Singers Who Could Totally Notewatch (658 views)

[BAZanine]

To be clear: if you can match pitch, you can notewatch. It doesn't take much more than that to get started. But this thread is for discussing singers who have more expressly shown us their nerdy side to this end.

This thread was inspired by my favorite dead horse to beat, Frank Sinatra. Frank had a very well-documented sense of pitch which apparently made him at times hellish to work with. If one person in his orchestra backing hit a bum note, he was apparently able to suss out exactly who did it and, given his mob connections, you don't wanna be the one who did it. I kind of doubt Frank had such a stupidly refined sense as to think "that was an A2" or "constipated E♭4," but he had a pretty clear knowledge of his own vocal limits and, as a result, the keys each song would be in. He'd shit out a D2 if he felt like it, but you better believe he'd never be caught doing the same thing a half-step down. As such, I haven't a doubt that he'd be able to pick up notewatching pretty easily, that is of course assuming he wasn't litchrully facking dead.

So, that's a start. Feel free to postulate about any other singers with such overt understandings of pitch and such. 

[kaji]

Durand Bernarr would shitpost about vocal range all the time on his Twitter and post the most random notes from C8 to some deep fry, and would link vocal range videos. So safe to assume he'd do this thing. Or even did it.

[Bink]

Charlie Puth. I don't think I need to explain why.

[Yojojo]

Jacob Collier. No doubt that he would list everybody's vocal range with half sharps and half flats.

[Tetra]

Lin-Manuel Miranda notewatched The Rock for Moana lmao

[Electric Mami]

Justin Bonitz is not only a vocalist but also a vocal coach who very much is into the nerdy stuff and has great technical knowledge, so I'd definitely see him doing good notewatching. He even made a video about his own vocal range so he's also well aware of pitching
Chris Liepe I suppose counts as a vocalist too; he's mostly a vocal coach and he's quite thorough in his reaction and analysis videos. Now I don't know how good his pitching is, but I would suppose he has good relative pitch at the very least given his constant exposure to the more technical part of music

[Hennessy Macklemore III]

I've kinda found myself curious at times how someone can be a singer WITHOUT notewatching to a degree, considering that that's how I got into it myself. Like if you're just that much of a natural talent with some kind of huge range (or at least a great high range) to begin with, I guess you can just fit the pieces to the puzzle while singing other people's songs and work it all out without having to give it as much thought. But I know for me the big thing that struck up my curiosity and interest about notewatching was discovering the limits of my voice, and when applying that to other songs finding the notes I couldn't hit, it made me wonder "why can this singer hit these notes and I can't?". And then from there it was all a slippery slope of studying the ranges needed for every song I was interested in singing, which gradually led to studying various singers' entire recorded ranges, and the creation of TRP in the first place, etc. etc.

Maybe not everybody follows the rabbit hole that deep when they're figuring out their own range and the limitations, but I feel like you have to at least develop some awareness of that kind of thing unless you only literally ever sing original songs that you get to write your own vocal parts for, or if your range just happens to magically fall exactly in line with everything that you want to sing (in which case, lucky bastard).

I find it interesting to notewatch replacement singers for this reason, because it gives you a chance to observe how they go about handling someone else's vocal parts and what notes they have to dodge, how they approach certain challenging sections, and so forth. I actually had the chance to ask Matt Barlow about that a little bit when I met him last year, because I noticed that in the Days of Purgatory version of "Angels Holocaust", he dodged the epic B♭5 scream on the second verse of the original (doing an ascending melody up to G♭5 instead), despite the fact that he's proven himself well capable of hitting strong B♭5s on other occasions. I asked him if he had had trouble with that note and opted to go for something different instead, but he didn't really seem to remember offhand. I guess it's safe to say that he is not, in fact, a singer who notewatches.