play them for, and how we play them. Too many options right?

In this resource pack, Guest Piano Pro for piano, Ruth Power, teaches how to simplify and expand into new musical dimensions:

Including:

• How to choose as little as 1, 2 or 3 pitches to create motifs and phrases.
• How to fluff around and solidify a basic rhythm for that pitch.
• How to create variation with articulation and dynamics.
• Extra three-note improv tips and tricks.
• MP3 backing tracks for you to practice hands separately before you put them together.

We can create something musically textured with just three notes or even less by focussing on how we can make each note special. This makes it interesting for the listener and expresses an idea or feeling rather than running up and down the requisite scale as fast as possible!

Bass

Why improvise with only 3 notes!? Because limiting your note choices will refocus your mind on many other aspects of your playing and creativity that make your playing sound much more musical.  Steve Lawson, our Resident Pro for bass, takes us on a systematic tour of three-note improv that will bring a deeper sense of musicality to everything you play:

Including:

• learn how to improvise with three notes!
• learn all the possible combinations of those three notes as patterns for improv.
• begin thinking about the relationship between phrasing and implied harmony
• using rhythmic combinations to add variety and interest to a limited range of notes
• extending our phrases through repeated notes
• using a shifting bass note to completely change the feel of a melody
• repeating phrases for dramatic effect
• MP3 backing tracks to your new jam skills

Who says bassists have to sit in the corner while everyone else gets the glory? With just three notes you bring your improv out front.

Coming up next month…

Singers will continue to grow their harmony skills, while bass, piano, and guitar will learn to improvise with harmonic tension and release.

Interested in getting access to these resources and much more, with an Instrument Pack membership? Just choose that option during checkout when you join Musical U, or upgrade your existing membership to get instant access!

The post Improv 1, 2, 3 and Harmonization, Part 1: Resource Pack Preview appeared first on Musical U.

Today on the show we’re joined by Dale Duncan, also known as “Mr. D” online, who is the creator of a popular method for teaching sight-singing, specifically to grade-school students – perhaps one of the most self-conscious groups of students you can imagine to try to get singing!

We were desperate to pick Dale’s brains on how exactly he approaches this and how he’s able to quickly get young people up to an impressive level of sight-singing that has them winning competitions and sight-singing material that the vast majority of experienced adult singers would struggle with.

In this conversation we talk about:

• How he helps students who struggle to sing in tune and why he never requires members of his choir to sing solo.
• One core technique he uses to teach sight-singing, and how it enables you to practice sight-singing independent of score notation.
• And the clever way he helps students to integrate their pitch and rhythm skills when sight-singing.

Dale’s “S-Cubed” method for teaching sight-singing is specifically designed to help other music teachers and choir directors like himself, but as you’ll soon hear, Dale has a ton of insight that can be helpful to move anybody’s singing or sight-singing forwards. We hope you’ll enjoy this!

Listen to the episode:

Links and Resources

• Dale’s website, “In the Middle with Mr. D”
• About S-Cubed
• S-Cubed! Successful Sight Singing and Sight Reading Course for Middle School
• “Forbidden pattern” game
• S-Cubed Middle School Sight Singing – Singing Dotted Rhythms
• Sight Singing – Follow the Hand
• Music Prodigy app

Transcript

Christopher: Welcome to the show, Dale. Thank you for joining us today.

Dale: It’s awesome to be here. Thanks for having me.

Christopher: These days, you are a world-leading specialist in sight singing, particularly in the middle school environment, and I’d love to understand if this is something you were skillful in from the very beginning, or if not, what did your own musical journey look like? What were your early music education experiences?

Dale: I started playing piano when I was five, and I had a teacher that I did not like. I don’t think she was able to work with young children. I stayed for about a year and then I stopped until I was maybe 11, and then I took for a couple of more years, but I didn’t practice very much. I loved to sing more than I loved to play. When I decided to focus more on singing at around age 11, I became less interested in piano and just did more performing things with my singing.

I did an opera as a little boy, I sang in boys choir, and then when my voice changed, I did productions in junior high school and high school, and performance really was where my passion was. I think when I stopped taking piano, I kind of lost some of the abilities I might have obtained with sight singing. When I was in high school, I really didn’t know how to figure out the notes at all. I just kind of sang and listened and estimated, I didn’t know what I was doing.

Then when I went to college, I encountered the same situation. I went to music school at the University of North Carolina, and when I was there, we had to have sight singing in our freshmen year.

I decided to pass, I would record every example, and this was a long time ago, so I recorded it, I put it on a… What was it? A Walkman, and I would put it on my head and walk across campus and listen to the examples. We would have to sit down next to the teacher, and the teacher would have us sing the examples, and I would study the examples when I would be sitting, and listen to the examples when I would be walking, and then I would be able to identify what they were. I sat down next to him and each time I would get a great grade because I’d just listen, I wasn’t sight singing, though.

Then I started teaching, which was a nightmare. I had to impart this tool of sight singing on them and I had no idea what I was doing. I remember they would get the books out, they were trying their best for me, but when they would start to sing it, they’d get to measure two and then everyone would just drop out. Whenever I would ask them to take out the sight singing books, they would just moan. That was just not a good situation. That is sort of what led me to start working on how teach this subject better to a true beginner.

