The Smiley Smile Message Board

What do posters think?

I think you'd get a different answer over at the Four Seasons' board!   :lol

That's like asking 'Was Dennis Wilson a good drummer' on a BB's board  ;)

Or which Beatle had the bigger dick on the Hoffman board.

 :lol Classic

Brian, his was smooth and natural. Frankie's was forced and irritating.

Ringo ,you know what they say big nose big..........

This is a question for Watson.

Frankie Valli.

Interesting question...

This poster thinks that it is apples and oranges -  because a different "vocal effect" appeared to the goal.  

It seemed, although the falsetto was an integral part of Brian's intended "vocal matrix" that he constructed, and it does not appear that it was intended to overshadow but complement the rest of the voices.  

The "shared lead" concept is brilliant, of the Boys.  (not the Jersey Boys)
 
But the question asked is whose voice is better, and that too, is a matter of taste...Brian's absolutely...soothing, yet can rock (I Get Around comes to mind.)   Frankie's falsetto is too harsh for the Boys music.   It's just not fabulous!  :lol  

They are a great band but don't hold a candle to the real "masters."   ;)

    

Four Seasons, you'd better believe it.

Frankie's falsetto always sounded feminine and at the same time unrefined. Whereas Brian's just sounds clean. I prefer Brian's. (big surprise)

Ringo was Richard, not a Dick.

Wait wait, we're still talking about falsettos, I hope?  :o

I'd take Brian's anyday.

This will sound broken-record to many, but this question makes my point that much more distinct.

Brian rarely, if ever, sang in falsetto.  Frankie did, but not as much as people think.  So it's hard to compare, because they're singing in two different ways.  Brian could control the volume of his higher ranger throughout, the tone was well supported, the vocal folds adducted--which is not true falsetto.  Frankie seems to have had to push more the higher he went, but I think the tone is still supported and focused.  As he descends the scale, it may start to sound hooty, in which case the folds are loose and he would be in some sort of falsetto mode.

It's pretty much a semantic thing, but there should be a distinction out there in order to give certain people their due.  Calling anything higher than the break in the voice "falsetto" is like calling everybody who lives in the United States American.  There are Americans living there, but plenty of other nationalities as well.  Likewise, a high voice can be falsetto, but it can also not be.  Brian's high voice is more cultivated than Frankie Valli's, and both are more cultivated than, say, Dean Torrance.  It's a different sound, and that Brian is not singing in falsetto is a credit to his technique--you just have to work harder to sing that way.  See Chuck Britz' quote of admiration where he marvels that Brian could sing high without going into falsetto--I think that sort of backs up what I've been saying for years.

So what your saying is something like Brian's vocals in I Get Around are not a falsetto or just select notes? That is incredible if it is true.

To me it is a falsetto. Brian was just able to transition (Slide) into it very easily, which not many singers can do.

i've wanted to start a thread where we debate when brian is using his falsetto and when he isn't.  Whenever I listen to surfer girl, it sounds like he barely uses it, if at all

Correct.  I mean, we'd have to had stuffed a scope down into his larynx to know for sure, but I suspect the vocal folds are adducted there.

The problem is, in some ways Brian was imitating a falsetto sound without actually being in a falsetto mode.  If he had been trained classically, he would obviously be pronouncing things differently and going for a different resonance, and then we'd hear it and go, "Oh, I see."  

A few links for those interested in this distinction:

http://www.become-a-singing-master.com/head-voice-and-falsetto.html (http://www.become-a-singing-master.com/head-voice-and-falsetto.html)

http://chanteur.net/contribu/index.htm#http://chanteur.net/contribu/cLHfalse.htm (http://chanteur.net/contribu/index.htm#http://chanteur.net/contribu/cLHfalse.htm)

http://www.vocalist.org.uk/falsetto.html (http://www.vocalist.org.uk/falsetto.html)

http://www.rockthestagenyc.com/members/movies/candle/ (http://www.rockthestagenyc.com/members/movies/candle/)

But you can google "head voice falsetto distinction" or somesuch and get a lot back.

can you think of any examples of when it's actual falsetto for brian?

