If you're serious about your band, and your bandmate-friend is not, level with your friend and stick to doing activities of friendship: eating out, talking, going to ball games (and playing cards). Painting: Card Players by Paul Cezanne.

Here is a common problem in bands. You start a band with your good friend. You’re not concerned with the fact that your friend doesn’t play well. You’re just glad to be making music.

Over time, it becomes apparent that your friend is not as committed as you are. Perhaps you study and he or she doesn’t. Perhaps you practice, but he or she doesn’t.

The progress of the band suffers and you suffer! The chain is as strong as its weakest link. But you don’t know how to handle this problem. After all, it’s your friend, maybe your best friend.

This is your first test of developing an attitude of professionalism – or at least seriousness.

If your friend won’t put the effort into improving, you need to replace him or her in the band. Don’t let a misguided sense of loyalty stop you from doing what you need to do – if your goal is to have a professional-sounding band. It’s not fair to you to be held back because you’re afraid to level with your friend.

If this person is truly a friend, go to the movies with him or her. Hang out, eat meals together, go to a ball game. Be a friend – but don’t let friendship interfere with a musical pursuit if your goal is to take it seriously.

Visit Chuck Anderson’s website to join his mailing list and learn about upcoming concerts. Buy his CDs and educational materials. And of course, become a Facebook fan.

Judy Rodman

Using your voice requires something you may not have considered: courage. Here is a list of questions to help you determine your level of courage. Are you brave enough to:

• Commit to the connection to your audience?

This means you would actually “look ‘em in the eye” so to speak — not just go through the motions or hold back in an insecure, guarded stance — but actually focus your communication like an icepick to move them emotionally.

• Allow a real part of yourself to become known?

To effectively connect, your audience needs to be able to tell that you are really with them. This requires that you truly give them a glimpse of at least part of who you are. There is a time to guard yourself… being onstage is not one of those times.

A consultation with a media expert or performance coach will help you determine what you will and will not expose about yourself to your audience. And a side note… you can keep part of you to yourself. The public does not own you or have access to you at all times. They just deserve an honest part of you while you perform, if you want to reach them.

• Let someone know you’re having trouble?

If you are having vocal strain, stage fright, difficulty connecting or numbing out in performance, trouble hitting notes or controlling your voice, substance abuse or eating issues, there is help. In this competitive music business world, there is a temptation to hide all weaknesses, and indeed in some quarters you should do so.

But you need to have safe places to get real, and friends/professionals to whom you can confide problems. Oh if only Elvis, Michael Jackson, Kurt Cobain, et al, had known this, we would still have them with us. And many other singers and speakers would not have fallen silent.

Real singing and public speaking is not for the squeamish. But when you gather your courage, get problems fixed, commit, reveal and connect – it’s a blast, believe me… and bungee jumping can’t compare with that rush!

Judy Rodman is a singer, songwriter, producer and vocal instructor in Nashville, Tennessee. In the 1980s, she topped the country music charts with the number one single “Until I Met You” and won the Academy of Country Music’s “Top New Female Vocalist” award in 1985. Her recorded songs include LeAnn Rimes’s number-one hit “One Way Ticket (Because I Can)” (co-written with Keith Hinton). Judy has developed Power, Path & Performance
a vocal technique she teaches and sells.

Steve Burks

The book Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else by Geoff Colvin helped me get over a misguided obsession with age and temporal starting points. Developing musical skill is about how effectively you practice and how much time you put in. Neither of those factors is obstructed by age. Focus and time. That’s all it’s about. Here are some excerpts from the book:

“One factor, and only one factor, predicted how musically accomplished the students were, and that was how much they practiced.” (pg. 18)

” … as most of us understand ‘talent,’ meaning an ability to achieve more easily … ” (pg. 19)

” … such findings do not prove that talent doesn’t exist. But they suggest an intriguing possibility: that if it does, it may be irrelevant.” (pg. 23)

” … talent is looking like an odd concept if it hasn’t made itself known after six years of hard study.” (pg. 24)

