2. Song #1 'I Know Where I've Been'

For our assessment we were asked to pick two solo songs, I found this a little bit difficult if I'm honest as my voice is unique in a way that it doesn't quite fit most songs sung by women as they are quite high or men's songs as they are too low, so finding common ground was hard. However, I chose I Know Where I've Been from Hairspray as my first song. 

This song in particular suited my voice best because of the range and the power. Whilst I am not particularly a soul or gospel singer I still think this was the best choice, this song also carries great meaning behind the lyrics that also help with I sing it as well.

Having good lyrics behind a song can help with your onsets, it creates the emotion. This song as an example is about integration, unity, loss and love which can create a lot of powerful overwhelming emotions which leads to a lot glottal and aspirate onsets. The character Motormouth Maybelle sings this song, in the show she is shown as a very strong and flamboyant person who likes to speak up for her community which is as an ethnic minority. Motormouth's intentions in this song is to tell Tracy about her struggles being part of the community and how she has been treated, in this part of the show she is teaching Tracy why it is dangerous to side with them during this time. This effects the techniques as it shows a lot of upset and exhaustion. 


 
Here we have the first verse of the song, the common things that can be seen is there is a lot of aspirate both onset and offset, this emphasizes the strong emotions I mentioned before. In the first verse you can also see there is a few times where vibrato fade comes in this shows the use of emotion within the voice, it creates a feeling of giving up and exhaustion which in an ironic way is the opposite of what the song is about. 

This song suits my character type as I am a woman with a deeper voice therefor I thought this song would suit me best especially with the use of soul in the song which is something I resonate with a lot and can communicate with my voice.

First Practice

My first practice https://youtu.be/DEaJk3IYFWQ

In one of the first practices I did with this song, you can see it is within the early stages as I did not push any character and I used my phone to keep track of the lyrics. The whole point of this song is to feel the emotion and spirit about the struggles they have faced.

I tried numerous amount of techniques within this, in the first verse you can hear I used a lot of aspirate techniques both onset and offset, I tried to use this to keep in tact with emotion that is communicated in the lyrics - trying to give it that almost whispering, tired sound.

In the parts where the ensemble is used you can hear a lot of glottal attacks, this is to keep the emotions but communicate it a lot harsher and more upsetting in a way that is easy for the audience to understand. In this bridge section I used vibrato as well, this is what is used in the studio recorded version of the song done by Queen Latifah I think personally this worked well with my voice as I have a good sense of control.

In the final part of the song there is a lot of big notes that require a lot of breath, originally when I first thought about doing this song I was against doing these notes as I had a lack of confidence however, when I tried it in this practice it worked well because of the key of the song, it was easy for me to hold these notes. In the final big note of the song it is meant to trail off onto much lower notes which I wanted to do as I saw this is as a good opportunity to showcase my ability to change key however, when I tried this it felt like it wasn't necessary to my perception of the character.

Final performance

https://youtu.be/w0mBE9bfl6U

In the final performance I used this song in the showcase because I feel like the song today is still very relevant and it fitted nicely. 

You can see in the video that I pushed character a lot more throughout this than my practice. You can hear in the song I kept the already identified techniques throughout using a lot of aspirate offsets to keep that soft and emotional feeling however you can hear the one thing I did change is the ending note, instead of trailing it off like the actual recorded version I decided to hold the note instead, this was way more comfortable for me and it still had that same energy and feeling.

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