So assuming that, Brian had apparently three different high voices:
Falsetto
False Falsettto -  what we all assume is his Falsetto?
High Chest Voice - like when you yell.

Am I correct?

Can you name any examples of each?

Frankie Valli had a lovely voice, but it was unfortunately more hilarious than beautiful:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cu74JIvtMc4

I get the distinction - Brian is not busting full falsetto, just singing very, very high, which comes off in the tone of some of his leads - On ballads, he still has the 'croon' inflection and phrasing despite being way up there. An effect from learning from The Freshmen, perhaps?

Some examples of his 'actual' falsetto would be handy - I get the feeling that ball-busting high note he hits on Til I Die during the fade is one.

On something like the Wouldn't It Be Nice verses Brian sings pretty high and it is easy to tell not in falsetto IMO...but with something like 'She looks in my eyes...' from Don't Worry Baby, the tone is comparatively different and more suggestive of falsetto to me...

Yes, suggestive of, but in my opinion, it sounds that way because he has just skipped up a seventh there, anytime you skip like that the difference in timbres will be evident.

Certainly older Brian had to resort to falsetto because his folds were not as supple, so to speak.  His high stuff on Orange Crate Art is falsetto, I would think.  You can tell because it's hootier.  In falsetto, air is escaping from between the folds, thus "false"-etto, the folds are not really closed.  Try the exercise in that last link I posted and you'll get an idea of the mechanisms involved here.

If you watch the Inside Pop solo piano performance of Surf's Up, you hear Brian's voice without any kind of studio processing or trickery. When he hits the impossibly high notes on the word "domino", what voice is he using?

FWIW, I thought Frankie Valli's high falsetto could be very grating and shrill because he used it so damn much! It's similar to a high screaming trumpet player like Maynard Ferguson, or a shredder of a guitarist - sure it's a technical skill, yes it can be really cool and impressive, but some players like Ferguson pound your ears with screaming high notes constantly and it's too much to handle.

Don't get me wrong, I like the Four Seasons especially the production and songwriting, but too much of Frankie Valli belting out high notes can overpower the sometimes brilliant music going on underneath all the faux-streetcorner swagger. I prefer the more mellow, chest-y voice Valli used on later songs, especially "Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You", which is a brilliant vocal performance where he doesn't lapse into that falsetto at all, and delivers a powerful vocal over a brilliant arrangement.

Both were extraordinary. Valli was a terrific singer falsetto or not. Some of his delivieries with his full voice are amazing, like " sunday kind of love", for instance. Brian was brilliant, and, like Valli, could sing great regular and falsetto vocals. Of course, Brian's falsetto register was achieved smoothly (don't worry baby) and had efortless, beautiful tone, and was able to achieve great depth of expression within it... Which is rare. He also had a wide range and great expressive qualities with his regular voice, to be sure. But let's make one thing clear:

She knows me too well... Verses regular voice, chorus falsetto
I get Around... Falsetto
Dance dance dance... Falsetto
Don't worry baby... Smooth transitions from regular to falsetto
So young... "we wanna get married" regular voice, rest of phrase falsetto
We'll run away... See DWB

Brian's the great counter tenor of rock. But Valli could kick some serious ass too with his in-your-face delivery

Frankie Valli's falsetto sounds like its coming out an amped Italian leprechaun, Brian's sounds like its coming out of a big mellow dude from California who can sing really high. I like a lot of Four Seasons stuff, Valli had a great feel for songs...but he's no Brian Wilson. Consider this... Don't Talk (Put Your Head On My Shoulder)...can you imagine what torture that would be hearing Valli sing it with that mean nasal thing he's got going?

But Brian was a big fan of Sherry. He taught it to the Beach Boys right after it became a hit...and made them sing it live in '62.

I feel Brian's conveyed much more emotion and could be incorporated into a much wider range of song styles than Frankie's which sometimes feels like he's using it more as a gimmick. Saying that, his "Whoooohoooohoooo's" on "Walk Like a Man" slay me everytime I hear it, pure magic.

"Ringo was Richard, not a Dick." 
That was Lennon, wasn't it?

