And now to answer that burning question you’ve all been asking: is it vibrato or is it tremolo?
In my recent explorations in the field of popular music, I was reading an article in which a certain person’s singing voice was described as having vibrato, and I immediately thought, “No, it was tremolo.” Then I suddenly realized that, although I had some intuitive notion of the difference, I really hadn’t a clue what it was. I merely had a vague sense that “tremolo” referred to a weirder kind of wobble in the voice, and “vibrato” a more conventional one.
And so I went to YouTube and got the whole thing clarified:
The 60s/70s singer Donovan is a good example of the sort of tremolo that people often refer to (mistakenly, I believe) as vibrato. Listening to his records way back when, I assumed he achieved that strange effect through some sort of extra technology. I was shocked when I went to a concert of his (late 60s? early 70s?) and discovered that he did it naturally. It was like watching a magician perform a mysterious trick:
This tremolo/vibrato distinction is likely to come up again in discussion of the Bee Gees.
I have a natural vibrato. Before the virus, I had stopped singing in my volunteer church choir because the director wanted me to eliminate the vibrato. She told me how, and claimed that the vibrato was a “learned” behavior. Nope, and when I tried, I still couldn’t produce the clear boy soprano sound she wanted. (My opinion is that the director of a volunteer choir in a small church should work with what she can get, and besides, most people really like my voice.)
An interesting video about the Bee Gees and specifically Barry Gibb
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5qYc9X5Uo0
For a classic rock song with great tremolo effects, listen to the live version of “Mona” from the Quicksilver Messenger Service album “Happy Trails”. And turn it up!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjWGr-h8ETA
Kate:
I’ve read that some people have a natural vibrato and some cultivate it. I think if you have a natural vibrato it’s hard but not impossible to eliminate it. Why would you want to, though, if you like it and others like it? But there are quite a few videos like this one, if you haven’t seen them already.
Griffin:
Now that I’ve become a Gee Gee nut, I’ve already watched many of the videos about them, including that one. I like that voice teacher guy; he’s smart and he’s funny and very enthusiastic about music. Barry Gibb has so many voices he’s a regular one-man choir.
Well I’ve never seen an errant Tremolo in the background of anyone’s FB/Instagram selfies.
Nice! I hadn’t listened to Donovan in a very long time, so my first thought was that he used a lot of vibrato. Then I clicked on his video above. Instantly, Oh, no it’s not! That is amazing technique.
Here is a song and album that got me hooked on the band mostly because of Gwen’s great control of her pitch and vibrato. The general music style for No Doubt is called third generation ska.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qxWhkY1Z4Y
She does a number of interesting things. She doesn’t use any vibrato on eighth or quarter notes. She sometimes hits half notes with completely steady pitch. She does quite a bit of pitch bending or sliding, sometimes with zero vibrato. Frequently, she’ll hit a half note steady and then vibrato only the end of it with exactly two or three warbles.
There is one pair of notes where she hits it steady for a moment, sliding it up a tone, holds steady for a moment, then finishes with exactly two warbles. Some the the vibrato is very modest and conventional. But then there are two notes in the song, at 0:45 and 2:40, where she warbles the heck out of them. Instead of accenting those notes with volume possibly, she hits them with extreme vibrato.
I don’t know that the tonality of her voice is all that great, her voice strikes me as more of a precision weapon, at least on the Tragic Kingdom album. I’ve seen a few video clips of her in concert and she doesn’t seem to be able to carry this precision onto the stage.
Hi, TommyJay. That is a rather cute song. Reminds me a bit of Fleming & John, some of whose stuff I used to like; but only a bit, in that Fleming’s vocal approach was oddly… well… violent, for lack of a better word. Interestingly, they ran in parallel for a little while.
The short video by the bald guitar fellow was fun, but still left me puzzled. This topic of tremolo is of a certain importance to me, since I recently did a few very small arrangements for church in which I scored certain notes with tremolo, as the little wobble I wanted wasn’t enough to warrant a grace note. And yet here we seem to have an implication that tremolo is a function of volume alone, not pitch. I’m not sure I agree with this, though what Donovan achieved there is very interesting and I would certainly have taken that as an effect filter as well.
TommyJay:
Her voice sounds very contrived to me. Not much feeling there, at least not sincere feeling. Perhaps her inability to reproduce the sound live is a reflection of reliance on things like autotune and other electronic assistance?
