Basics of Singing: Intonation

(read time: 4 minutes)

I’ve spent most of my career teaching people the tenants of great singing. One of the things people fail to understand is that great singing—great performing—is governed by four distinct principles.

1. ion

2. Intonation

3. Message

4. Articulation

If you hear something you don’t like in a singer’s performance, it’s that one or more of these components is a little bit off. How many times have you heard a judge on a reality show say something like “it was a little pitchy for me“ or “It sounded nice, but I couldn’t understand anything you were saying” or “I just didn’t believe you.”

Most people can identify well-executed music when they hear it with no musical background whatsoever. Whether they like it or not is a different story because there’s a certain level of subjectivity when you talk about any of the performing arts.

Intonation

Intonation is a purely objective principle. The word itself essentially means accuracy of pitch. Whether you’re playing an instrument or singing the idea is that the note that you’re playing or singing will be “in tune” With the rest of the notes in the song. When something’s out of tune you know it immediately. For example, in traditional Western harmony the A above middle C—designated as C4 on the piano keyboard— will sound at 440hz.

Try not to get too caught up in the technical jargon, but the important thing to is that the A above middle C sounds at 440Hz.

Now, if A sounds at 442Hz, it seems a little bit off. It’s sharp. It’s not sharp enough to be another pitch, but deviant enough to sound wrong.   If it sounds at 438 Hz, it will still sounds off because it’s flat, but again, not flat enough to warrant a completely different pitch designation. This is the difference between being sharp or being flat, and when you combine a sharp note with a flat note, it sounds very dissonant. Dissonance isn’t necessarily a bad thing altogether, but for the general purposes of this discussion, it’s something to be avoided.

Pitch problems often arise when a singer doesn’t intrinsically know what the next note is. When you don’t know what you’re supposed to be singing, how are you supposed to have your brain tell the voice what to do?

The other major pitfall with singing under or over pitch is having learned it incorrectly to begin with. The best example I can think of is Happy Birthday to You. The third “Bir” in “Birthday” is almost always under pitch (or flat). That jump is written—and it was intended that it be performed—as a perfect octave; however, what we almost always end up with is something between a major seventh and a perfect octave.

Pitch problems are some of the most pervasive in vocal performance, and they can only be mitigated once you know they exist. It doesn’t matter if you’re an amateur or professional. At some point in almost any song—regardless of style or genre—you are bound to hear some sort of intonation issue.

How do you fix the problem?

The first thing you have to do is stop singing along with the recording. When you sing along with the recorded rendition from the original artist, that recording is going to be masking any mistakes that you make.

That’s one of the primary reasons a lot of people find it so much easier to sing in groups. It gives you a sense of security because the guy next to you might be singing the right thing while you’re singing the wrong thing and vice versa. It takes a skilled ear—from a conductor or expert singer—to identify when something’s off. The ultimate goal is to be able to self correct.

Now that you’re not singing along with the recording, you can hear everything you’re doing and it’s going to be uncomfortable. What’s even more uncomfortable but at the same time more useful is recording yourself singing a cappella. At that point when you listen back, you hear every nuance of what came out of your mouth, and hopefully you’ll be able to identify when something is sharp or flat.

Obviously, this is a very simplified explanation of the concept, but it’s often overlooked. So I thought I’d address it!

:ok_hand: I’ll cover the others soon :ok_hand:

Thanks for reading!

:microphone: Keep singing! :microphone:

#featureworthy