“For nearly two hundred years many people have believed that [Mozart] had a miraculous ability to compose entire major pieces in his head, after which writing them down was mere clerical work … based on a famous letter in which he says as much … The trouble is, this letter is a forgery …” (pg. 27)

” … a large mass of more recent evidence shows that memory ability is acquired, and it can be acquired by pretty much anyone.” (pg. 45)

“Many scientists and authors produce their greatest work only after twenty or more years of devoted effort, which means that in year nineteen they are still getting better … evidence showed clearly that people can keep getting better long after they should have reached their ‘rigidly determinate’ natural limits.” (pg. 62)

“Deliberate practice is characterized by several elements … it is activity designed specifically to improve performance … it can be repeated a lot … feedback on results is continuously available; it’s highly demanding mentally … and it isn’t much fun.” (pg. 66)

” … becoming significantly good at almost anything is extremely difficult without the help of a teacher or coach, at least in the early going.” (pg. 67)

“The great performers isolate remarkably specific aspects of what they do and focus on just those things until they are improved; then it’s on to the next aspect … Only by choosing activities in the learning zone can one make progress. That’s the location of skills and abilities that are just out of reach.” (pg. 68)

“The best performers … are in effect able to step outside themselves, monitor what is happening in their own minds, and ask how it’s going. Researchers call this metacognition … thinking about your own thinking.” (pg. 118)

“Deliberate practice activities are so demanding that no one can sustain them for long without strong motivation.” (pg. 134)

” … too much familiarity with a problem blinds a person to innovative solutions.” (pg. 160)

” … becoming world-class great at anything seems to require thousands of hours of focused, deliberate practice.” (pg. 171)

” … the brilliance of what has been achieved blots out any sight of what has been given up.” (pg. 178)

” … excellent performers suffer the same age-related declines in speed and general cognitive abilities as everyone else – except in their field of expertise.” (pg. 180)

“Landing on your butt twenty thousand times is where great performance comes from.” (pg. 188)

“Teresa Amabile of the Harvard Business School … proposed a simple hypothesis: ‘The intrinsically motivated state is conducive to creativity, whereas the extrinsically motivated state is detrimental.’ ” (pg. 191)

Read more about talent here.

Steve Burks is a graduate of the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music. Currently, he’s a vocalist and keyboardist in the International House of Blues Foundation’s “Blues School House,” a live musical presentation for 5th through 12th graders that traces the history of blues music and its influence on other forms of contemporary music.

I wrote this little script and sent it to the amazing Betsy Streeter, who created this amazing video.

Rick DiBiasio is the author of The Affluent Artist. His latest project is MiddleAgedCrazy.com.

Tony Bennett sings without a microphone at the end of each concert, because of something a cab driver once said to him. Photo source: Jazz at Lincoln Center. Tony Bennett with the Bill Charlap Trio.

Tony Bennett told an interviewer that he’s still performing at 84 because: “I can’t not do it.”  The legendary vocalist will be performing Saturday night (Aug. 28, 2010) here in Philadelphia at the Mann Center for the Performing Arts. David Patrick Stearns, a music critic from the Philadelphia Inquirer, did a fantastic interview with Bennett that was published in today’s paper. Below are some of the highlights from the interview, and more than a few words of wisdom from Tony Bennett:

David Patrick Stearns: I love the moment in your concerts, usually near the end, when you sing without a microphone. How did you come to do that?

Tony Bennett: Years ago when New York cabdrivers were all philosophers, I had one guy, he had a Brooklyn accent, who said, “All you guys are a bunch of bums. You use microphones. I grew up in an era when Al Jolson and Ethel Merman used to hit the back wall with their voice.” And that stayed with me. The microphone is almost like . . . an invisible curtain between you and the audience. When you eliminate the microphone, the curtain disappears. It’s like you’re visiting something really personal.

Stearns: Often, late-in-life singers maintain their voices but lose their fire for performing. They seem bored. I can’t imagine you falling into that.

