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hi friends,
while i am sure many of you who are students are relishing in the feeling of SCHOOL IS OVER! SUMMER IS HERE AT LAST! HUZZAH!, I, along with the countless other misguided souls who are thinking of taking the bar exam this July, have started that dreaded process of bar review. It pretty much amounts to condensing more than three years of ( Read more... )
while i am sure many of you who are students are relishing in the feeling of SCHOOL IS OVER! SUMMER IS HERE AT LAST! HUZZAH!, I, along with the countless other misguided souls who are thinking of taking the bar exam this July, have started that dreaded process of bar review. It pretty much amounts to condensing more than three years of ( Read more... )
yeah, my point was pretty much that instrumentalists have a good sense of pitch AND rhythm whereas too many singers have a good sense of pitch but a REALLY bad sense of rhythm. This is just from personal observation in the various choirs I have been in and from talking to singers who also play instruments or did in the past (which would be me). since you're in a conservatory (which is awesome - what do you play?) I am sure this is all old news to you, but i think the discrepancy between singers and musicians is in the nature of our instruments. singing is such an inexact, mushy science compared to instruments, so I think singers have a correspondingly mushy grasp of music. i am only really familiar with the piano, but on a piano, you know very well the difference between say, an A and an A flat. in singing, we don't really hit the note dead on like the piano and are always sort of singing a bunch of microtones, and it's a lot easier to kind of stray towards the A flat range even when supposedly singing an A. I guess it's what makes the human voice so versatile and expressive but it's also what makes it so difficult I guess...
Okay i can talk about this forever, but I feel like you know all of this already lol. in brief, my answer is that instrumentalists are superior in sense of pitch AND rhythm to vocalists. can you detect any jealousy on my part? lol.
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Haha, I'm not exactly part of a conservatory; I just take examinations set out by the Royal Conservatory of Music. I play the piano, and have some experience with the flute from my elementary school days. I am also tragically out of practice with both instruments. And it's great that you also play the piano! Have you been playing for long? Do you still play?
I agree that pitch is harder to control for vocalists than for instrumentalists because of the instruments themselves. Once tuned, an external instrument just stays tuned until stress untunes its sound, while the human voice is mutable at all times. Though, I also think stringed instrumentalists who aren't as sensitive to pitch run the risk of tuning to the wrong frequency, which reminds me a bit of the hurdles vocalists face.
LOL OMG INSTRUMENTALISTS ARE SO NOT SUPERIOR WHAT ARE YOU ON. Well, okay, I understand that what you mean is that instrumentalists must have a good sense of rhythm to play a piece well while singers usually don't (or something along the lines of that) but seriously, most instrumentalists I know have senses of rhythms that are reminiscent of roadkill. There is a reason almost every instrumentalist practices with a metronome! (Or SHOULD practice with a metronome!) Keeping rhythm internally is a difficult skill to develop and I don't think enough musicians actually focus enough on that skill to keep it consistently, barring the professional ones.
I feel like it's likely a case of instrumentalists (who mostly practice solo) being required to have senses in pitch and rhythm, even though so many fail to develop them properly. It's not to say that singers have practice and training any easier, it's just - again - the nature of the instrument's need. After all, solo instrumentalists don't normally have others keeping beat for them. I suppose the corollary is that singers are usually more in tune with pitch (ha, ha) than instrumentalists! Was it like that in your choirs?
I share your envy of folks with senses of rhythm. I'm always so amazed when rock or metal bands have enough rapport to just launch into a song right on beat without any external visible cues. If anything, I'm most envious of drummers and beatboxers! I just can't even fathom what it takes to keep that kind of beat going. I swear my Chopins kill my houseplants.
/tl;dr MUSIC IS TRICKY AND HARD AND AWE-INSPIRING. ♥
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