bigsciota wrote:
With all due respect, this makes very little sense. Amplification and recording technology make having to project or blend with anything fairly moot. And the whole "pushing into head voice without being relaxed" thing confuses me as well, because there are plenty of singers with great, "relaxed" technique who nonetheless sound "whiny" to you.
Can you name some? When I talk about relaxation, I'm talking about the mechanics of falsetto vocal production. As a baritone who sings alto, I know quite a bit about how this works. Yes, digital production techniques might make much of this irrelevant. But who cares? The recordings I'm talking about are all analog era.
In any case, if you reread this thread, I believe there's only one artist whom I have IDed as whiny, and with him it's as much a matter of his tone as his lyrics . You're making definitive - and false - statements about what I do and do not believe. You are not qualified to do so. It is my opinion that you have no idea what you're talking about.
bigsciota wrote:And as for your Freddy Mercury "explanation," he's quite clearly emphasizing "thrown it all away" by adding a bit of a growl to it. Same with the rest of it, it's all interpretation of the text. ....
There's no technique or vocal issues with any of it, it's just a sound that you don't like and others do. So what?
If you think I don't like it, you have completely misread me. My point is that the growl he adds is exactly mirrored by the growl in May's guitar part, and that these need to match each other. If Mercury had persisted in singing over the guitar as he had over his piano, it would have sucked. That's my point. Different backing requires a different vocal quality.
bigsciota wrote:He'd probably do the same if he was backed by a ukulele.
No he wouldn't, and if he did, the mismatch between the vocal and the accompaniment would have destroyed the effect he was trying to produce. Brian May's crunchy guitars mirrored the 'desperate' vocals Mercury was singing, and vice versa.
The vocalist needs crunch to match the guitars, and the guitars need crunch to reflect the angst in the emotion. Both the vocals and the guitars need to demonstrate 'crunch' at the same moments. And vice versa. What's difficult to understand about that?
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Freddie Mercury isn't the paragon of vocals, although he was a virtuoso. I cited Bohemian Rhapsody not for it's excellence, but because of the wide variation in backing instrumentation which makes it easy in the same song to compare vocal quality to accompaniment. It's a rock song that's half not rock. Great for comparison. I believe I demonstrated that there is a qualitative difference in the vocals when Mercury was singing over acoustic instruments, v.s. when he sang over crunchy guitars. My thesis is that this difference in vocal purity is necessitated by the requirements of singing over characteristic rock crunchy guitars, and that the need to provide 'crunch' in the high tenor register is why male rock vocalists don't demonstrate the purity of sopranos who sing rock. There are plenty of altos, like Janis Joplin, who crunch as hard as the boys.
I believe that this is exactly what I have demonstrated. Sorry if you missed it.