Be Kind To Your Voice: An interview with Vocalist Shannon Dyer

Jul 082011
 

Shannon Dyer is a vocalist who has performed across classical, sacred, folk, and musical theater genres. She has won vocal competitions, served as a church canter, and has performed professionally with chamber ensembles in New York City. I interviewed her about her experiences and vocal technique.

SM: Describe your background, training, and career

My background is highly classical. From the time I was eleven, I was trained classically. One of my majors in college was vocal performance with an emphasis in classical.

However I don’t really like a lot of the classical vocal pieces. They’re definitely challenging and useful for expanding range and making sure diction is good. I’ve taken the classical technique as much as it can be used to sing different genres of music. I sing a mixture of pop, folk,, and musical theater. I tend to shy away from fully classical performances. I did perform full-time for nine months with a full ensemble in New York City. That’s where we got into a lot of the German opera and Italian arias. There were things I really enjoyed about that, but it also taught me that I wouldn’t do well as a full-time classical musician. I prefer different genres of music.

SM: One of the things I noticed when I accompanied you once was the connection between your technical command of the voice and the emotional response of the audience.

I’ve been taught that there is a lot to be accomplished by knowing the technical art of singing. But I’ve also been taught that there is an equal important to channeling your emotions into your singing without losing the technical stuff. It’s an interesting mix–how do I sing this in a way that portrays a certain emotion? People that sing just by emotion tend to lose pitch a lot of times. Sometimes they’re voices will sound strange with cracking and sliding around. You can only sing that way for so long before you’re going to have vocal issues, and I think your overall performance will suffer.
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My Invention: Let Your Guitar Or Fiddle Right Hand Work Steal From Drum Paradiddles

Jan 122011
 

Here’s an interesting invention of mine. Yeah, I invented this, sure … so give me all the credit and royalties when y’all swipe it. (Ok, I know lots of other people practice like this, but it’s a new thing for me anyway.)

this is a new right-hand exercise that I’ve been using on flatpick guitar and on fiddle. I’m applying the concept of “paradiddles” from drum vocabulary to picking and bowing.

If you’re not familiar with paradiddles and other drum rudiments, just search the web and you’ll find lots about it. The key advantage of pulling paradiddles into picking and bowing is that they strengthen the independence of each stroke, make timing tighter, and thus richer and more explosive tone follows. A drummer wants left stick and right stick to be precise and independent. The same goes for pickers and fiddlers–work on these exercises to make your down stroke and up stroke more precise and independent.

Here are the three basic paradiddle exercises. Find a comfortable, relaxed speed on your metronome, and let your muscles nerd up for a while on this. The “d” means down stroke, “u” means up stroke. Play these patterns over some scales, one measure per scale tone. Or, get creative and play multiple scale tones per measure.

1. A measure of eighth notes: du dd ud uu

2. A measure of eighth-note triplets: dud udd udu duu

3. A measure of sixteenth notes: dudu dudd udud uduu

So there it is, just a simple idea that it’s good to break the “down followed by up followed by down” rule. Try doing these three exercises for a minute every day for the next week, and see if it helps your tone and timing. Then you can push the boundaries by playing these patterns at faster speeds, and by creating more complex patterns. Again, the goal here is that each stroke can be independent of the one before it, breaking the down-up-down-up habit.

I don’t recommend application of these paradiddles in actual performances. It’s just an exercise, just spending time in the gym to get ready for the tennis tournament.

I have some other right-hand exercises for guitar here at my music site.

Enjoy!

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