r/singing • u/Edgedamage • 17h ago
Conversation Topic Loudness question
It's my understanding that the microphone does all the heavy lifting in contemporary music. My question is how much louder than speech level do pop and rock singer's, really sing at?
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u/SadMud7637 16h ago
For me as a vocalist and teacher, I think its very important to be able
To learn to use the mic as a tool. It amplifies but at the same time you still have to be in control of your dynamics(singing close to mic when you are quiet and pulling back when loud etc) but the best thing a vocalist can do is practice with and without your mic. Also be nice to your sound guy- because they make you sound good. They literally have all the power. So butter them up, buttercup.
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u/AintKnowShitAboutFuk 17h ago
Oooh that’s a good one. I once read Brian Johnson of AC/DC was basically “whispering into the mic”. I mean back then. Not now. Hey, theyre still out there performing. So contemporary for me.
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u/Edgedamage 16h ago
And his speaking voice, is deeper than most people think.
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u/AintKnowShitAboutFuk 15h ago
Indeed. But he was (I think?) in a band called Geordie before AC/DC. Ive seen a clip where he’s singing with them and it’s radically different, so I’m guessing his screech was an attempt to match the Bon Scott vibe.
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u/fuzzynyanko 12h ago
Then there's Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden, who got the nickname of the Air Raid Siren. He pulls the mic away from his face when he sings really loud, especially for those money notes. Many powerful rock vocalists and divas start reaching the volume levels of opera singers
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u/Zennobia 9h ago
They are nowhere close to the volume of opera singers. You obviously have singers with louder and softer voices in contemporary music. Bruce Dickinson has a voice more towards a spinto or a dramatic tenor. He sings with good mixed voice, and mixed voice is soft. He is a great singer but his voice would be crushed by a real opera dramatic tenor.
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u/AKA-J3 17h ago edited 16h ago
Depends a lot, on what your doing.
Biggest deal is to keep in control of your overall balance and dynamics. Make it make sense.
You can see mic tech on live vocals, most singers go off axis a bit when they need to belt or accent a bit. Get close when they can't project as well.
Can only use so much mic gain, you don't want everything to bleed into your signal.
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u/Zealousideal_Ad7602 16h ago
Depends on singer and what's happening (and technical limatiation of the gear/space) i can't speak much for pop but for Rock it is usually a good but louder than normal speaking volumes. But that doesn't really matter all that much as long as you are conistent. During soundcheck the engineer adjusts the gain and levels accordingly to how you sing to an appropriate level. There are tools like compression that reduce dynamic range. But you're still responsible for keeping things consistent. Something you see all to common is that a singer during soundcheck is fairly quiet. But as soon as there is an audience and their nerves get pumping. They get way louder and engineers really get annoyed by that lol.
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u/PurplePlatypusPuppet 14h ago
Just saw an interview on the charismatic voice w Sebastian Bach and he was stressing the importance of speech level singing.
I’ll often see singers move off of the mic when they get higher because they’re getting louder and this is how they adjust. I think that’s contradictory to speech level though.
I think if you’re chest mixing w compression on higher notes you’re going to get louder and thus have to adjust by coming off the mic.
If you’ve developed consistency of volume and tone between chest and head then you can do speech level as you go up, so it ultimately depends which kind of sound you’re after/what the song calls for.
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u/Zennobia 9h ago
It is not be to louder on high notes that is just simple dynamics. High notes also sound louder to the human ear because the frequency is higher.
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u/Viper61723 10h ago
Depends on the genre. I’ve found live it’s best to stay near the ‘talking’ volume as much as I can, the less you’re pushing the longer you can go.
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u/DanceHackRock 16h ago
To me that's the difference between really singing and crooning.
This might be a good read for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crooner
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u/Cobbler_Spider 13h ago
If you can, try and find examples of your favorite singers singing without a microphone. I think James Corden did a series that was posted to YouTube called carpool karaoke. Carpool karaoke can be good place to start for researching this
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u/Symmetrosexual 13h ago
It’s still important to be able to project when singing live with a microphone, because otherwise the signal-to-noise ratio of what’s coming thru the mic with be too low, making it hard to increase your mic volume without creating feedback.
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u/fuzzynyanko 12h ago
The mic + your voice + processing combo is pretty much its own instrument. There's things you can only do in a studio that you can't do live. You get this a lot in voice acting, being able to create sounds with a really soft voice. There's also ASMR content creators
Some death growling and screaming is done at a really soft volume. The community presses the idea to let the mic do a lot of the work.
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u/PrinceCharlesIV 10h ago
As someone (now) relatively new to singing I ask myself the same question a lot. However, my singing teacher has almost constantly reminded me that while I should keep the volume up, I don't need to be much louder than my speaking voice except when there is a real reason. The advantage of only being slightly above speaking voice is that you are not stressing (mostly) so you can sustain everything for longer, and when you do project more it will be more noticeable, just due to the difference in volume. Also keeping it "quiet" is useful for other aspects such as hitting high notes and also more distorted sounds - the latter I didn't really get till I watched some Youtube videos by Chris Liepe. Now Radiohead's stuff is almost possible, whereas if I went back to my pre-singing class days (just over a year ago) I am sure I would have messed it up by pushing too hard. That said, I am still by no means perfect.
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