Sing like you're a star (even if you can't carry the note in a bucket)

The sandwich rules

By Steve Johnson - Chicago Tribune

CHICAGO -- Even if you weren't at Wrigley Field that day in May, you may have heard actor Denise Richards' attempt to lead the 7th-inning stretch sing-along.

The syllables — we won't call them “notes” — lurched out of the stadium, stopping old ladies and scaring small children. An ambulance siren was shocked into silence at hearing a noise more annoying than itself.

A passing legislator vowed to restore full funding to public-school music education.

One of the latest to butcher “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” at Wrigley, Illinois' ground zero for bad vocal performance, Richards took a lot of guff afterward on talk shows and such.

But a whole lot of us — the bad singers, the scared singers, the amateur-division lip syncers of the world — were secretly sympathetic. There, we thought, but for the grace of not being famous and fetching and in town promoting some project or another go I.

And we got to wondering: What should non-singers do when we find ourselves in situations where singing is called for, whether at church, a karaoke bar or, indeed, in the crowd at Wrigley?

The No. 1 piece of advice, according to the expert virtual panel we assembled, is to learn what pitch is and find it. If your pitch is decent — and we're not talking curveballs or sales patter — you'll cover a multitude of other sins, apparently.

“What makes the rest of us uncomfortable listening to someone who's lacking confidence or skill is pitch,” says Michael Melton, choral director at Northeastern Illinois University. “It's not so much the quality or the beauty of the voice or knowing the words. What people need to try to develop is pitch sensitivity. The simple way of saying it is ‘singing the right notes.' “

Robbie Fulks, a singer-songwriter, says when he's not in good voice, he'll instinctively back off the microphone a bit. But he believes people who want to sing should sing.

Indeed, his concern about this article was that “you're going to make people so self-conscious nobody's ever going to sing along at a ballgame again. I think people sing better if they're not thinking about it. The world is so full of ‘bad' singers in the sense that they can't sing like Norah Jones. But that's not the standard.”

You can improve, however, by taking lessons and by practicing. Don't just sing along, says Barbara Silverman, who teaches voice at the Chicago area's Old Town School of Folk Music. Record yourself singing along. Listen to the recording or play it for a trusted friend, and try to understand where you're good and where you need work.

“If it's ‘Ave Maria' at a wedding, just move your lips,” she says, “but beyond that, you can sing. Singing is talking. It's walking. It's breathing. It's just how we express ourselves as human beings.

“For someone to shy away from that opportunity out of fear or self-consciousness or based on bad advice they got as a kid from some unhappy music teacher who had a bad home life — it's a tragedy.”

But if you are invited to lead the sing-along at Wrigley, please, for all of our sakes, treat it with the respect and preparation any public performance deserves.

Now that you've read some tips on singing in public, it's time for specifics: Our experts offer 25 fail-safe solutions for six singing situations.