D for Day and Th for They

If you’re not a native speaker of English, you might struggle to hear and to reproduce the difference between d and th (ð) sounds. Don’t give up! If you sing ‘dey‘ instead of ‘they‘ or sing ‘dose‘ instead of ‘those,’ you sound as if you have a very bad cold. To a native speaker, you sound as if your nose is blocked. That’s not an attractive thought to put in their mind. You can’t avoid the soft th of English. The word the is the most common word in the English language.

Listen to the Mamas and the Papas singing California Dreaming. Focus on the clear, clean d of dreaming, day and down. Fix that sound in your head. Enjoy the bathtub dancers.

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The Ghostly D of Plan B

Watch Plan B sing “She Said.” He chose to include the actual phrase ‘she said’ 17 times in his song. The repetition is pure percussion. But his voice weaves a story around that repetition. Sometimes he lands on the d of said hard, sometimes softly. And you, the listener, read him through the subtle messages contained within that choice. Just as the jury, and his girlfriend read him.

Why doesn’t he sing said exactly the same each time? Who is he trying to convince when he sings it: the jury, his girlfriend or himself? Watch his target change as the song goes on:

Love: what does it rhyme with?

If you want to sing in English, the word love is hard to avoid. Sadly, it’s a word that lots of non-native speakers of English find hard to pronounce. Try this: does love rhyme with prove, drove or above? After all, they’ve all got ‘ove‘ in the middle, haven’t they? So they must rhyme with each other, mustn’t they? Well…let’s see… Here’s Tom Jones singing “Delilah.” Listen out for love and drove (1.04). Do they rhyme?

From Lorca to Leonard Cohen and back again

It’s a marvellous thing to write music that suits the original flamenco Spanish of the Lorca  poem as much as your English translation:

 

A squillo

It’s a lovely thing to see image and movement in the service of knowledge.  Ming Luke provides the words, Franz Palomares brings them to life and Ted-Ed provides the screen:

© Sing Better English 2020

What the Stranglers did to their Diphthongs

R.I.P. Dave Greenfield. Keyboardist, songwriter and singer.

When you listen to the Stranglers’ song Golden Brown, pay close attention to the way Hugh Conwell sings the word brown:

Lighting every step on the Stairway to Heaven

Stairway to Heaven is a classic choice for song contests.  If English is your native language, don’t take the words of this song for granted. If English isn’t your native language, don’t take the words of this song for granted. The words matter.

They matter, but they’re not a liturgy.  Dave Grohl captures the heart of the song without reciting every word in order. Or at all:

Bunraku

Because singing is communicating and connecting. And because all the arts inform each other:

Making music

Music: Poppy Ackroyd

Director: Ainslie Henderson

Producers: Puppet Animation Scotland

Akala: Carried Away

The mouth is almost like a percussive instrument. If you use it in the right way, your flow can have melody coming from the vowel sounds, but then percussion coming from the consonant sounds. And your flow of how you divide up these consonants and vowels determines how nice an instrument your rapping can become.

Akala

Lady Leshurr

“I started thinking, ‘You know what? Why don’t I just rap?’ Because it’s just poetry with a beat behind it, really.”

Lady Leshurr in The Guardian.

Jazz, respect and memory

What’s a Polish song doing on a blog about singing in English? Blaszane Mordy is here to show that connecting with a song is a conscious skill, and an ability, that transcends language. You don’t need to understand Polish to ‘understand’ Lautari‘s Blaszane Mordy. Emotion pulses within the shape of the words alone: