No, You Can't Sound Like Your Favorite Artist

But there's a very good reason why - and it's not your fault!

I was in a voice lesson, working with one of my adult clients. We were digging into a Chappell Roan song, and, to my ears, everything was going along swimmingly, when the student suddenly said, “I’m so frustrated, I can’t get this part to sound like the recording!” ”Oh,” I replied, “well, that’s because what you’re hearing there isn’t real.” Wait, what? Please allow me to explain. :)

My student Emily, performing in a Showcase Experience with the Studio that required live mixing during the performance to recreate the sounds of her favorite Artist.

What You Need To Know About the Music Industry An issue I encounter again and again in the voice studio is singers tying themselves up in knots trying to replicate a sound that is simply not acoustically produced by a human voice.It is a ubiquitous fact that audio engineering and sound mixing is an industry standard, but very few music consumers are aware of this fact. This technology is not new - though its use and capabilities have increased exponentially since it first hit the scene 60-70 years ago, depending how you count it. When you listen to a recording, it has had layers of editing applied to it. The performer has likely done multiple takes of the song, with the audio engineer taking the best ones - or even more commonly, splicing bits together -so the track you are listening to might very well be one to two words from multiple takes, all spliced together. Then, there are the audio editing layers. Sound gets layered on top of each other, looped, boosted, and a number of additional fancy things added to it. Matt Edwards has an absolutely brilliant breakdown of this in his video covering Billie Eilish’s track Ocean Eyes, which I highly recommend. It’s very worth the 10 minutes to deepen your understanding of how this technology works.

Live Singing Is Mixed, Too! But what about live singing, Kim? Surely that is unedited, right?I hate to break it to you, but when you are listening to any high-level, amplified (i.e. uses microphones) performance, mixing, compression, EQ, and reverb are being added to the sound that you hear. This applies to your favorite touring artists, local bands that play at a high level/with good equipment, and yes, even live on Broadway! (and for sure in those cast recordings you’ve sung along with eleventy billion times)

The Big Caveat So, does this mean my favorite singers are a sham? That no one I’m listening to is actually any good? That they are being assisted by all this technology, and this is an existential crisis of the quality of live singing in the modern market??? Absolutely not.Your favorite singers absolutely are fierce vocal athletes, accomplishing incredible mind-blowing vocal feats on the daily, and they are absolutely worth emulating. The trick is knowing what, exactly, is reasonable for you to be attempting acoustically, with your own voice. How Can I Know If What I’m Hearing Is Acoustically Equivalent? The first step is knowing it’s probably not. But, hear are some things to listen for that can tip you off to what might be going on behind the scenes in the audio engineering booth.

• The singer is singing with an incredibly soft, breathy texture, but it is just as loud in your ear as their louder moments. This is not reality - breathy singing is inherently a low volume production. The use of compression boosts this to create a homogenous effect.

• All parts of the voice are of equivalent volume. The voice will naturally shift in volume across it’s range. For example, a high voice will naturally get louder as it goes higher, and softer as they approach the bottom of their range (this is an oversimplification, but roll with me) - and it takes a herculean vocal effort to maintain equal volume across the vocal range at all times. If that is what you’re hearing, it’s probably not what the artist is actually doing. (Hello again, compression!)

• There’s tons of echo and it sounds like they’re singing in a cathedral (reverb). 90+% of recordings are made in a dry studio like the image below- so this is added in after.

  Again, I refer to my colleague Matt Edwards who has another fantastic video sampling the different sounds you can achieve via mic effects.

Recording studio at JamSpot in Wakefield, where I host my Studio performances. I highly recommend working with them!

• The singer consistently performs the song live in a lower key than the studio recording. This is SO common - because of all the tech above - the singer can get that one perfect take. THIS IS NOT ME SAYING THEY CAN’T SING IT CONSISTENTLY IN THAT KEY. What they can’t do is deliver a stellar live performance in that key with the added demands of a grueling tour schedule, illness, normal life stuff, and oh I don’t know, dancing their faces off? But, if they never perform the song live in that crazy high key - why are you expecting yourself to? Adjust thine expectations. So, If you’ve ever found yourself bashing your proverbial head (or vocal cords) against the wall, frustrated that you can’t get your singing to sound exactly like your favorite recording - it turns out there’s very good reason why the struggle is so real! And, if you’d like some assistance in parsing this all out, and learning what you can do with your own voice, I’m currently enrolling in my voice studio. Drop me a line here, and let’s chat!