Up and running!

Good question. Whitney certainly had a unique and beautiful voice in her prime. She could belt it out with the best, but could also back down and caress the notes tenderly.

Comparing Adam and Whitney, tho, is a little like comparing apples and oranges. They sing very differently. Whitney comes from a gospel background and training. Adam comes from a classical and musical theater background and formal training. I suspect that Whitneys' background and training from her mom emphasized the emotionality of a song more than the technical aspects of the voice.

Whitney tends to sing in short bursts. She takes breaths in the middle of phrases and sometimes in the middle of words. I think this is a combination of style and of lack of proper breath control. She uses lots of air to push out her belted notes thru much of her range.

Adam goes for long, legato lines. He breathes where it makes musical and lyrical sense. He extends lines even past where you would expect him to breathe.

This difference makes Whitney sound powerful with great effort, and Adam sound powerful and effortless. Whitney pushes out her notes (except when she is singing low and intimately or high in her head voice). Adam floats his voice on top of the note. You hear no strain. Instead you hear this crystal ring. (Unless he intentionally adds grit to the tone.)

It is a basic difference in singing technique. Whitney's is founded on singing gospel in a church setting on Sundays (nothing wrong with that!). Adam's is founded on singing on a big stage, unamplified, and creating a sound that will float over the instrumentals and to the back of the theater. Eight times a week, 50 weeks a year.

Which sound you prefer is a matter of personal taste and experience with music. Both are the best at what they do. Adam's technique and style, tho, is proven over the years, over the centuries, to maximize what the voice can do without causing strain or injury. Whitney's style, along with her regrettable lifestyle, was destructive to her instrument.

You make a lot of sense. And ask good questions.

If you have read the masterclass thread, you are familiar with talk about chest voice and head voice. Everybody can sing in chest voice. It is the same mechanism one uses when talking. But, when the notes get too high for one's natural chest resonance, an untrained singer does not know how to switch to head voice. That does not come naturally. Unless you somehow, thru trial and error, stumble onto your head voice, it is inaccessible. Instead, guys will switch to a falsetto. A light, soft, sometimes wispy high voice that sounds jarringly different from their chest voice.

It is not that falsetto is bad. It is just untrained, unsophisticated, and lacking in control or consistency. A "legitimate" singer wants to be able to sing from their lowest notes to their highest notes without strain, and without a "break" in tone or quality. They want to be able to sing with power or with restraint anywhere within their range. They want to be able to start soft and gentle, and crescendo gradually to loud and powerful, and sing anywhere in between. They don't want to sound like a powerful man down low, and a little child up high.

It takes sometimes years of deep practice to master this. To attain such control over your tone, your approach to a note, your consistency of sound. So, I think Adam, and others, are understandably frustrated or insulted when people talk about them singing falsetto every time they hit a high note. Adam is well known among "legitimate" singers for remarkably having no discernible break in his voice. That means he can walk his voice up a scale, note by note, and the tone sounds just the same. He can start at the very bottom with a light, lilting, floating tone and carry it up the scale for almost three octaves, or something like 21 steps. He starts with an incredibly gentle chest voice and transitions into that beautiful, ringing, light head voice. Conversely, he can start at the bottom with a powerful, booming, rich voice and walk that all the way up about 2.5 octaves retaining that same powerful sound without strain and without any noticeable change in the tone. VERY few singers, even the best trained, can do that to the degree that Adam can.

Adam can switch and change up his tone to fit the genre, the song, or even the phrase or word. If he flips into a light head voice or uses falsetto (rarely), it is intentional for musical reasons, not because it is the only way he can hit the note. It makes sense in the musical context.

With Kris's new song, for example, that shift to falsetto is jarring, startling, and has no musical reason. He just cannot hit the note any other way. Or, at least, I can hear no musical reason for the shift. Bruno Mars, on the other hand, avoids the shift into falsetto on most of his songs by pushing and straining his chest voice past the natural breaking point where he should shift into head voice. (Should meaning to avoid straining the vocal cords and sounding like a strangled cat, and to expand the higher register.)

There are some singers who use falsetto for effect, and want that jarring shift in tone. On the thread I think aloha pointed out that it is common and highly respected in Hawaiian music. We hear the shift or flip often in pop music, and one could argue that is part of the "sound" of a pop singer. But, in the "legitimate" singer's world, it is perhaps the lazy way out, instead of learning to control and master your range.

Um, does that answer your question???

Thanks for the compliment and for the suggestion. I have added the link to the post about the Sweden showcase.

Linda

I really enjoyed this article thank you.





Oh how I wish "Underneath" will cause the same emotions to people!! From the snippet we heard I'm really hoping for it!