Are You Still Stuck With Emulating Others Or Have You Found Your Identity?

[hecklerkoch]

Ya, you guessed it.

A lot of singers start out singing and trying to sound like their favourite vocalists and rock stars, tone and all.

It is a good start because you can practice to your beloved songs, whatever the genre is BUT I am wondering - how long do singers typically do that?

As in do they end up 'being somebody else' all their lives, whether recreationally or professionally (I mean, those club singers lah), or they make effort to find their own voice and identity, and let others see them for who they are, and not who they are trying to be?

 

[Inklusiv]

Sadly, yes.

I still think I'm Bon Jovi =(

 

[wennny]

i think it's about knowing which vocal techniques (if this is the right word, e.g. slurs) make your voice shine, and using them. also learning to interpret songs creatively, based on their basic melodies and lyrics and just give it a go! haha.

this said, i've been mimicking singers til i realized i was hurting my voice. each person's voice suits diff singing styles i guess. rarh still learning =)

 

[sage]

I've been singing under mixed vocal influences so I didn't end up getting too attached to either attempted vocalist 'copying' as time goes by.. it just keeps changing until I ended up with my own style.. which was a mix of everyone's style

That took about.. close to a decade?

 

[enzoalec92]

I started out trying to learn from so-called "pros" but found out that my style was different. So I started experimenting with other vocalists' styles. That's because everyone's singing style is different. That's what keeps the music industry going (duh)... But now my style's a mixture of Gerard Way from MCR, Cove Reber from Saosin, Ronnie Winter from The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus and Shane Told from Silverstein. In a way, I've sort of "learnt" (or you can call it blind copying) from their styles because it suits me. I guess that's the reason why there's a term called an "influence".

 

[jianrong]

Actually i could said I have found my own identity. Because when i sing, i dont sound like any of the singer at all. Just that my own identity is still far behind being weak.

 

[KhaiHan]

to me being able to put in my personal feelings and emotions into the song and if the audience gets it, i consider myself successful.

 

[jeremyspk]

I've been singing without imitating others.. trying to develop my own identity..
then there's this period of time when I'm training my upper range and learning how to go into mix (i'm still learning), i begin to learn how to connect them and hit high notes comfortably (comfortable to people's ears also) using a way to sing that i discovered along the way. And, that singing style sounds like another artiste whom I don't even have a single song of his in my itunes. Man, so did i get my style?

 

[tpiledriver]

yeah, jeremy's a good vocalist.
and we shld have our own identity and flair of singing..

 

[enzoalec92]

In some ways, I find that even if you sound just like another vocalist, as long as you can really feel the emotions of the song or put your emotions into singing it, you've actually sort of found your style. Just like screaming, when you scream, you have to feel the frustration of the song to scream, otherwise it's just plain pointless to do so. Screamo is for the frustrated after all. (See also my "How to do screamo?" forum)