'Don't Worry Baby'

Greatest falsetto in history. Especially the version from Summer Love Songs.

Frankie has/had a strong falsetto but it's not quite as versatile as Brian's was. He could wail those high notes but when it came to being sweet and soft, he didn't have the control that Brian had. Brian's falsetto is more jazz inspired as well while Frankie's most certainly had its roots in doo-wap.

I like Frankie's lower voice too.

As for the high note in Surf's Up...hard to tell.  Certainly that is quite high, but there are plenty of examples of operatic tenors hitting that same F5 in full (that is legitimate head) voice.  Interestingly enough, there's a debate about many of those in the tenor community, about who is actually supporting the note and who slips into falsetto.

Check it out:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znluwLNcL7g (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znluwLNcL7g)

The high note there is the famous high F5 (same note as Brian sings in Surf's Up.  Interesting to note that on the Surf's Up LP, that note is harmonized above, by Carl, who is surely singing the A5 there in falsetto.) from the aria "credeasi misera" from Bellini's I Puritani.  Most tenors will sing a lower note, but that F is actually notated in the score.  This Brownlee fellow is considered by many to have the best high F in this aria of the people that have attempted it, and you will notice they're talking in the comments about Falsetto V. Head, etc.

Brian by a mile.  Not really even in the same category.  Frankie Valli is great but Brian's unbelievable.  Frankie's was great for longer, I guess, though if that matters. 

That's how I feel too.  Brian definately sang falsetto a lot, he could switch in and out of it within phrases, though, which is pretty incredible to pull off easily.  I think Michael McDonald uses that same type of effect.  Half the notes are just clean head voice, the other half are falsetto.  Brian's the best I've ever heard at that. 

I know this is a silly thing to debate, but I just can't disagree more.  Perhaps the debate would be better suited on a vocal technique forum, but there nobody would care about the Beach Boys.  I just don't hear loose "cords" on almost anything Brian sang certainly through the 60s.  I think people are still taking anything that is higher than the break to be falsetto, which deprives Brian of a lot of credit for the work he was doing.  I dunno, call it what you want, but I will always be here to protest.   ;D

I'm with you Josh.  Unless you know what each voice feels like and sounds like, it can be hard to tell the difference.  I can't think of too many examples of Brian using an actual falsetto - "columnated ruins domino" is a maybe, only because it's higher than most notes he sang and somewhat softer than a lot of his "power" head voice vocals (think "I Get Around").  Even so, I'd still call that head voice, whereas Carl sang that part (and the A5 harmony) in falsetto (as you alluded to earlier).  "Barbie" is the only other song I can think of where it sounds like he's using falsetto in the 60's.   

As a singer myself (no Brian Wilson, of course), I've always been in awe of what Brian was able to do with his head voice, which for most male singers is a lot more difficult to control than falsetto.  He not only controlled it, but made it sound so natural.  Just a nice clean un-forced sound.  Watching him on stage in '64 blows my mind, because he makes these super high parts look effortless to sing. 

What makes you so adamant about this particular distinction?  I mean even Brian calls that voice falsetto.  The singers most know for this style of singing, like Frankie Valli, Brian Wilson, Del Shannon all call what they do falsetto.  

Ok, I'll play dumb here. Why would a vocal technique forum not care about The Beach Boys?

... Exactly.  Anybody who tells me Brian sang the chorus of California Girls in full voice is full of sh*t.  That's falsetto, you don't have to be a vocal expert to know that.  He sang high.  He sometimes sang REALLY high, but when he sang a lot of that stuff he sang it in false.  You can hear him switching into it clear as day! Listen to Don't Worry Baby, like everybody's mentioned, it's obvious where he's singing falsetto.  I think the confusion is because he sang with such a strong falsetto that you can't hear much difference in his power, whereas almost everybody else has never been able to do that.  Most falsetto sounds weak and thin (AHEM, LIKE FRANKIE VALLI'S).

Brian sang it.  He said he sang it in falsetto.  He's one of the most famous musicans ever, and in my opinion one of the best singers I've ever heard.  I'll take his word on it.  He seems to know what he's talking about.   


