First time eval - All of me

rafcann

Hey gang,

I have been doing Volume 1 exercises for 2-3 months and have recently started a bit on Volume 2, without prior singing experience. I wanted to see how the exercises would translate to a song, so I downloaded Smule and tried to do "All of me" by John Legend. I still hide from my wife when doing exercises haha, so please be honest but constructive in the feedback, this is a very vulnerable moment!

My main question for the group is: how do you recommend one practices a song?

Can you pls critique? (cc @Wigs @jaclynser who have helped me with exercise feedback so far)

Link: https://www.smule.com/recording/all-all-of-me-of-me-of-me/2443419382_3596154498

sjonrokz4u

The way I work on a song is I roll through it with the recording a couple times after I’ve listened to it a bunch then go line by line and write the words down. After I have the words written out then I go back and try to work the song out line by line. Once I feelive got a couple lines or a verse depending how much I feel I’ve gotten then I find a good (sounds like the orig) karaoke version and sing the parts I’ve worked out, record them and listen back until I feel like it’s coming together and do that for the entire song piece by piece

aniram

I think this song is really difficult for biginners. You sing it with your heart and that's great. Try working on your pitch, you hit a wrong note from time to time. I'm a beginner myself so I can't say much more

rafcann

Thank u both for the feedback!

Just re_listened to the pitch section from Ken in Volume 1. It lays out perfectly how to work on pitch and how to apply learnings to song. Which I had disregarded as I was focusing on the throat and vowel mods. A lot of practice ahead of me, will update!

Wigs

When I started applying my scales to songs, I would listen for the vowels in the song, and no matter how weird it sounded I tried to stay pure to the vowel or mod. Start with the ah vowel the whole song through, then use all the vowels, then add the consonants as needed. This last is very tricky and I still get caught with it. Its very easy to fall back into singing the words as we see them hitting every consonant, instead of singing with an open throat with vowel mods.