Christopher: That’s really interesting. From my own experience, I grew up doing a lot of singing and particularly in a choir context, and looking back, I was never really taught to sight sing. When I was doing oral skills prep for instrument exams, there would be these little bits where you have to sight sing two bars and I’d get a 15 minute teaching session where they tried to explain intervals to me and give me a reference song for the intervals, and they were just like, “And then sing the example,” I was like, “What? How does this all fit together?” That was how it was for me for about 10 years and some people in choir could figure it out, and then I just listened to what they did and replicated it.

Looking back, it’s bizarre that we were handed the sheet music in choir, expected to sight sing it, and then in reality, most people just kind of picked it up by ear. I’m sure some of our listeners are surprised to hear that someone like yourself who went to college for music, it sounds like you weren’t really taught step-by-step how to do sight singing.

Dale: No. When they would say go up a half step, really, literally until my junior year I was guessing. I had no idea what I was doing. I just didn’t have the skill sets. The skill sets required to be able to sight sing are just tremendous. I would love to see a study done of the brain, a scientist looking at the brain as it’s sight singing, as it’s trying to learn these skill sets because there are so many things involved, as I’m sure there are with instruments, but with an instrument, you’re touching something.

With a piano, you’re touching, and your body is doing something. With all the other instruments, which I’m not familiar with, I didn’t play any other thing, but I know there’s touching. With French horn, I think that’s such a hard instrument, but I don’t really even know how they get the pitch because I’ve never played one, but I know that every French horn player I know has such a great ear.
There are so many things involved that with singing, in singing classes throughout my life, we never did anything, we never used the Kodaly hand signs, nobody ever taught me the skill sets required. What I’ve tried to do over my career with my students is to break it down step-by-step and to give them the skill sets one step at a time and let them master is.

I’m former gymnast, so for me, I think about teaching sight singing the way we teach gymnastics, which you don’t progress from level one to level two until we’ve mastered the skills in level. When you go too fast, if you skip a step, you never, ever will be a very good gymnast, even if you topped out at level six, if you skip steps, you’re just not going to be that good. That kind of has influenced my approach of the step-by-step and being able to instil it successfully, and most importantly to be able to do it in a fun way that’s engaging because I teach 11 to 14 year olds, and if it’s miserable, if they’re moaning, when they pull out a book, which is just a miserable experience, even if they are successfully taught it, it’s not a great journey, and I want that for them.

Christopher: Well, I’m sure a lot of our listeners are feeling the way I would have if you had said to me at the age of 16, I can teach you sight singing step-by-step, which is super excited and curious to know how that can work, because to me, it was definitely a magical kind of skill.

Before we dig in to all that goodness, I want to just come back for a moment to something you talked about there, which was when you left college, and you’d had this experience of sight singing where you kind of used your ear to get through the requirements, but you didn’t really go through the process of learning sight singing. Then you were cast into the teaching environment, where suddenly you were in the teachers position. Take us back to that and maybe the first year of teaching. What was that like for you? Was it just the sight singing that was tricky? What was it like becoming a music teacher?

Dale: It was an absolute nightmare, I would say, for really three years. I had sung on a cruise ship between finishing my master’s in Hawaii, of all places, beautiful place, before I began teaching, but I knew I would teach. I questioned myself so many times, I’m like, that cruise ship in Hawaii, why am I not on that cruise ship? It was so bad. The classroom management piece was really hard, I looked about 12 years old and the students were 12, so, I mean, that was a really tricky thing. I tried to be mean instead of really just relating to the kids. I wasn’t being myself is the bottom line. Then with the sight singing, I wanted to make them literate, I wanted to take them to adjudication, the state of adjudication, because it helped me prepare them for something.

At each time I worked on it, it was just, I couldn’t figure out how to get them to be able to combine pitch and rhythm at the same time. The first time they would encounter a half note, they would not hold it long enough, and some child would move on to the next pitch before time, and then of course, this age group is not very confident usually. I never have taught a Mozart, so I don’t know where those come from. I’ve been waiting for 27 years, I have not had one yet. Every time my students would encounter that difficulty, they’re just embarrassed to be wrong. I was encountering that over, and over, and over again.

The first year I didn’t take them to adjudication because I couldn’t get them ready enough. The second year I took them to adjudication and they sang two songs for a rating of a superior, excellent, good, fair, blah blah blah, and then they went into the sight singing room and they did the same. Now, by the second year, in that state, they only had to do stepwise quarter notes, unison. It was very simple. They did get through that very well, which was awesome, and I was grateful. I was starting, even then, to figure out how to get some of this across, even though now my students can go three parts and do skips as wide as an octave, and chromatics and things that are crazy that never could have happened back then.

I was starting to figure it out, I just didn’t really realize that they got superior in sight singing, but when they were in there with the judges singing their songs, they had always gotten superiors before me, the teacher always supersede superiors. I was devastated. We got on the bus, and the students looked at me and they were trying to make me feel better, and they were like, “Mr. Duncan,” and they were trying to use some slang, they said, “We did good,” and then we all laughed. It was fun.

Then, after that, the state I was teaching, in North Carolina, they had a magazine for choral teachers, they had always published the superior ratings. That year, they accidentally published all of the ratings. All of my peers that I had gone to school with, everyone saw that my students had received threes. That was really humiliating, and I almost stopped teaching, I was really ready. At the end of that year said to myself, I either have to stop doing this, because I’m not good at it, or I’ve got to figure it out. Then in year four, I really made an aggressive attempt to get it all figured out. I had already been trying, but I was really on the brink of leaving.