Also I'd like to point out that Brian has a Doctorate in Music.  Do we have any folks on this board with a doctorate in music?  Hmmm? 

Doesn't he only have an honorary degree? That's not at all the same thing as, you know, a degree that you worked to get.

He worked his ass off to get that degree.  Attitudes like that are astonishing to me.  The reason they gave him the degree, is because he's worthy of it.  Brian Wilson knows more about music than any student that's went to school there and got that diploma, he's absolutely deserving of it. 

I'm supposed to accept a scholars opinion on how a guy sang, over the guy who actually sang it.  That'd be fine if we were talking about some halfassed american idol reject who didn't know what he was doing, but Brian Wilson?  You honestly think he doesn't deserve a doctorate in music? 

Ludicrious. 

Might've over-reacted there.

How so? I think Ron reacted just right. 50 Years of writing and making music is terrific on the job training for a honorary doctorate.

Yup.  Plus, it's some of the best ever.  To say that he doesn't deserve it, when he wrote Good Vibrations, is rediculous.  That's just 1 track.  LOL To get it back on topic, I feel the same way about Frankie Valli, he too is well deserving of a doctorate.  I'm sure he's been awarded one, hasn't he?

From the Brian Wilson interview, Jim Pewter, August 1974:

JP: “Brian, besides writing and producing, you developed a style of singing in a falsetto kind of a style – it’s been your trademark through the years. How did you develop that?”

Brian : “It was easy for me to do falsetto, so I did the falsetto stuff with the guys 'cause it was easy to after practicing singing with the Four Freshman records. I wanted to see if I could go as high as he (Bob Flanigan) could, so my range went up a bunch of notes.”

On the OTHER hand…………

From Philip Lambert's “Inside The Music of Brian Wilson”, he quotes David Leaf as writing that Brian could sing high without resorting to falsetto. In Brian's words, “Bob Flanigan taught me how to sing high.”

Lambert also refers to Brian's "effortless falsetto", but that technically neither he (nor Carl) used "falsetto" when they sang high. Occasionally, Brian slips into falsetto (it's usually on the hook lines of chorus's: "Fun Fun Fun," "Surfin' USA," "Help Me Rhonda," etc) but more often than not Brian’s high lead vocals are not strained, i.e. like Flanigan's. Brian's lead vocals on "Surfer Girl", "In My Room",  or "Lonely Sea" are not classic shrill falsetto. Contrast those with, say, "Let Him Run Wild."

Lambert quotes Brian as saying "The Freshmen’s 'Voices In Love' is probably the greatest single vocal album I've ever heard in my whole life."

But the real question is: who does the better nasal tone: Mike Love or Weird Al Yanovic?

Well, they tend to either be into operatic singing or their own singing.  In any case, they certainly wouldn't be as into as we are here.


Well, I ask this honestly, did you read any of the links I set up up there?  I mean, I think vocal pedagogues and physiologists can have differing opinions without being full of sh*t.  The voice is a tricky thing to pin down, the thing that produces it buried within our throats.  That said, the distinction is interesting to me, as I've said before, because if we make it, then Brian is that much more impressive a singer.

I suspect the reason Brian calls it falsetto is the same reason most people mistake what he sings as falsetto: because most people aren't voice teachers.  It's not an important distinction to the guy on the street.  It's technical language.  Unless you're going around discussing the ins and outs of technique, there's no reason to be accurate as long as you are understood.  It's like any specialized field.  Being Beachboysologists here, I'd just sort of like to get it right, much like we want to have dates of recording sessions right.  I find it interesting, anyway--I'm always reading books about vocal technique, so it's bound to spill over here.

Yeah, that's actually about right.  A supported head voice is like a strong falsetto--it's above the break like falsetto but the cords/folds adduct.  Falsetto by definition cannot have much power because any power you put in just slips through the loose folds.

yeah, but it seems nowadays "falsetto" is the umbrella term. 

i think what's more impressive is his chest voice.  It's easy to jump into head voice and sing beach boys songs, staying in chest voice when brian does is what's awesome.  the way he falls back and forth between head and chest so smoothly on like "don't worry baby" and "we'll run away" is awesome. 