Bennett: You should never be bored. In the Italian American neighborhood where I grew up, my siblings and I would entertain the family, and we were so young and cute that everybody loved us. That stayed with me the rest of my life. . . .Frank Sinatra was a great friend of mine and he made me realize that instead of being frightened of audiences, that they will help you. If you’re nervous . . . and if you want to do it right, they’ll support you. The old tradition that some audiences are cold is not true. That means the artist is cold. If the artist loves to perform and wants everybody to have a good time, the audience sees it right away. They know when you’re first walking onstage.

Stearns: How did you develop your singular jazz/pop singing style?

Bennett: I was told not to imitate singers; then you’ll only be part of the chorus. You have to imitate musicians. Find out how they’re phrasing. I like Art Tatum. He was the most unbelievable piano player. Stan Getz had this honeyed sound. I put those two together and got my own style.

Stearns: From there, you dipped into film and musical theater, but generally stuck to the concerts and recordings. In the heyday of the TV variety show, I don’t remember seeing you very often. Why is that?

Bennett: When I lived in Los Angeles, Fred Astaire would come by to chat, and he told me something that changed my life completely. Don’t make a move without care. You don’t know how quickly you can find yourself in an alley and saying, “How the heck did we get here?” If something is not completely right, I just say that I’m busy. I won’t make a move unless it’s just right for the audience and the musicians I’m performing with.

Stearns: You’ve talked about the battles with Columbia recording executives from Mitch Miller to Clive Davis, who pushed you to record music you disliked.

Bennett: Sometimes Mitch Miller would say, “You have to do this song!” And we’d battle about it. If it was real stupid I’d stay away from it. But every time I had a big million-seller, they’d say, “Record what you want.” Then I would do the American songbook. It ended up that I created this vast catalog of the American songbook albums during the years, and they never went to No. 1, but those are the ones that are still selling.

Stearns: What further recording plans do you have?

Bennett: Stevie Wonder keeps telling audiences that he wants to do an album with me. He once received the highest honor in France and he only now got around to picking it up 30 years later, so he’s a different kind of guy. Whenever it [the album] is, I’ll welcome it. Everybody’s reaction is “I can’t wait to hear it.”

Judy Rodman

Vocal embellishments, colloquially known as “vocal licks,” can enhance or detract from a vocal performance. When used correctly they:

• Make the sound of the singing more interesting
• Heighten emotional connection and response
• Make the voice feel better, not worse, by throwing off tension.

When used incorrectly they:

• Make the delivery of the song sound fake
• Flatten emotional connection and response
• Cause vocal strain just attempting them.

Here are some tips for doing them correctly:

• Learn to support and control your breath pressure! Not enough – or too much – breath pressure will sabotage any vocal lick, because it will not allow the tiny controlled movements of the diaphragm, which are necessary to power the vocal lick smoothly and accurately.
• Learn to use your hands, arms, other body parts to help accomplish licks.
• Learn how letting your tongue base, jaw hinge and soft palate relax enough so they can make the automatic, fine, quick movements necessary for creating the licks. Learn to “pull off” air pressure for certain licks much like the guitar “pull off” technique.
• Only do vocal licks where they – create interest/emotion in the language of your genre or - de-stress your cords.
• Get feedback from trusted source(s) about how your performance makes the listener feel.
• Learn the typical types of vocal licks, and where/when they are put in songs, of other master singers in the musical genre you are interested in singing so you can ‘speak the language.’
• Practice “scat singing,” a phrase that means just throwing some random vocal syllables around. Scat singing is typically performed over a song’s instrumental, tag or fade, but here’s Ella Fitzgerald scatting a whole song “One Note Samba”…

What has been your experience with vocal licks, embellishments, runs, flips, scats or whatever you call them?

Judy Rodman is a singer, songwriter, producer and vocal instructor in Nashville, Tennessee. In the 1980s, she topped the country music charts with the number one single “Until I Met You” and won the Academy of Country Music’s “Top New Female Vocalist” award in 1985. Her recorded songs include LeAnn Rimes’s number-one hit “One Way Ticket (Because I Can)” (co-written with Keith Hinton). Judy has developed Power, Path & Performance
a vocal technique she teaches and sells.