I pose the title question of this post after seeing a Kelly Clarkson performance where her voice sounded strained, and lacked her normal beautiful effortless delivery.

I think it was probably because it was difficult for her to hear her own voice properly.  I could be wrong, but football stadiums have notoriously bad acoustics for music.

Even if this is not the case I have seen good singers performances ruined by the lack of proper monitoring for the sound.

What happens is that either the singer can’t hear themselves hardly at all, or the way they are hearing themselves is so different than they are used to, it totally throws off their singing technique.

In Kelly Clarkson’s case the reason I say I think she could not hear herself well is that her voice sounded forced and flat compared to the way she usually sings.   As far as technique what usually causes this is pushing to much with one’s voice and singing with too much force.   This is what singers usually do when they can’t hear themselves well. 

It’s a natural reaction to try and sing louder when you can’t hear your voice coming back to you.   The problem is that when you sing with more force than you need to you engage a lot of muscles you don’t need to and the voice becomes flatter and more strained sounding.

Sometimes not hearing yourself isn’t a volume issue, but a monitoring or even a frequency issue.  

A lot of sound-men swear by in ear monitors.   I myself find them off putting and even dangerous to your hearing if you have a sound-man that puts to much volume in them. So, the type of monitoring can throw you off as well.  You might practice with wedge monitors in front and then do a show with provided sound and they don’t even have monitors and you have to rely on the bounce-back off the mains to hear your singing.   A difference in monitoring can severely impede a singers performance.

Worst of all is the sound-checks where they check a mic with no music going, and because it seems loud the sound-man assumes the singer will be able to hear.  What usually happens is that when the music starts the singer can sometimes get buried no matter how loud the mic is.   This is because of the musical amps on the stage.  It might sound fine out front, but all the amps on stage are adding extra sound on the stage.  This competes with monitors.

This is where we get into frequency issues.   If you are a singer in a guitar orientated band you’ve probably run into this.  Your mic is plenty loud, but the the guitar players amp hogs all the high end frequencies, no matter how loud your mic or how loud you sing you just can’t get your voice to cut through the mix if the guitar player is loud and has his frequencies boosted all over the place.

This is the same reason bass players in rock/metal bands complain that the bass disappears.  Guitar players usually add a lot of bass frequencies to their guitar for oomph.  Most don’t realize while that may sound good on their own, in a band setting it’s not needed if you have a bass player.

Anyways, back to singing.   My point is, often times when you a hear a singer live and they sound strained or flat, look around at the monitoring.   They may simply be a victim of a poorly set up sound.

In the traditional triple sound system approach……mains, monitors and back-line amps, the front of house sound is usually much better than the stage sound.

It’s not unusual to have a nicely mixed front of house sound and then have the performers come off the stage saying things like, ” I couldn’t hear a damn thing except guitar,” or, “I couldn’t hear myself, all I heard was drums and vocals.”

If you are a singer, and sing with an amplified group I recommend always bringing a pair of ear plugs.   This will help in bad monitoring situations where can’t hear yourself sing.

Although it will sound a little muffled, singing with ear plugs in puts your voice right in your head.  It will also filter out all the loudness and stray frequencies and make it easier to hear the rest of the music.

Wearing earplugs while singing has saved many vocal performances of mine from being the victim of poor sound.

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