"(head) don't worry (chest) baby, everything thing will turn out alright".

and his head voice on like this song is definitely a mix with chest anyway.  That's where some of that power comes from, that mix.  This is just going off my ears anyway.  And then singing with it to match the tone/power. 

i think what caused some of his nasal/not very good singing in the late 80s/early 90s was him losing a lot of the high chest voice, and he didn't know how to use his voice anymore.

So, are you saying that Brian himself doesn't consider what he did falsetto?  He's just dumbing it down for the layperson?
What I'm getting at is, I don't think it's an important distinction to Brian Wilson or Frankie Valli either.

Exactly. That is what it all comes down to.

I've got a few Four Seasons albums and have never even felt the need to compare between Brian and Frankie, in the same way I would not compare between Frank and Dean!

Frankie had the best Falsetto by far.......for "Four Season' songs just as Brian had the best for 'Beach Boys' songs.

...and Dean the best for 'Jan & Dean' songs?  ;)

You're a good guy.  We all like you.  But you don't have to make up sh*t that Brian was capable of doing, to make him a better singer.  You don't have to say he sang with a special voice to say that he's one of the greatest.  He sang falsetto.  Period!  Brian says he sang falsetto.  Most people say he sang falsetto.  Everybody in the band said he sang falsetto.  Because you want to change what it's called to somehow represent that he was a space alien or whatever is irrelevant.  I didn't read any of your links because it's a common sense thing that doesn't need research.  I sing.  I know how to sing falsetto, and I know falsetto when I hear it, and he's singing falsetto. 

The funny thing is you KNOW he's singing falsetto, you just want to argue it for the sake of arguing it.  He has a thicker, much more full falsetto than most people, but it's STILL FALSETTO.  Posting a quote from someone who says that Brian's falsetto didn't sound like most people's falsetto doesn't lead to the assumption that it's not falsetto.  He's simply got a different voice.  On "In My Room" and things like that, most of it is just head voice, like everybody's been saying, but some of the notes are in false voice.  On many of his tracks, Brian sang falsetto lower than most people do, which lead to it losing the shrill sound generally associated with it.  He's singing "Let Him Run Wild" much, much, much higher than he's singing "In My Room", hence the difference in the shrill tone in his voice.  Sing "In My Room" in the same key and octave as "Let Him Run Wild" and you'll see why one's shrill and one isn't. 

You're doing what a lot of apologists do.  You try to point out ways to show why most people don't 'get' why he or the Beach Boys were so great.  It's unnecessary.  In this instance, you're saying "Oh, he wasn't simnply a falsetto singer! Anybody can sing falsetto! Instead, Brian was singing in FULL VOICE LIKE A WOMAN when he sang those songs!"  What your suggesting is impossible, genetically, and you know it.

He was simply a great singer.  His voice stands on it's own merits, it doesn't need people making it out to be more than it is.


This is the same attitude that denegrates the bands early work... people say "Oh, yeah, the Surf Songs? That's all you've heard?  All their best stuff was done in the early 70's!" .  The surf songs were fucking awesome too.  The Beach Boys aren't great because of only what they did in the later years, part of the reason they are the greatest is because of Surfin' Safari! 

I just hate when people sell them short.  You're saying it makes Brian more impressive if he had a voice that wasn't falsetto, f*** that.  He was impressive period.  He's DEMONSTRABLY the greatest Falsetto singer of all time. 

When you have an opinion about something, you should be able to back it up without inventing things.  Brian was a great singer. Listen to him step into history on Surfin' USA when he sings "Everybody's Gone Surfin' !"    He's been great ever since.  You can prove they were one of the greatest bands of all time with their first 3 albums.  The rest just added onto the legacy. 

Aside from the difference in timbre within that particularly song, my point was more directed towards the difference in tone between the songs themselves...I think WIBN goes up to the A above middle C in the verses (?) as does DWB ('I don't know ho-ow long...'?).

I was suggesting that the tonal difference between these two examples - both featuring very similar ranges/notes - is the fact that one is head voice and one is falsetto...of course one was recorded a couple of years later however, but still.