Christopher: Wow. In a moment, I want to dive into that fourth year and how things started to come together for you. Before we go into the super interesting topic of sight singing, which I think, for a lot of people, seems like quite an advanced skill in the world of singing. Let’s just talk a minute about singing in general, because you were there casting with eleven 14-year-olds, and that’s an age where confidence is just starting to form and personal identity is coming into it soon. I know for a lot of our listeners here are adults, singing is intimidating, I imagine it’s 10 times so for the kid in the classroom who’s not sure they’re a good singer. How did you approach that? What were your experiences in those first few years of children just want wanting to sing, or feeling like they can’t sing, or indeed, not being able to sing in tune?

Dale: Singing is such a personal thing because it comes out of your body. I mean, I think I just said this to some of my students last week, it’s not the same as sitting at piano, or picking up an instrument, you can hide behind that a little bit. With singing, it’s so personal, it’s so intimate. I absolutely never make my students sing by themselves unless they want, and I make sure they know that from the beginning. They’re terrified of that.

A lot of teachers questions the fact that I don’t voice test. I never voice test. I did in the early years, and I regretted it because I’d watch their faces, they were just so scared. I didn’t want to put them through that unless they wanted to go through that. Right? Like if we’re auditioning for a solo and they’re trying to face that fear, or if they’re auditioning for a musical that we’re doing or something, that’s a whole different thing, that’s a whole different child. I want my room to be a place where those children can be, and also the children who really have no interest in singing alone because it is just scary. These students in my room know that I’m never going to make them do that, and if they want to do it they can.

In my home, I have a karaoke machine, and I love having karaoke machines. It’s just so much fun and I love it. I love hearing and coaxing people who are not really comfortable singing, to singing. Now, there may or not be some alcohol involved when that occurs, but we definitely get a little bit more comfortable. Then when they sing, it’s just so sweet to me. So often they think they can’t do that, and when they do, they’re so freed, it’s awesome. These are of course friends.

I understand that fear. The importance of singing for any instrumentalist, I think, is critical, but as it helps you learn to play, it helps learn to play in tune more, I think. I think if you can figure out what the part is on the paper before you’re trying to play it, I think that can only be a good thing. Now, I am not an instrumentalist outside the piano, and I’m not even that good at the piano, so I’m not the expert on that subject but I know how much it’s required in the brain to get people to even sing anything in tune or to sight sing, especially. To pick notes off the page and in that moment be able to sing it, so many things are happening.

I think adults are like little middle school kids. The ones who never sang are still afraid to sing. You think about your life, how many things happen in middle school that you think about still when you’re in your 20s, or 30s, or 40s, or 50s, that were an awful time for so many. I understand that fear just sits just like you’re in 6th grade, scared to sing.

Christopher: Absolutely. I love that you do not force the kids to come sing solo at the front of the room. It’s something that’s come up a few times in the show when talking about people thinking they can’t sing, because that is so often people’s first experience of learning whether or not they can sing at the front, teach players on the piano, if you hit it, great, you’re in choir, if you don’t, you can’t sing, and for the rest of your life you think you can’t sing. I wish more-

Dale: And then you don’t.

Christopher: Exactly. You don’t even try. I just wish more choir directors would make it clear to people considering joining that choir, that that is how they approach things, that they are not going to be put on the spot like that. Because I know so many instrument players who like the idea of going alone, even to their church choir, or even just the local community choir and giving it a go, but they won’t because they’re nervous that the first time they’ll be put in front of the piano, they won’t get the note right and it’ll be really embarrassing. That’s hard as an adult, it’s hard as a child.

Dale: I don’t want my students to have that imprint on them from me ever. I think my room should be a place where anybody who wants to sing can do it. I don’t screen my 6th and 7th graders ever, and in 8th grade, I can only have 84 students in a class, and so the way my schedule is set up, I do have to screen some of those … And I don’t ever audition them. I have a program called Music Prodigy that my students use and they can sing into it. I can listen to them sing and I can see the grade. There’s grade that comes up for them, it’s a sight singing program, and I use that as a part of the screening process and it takes some pressure off. If by the time they’re in 8th grade, they haven’t gotten certain skill sets, then I can … I make exceptions, even for that, for the students who just really want to sing desperately.

I try to find a space for them in that room because I … Not that I have nay judgment on people who do screen the kids if that’s the program they set up, but I think even in those programs, there should be places where students can sing who are not screened if they want to sing.

In my high school, it felt like we had this top choir, which I was lucky enough to be in, I think as a male, it’s little easier to get in that even if you can’t sight sing. Then we had the other choirs. It felt like they weren’t as good, they weren’t as valued, and for me, that was not how I wanted mine to be.

Christopher: Gotcha. One thing I love about you and the material you publish online, and your blog, and your videos is that you’re clearly someone who does have this very inclusive, encouraging, joyful spirit to your teaching, but you balance that with some very serious teaching. You are not just creating a fun music play environment, you are imparting real skills. So, I think I have to ask the follow up question of, if you’re not putting them on the spot and checking before they join the choir, that they can sing in tune. What do you do when you’re aspiring to take them to competition, and you can hear, as the choir director, that there are two or three in the room who are just not hitting the pitches? How do you handle that?

