Vocal Precision Quotes

I think my style as far as vocal delivery and even down to the pronunciation of certain words is so deliberate.

I use Auto-Tune but it's not to mask anything. If you come to see me live, I can sing on the spot. Auto-tune is just for the recording. It keeps everything really precise.

I said to Mr. Pavarotti once ... a marvelous man and a great artist ... I said to him ... "Maestro, I'm having trouble closing out a note so that it's almost as thin as a butter knife ... finish it out quietly like that." I said, "I have trouble doing that. What do you think I should do?" He said, "Justa close up your mouth." That's all he said, and I fell on the floor. I thought he was gonna give me a dissertation.

With narration, you have to be very accurate with your voice. It's a good exercise to do.

If I had a pull on 'One of These Nights,' on the first high note on 'One of These Nights,' that was just a tiny hair flat or something, I could just feel Henley's eyes scouring into the back of my head. No mistakes were allowed, and it really kept the quality at a high level.

There are so many challenges and different parts to the job of singing. When you're in the studio, you have to be really, really, precise. You've got to keep everything clean and nice because that's going to be something that's down forever. And then you go onstage, and it's much more in the moment.

Singing bel canto is like walking on a tightrope - especially with a larger voice like mine.

The mastery of one's phonemes may be compared to the violinist's mastery of fingering. The violin string lends itself to a continuous gradation of tones, but the musician learns the discrete intervals at which to stop the string in order to play the conventional notes. We sound our phonemes like poor violinists, approximating each time to a fancied norm, and we receive our neighbor's renderings indulgently, mentally rectifying the more glaring inaccuracies.

Background singers who are any good have to be great imitators.

I never, my producer never, we never let myself just sing. We were always trying to get the perfect vocal.

French is, in many ways, more difficult for an English-speaking person to sing. It is so full of complex and trying vowels. It requires the utmost subtlety.