Month: May 2019

When we try to hit a pitch, we are trying to hit an exact sound, that falls on a particular note, which can be found on an instrument, such as a piano.

Notice that instruments need to be regularly tuned – except for electronic instruments – as they are tuned at the time of creation only.

If you don’t tune a piano or a guitar to the exact note, what happens? You get an OFF pitch sound. This means the instrument has been tuned to a pitch that is not accurate (or it has fallen out of tune over time by itself).

People use tuning tools to aid in getting the right pitch – for example an electronic guitar tuner to tune guitars, or a pitch pipe to help choral singers get their right starting note.

So if a note is not in tune when you start to play an instrument, every time you play the off pitch note, it will sound wrong, by the degree that it is off pitch. The degree that it is off or on pitch is what I call pitch accuracy.

It could be tuned to a completely different note, making it off key, or it could be tuned to the right note, but a little too high (sharp) or a little too low (flat) and variations of ‘a little’ to ‘a lot’.

This is exactly what happens when you attempt to sing a pitch in a song. If you don’t hit that note in exactly the right spot (hertz measurement – which is what the guitar tuner or pitch pipe does for us), you will sound unpleasant as you sing a melody.

Now picture this – a song has approx 300 notes – that means you have 300 times when you might sing a note with less than perfect accuracy (flat, sharp, or wrong note entirely).

Because a song moves so fast generally, the lyrics are changing at a quick pace for a beginner or intermediate who is unaware of how to hit a note accurately – the likelihood of sound unpleasant or average is high.

Usually to counter this, and learn to sing with a high level of pitch accuracy of every one of those approx 300 notes per song, you need to spend a lot of time with an instrument – listening to the notes of a song, and then ‘tuning’ your voice against those notes, the exact way you would when tuning a guitar with a guitar tuner.

This process is difficult for a voice, as a guitar tuner tells you where the note is that you are playing on guitar – so you have a guide as to whether you are flat, sharp or on the wrong note entirely.

With voice, it is not the common teaching method to for a student to see what their voice is doing. This is because we didn’t have this technology available in the past, so singing well and getting lessons was reserved for those that already had a certain amount of pitch making ability, as a gift from birth most likely – part of their genetics.

Now that we have this technology, anyone can see the note they are singing.

I have create software which allows you to input entire melodies, from one note to many notes at a time – and sing along with each note, while a graph accurately depicts your level of pitch accuracy. This way, you can learn to ‘tune’ your voice to a melody with a visual guide, as opposed to just having to guess if you are singing the right note with a singer, teacher or piano.

So get started tuning your voice using your favourite melodies and watch the difference it will make to your overall sound. People mistakenly think that tone is a magical element that we have or don’t have. In reality, your tone is sculpted as you tune your voice. Notice how a guitar sounds beautiful (when in tune) – even a cheap guitar. This is because it is the perfect pitch accuracy which gives a sound it’s pleasant tone (from the tuning of the guitar with a guitar tuner tool).

So too will your vocal tone sound pleasant as you gradually become more and more pitch accurate on every one of those approx 300 notes in a song.

This is not easy to do – it takes persistence and hundreds of thousands, if not millions of repetitions – but using this tool, you can know for sure how to direct your repetitions, instead of being unaware of your accuracy.

Thanks

Rached Hayek

From teaching students of all levels, beginner to advanced, the one thing that all singers have in common is their inability to ‘see’ a note or set of notes from a phrase in their mind.

This is a skill which can be learnt. You could also say that a singer is unable to ‘hear’ the note in their head. This is an extremely important skill to learn, as it allows you to be sure of what you intend to sing, for every single note in a song, start to finish, no matter how fast the notes are, or how many there are.

For a beginner, they will not be able to notice notes that are the main part of the melody; these notes don’t even go by quickly necessarily – but a beginner can’t hear or see them clearly in their mind – therefore, they have no chance of singing those notes properly.

For an intermediate singer, they can usually sing a melody on their own nicely, but there will be a few notes here and there that they are unsure of – usually quick slides at the beginning of a line, fast vibrato embedded in phrases or at the ends of lines, or quick runs that go by too fast for the intermediate to clearly hear or see in their mind; meaning they can’t execute them smoothly.

For an advanced singer, they can usually sing an entire song at a professional level; but when it comes songs which have more elite level skills, such as notes that are extremely fast, usually in runs that are 5 or more notes in length; and also in complicated melodies that have key changes, or intentionally use notes that are not in the scale/key of the song (chromaticism), such as classical music, musicals and jazz music.

So you can see that the fundamental issue of not hearing a note is the same for any level of singer. The only difference is the difficulty of the song.

The good news is that the process to teach a singer to see or hear a note which they currently can’t pick up on their own, is to use chunk the difficult section, slow it down, and use a visual pitch guide, so the singer can clearly ‘see’ and ‘hear’ (with a piano or instrument sound) the notes that they are attempting, and the note they are producing, and compare them to each other.

For example, if a beginner is singing a phrase and they aren’t sure if the notes are correct, they could enter the phrase into the software, and then sing along with the piano notes, while watching a chart graph their voice to a high level of pitch accuracy.

This way, singers of all levels can see and hear their hits and misses when it comes to their pitch/note accuracy, and can self-correct, in real time, as they get the real time feedback from the software.

I have created this software for you, as after teaching for many hundreds of hours, the same problems creep up, and I designed a tool and strategy to automate the manual process I used to go through with students to help them see and hear their notes in their mind. This automated process via software is much more powerful and efficient, as it contains no emotion, is able to be used by the student when they practice alone, is never wrong, and never gets tired.

Teachers and students can now learn to see and hear their notes, by inputting their favourite melodies and testing themselves. Ofcourse you could never ‘see’ your notes with traditional teaching/learning – sitting by the piano and ‘listening’ closely to hear if you are matching the note’. This software allows you to ‘see’ your note – which is previously impossible, and the reason for the reality that so many singers who love to sing, but are unfortunately tone deaf (can’t tell notes apart).

This will change the way you practice, and will open the doors to so many students who were frustrated with their inability to match pitch and get accurate feedback from others.

The trainer is available on my website under ‘Trainer’ in the menu.

Thanks,

Rached Hayek