I was listening to Martina McBride today. “God Fearin’ Women”
Is there a word for the vocal technique where the singer deliberately sings a note flat, then slides up to the right note - or from one note to another, rather than hitting the note on time?
I’m not a real big country fan, but it seems that there’s a tendency for country vocalists to sing a word on time, but at a lower pitch than “normal”, then slide up to the proper pitch. Sorta sounds like a slide guitar.
It’s a technique which will get you yelled at by nine out of ten vocal coaches/musical directors. I remember meeting with a musical director when we were doing a production of “Fiddler on the Roof” and I had listened to the Broadway cast album as a refresher before our first rehearsal. Zero Mostel played Tevye in that production and he slid from note to note pretty frequently. I did that in my first run through and the musical director stopped me and said “don’t slide around.” I said “that’s the way it was done on the Broadway cast album” and he replied “You are no Zero Mostel.”
All that having been said, it’s fairly common when singing the blues(using blue notes) to use a bit of melisma(changing the pitch during a syllable without it being indicated in the sheet muisic) to keep the song from sounding flat all the time. Blue notes, from which the term “the blues” comes, are a slight bit under the standard, or “tonic”, tones of the scale in each key. Thus they sound more flat or depressed than music written on the tonic notes. This can grate on the ear and sound flat all the time.
It’s a blue note. Not to be tried at home. Singing coaches hate it; you WILL get in trouble. One should only begin using blue notes when one has fully mastered the art of singing, because otherwise it’s just a lazy way to land near the right note and make your way to it gradually. In other words, until you’ve proven you don’t need such a safety net, it’s basically a cheat. This is why you hear so much of it in top40 music, because kids these days can’t really sing.
I think an example of this out of control is Fiona Apple’s “Criminal.” Her pitch is just about under control in the recording. I always imagined it turning into a trainwreck it she tried to do it in concert.
If I’m reading the other posters correctly, it seems that there are certain notes in the scale where bending up will be pleasing and that most notes in the scale shouldn’t be approached that way. That’s certainly been my experience with the blues, but I haven’t been as observant of the phenomenon when listening to other types of music.
Can I ask about a totally unrelated vocal technique/?
What is that strange thing that Conan O’Brien does when he sings? He adds a bunch of extra syllables. It sounds something like “shabada-HEEEEEEEEEE”, stuff like that. That must come from somewhere.
From the OP’s description (not knowing the song in question, and also the between-two-notes aspect), I’d certainly go with portamento. ‘Blue note’ can be used to describe sliding up to the target note, but also has numerous other definitions, some more closely related to this than others.
It’s scooping when it involves sliding up to the first note in a phrase, the “attack” note. There’s a guy in our chorus who does it with about every other note. Of course our nickname for him is “Scoop.”
I checked out the song in the OP, and it’s definitely a nod to the blues (especially since it happens most prominently on the word “blues…”), but it’s also fairly standard fair in country singing. I don’t know if there’s a specific term for it, but I would call it “bending the pitch”, because to my ear it’s the vocal equivalent of the guitar technique of the same name, in which the player pulls the string off-line and causes it to bend up or down.
IMO, most of the classically-oriented terms suggested so far in the thread (melisma, portamento, glissando) don’t apply. Some of them refer to other things (melisma is the singing of several different discrete “real” pitches on one syllable; portamento is a legato technique used to literally “bind” notes together; and glissando is an instrumental technique used on keyboard instruments and the harp).
“Scooping” as mentioned earlier in the thread is a staple of popular singing these days, and IMO it can only be fairly considered a vocal fault if it doesn’t fit the style of the music, or if it’s done unintentionally. It’s easy to tell if a singer has chosen to color a pitch by scooping into it, or if they’re just sloppy and inattentive, and sing every note that way. I would never teach my voice students to scoop, but that’s because my students aren’t aspiring to be Christina Aquilera or Martina Mcbride.
Only these? Glissando (and the colloquial verb ‘gliss’) are common parlance for string players. In my experience, it’s mainly non-string players who ask for a portamento effect rather than a glissando.
Didn’t mean to imply it was restricted to those instruments - only that it’s rarely (if ever) used in conjunction with singing.
Checking my Harvard Dictionary, it lists the piano gliss, harp gliss, and string gliss as the primary examples, and defines it as a “continuous or sliding movement from one pitch to another.”
Interestingly, it also discusses the timpani glissando, which can apparently also be called portamento! Let’s hear it for confusion of terms!
Completely random thing that just occured to me - pianos and other keyboard instruments can’t slide through a semitone. Everything else mentioned so far can (I’m pretty sure I’ve heard it done using pedalling on a harp).