Dale: Well, first of all, I do a lot of listening every single day. My ear has become so good at spotting where the children are who are having the issues. I move around the room when I hear that happening, if I need to, because I have a very large classroom. Let’s say I have a child boy, this is typical in middle school, whose voice has changed very quickly, who is dropping the octave, he’s matching pitch, but it’s on the octave. That child, what I would do with him is at the end of class, I’d ask him without anyone hearing, or maybe just only the person next to him because I don’t want to put him on the spot, “Could you come see me during homeroom?” Or whenever I have time. I’d write him a pass, he’d come to me, I would find where his voice is living, and usually I use a minor third, sol-mi-sol, or whatever.

It’s usually way down deep where they are, so I go to where they are and I find it, and I help them feel what it’s like to match the pitch because it’s such a physical sensation when they do it, and then they hear it as well, instantly. Because if you let them not match pitch for a really long time, then physically, they become numb to it and it becomes really difficult to fix. I compare it to walking with a hunchback when you’re a young kid, and people say, straighten up, your body, your muscles go and they remember that position, and then it becomes very hard to correct, and then suddenly you turn 60 and you’ve got this happening or whatever.

I also compare it to the lines on our faces. If you’ve been frowning your entire life, you’re going to have the frown marks. If you’ve been smiling, you’re going to have the smile marks. These are the things, I think, the muscle memory, the physicality, and I try to get them to find it. I take them up by half steps until they stop feeling that they’re in tune and hearing, and I have them recognize it, and when they recognize it, then we’re on our way.

This is not a one time fix. I might have to have that child back several times. I teach them to listen in class, I use tons of each training things that are on my YouTube channel. I think it’s called Follow the Dot, or I think you may even know better than me. There are things that they have to do. I sing out of tune on purpose, I play a P on the piano, I sing a little sharp, and then I tell them I’m sharp, and then I ask them afterwards if they can hear when I’m out of tune, something that simple. Then, I’ll say, well, I went sharp again. I’ll start in tune and then I’ll go sharp, and I’m just training their ears slowly.

There’s nothing quick about learning to sing in tune. There’s nothing quick about learning to sight sing. For some kids, it’s easier than others. There are some students who have more natural ability in those areas than others, but I believe that every child can get there if we take the time with them. If our teaching techniques are strong in the classroom, we can keep the individual work to a minimum, it’d save us a lot of time. That’s what I’ve tried to do is become more efficient and more effective in identifying and addressing early.

Christopher: Fantastic. I think we’ll definitely put link in show notes to one of your videos that I enjoyed on this topic, which was where you had a bullseye diagram on the board and as you said, would play a note on the piano and then you would match pitch and then move gradually up or gradually down, and the students have to indicate when they’d heard that you’d gone off pitch, which I thought was really elegant as way to separate out that ear skill from the vocal control, you need to match pitch yourself-

Dale: The best thing is they laugh about it. Their faces get all twisted because I’m so out of tune and then I have fun with it and then they laugh, and I end up laughing, and then anyways. That’s the way it has to be. I love that. Sorry to interrupt. Go ahead.

Christopher: No, I was just going to ask if there are any other exercises or ideas you found useful if someone’s in the situation of trying to teach this to themselves, or trying to learn it in the privacy of their own home, are there any things like that they can do to help tune their ear and their voice in to matching pitch?

Dale: I would just again refer to those YouTube videos. I made several about singing in tune, and bullseye, and ear training, if they go to that YouTube channel and type in ear training. These are meant for middle school, but these people, anyone, any age can learn and listen and hear. I think when you start to hear what flat is through those videos, and then you record yourself, I think recording yourself is going to be really important to learning … Once your ear sharpens a little bit, you record yourself, you play it back, there’s so many easy ways to do that. Then you listen very carefully and non judgmentally, and you say, oh, okay, maybe I was out of tune there. If that’s all you can identify is that you were out of tune, then you’re still on your way. Right? You need to learn whether you’re flat or sharp and what your tendencies are. You will over time if you listen to yourself because you’ll have habits for you. Maybe your tendency is when you go into the higher range of your voice that you tend to go sharp, or whatever. You learn to identify those tendencies, and then you can slowly begin to address them more and more over time on your own with your own recordings.

Christopher: Fantastic. You referred earlier to the program, the app that you use with your students, Music Prodigy, and I believe that doesn’t just let you listen to their recordings, it also gives them feedback on their singing pitch, is that right?

Dale: [crosstalk 00:24:12]. Yeah. Oh, it’s so good. They sing first, and then as they’re singing they get a red dot if they’re wrong, a yellow if they’re close, and green if they’re right, and that includes pitch and rhythm. Of course, the exercises that I use with Music Prodigy are the ones I created to complement S-Cubed. They’re available for anyone who wants to do it. It would be a good ear training thing for people, it’s on the Music Prodigy website, but the examples are really, really simple in the beginning and then they get harder and harder as time goes.

In the start, they’re just singing quarter notes, and they’re basically seeing if they’re singing in tune. Then later on I incorporate the rhythm and other things, and skips and such as that so they can see if they can improve with time.

Christopher: Terrific. Well, I think it comes back to what you’re saying before about needing to make it step-by-step, and that’s certainly what we found at Musical U. A lot of the people coming to us wanting help with singing.

What they’ve experienced is that learning to sing is, here is the song, try and sing it, oh, you didn’t sing it right, nevermind. What we try and do is break it down for them into, let’s first make sure you can sing one note in tune, and then we can worry about singing another note after that and vocal control and tone, and then we can work our way to songs and repertoire. We’ve just found that’s really liberating for people because they’re still working towards the songs they want to sing confidently and accurately, but they don’t have to tackle that all at once and they can master the building blocks first.

Dale: Yes. It’s definitely the best way. You are less frustrated, you can enjoy the process more. You think about any song, any given song, and how many pitches there are and different rhythms, and how can you expect if you’re learning to be able to hit every single one of those pitches in tune right off in a live performance? How many live performers have we heard, who are famous, who sing terribly out of tune when they’re in a concert venue filled with millions of people, or thousands of people? It’s just, we are human, but we try to perfect slowly over time and get our brain to awaken to what we need to do to sing in tune, or to sight sing or whatever it is we’re trying to do.

Christopher: Yeah. I love that you mention that because I think it’s easy to fall into the trap of assuming it’s kind of an on/off switch, either you can sing or you can’t. I was just thinking about this this week, I was singing a Beatles song to get my 7-month-old to sleep, and I was in a room where there was quite a lot of echo, and so it was really easy for me to hear my own singing. I was very aware that my pitching is not great these days. My voice is rusty, I will be a little sharp or a little flat, and I can hear that I can correct it. When I’m paying attention, I do fine, but it just brought home to me, this is not a one and done kind of thing. Your voice is such a biological instrument. You really do need to make sure your ears are staying turned on to get that vocal control right.

Dale: One of the things I say to the students often, especially early in the year, is to self assess and self correct as they’re singing. That is something that definitely clicks with even that age group, and maybe it will click with some of your listeners. Singing is something active. I say this to my students, I can see when you’re listening. I don’t know how, maybe it’s all these years of being in the classroom, and I can see children who are just singing. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I want them to enjoy it, I want their faces to be alive, but you have to be able to do all of those things and it takes time to be able to do that.

In fact, my 6th graders, who are new to me, 11 and 12 year olds, in the first nine weeks, the first semester, really, I am teaching them how to learn to self assess and self correct instantly. When they do, I reward it and I say, I know that you’re doing that. It’s happening right now. Then they know that I’m noticing and not beating them down. I try to keep it as positive as I can, and that’s what we have to do with ourselves as individuals if we’re self teaching.

Christopher: Absolutely. Let’s talk about sight singing in particular then, so by that, we mean being presented with a piece of sheet music and then trying to produce it with your voice. You do this in the choir context and you alluded that to competitions. Can you talk a little bit about what sight singing is to you as a high school music teacher, singing teacher, and what those competitions look like? It’s something that I have to admit, I hadn’t really come across as somebody who grew up in the UK and wasn’t immersed in that world of competitive choirs. It’s really interesting.

Dale: Well, in the state of Georgia, where I live, when I moved here, I moved here from New Jersey, so North Carolina had unison requirement. Unison stepwise, that was it for this age group. New Jersey had no requirement. Georgia has three parts for 8th grade, three parts, skips as wide as an octave with dotted quarter 8th combinations, syncopations. Crazy stuff. I mean, I was so alarmed when I read what they required, and I thought it couldn’t possibly be true, that I called a colleague who’d been helping me, and this was 2002, and I was like, she said yes, that’s what it is, that’s what they have to do when you go. I want to go to these things because they are really helpful for me, I get feedback from the judges about the two songs they sing, and it helps me dot my I’s and cross my T’s as I’m teaching the sight singing. I want to make sure I get the skill sets in them so they can beat the page.

The first year I went to it, they sat down, and they did the very best that they could do, and it was not good. They failed. I mean, they got a three out of … One if best, five is worst. The kids were disappointed, I was disappointed, but fortunately, had this wonderful sight singing judge. She came out and she gave the kids and me some tips that were really helpful. I went home that summer and I just started thinking about those tips and how I could incorporate some of those things for the coming year. When people ask me about sight singing, that’s when I really started developing S-Cubed, that’s when it really got … I’m sure I started before that, but I started to really put the puzzle pieces together because I was determined to go and beat that page the next year with the kids.
For me to get to that outcome had way more positive impact than I ever could have anticipated. For my students, they have to sing acapella, they have five minutes to figure out what the example is. I can’t sing with them, I can’t help them, I can only give them doe, and maybe a scale, they can sing a scale and arpeggio, that’s all they can do, all I can do. I can guide them if they look at measure three or look at measure five. These students had to be able to beat that page.

The second year, I had gotten the skill sets in them enough that they were successful and it was a great feeling, but I watched so many teachers and their students walk out of the room completely demoralized that I was like, I’ve got to figure out ways to share it. Back then there was no YouTube, there was no Google, I didn’t have any idea how to share.

Around 2009, I was living in Switzerland for a year with gymnastics stuff and I was thinking about sight singing and how I could share it, so I started writing a book and I submitted it to music publishers. Nothing. Not interested, it’s boring. It really was. It didn’t translate this way. More years go by, and then in 2013, I found TeachersPayTeachers, which I was like, I didn’t know a thing about it, but I knew that I could offer it digitally, I could create PowerPoints, I could record myself singing, I could record the students learning, which there was nothing like that out there. I did it and it was terrible. My PowerPoints are still awful, but the YouTube links are all out there, most of them are public, your listeners can listen to them and see what they can learn that will help them. Mostly, I’m just really glad I’m helping teachers who need help with a subject matter, and I’m taking them step-by-step through the process. If they just follow it, and turn the page, or click the link, or whatever they have to the next thing, they can figure it out with their students, but it’s not a quick fix. There’s no such thing really.

Sorry, I wish I had better … It’s just how it is. It takes time to build these skills.

