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Whatever happened to light and shade, subtlety, nuance, "less is more" etc?
cathrin
Posts: 4,968 Forum Member
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It breaks my heart to hear beautiful, haunting, gentle songs like A Song For You, being bellowed out at full volume with the melody changed beyond recognition to create constant big moments of drama.
This is the problem with making singing a competitive sport; it's all about making everything huge and loud and powerful, so all the subtlety goes out of the window, and a song that should be performed sensitively and expressively ends up losing all its light and shade. Judging by the audience reactions I realise I'm massively in the minority with this opinion
...but still.....Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime! A Song For You! Aaargh! It's so wrong!
(scuttles off to listen to The Corgis and Karen Carpenter's versions of the above to restore emotional equilibrium...)
This is the problem with making singing a competitive sport; it's all about making everything huge and loud and powerful, so all the subtlety goes out of the window, and a song that should be performed sensitively and expressively ends up losing all its light and shade. Judging by the audience reactions I realise I'm massively in the minority with this opinion
...but still.....Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime! A Song For You! Aaargh! It's so wrong! (scuttles off to listen to The Corgis and Karen Carpenter's versions of the above to restore emotional equilibrium...)
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It bores me stiff to hear every note, every word stretched and stretched till there is no elasticity left.
It doesn't.
or melisma even..its nice but sometimes its just not needed
I didn't really like her version. It's a beautid ful song and I hardly recognised it after she put her 'twist' on it.
Whilst Joseph over-sang everything at least you could hear the words and it showed his range.
For me : Tone >>>>>> Range
Unfortunately, most singers in the voice are like this.
This annoys me on all singing shows... you can't even tell if they can sing because they don't sing the usual notes.... they sing around the notes so basically anything goes and it all sounds the same.
Another example being Leah's Loving You - at the end she just squeaked out a few notes that went nowhere and weren't the 'proper' note (sorry i'm not a singer). essentially she strung together some notes that meant nothing and showed no skill. Same with Jordan and his falsetto - they is not skill is just squeaking out any old note.
Does anyone remember Rebecca Ferguson? She was the worst for singing around a melody.
It's a get out for being flat and out of tune. I would rather hear the original melody and if you are going to change it, change it for the better, don't just over sing it.
No way for me, Range is way more important than Tone. Range makes a song really interesting. But I hate it when singers overplay it and go from high to low really quickly throughout the entire piece...I prefer when the artist themselves is enjoying the notes too and holding them on so we can enjoy them. A bit of vibrato doesn't hurt either.
I agree, the whole process defies the idea. We are trying to find "The Voice" and yet we hardly get to hear the contestants. Thus far they have had probably had less than ten minutes singing time each. And even then a four minute song is bracketed into a two minute slot where the singer is presumably trying to make their name but ends up just trying to screech louder than anyone else. Songs end up being butchered and murdered-if that's possible. Last night was a mess imo.
Its a good idea at heart but still needs much work to even start living up to its grand title.
Also is it me or could the backing music be better?
Couldn't agree more with the above posts. They don't just sing something anymore but have to do all the ridiculous vocal gymnastics, screeching, screaming or just generally shouting. It's awful.
I blame Mariah Carey and Christina Aguilera :mad::D
There doesn't seem to be one person who sings, they just seem to be yelling an approximation to the known tune.
If there is no tone, the range doesn't matter it's squawking low to high like a parrot. Tone is what makes a voice sound good by giving it depth and richness, it's what makes them individual.
I'd love to see contestants singing songs with real understanding of the lyrics and conveying that to the audience. At the moment, they might as well be singing the listings in their local phone book for all the emotional connection we're seeing!
By contrast Joseph didnt have the range in the song he sang, It was far too simple for his voice.
Agreed, the song didn't show off his vocal ability and I thought Matt's song didn't do justice to what he can do soul-wise.
Legendary soul producer Jerry Wexler coined this vocal nonsense 'oversouling'.