songs that are surprisingly hard to sing

I don't know how many people here sing much but I was just trying to learn the old standard "cry me a river," which only demands a huge range if you're super-babs'ing it, but some of these intervals are like they're written to make you look bad when you land sharp

destiny's child singles = karaoke minefield. people think they know them but start floundering within bars

xp - maybe it's just your range? I've always had an easy time with that one.

no I'm in range pretty easily here! it's the drop from the first "river" to the 2nd "cry" that ends up sounding like some guy in the orchestra pit clearing out the valves on his trombone

Guided By Voices - If We Wait

i think coming down to the pitch in that part actually is effective if the slide downward is breathier - like a sigh

I'm not a singer but I have trouble with that GBV one when I'm feeling it enough to sing along.

destiny's child singles = karaoke minefield.

to be fair, this is less due to inherent difficulty/unpredictability in the music and more related to their propensity to cram seventeen words onto an eighth note

sarahel we may be talking about diff. "cry me a river"s also

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAoABuJS1MA

this thread is nothing without people posting recordings of themselves

^^^ completely incredible performance by both pass & ella btw

xp well not 'nothing', it's still a p.good thread concept

no we're talking about the same song - she does what i'm trying to describe on the first "cry"

oh man great vid, and I can also see exactly the part that's givin' you trouble. wish I had some advice but uh just keep pluggin' away until you get it I guess!

I want to hit it clean like babs does before she goes all reach-the-rafters

it's a moot point kinda I'm just doing this in my living room it's not like I'm going to do anything more with it, it's just that I was singing it to myself and went "whoa - that's a lot trickier than it sounds!" which is sort of my favorite kind of compositional effect - the hidden complexity

for me, this is where it helps to have the music so I can see where it's supposed to fit in the chord

O Isis Und Osiris from Die Zaberflote.

rangewise for a bass, it's not difficult, but there are quite a few intervals that it is easy to go flat on, but it has to be precise to be effective. I guess I'd say its not easy to sing "well" (was a piece I used to do with an old voice teacher)

also in this song on the first "river" the melody demands that you hit "-ver" just exactly right - drop your guard for a second and the line will lose all its pathos, over-emphasize it and you're the chump who thinks the word is ri-VER instead of RIVer - that balance for me anyway makes landing on the note in a way that's effective just tricky enough to make me pause and go "damn dude that is a nice little melody/lyric interplay thing you've got goin there"

for me, it's a number of PJ Harvey songs where she does that loud whispery thing

also as a music nerd all I'm hearing is a descending 4th and it doesn't strike me as complicated as some of the extended chords or total progression shifts that kick in at other points in the song

the whole performance is based off of her knowing exactly what the harmonic structure of the song is and just smoothly singing into it

oh god if we're going into arias we should just list, like, all of them

i dunno - i feel like there's leeway on the second syllable of "river" - depending on how you are approaching it

xpost lol. well that was the first song that sprung to mind as I immediately had nightmares of my freshman year of college

xp - Dan - also songs where you have to sing very quickly in German

as far as pop songs go (leaving 'range' out of the equation), Boyz II Men's "4 Seasons of Loneliness" because of that fast little fluttery pre-chorus part.

I mean, "la ci darem" from Don Giovanni to thread etc etc

xp: heh this is a case where intensive study of the language in high school paid off for me big time, because if there's one language besides English that I'm not at all terrified to sing it's German

oh, it isn't terrifying - it's just a real workout sometimes - like St. John's Passion

I was always better at Italian

when we did "Der Freichuetz" I was in HEAVEN and everyone else wanted to die

Italian is the BANE OF MY EXISTENCE

possibly my favorite thing in the world to sing is "Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied" but no one would be surprised at how hard that can be

Italian is the easiest - like almost everyone I knew who did classical voice training started with Italian

I did a bit of German. I remember singing some song that I forget the name of, but the lyrics were something like "es redet un troimet de jugend so viel, von tanzen gallopen galagen...." (spelling all wrong cuz I only took German for a year)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsYoZ2iZvqk&feature=related

I mean, on the one hand this is okay but on the other hand NO STOP IT BOTH OF YOU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ztc_lAb5Ws

it's not really surprising that a Brian Wilson composition should be hard to sing, but the first line of the chorus here (the "girl don't tell me you'll wri-hi-hite" @ 1:00) is very counter-intuitive for me. I tend to sing the first syllable of "wri-hi-hite" a full note lower than I should, so that my "hi-hite" ends up being the same two notes as Carl's "wri-hi". I think I sing "wri-hi-hite" as E-F#-A, whereas the right way is F#-A-B. I know next to nothing about music theory, so I'm not sure why this bit throws me off so badly.