Christopher: We refer, sometimes, on the show to the advantages you have as an adult learner, and I think one of those is definitely a realistic sense of what’s possible. I know a lot of our listeners won’t be put off by the fact that this isn’t an overnight trick to sight singing, it is going to take practice.

On that front, I think what you just described is fascinating, and I think it’s super cool that those competitions exist and stretch middle school choirs in that way because that’s not something I’ve come across, and clearly it results in students who are equipped with an amazing level of sight singing that will serve them in all of their musical life. I mentioned there the practice and repetition that’s going to be involved to learn the skill over time.

When I was faced with sight singing, that was essentially all that was presented to me. Try it, try it again, oh, you got it wrong, try again. That’s incredibly frustrating. Clearly, you’ve developed a step-by-step process, and I wonder if we could just give our listeners a glimpse into what that might look like. What are the tools you’re drawing on or the ideas or the frameworks? Because you alluded to the simplicity of stepwise quarter note sight singing examples.

I know for 99% of musicians, that is impossible. Genuinely, literally 99% of good instrument players would not be able to accurately sing stepwise quarter notes, and by stepwise, we just mean it’s moving up and down the scale without any jumps. That’s no criticism of them as we’ve alluded to, this isn’t something that’s taught, but once you learn these skills, that does seem like a very simple example. So, can you just give a bit of a glimpse into what this process looks like and what it is that enables your middle schoolers to do this amazing sight singing?

Dale: At first, I think the important thing is the Kodaly hand signs. I play a game with the students where I introduce it. It’s fun for them. I teach them the importance of going up and down, I teach them the importance of the half steps and things like that over time, over the first couple of weeks. Within two or three weeks of doing this game called Forbidden Pattern, they’re then able to go … I point to an example on the page, very simple stepwise … Actually, before I do that, I have them do something called Follow the Hand. I will just use the hand signs, ill give them doe, and they follow the hand. They’re essentially already reading music, you can say, because they’re following my hand. The next step is I go to the board and I point to the example, and I tell them this is doe, and then I point to it and I ask them if it’s on the space or on the line.

There’s not only an ear training component, there’s a visual component. I mean, many people, I didn’t realize for many years that some students don’t understand the deep, the low, the treble clef below the staff that it’s a space note. I didn’t realize that. They thought it was the E or whatever. When I realized that, I knew then that I had to then give my students visual training and how to see what a ledger line is. What does it not look like when it’s below the ledger line?

I didn’t realize how much my students were tricked up by when a note is quarter note versus the half note because it’s white versus black. I mean, there’s so many things with the young beginner that I didn’t know. I was taking them through those steps. I train their ears, I train their eyes, and then we’re building the skill sets to rhythm, that would be the next step.

We’re just adding one layer at a time, but that’s how we get to … When they are doing rhythm, I have them pulse. That’s something I didn’t do for a long time. Pulsing, I tell them that by the time they get to the pulsing, it’s like they’re tapping their head and rubbing their bellies at the same time, and tap dancing. They’re doing so many things and they don’t realize it. For them, by the time we’ve built slowly to that point where they can actually maybe sing a unison, that’s probably takes eight weeks for them to sing unison with maybe half notes and whole notes. We do it 10 to 15 minutes a day, three to four times a week. It’s not like it takes that much time, but it’s really just being committed to that process one step at a time.

I say to them, I do a cartwheel or something in the room because I’m like, this is awesome that you are able to do this, and for them, they’re like, well, he’s excited, for them that might feel like not much, but they’re still appreciating that it is a big deal, but we don’t want it to feel like a big deal.

It’s like learning any language. If you go to France, and you don’t speak french, and you have a translator with you all of the time, you will never learn the language. If you don’t actually try to speak it and you’re listening, and you’re looking at the physical cues that people are doing, and all the things that are required when you’re learning a language, it’s not just oral, it’s not just visual, and it’s not just kinesthetic, it’s all of it. You have to leverage all learning styles and that’s what I’ve tried to do as I used my program with my students.

Christopher: Gotcha. Well, I want to pick up on that point about speaking a language in a moment, but first I think I need to hit pause because you mentioned a lot of good stuff there that to me and you is clear, but to our listener may be a bit less familiar. Specifically, Kodaly hand signs. It’s a bit tricky for us to convey on an audio podcast, but if you wouldn’t mind just explaining what is that? How does it work? And why is it helpful for sight singing?

Dale: Okay. That Kodaly hand signs were created by a Hungarian man, his last name is Kodaly, and it’s used in his system, which I’m not an expert on by any mean, I’ve taken level one many, many years ago, but it’s a good system for younger singers, really young, like ages five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11. Some teachers use it beyond, and they’re really good at it. My system is based on those hand signs on some level. You lift your hand up, you lower your hand, you show the skips with your hand. There are certain specific hand gestures for sol versus mi versus fa, that sort of thing. Those are the hand signs we play the game with, and the students are also uncomfortable with those in the beginning if they’ve never been exposed. I encourage them to use them even if they’re making mistakes. It’s really about the doing and not worrying about if you’re making the errors at this moment.

Christopher: Cool. So this is something where you have a particular hand sign for each note of the scale?

Dale: Right.

Christopher: And we’re talking about moveable do solfa, so it’s do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do, whatever keys they’re in.

Dale: Right. I use moveable do, but in the beginning, I used a concept called varied but comfortable do, because I use C, C sharp, D, D sharp, and E around there because middle school students are afraid to sing high and they get paranoid, and that becomes the focus. If we go to the key of G and we ask them to sight sing, they’re scared. I figured in the beginning I would stick them around there without any regard for going from the key of C to the key of G to the key of F, which is what most sight singing methods do. For middle school, this age group, it just seemed to be an obstacle so I just removed the obstacle.