The Donovan vid is lip sync, yes?
JimNorCal:
Yes, could be. Back then, TV performances in particular were often lip-synced because TV studios didn’t have the capacity to do the right sound quality, so it can be hard to tell. The lengthy in-person concert I saw was not lip-synced, however. I have seen discussions online of the fact that other people were surprised, as well, to discover he accomplished the effect without electronic assistance.
I thought about that Neo. I searched a tiny bit and didn’t find anything about them using autotune, but then would I if they didn’t want to own up to it? I’d guess that her technique would be extremely difficult to manufacture in autotune fashion, but I don’t know much about that either.
Here’s a factoid: The official autotune came out in 1997, and the Tragic Kingdom album came out in 1995. That’s close, but suggests no.
My best guess is that they did lots of gigs in the Orange county area, and the kids want rock concerts and they give them that. I only attended a handful of rock concerts in my life and many were a mess. Plus there is the ever present problem of getting the “monitor’ speaker adjusted right so you can hear yourself and not just the echo from the jumbo speakers.
I did hear some elements of her technique in a youtube concert video before posting the above, but they were definitely sloppy.
I’ll stand by my “precision weapon” comment. I’ve never heard anyone ever pull off technique like that, but maybe only in a studio (or an “intimate” concert?).
______
I listened to the whole Donovan song again because I loved his stuff as a kid. Yes I think it is lip synch because it is “doubled.” In the latter part he is singing some harmony with himself. But in the early part it is standard doubling where he is singing in unison with himself.
But that unison doubling blew me away a little because it means that he could reproduce that tremolo exactly the same, over and over.
neo,
I stumbled across Ken Tamplin the other day and spent awhile watching his videos. I really like these isolated vocals videos. It’s amazing how talented so many of these vocalists were in the pre Pro Tools days of about 2000.
What do you do if a standard vibrato doesn’t have enough impact? You use “coloratura” of course. It’s an opera thing, and I believed it was vibrato with extreme pitch variation and/or little trills or runs at the end of a long note.
Here is Wikipedia on coloratura:
Christoph Bernhard (1628–1692) defined coloratura in two ways:[4]
cadenza: “runs which are not so exactly bound to the bar, but which often extend two, three or more bars further [and] should be made only at chief closes” (Von der Singe-Kunst, oder Maniera, c. 1649)
diminution: “when an interval is altered through several shorter notes, so that, instead of one long note, a number of shorter ones rush to the next note through all kinds of progressions by step or leap” (Tractatus compositionis, c. 1657)
I thought it was definitely the latter and not the former, but I what do I know?
This is fun example from a lady that does “Schmopera” videos:
Start at 0:50 if you want to hear her extreme vibrato.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wg_wzbpgp8k
The whole thing is fun and she is very talented, although … She butchers the magnificent “Queen of the Night” aria by Mozart in the first minute of the video. I count 2 or maybe 3 notes where she botched the pitch. The movie Amadeus has a wonderful Queen of the Night performance.
These days Donovan is remembered as a hippie has-been, but after he cut loose from pure folk after 1965, he was cutting-edge with his new signature folk-jazz-rock sound. Top rock musicians like Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck and Nicky Hopkins played with him.
Page was rumored to have played on “Hurdy-Gurdy Man” but that turns out not to be the case.
Donovan’s magic streak from “Sunshine Superman” (1966) to “Barabajabal” (1969) came to end after he and record producer, Mickie Most, split up. I’m not sure how much Most had to do with Donovan’s success.
The actress, Ione Skye, is Donovan’s daughter.
I am far from knowledgeable about Donovan but I recall reading that he was famously undisciplined. He put out a lot of music and was less than average in picking what was good and what was trash.
Here’s a brief interview (8 min) with comments on guitar technique. I had thought of him as just voice and song composition but he talks about delving into odd corners and then passing along his findings to the Beatles and others.
https://youtu.be/Q3tWkyYXcLc
So, yeah, I’m a Donovan fan and consider him, at his best, way under-rated.
Those four albums, “Sunshine Superman” (1966), “Mellow Yellow” (1967)
“The Hurdy Gurdy Man” (1968) and “Barabajabal” (1969) are iconic sixties music and nothing to be sneered at.
