I think the most surprising thing we’ve come across during our 25 years of Jingle and Original Music Branding experience is finding out through trial and error, session after session, that great world class singers often times do not make great jingle singers. Who knew, right? I mean you gotta figure someone with a four octave range and the ability to bring an arena, church, or even a bar to a standing ovation can go to studio and totally own the vocals on a commercial jingle or radio jingle. Of course on some commercial jingles, not many, if the music is written for THAT singer it usually works out great. But if it’s something that requires extreme control of pitch and tone in a very short window with no time to really establish style, feel or originality, it’s often a “No… No… You sound great! Let’s take a break and… you know, let’s take a break for and live with it for a day or two. I’ll text you if we need to re-cut anything. Thanks so much for doing this! We’ll Venmo you.”
Not a pretty picture. Our singer doesn’t feel good. We don’t feel good. If our dogs are in the studio, they don’t feel good. My stomach doesn’t feel good. I have a headache. I mean… How could this happen?!! I’ve heard this male/female singer many times… I just heard her singing around the studio. She sounded great! The thing is… To be a great Jingle Singer you have to have what we call in the biz “Vocal Notches”. Literally. Like physical pitch notches on your vocal chords. Most of the time, a Jingle singer doesn’t have any extra time to build up to a hook and use their own little tricks to make it happen. Their hair has to be on fire from the first note. No run ups. No caressing. No nothing. And if you haven’t done it before, that can be very demoralizing. That makes us sad in the moment. I mean we LOVE great singers! Great Vocals are what we’re all about. So what have we learned here? Killer jingle singing requires great talent plus experience, with a little dash of even more experience. We’ve done both… We’ve had to execute live during 10 years of touring, we had to execute in the studio doing OUR songs that we wrote for US, and we had to learn to deal with the very different experience of executing jingle vocals. It really is tougher than you think. Who knew?