How To Sing While Playing A Bowed Instrument
Your voice is perhaps the most natural melodic instrument you’ll find, and the most portable! We were all born using our ‘pipes and chords’ and I urge you to sing, especially if for some reason you think you can’t.
Because you can! Everyone can sing. It just takes practice. Like everything in life, amiright?
In this post, I’ll discuss ways your knowledge from your instrument and hands can help guide your voice to improve, and then vice versa.
The very beginning of this process is to make sure you can match pitch. Grab your instrument and play an open G. Keep playing it while your voice starts to sing that same note. If you can find the pitch with your voice, great! You can move on to the next step. If you can’t yet, no worries. Here’s something that will help: use your phone’s recording app to record your voice singing. You could just sing one note, or maybe a melody you know really well, like Happy Birthday, or Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. When you’re done recording yourself singing, go ahead and pick up your instrument again. See if you can find the last note of the melody you sang on the recording with your instrument.
Once you’ve found that note, play the recording again while you sing along, and when you get to the last note, play it on your instrument too. Keep singing and playing that note, so you can feel and hear that you are matching the pitch. Then move the note to your closest G (you’ll have to figure out if you need to go up or down) by playing steps (scales). Sing and play your way to the G. Once you’re on the G, keep singing and playing so you can recognize that you’re matching pitch again. The takeaway here is that if your voice can’t match your hands, get your hands to match your voice and then guide your voice to where you want it to go.
Now let’s sing and play a G major scale. We’re starting with G because it’s pretty user-friendly and most everyone can sing comfortably in the key. It’s actually nicknamed ‘the people’s key’.
You can sing the note names out loud while you play, but I prefer to sing the scale degree or number of the scale, so I know if a half step or whole step should be played or sung next.
Not sure what I’m talking about? Hold up. This means you probably haven’t downloaded my free major scales workbook yet. Here’s a link for you to do that.
Okay back to practicing: play and sing G-A-B-C-D-E-F#-G, but instead of singing la-la-la, sing 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-1. Then go back down the scale and sing the numbers as well. That’s G-F#-E-D-C-B-A as 1-7-6-5-4-3-2-1. Go slowly so you can feel your two instruments blend and almost disappear inside each other. This helps you practice your intonation.
Now sing and play the same notes, but this time start and end on the B. B-C-D-E-F#-G-A-B/ 3-4-5-6-7-1-2-3, and then descending B-A-G-F#-E-D-C-B/ 3-2-1-7-6-5-4-3. Again, take your time and make sure that your voice and instrument are blending in unison.
And for the fun bit: your hands and your voice are now going to do something different from each other!
Try playing G-G/1-1 and singing B-B/3-3.
Then reverse! Sing G-G/1-1 and play B-B/3-3.
Here’s a video of me going through the above 4 steps:
Next, we’ll practice singing a melody while playing the root of each chord in the progression.
Let’s use ‘Boil the Cabbage Down’ because it’s essentially the scale you’ve already sung today.
The melody starts on the third scale degree and goes like this if you’re unfamiliar with this ubiquitous tune:
3333 4 4 , 3333 2 2 , 3333 4444, 3322 1 1
If you haven’t learned how to apply the numbers to the scale yet, that would be:
BBBB C C , BBBB A A , BBBB CCCC, BBAA G G
The lyrics are: Boil the cabbage down down, bake those biscuits brown brown, the funniest song I ever did sing was Boil the cabbage down down.
And the chords are as follows:
1111 4 4 , 1111 5 5 , 1111 4444, 1155 1 1
Or in note names instead of numbers:
GGGG C C , GGGG D D , GGGG CCCC, GGDD G G
Go ahead and sing the melody while playing the chord progression. You can use your bow and drone the chord while you sing, or if that’s too much of a challenge right now, try plucking the chord while you sing the melody - it will be a little quieter and therefore easier to hear what your voice needs to do.
You’ll notice that some of the time the melody is different from the root chord tone, and some of the time it is the same (during the 4 chord and the last note). Once you’re comfortable singing and playing the melody and basic root chord voicings, you should try to find chord voicings that don’t include the melody note - that way you’ll have all three chord tones and a really lovely, full sound.
If you’re unsure of how to build a chord, check out this comprehensive eBook I wrote on Chords!
You could also try playing a harmony part while you sing the melody.
A third above the melody works for a nice easy ‘tenor’ part to play. That would be:
5555 6 6 , 5555, 4 4, 5555 6666 5544 3 3
aka
DDDD E E , DDDD C C , DDDD EEEE DDCC B B
Enjoy blending your voice with your fiddle- working on your intonation of each instrument. When you are ready, you could make a little arrangement of this song.
Perhaps something like this:
Play the tune on your fiddle
Sing the tune while you play chords
Play the tune in a different octave than before
Sing the tune while you play the harmony
Play the tune one last time
Once you’re comfortable, film a video of yourself being a one -person band!
I’d love to hear you - post it on my JamWithLauren Facebook Page, or email me a link to [email protected]
Some other thoughts:
It’s important to recognize that your voice has a comfortable range - usually a little more than an octave (this can expand with practice). The keys your voice might like for singing might not be your favorite keys for playing!
The next step is matching your hands to your voice. So if the above exercise didn’t work so well for you in G, try moving it to a different key. This is the beauty of using the numbers instead of the letters- so easy to transpose.
For more help with understanding what key you’re in and how to transpose, work through these two blog posts:
If you’re having a tough time singing and playing with your instrument right up on your neck, you might allow yourself to tilt it away and hold it more with your hand instead of your shoulder for a bit. Or try holding your fiddle in rest position and strumming it to get the hang of your hands doing something different from your voice.
For more inspiration of bowed string players singing while they play, check out these links:
Tim O’Brien- Workin’ on a Building
Tatiana Hargreaves- Blackest Crow
I hope it is pretty obvious by now that I love teaching people how to apply music theory to their instruments and become musically independent. If you’d like more lessons (over 400) with me, I’d love to welcome you to my online studio.
Until next time, be well!