Now, over time, by about the 14th or 15th week, then they get into movable do and we stick to what’s really on the page because they’re able and they’re ready. We have to get out of that varied but comfortable do because they really do get stuck and they can’t sing in the correct keys if we don’t do that.

Christopher: Gotcha. I love that and it lets them get a real physical, visceral sense for those hand signs and pitches, and how they sound before you worry about connecting it with the nitty gritty of notation and the stuff. Right?

Dale: Oh, yeah. I actually, not until year three do I talk that much about theory. My students, my S-Cubed for three years, the first two years I repeat because I get a lot of new students, and then the final year we go into all kinds of things. They don’t leave me as theory experts, they leave me as competent … It’s like they could … Let’s go back to French. It’s like they can speak French completely fluently given anything they can do, just about anything. They have no idea what they’re doing, but they’re ready for the high school teacher to go into all of the things that I didn’t touch on because it really gets in the way on some level. It’s like we don’t expect a baby to come out and conjugate a sentence, they have to speak and they have to learn the cues. It’s just the same.

Christopher: Perfect. Well, I’ll make sure we have a link in the show notes to one of your videos where people can see this in action with some of your middle schoolers as a choir singing and hand signing their way through a sight singing example. The other specific thing that I wanted to pick up there was you mentioned pulsing, which I think is a really interesting idea that people may not be familiar with. Could you explain what that is and how it helps?

Dale: Well, when we get into keeping the steady beat, which is a skill in its own, it’s not an easy skill, and especially for these young kids. The students are taught by me to constantly, their hand goes forward with each beat. I’ll count them in, I’ll go one, one, two, ready, go, and then they’ll just pulse to that beat with a solfa signs, and they are lifting and lowering their hands at the same time, which is really, really hard to do. I go carefully and slowly, and I hold them through that process until they master that skill. They keep it in there for … It’s nothing within a month or so it’s like second nature.

Christopher: Very cool. Well, again, you can see this in action in the videos, but just to give you a sense, it’s like watching someone hammer with an imaginary hammer with a steady beat or a very restrained version of a Metallica crowd pumping their fists in the air as the song plays.

Dale: That’s the best way to put it.

Christopher: I just wanted to get a glimpse into this for the people listening because I think it conveys clearly how there are very practical tools that you’re using here in the S-Cubed method in your own teaching. This isn’t something where you study theory carefully and then you intellectually know how to do it, and it’s not something where you just need to be born with an instinct to do it, this is kinesthetic, visual, auditory, all combined together in a step-by-step fashion that helps you really internalize what the notes on the page should sound like.

You mentioned there, the analogy to language and how your students get very good at speaking the language, and one blog post I loved on your site was about what you call chaos and how it compares with the activity of audiation. We’ve talked on the show before about the advantages of audiation, imagining music in your head, and I was delighted to see how you used this idea of chaos in preparing for sight signing.

I wondered could you first just talk us through, you mentioned your students have five minutes before sight singing performance as it were, sight singing test. How do they use that five minutes, and how does that connect to this idea of chaos?

Dale: Well, chaos, any middle school teacher knows what that is already, but anyways… Chaos is a time when they get to personally practice. I teach chaos to them, this is how it goes, these are the rules, this is what you do. They sing out loud on their own, they have to block everyone out in the room, because it sounds like an orchestra tuning up. This, I found to be a useful technique because it gives them their own personal time, which everybody can work at their own level. I encourage them that if they only get through measure one, but they’re successful, that’s okay. If the other person next to them, who gets all the way through it five times during the minute of practice that I give them or whatever, that’s okay, too, and not even to worry about it.

I want them to work at their own pace, their own level. I found that it really helps the kids to improve over time in their space, in their time, in their way. Then, the entire group does better together as a result of that. Audiation is a great technique. I think some of the things I’ve written may lead people to think I would never audiate with my students, no. I actually do, but I think it is something that we need to do later. We do it after they’ve gotten all of their skill sets in. With my 8th graders, they’re really good at all the sight singing. That’s when I begin the audiation because they built all the skill sets. Those are ingrained, and they can listen, they can really hear.

I think I saw too many of my students, when I used to try audiation in the early days with great failure, they would just sit there like, what are we supposed to do? They were doing nothing because they didn’t know what to do, they had no idea because I teach true beginners. So they just sat there and there was nothing productive. Then when it was time to sing out loud, they were just so scared, and frustrated, and wrong, and this way they’re taught during chaos, during the times that we use it, they can hear their mistakes, they can self assess, they can self correct. I encourage that all the time, and I’ll talk to them as they’re doing chaos and I hear a mistake on fa. To help them learn what maybe they’re not doing right, I’m guiding them, but over time, I guide them less, and less, and less. It’s like I’m taking the training wheels off so they can do their own thing.

Chaos, I think, is really great or people to sing out loud in their environment before we begin the audiation process, which is also going to help them be just better musicians over time. In our country, there are some states in their adjudication process that I’ve described in Georgia, where students are not allowed to sing out loud. They have to audiate the entire time. That’s what I’ve written on my blogs, is in response to that. I think that’s really not a great situation for kids. I think it causes frustration for teachers. I think on some level it causes teachers to stop attending those events, which I think impacts the kids because they’re so frustrated, they don’t understand how to get the skill sets into the kids. That’s never a good thing. We want kids to sing.

