November 13 2007
Tips for Singing While Playing Guitar
You know and I know playing guitar can be a beautiful thing. Some melody and rhythm can bring about the best of the human spirit and put it on display musically. There are also genres that sound great when all you hear is the guitar, stripped of the special effects, and the distortion; a lot of you like fingerstyle acoustic or classical guitar for that reason, I’d bet.
However there’s one thing you can add that can just take your playing over the edge and give it powerful soul, and that’s your voice. Probably every guitarist has tried to sing and play, I’m sure with varying degrees of success. So, what’s the reason for the difficulty, and what can you do that helps to overcome it?
Syncopating your voice to a guitar piece can can range in difficulty from “piece ‘o cake” to “friggin’ near impossible”. The difficulty will be due in large part to your skill level and comfort with the guitar, and in part due to the complexity of the piece of music you’re playing. For example if your strumming a simple 1-2-3-4 chord pattern on your guitar, it’s pretty easy to sing over that because your strumming hand isn’t doing much more than keeping beat like tapping your foot or tapping your finger on a table–1-2-3-4. But…
What gets tricky is when your strumming hand is playing something much more rhythmic, and add to that some complicated fingerings and you’ll have the formula for “how the hell do I sing over that”. 
Don’t worry, you’re not the only one. The majority of radio friendly songs aren’t going too be too difficult, but certainly some will be, and if you’re into a demanding genre like thrash metal it’s time to think about a strategy for approaching the vocals. Simply playing guitar riffs up to speed and trying to force yourself to sing along with a recorded song can lead to frustration quickly.
Here are 5 tips for successful vocals, whether your just starting to play, or your playing advanced riffage.
Tips for Singing While Playing Guitar
- Practice the riff, then practice it again.
Know the riff so well, and have it ingrained in your brain to the nth degree. You need to be able to play the riff and have a conversation with someone else in the room without skipping a beat. The riff should become almost involuntary like a heartbeat. This is especially important for complicated music. - Listen carefully.
Okay, you might think this is obvious, but I’ve found it’s easy NOT to listen carefully, and it’s easy to want to rush into playing and singing. If you don’t take your time and listen to the music you’re trying to sing–and I’m assuming here for many of you you’re working on singing something that you didn’t write yourself–then you may be practicing mistakes. Unfortunately when you practice mistakes you train yourself to sing it the wrong way. Slow down and take time to listen carefully to each bar of the music. If you have an MP3 player or CD player put on some headphones so you can tune the world out and get intimate with the music. You might find after careful listing that some singers come in just before or after the beat, or during mid measure. It’s hard to pick up on details like this without a careful listen. - Slow it down, and break it down.
Break the riff into parts and practice rhythmically vocalizing the lyrics over the riff slowly. Take it a measure at a time. Don’t worry about sounding good at this point, singing is rhythmic and the challenge here is to make sure you’re saying the right words at the right time. - Put down the guitar and come back.
If you find a part of the song that is very tricky and you’re getting frustrated–stop! Take a break and come back. Often with a refreshed ear your vocals will click in to place and you’ll hear the music more clearly.
I’m sure these aren’t the only tips that are helpful, but these are the tips that have worked for me and some of my students. If you’ve got some of your own tips, I’d really like to hear about them. Drop your tips in the comments below.
One thing that helps for me is to think of the overall melody line – which starts with the first note of the song and finishes with the last, and is passed back and forth between the voice and all the other instruments in the band including your guitar. Your contribution to the melody line is your voice and your guitar – just play and sing the notes one after another as they come, thinking all the time of the *whole* sound you’re trying to make.
When you’ve got used to thinking like that, you can expand it to thinking harmonically, too. Multi-string harmonic leads or voice and guitar in harmony can also be thought of as following the line, except you have to think of the tonal colour of the harmonic combination replacing the simple pitch of a single note.
Does that sound like gobbledygook? Read it again, and think about it next time you’re listening to a piece of music. It will come right.
yeah, it gets hard for me too. i mean playing something like the scientist or dare you to move isnt tough but something like dirty second hands or meant to live…i have to stop and go away and come back to not get frusterated…and then you have picking riffs like One or sliding down from 9-6-3 while shouting Stars at the top of your lungs…
its all about practice, like you said. know them well so you dont freak out.
“…you’ll here the music more clearly.”
I tend to lose a lot of respect for people who can’t spell anyway but a site about music that can’t even spell the word “hear” correctly, that’s unforgivable.
Hey Yahweh, I fixed the typo. Thanks. I know you can’t forgive me, but look on the bright side, I didn’t spell it correctly in the next to last sentence.
Hey Palmyrah thanks for your ideas.
I like your point about thinking of the whole sound. I think I sometimes tend to focus so much on one aspect of a sound that I forget and neglect the rest. I’ve gotten better about this over the years, but it’s something I find I have to remember to remind myself about.
Singing and playing a new song (especially complicated rhythm like metal) is often like tapping your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time. At first it’s awkward as hell but you catch on after doing it a while.
WHERE IS THE FIFTH TIP?!?