But he never found the groove again, though not without trying. He has put out quite a number of albums since, and I’ve checked some with no satisfaction.
Art is a cruel mistress.
Huxley,
Yep, Ione Skye is Donovan’s daughter and he has a son Donovan Leitch who is also an actor.
Ione Skye was in one of the best (maybe the best) movies about my generation ‘…Say Anything’.
‘Season of the Witch’ is my favorite Donovan song.
Griffin:
Donovan also had a relationship with Linda Lawrence, the inspiration for many of his songs, whom he later married. He adopted her child by Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, Julian Brian (Jones) Leitch.
I get the impression Donovan is a pretty decent guy.
“Season of the Witch” is a great song.
huxley; Griffin:
Yes, the story of Donovan and his wife (which I read for the first time last night, preparing for this post) is a very touching one. He met her, they instantly liked each other, but she had just come off the Brian Jones relationship and didn’t want to get involved at the time. Years later they met again by chance and married rather quickly, and still are married (50 years now). He wrote “Sunshine Superman” for her before they got back together again. The theme is basically “You don’t know it yet, but we’re going to be together. That’s that.” And it turned out to be true.
neo:
“Sunshine Superman” is one of the great romantic brag songs of rock!
I remember listening to it for psychedelic messages, then realizing, “Hey, wait a minute. He’s just after this girl and he’s pretty cocky about it.”
At his best Donovan was also a helluva lyricist. He wrote “Young Girl Blues” for Linda which was a haunting, searing indictment of life in the music biz fast lane for beautiful women. Marianne Faithfull, Mick Jagger’s lover and Donovan’s friend around that time, did a perfect version of it:
_________________________________________________
It’s Saturday night, it feels like a Sunday in some ways
If I had any sense, I’d maybe go away for a few days
Be that as it may, I can only say I am lonely
I am but a young girl working my way through the phonies
–Marianne Faithfull, “Young Girl Blues”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOxNoLVa7ZU
The confusion between tremolo and vibrato has been made worse by Leo Fender calling the vibrato tailpiece on the Stratocaster a “tremolo”, even though it changes pitch, not amplitude.
“(My opinion is that the director of a volunteer choir in a small church should work with what she can get, and besides, most people really like my voice.)”
Kate, that is hilarious!
And correct!!
Regarding Gwen and the “No Doubt” song, probably a lot of production going on there. Even before the abominable autotune, sound engineers could do a lot. There is no shortage of singers who disappoint fans at live performances because gifted folks in studio made them sound better on their albums.
I watched the Tamplin video on the Bee Gees. Very neat!
However, if wikipedia is too be believed, (I looked it up after watching his video) he got the story of the Bee Gees’ writing the soundtrack for “Saturday Night Fever” wrong, and the real story is even more incredible!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_Night_Fever_(soundtrack)
The Brothers Gibb, like so many musician siblings who grow up in musical families, performing professionally at a young age, had incredible talent and, like the sister vocalists neo posted a few weeks ago, incredible intuition of what each would do while performing.
A few more fave Donovan songs
Wear Your Love Like Heaven
Ferris Wheel
Sand and Foam
Museum
Sunny South Kensington
Sand and Foam, about a magical time in Mexico, has beautiful imagery and at least one amazingly clever rhyme.
Ferris Wheel gives gentle psychedelic advice.
Rufus T. Firefly:
Yes, he got that story wrong. But I forgive him – he’s so entertaining, and so knowledgeable about singing.
The Bee Gees have given so many interviews and have told so many good stories. Their life story is really loaded with fascinating events and is a real rags to riches, up and down and up and down story. There are many documentaries on YouTube that are good. They are so funny and charming, too, it’s really extraordinary. I never knew any of this until recently.
Just had a chance to listen to the Donovan clip. Yup, that’s definitely not vibrato. It’s as if he can do a rapid glottal stop. Not what my voice does at all.
My husband, who may be prejudiced, and my piano tuner, who isn’t, say I sing like an angel. I just can’t sing like a little boy angel.
For those of you impressed with Donovan’s breathing technique in his tremolo; he only does it while exhaling. Harmonica players do it inhaling and exhaling, and ALSO by inhaling and exhaling. (Two different things.) When you hear Toots Thielemans, Larry Adler, John Popper, Stevie Wonder… they are inhaling and exhaling, often at incredibly fast rates, as they change notes*, and, any time they change volume quickly they are doing a tremolo affect. All other reed, brass and wind instruments (along with singing) only require exhalation.