Christopher: Yeah, I think it’s beautiful. I love the name. Was it you who gave it that name, or is this a general-

Dale: No, I did that.

Christopher: It’s fantastic.

Dale: I try to make each concept as memorable as I could in the process. I wasn’t always successful, but that one is something that even if you’re not using my program and you’re a choir teacher and you’re just looking for something to use in your class, you could learn, you could use it and enjoy whatever is on the YouTube channel and figure out how it can work for you.

Christopher: Yeah, well, it’s just so liberating and I think that’s so often what’s needed. I think partly why it brought me so much joy to see your videos demonstrating this was that I lead it to my own choir experience. When we were handed a fresh piece of sheet music, there would be 60 seconds where there’d be some kind of timid humming from some people, and other people would be muttering about intervals. I would literally just be stood there waiting until we sung it the first time, and then I’d be able to sing it.

I remember thinking, do you know what? If you just gave me five minutes alone in a room, I could probably figure out how this is meant to sound, but I’m not going to do that out loud in this silent room. I’m just-

Dale: I know, I know.

Christopher: Your idea of chaos and encouraging everyone to experiment out loud is the exact opposite of that and so empowering, I think.

Dale: Yeah. It’s so good for them, and it’s so good for them to learn to block out things and I make jokes about it. You know how you block out your mother when she says to clean your room, but she says you’re going to get an iPhone 10, you listen. Right? We can do the same thing. You can choose at this moment to block out. Right? We try to make it as fun, and funny, and silly so that the point is driven and they really do work to try to block it out and do their own thing. Then it just becomes part of what they do, and that’s another skill set that’s going to serve them, even if they don’t sing.

There’s got to be something about what they’re taught in those moments that serves them in some other way in their life. I’m sure of it because it takes so much brain power to do those things.

Christopher: Absolutely. I think we’ve given people a sense of the spirit of S-Cubed, and your teaching approach, as well as some of the specific tools and techniques you use, but I’d love if you could just talk a bit more about the S-Cubed program, what it is, how it works, who it’s for?

Dale: Okay. Well, honestly, when I built it, I built it for teachers in my state of Georgia to help them with their adjudication process. That’s what it was for originally. It’s available on TeachersPayTeachers, and so teachers around the world have found it over time, and they have found it really useful, which is awesome. It has far surpassed anything I ever, ever could have thought would happen. I’m sure it doesn’t work for everyone, I mean, everybody’s different, but the people who have used it, it seems … I’ve had band teachers who have been stuck in the choral classroom, who’ve decided that it works for them, high school teachers, which I built it for middle school who teach beginners, upper elementary teachers.

It’s just a step-by-step program where I hand hold … I want it to be like a personal trainer for the teachers. I wanted them to be able to get up that morning, an hour before they’re teaching kids, look at the lesson plan, study it really quick, look at the videos, fast forward what was boring, get the concept, and then go and do their thing, and use what works and throw out what doesn’t.

I wanted it to be fun. I want the process to be … It’s as much philosophy as it is a method, and the philosophy really is that this process needs to be one where we celebrate every single time that they accomplish something, we never ignore it because it’s hard what they’re doing. We enjoy interacting with the kids through the game, and then slowly, before you know it, they’re singing three parts, and can figure out chromatics, things that I really don’t think I could do even when I finish my master’s degree, some of the things.

Now, I understood the theory behind it, which was great for me, but in terms of actually being able to do it, that was a whole different situation for me and many of my peers in the same school. I went to a great school. I love my school. I got a great music education there, but I think the things that I kind of thought about were things that I saw happening in my room, I’m like, they don’t understand this. I, for me, it’s natural because I played piano. They don’t understand that this is a line note versus a space note. They don’t see it because it’s so small. Maybe I have to make it bigger for now so then they see it, and then I’ll gradually go smaller.

I mean, things that nobody else had addressed before for use in a classroom, practical use in a real classroom with real beginners. That’s what I wanted this to serve.

Christopher: Terrific. Well, people can find the S-Cubed program at inthemiddlewithmrd1, that’s the number one,.blogspot.com and we’ll have a direct link to that in the show notes for this episode, and you’ll also find the links to Dale’s YouTube channel where all of the videos we’ve mentioned can be found, as well as his TeachersPayTeachers store if you’re interested in getting the full S-Cubed program, which you can get bit by bit, or as an entire end-to-end program.

It’s probably been clear from this conversation, but I am just a huge fan of the way you approach what you teach, the way you equip your students for sight singing, which is a skill that intimidates most musicians, including able singers. I think it’s wonderful that you’re doing this work to empower other teachers around the world to do the same thing with their students, and I just definitely applaud you for that.

Hopefully, it’s also come across that this is something that’s designed for teachers, but there is a ton of interesting stuff on Dale’s website In the Middle With Mr. D, particularly if you’re curious about these topics of singing in tune or learning to sight sing yourself. I would love for you to head over to his YouTube channel, watch some of these videos, and be inspired, because if he can get a room full of rowdy middle school students doing the kind of sight singing he does, then there is definitely hope for all of us adults who struggled with it in the past.

Big thank you, Dale. It’s been such a pleasure talking to you today and I hope you have every success in your continuing work in this area.

Dale: Thank you for this opportunity. It was great talking to you.

The post Making Sight Singing Child’s Play, with Dale Duncan appeared first on Musical U.