kickingtone
New member
If you want a motoring analogy, take the trained driver and blindfold him and see how far he gets around a track he knows.
In that scenario the visual cues are our backing track and/or click.
In all seriousness, I'm pretty sure a lot of them could complete a familiar track...
I keep reading this, and I'm not quite sure if you are joking or not.
I would lay a hefty sum that even a robot, pre-programmed with all the "right" moves would crash. It is basically chaos theory. Minute errors escalate exponentially. As for humans, Myth Busters did an interesting experiment blindfolding people and asking them to walk in a straight line. They conducted the experiment in a field and used GPS to plot the results. It was crazy. Folks were looping all over the place in a remarkably short distance.
Anyway, to your main point about the singer learning to walk before he can run. I consider three possibilities.
1. It is early days, and I am slow at learning how the words fall. (There is no absolute right and wrong. The composer himself may change the arrangement half way through writing the song. We do have to familiarize ourselves with what the composer has settled on.)
2. I have learned how the words fall, but I keep forgetting because I am not feeling the groove. (The operative word here is "feel". I don't think that a groove is something that a singer calculates using halves and quarters. For me, groove and metronome just don't go together.)
3. I know the groove and I can remember it, but my technique won't allow me to reproduce it. (E.g breathing may be undeveloped and the singer comes in late because he is out of breath, or is too slow on rapid interval changes.)
They are all three different. I don't know how much of it can be addressed with a metronome. 1 and 3 could happen to someone with a good sense of rhythm.
Actually, thinking about that, as a kid, I just could not follow the rhythm of classical music. I would watch people wiggling their heads and waving their hands to some mysterious signal, and I would be sitting there, lost. Somehow I eventually fixed most of it along the way (thank god for Tom and Gerry cartoons. )