*I’m not sure this is exactly correct, but it stands to reason that about 50% of the time they go from one note to the next they alternate from exhaling to inhaling, or vice versa.
Neo’s question remains unanswered: tremolo or vibrato?
a lot of off-track Donovan stuff, though.
@Cicero:
If you must have an arbiter, well then: if it’s a Vibrato, any TSA Agent can be relied upon to loudly inform all persons present.
This more fascinating than I thought at first. Mykola at the top has separate and unambiguous definitions for vibrato and tremolo. (Ah, just like a scientist.) While vibrato is always unambiguous, I don’t think tremolo is across the music world. As JA Metesky says above, a Fender guitar tremolo bar does bend the pitch and can be used to create vibrato.
I found a couple other contexts for tremolo and I do think that it is mostly volume variation but also has some modest pitch variation to go along with the volume change.
First is the vibraphone. We have various mallet struck metal bell type instruments including xylophone, marimba, vibraphone and others.
From Wikipedia:
There is a nice audio recording of a vibraphone near the top of the page.
More about the rotating tremolo device:
A second example is the Hammond organ with a Leslie speaker. It’s got a motor driven rotating speaker with two horns. Mostly the volume changes as each horn rotates past your ear’s direction, but there is also a Doppler shift that adds vibrato.
And get this:
So tremolo is fast and chorale is slow?
TommyJay:
Perhaps the term “tremolo” is used slightly differently for instruments than for voices?
Forget all this modulating tones. Can’t we just lower the tone? I’m trying to show the way, people.
Well I’ll be darned! Being primarily a strings instrumentalist, it was all vibrato to me. And singing, I’m a bass, so the only thing I do ending in -o is continuo. Thanks!
I honestly don’t know Neo. I was going to lead with a dictionary definition above and forgot to do it. I looked at Merriam Webster, New Oxford, and this below is the Bing dictionary which very similar to the New Oxford (on Kindle & I can’t copy).
a wavering effect in a musical tone, typically produced by rapid reiteration of a note, or sometimes by rapid repeated variation in the pitch of a note or by sounding two notes of slightly different pitches to produce prominent overtones. Compare with vibrato.
a mechanism in an organ producing a tremolo.
a lever on an electric guitar producing a tremolo.
All of the definitions are inclusive of pitch changes, although I think it is correct that in most actual cases it is the volume change that dominates. There is no mention of the rate of change or speed in the dictionaries.
I’m amused and fascinated that there are and have been all these spinning gizmos used in different contexts to produce the effect. I believe I’ve seen a spinning sound reflector used also, though I didn’t find it online.
If I put my physics hat on, I find this dictionary excerpt very interesting.
… or by sounding two notes of slightly different pitches to produce prominent overtones
They call the end result “prominent [wavering?] overtones” but I’ll bet (90% sure) that they are referring to a well known effect called beats or beating which is not an overtone but a difference frequency. I’ve demonstrated that in the classroom, and I’ve seen it demoed once by a guitarist, but never heard it actually used in a song. Or it could be that I have heard it and the effect is subtle enough that I wasn’t aware.
I almost forgot that everything is available on youtube.
A lecture on beat frequencies, with a guitar at the end.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmvDu6EY2lE
Ah, this partly answers your question Neo perhaps. This phrase Vox Humana caught my attention.
Pipe organs go back to Bach at least, and this is interesting, because there perhaps is a connection specifically between tremolo and the human voice.
Pipe organ treatise excerpt:
Like Kate mentions, many singers have an innate vibrato, so choruses of voices nearly always evidence vibrato effects, which are then emulated in other non vocal music.
In this context, Donovan’s music is strange and ironic. Is he emulating an emulation that was intended to mimic a straight vocal vibrato? Or just doing something cool that only he can do?
TommyJay:
I think Donovan just thought it sounded cool. He used it in other songs, too, such as “Lalena.”
Having studied this a bit now, I like the idea that many musical instruments incorporate tremolo effects or capabilities in order to mimic the human voice. It points to the primacy of human vocals in music. The dictionary def. tries to stick with the end result and not the cause or intent of it. Stringed instruments can always use finger vibrato. Piano and harpsicord are completely out of luck.