(I can't sing for shit btw)

i once heard an interview with a professional singing coach who said that one of the hardest songs to sing is the happy birthday song. something about how it's slow and each note is drawn out and the melody is kind of awful. & also that the reason people often think of themselves as bad singers is because that's the only time they sing. ever since then i've thought about this while singing/hearing others sing happy birthday and it's actually weirdly otm

the star spangled banner.

Another problem with Happy Birthday is that when groups of people sing it, they usually all start off picking their own key at random, and then more or less shifting to a kind of consensus key. This can have a particular grating effect on anyone listening.

Another problem with Happy Birthday is that when groups of people sing it, they usually all start off picking their own key at random, and then more or less shifting to a kind of consensus key. This can have a particular grating effect on anyone listening.

a lot of men don't have the range to sing it in the same key from start to finish, unless they're willing to either (1) start the song in an infrasonic blue whale moan until the song to a reasonable pitch, or (2) start off in a reasonable pitch until the high notes reduce their voices to pubescent cracks and squeaks, à la Peter Brady. the less embarrassing alternative is to switch keys halfway through and hope the rest of the group picks up on it (which never happens).

(until the song climbs to a reasonable pitch, I mean)

m0stlyClean OTM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SHnpWohrg0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeBrjaohiJU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEonEZ9K-p8
and the list goes on

bad renditions of the Star Spangled Banner give me so much happiness

that hockey one is just...wow

that last one is almost like a Schoenberg reinterpretation

last one is my now my favorite song ever

Barrington Levy - Here I Come
Scatman - Scatman

PRetty much anything by Manic Street Preachers - JDB's register is a strange contra-falsetto or something.

It's also impossible for humans to sing the sound of church bells. Try it. It just comes out as "Weeeeerrrrrreeee"

where's that thread talking about aha - "take on me" with the I-XI-XII jump?

Painkiller by Judas Priest

thank you, I win

Crikey, that's right about 'Take On Me' - what a wide range for such a short phrase. Morten also holds the record for the longest-held note in any hit song (can't remember which song, but I expect it'd be hard to sing properly too)

Tool's Eulogy

xp It's 'Summer Moved On', which I have never heard. Bill Withers' 'Lovely Day' is next-longest.

It's really good!

every song is hard for me to sing :(

mariah carey - emotions
snow - informer

love the happy birthday analysis

i had a hard time singing 'reeling in the years' at karaoke, but i think that's just cuz it's kinda fast and i was drunk :|

anyway anytime I get depressed about how terrible I am at singing I remind myself that bernard sumner has made a career out of it so I just need to concentrate on my synth programming and drum breaks and

Oh man I really cannot sing at all, which is sad but ok because mostly I am never expected to (sometimes I get myself into trouble when I start a sentence "oh yeah, you must know that song, it goes... uhh... well here are some words which you won't recognise it from"), but Happy Birthday is the one thing that you are expected to sing, and not singing at all and making hideous out-of-tune noises are equally unacceptable options

I am an only child and both of my parents are in choirs and pretty good singers, so I wd dread parental birthdays for this, because it would usually just be the three of us and the non-birthday parent would be singing and showing off with little extra descant fills and stuff, and I would always know there was basically no chance of me hitting any of the same notes or providing the basic tune to their improvised harmonies, but they would always start with the WHY AREN'T YOU SINGING

ack

Handel to thread

I am an only child and both of my parents are in choirs and pretty good singers, so I wd dread parental birthdays for this, because it would usually just be the three of us and the non-birthday parent would be singing and showing off with little extra descant fills and stuff, and I would always know there was basically no chance of me hitting any of the same notes or providing the basic tune to their improvised harmonies, but they would always start with the WHY AREN'T YOU SINGING

that's a fantastic image, like something out of arrested development!