@Ron's megapost:

Holy merda, man.

Ron said it best.

Thick, expressive, smooth, whaterver. It IS falsetto. And the best one you can get.

Heck, on later recordings Brian obviously tries to do the same physically but a more pedestrian falsetto sound was produced. But physically, he was doing the same thing on BW88 it's just that he lost the sound. It's falsetto all the way. He's using his upper resonators, it's smooth, thick, you name it. But it's falsetto.

i think his point was that if we're getting technical between chest, head and falsetto, brian was head voice.  but most are.  people just say falsetto now. 

chuck britz said it wasn't falsetto either. 

my example is the backing vocals in sloop john b.  Those high notes at the "let me go home".  That's pretty deep back in the throat.  I don't think that counts as falsetto, cause you aren't really singing out the top/nasal cavities.  I'd consider that "head voice". 

Calm down guys - I don't think Josh was trying to be argumentative or cause any discord.  All he was trying to do was explain the difference between what Brian did and a true falsetto and correct a very technical misnomer that is commonly used to describe a high voice.  The difference isn't made up at all - it's very real, and those links explain it quite well.  Obviously many posters here have found it to be an interesting subject, so I don't see any harm in bringing it up for discussion.

Bottom line, we all know that Brian's voice in the 60's was incredible and unique, no matter how he was producing the sound. 

A couple of month ago, I first came across one of Josh's (older) posts about the difference between head voice and falsetto. Before that, I didn't know there even was a difference! Since I sing myself, I tried staying in head voice while going up the scale in Don't Worry Baby. Then I tried singing it as I'd sang it before, and yes, there is a difference. Head voice = louder and stronger, harder to control. Falsetto = weaker but easier to control.

really? i find head voice a lot easier to control.  Falsetto, in the technical definition sounds pretty bad to me. 

Maybe it's a practise thing then. I'll be at the piano...  :)

Well, I'm content to drop it for now, after one last comment.  It's really not an especially important debate, though i was hoping to have a more technical discussion which to me seems more interesting than debating a matter of taste like whose voice you like better.  I'm totally puzzled why you would criticize me without looking at the links Ron, because they, along with a huge body of literature, confirm that I'm not making this up, and that this idea is backed up by most people in the voice and voice pedagogy world.  Somebody might be making it up, but it's not me.  I mean, I don't feel like the voice-teacher industry is out there trying to brainwash people, but it it possible.  If "it's a common sense thing that doesn't need research" you mean you've intuited the terminology without recourse to any outside source?  I'm honestly confused.  Certainly you would concede that the human voice is created by vibrations of the vocal folds when air is passed through them?  When you say that Brian is "demonstrably" in falsetto, are you denying that his vocal folds/cords are adducted, or are you denying that lack of adduction is necessary for falsetto production?  Or, are you simply saying that, normatively speaking, there is no need to distinguish between these very different physiological mechanisms?

I may try to record an example of myself singing in a few different ways sometime, so you can hear what I'm getting at, not that it will be pretty.  By all means, continue to call it falsetto, or George, if you like.  Falsetto more or less gets the point across to most people.  On the other hand, that Hal Blaine played on drums on every Beach Boys hit worked for most people too.

there's other voices that i don't get.  I think it's just a high chest voice, but on like sam cooke's "a change is gonna come".  Those high notes on "born" in "i was booooorn by the river".

what is that?  I can do that on a clear throat day lol.  But it's like a high chest, but you open up so much.  I'm curious if it's considered chest voice i guess, or a really low head voice??  but then no...it's easy if head voice.  hmm.

I like this discussion very much, I'm actually very interested in the differences between a falsetto and a high chest or head voice.

For the record, it is amazing how Brian makes it sound effortless when he does hit those high notes, and he has such a smooth quality in those notes which Valli lacked. Carl Wilson would seem to have strained a bit, for an example listen to Wild Honey, or I Was Made To Love Her - it's a solid Carl vocal but at the same time he's forcing the higher notes a bit, and gets more of a Frankie Valli quality on some of them.

And it's not to put some accolades on Brian or anything which he hasn't already received, but it's awesome for me to hear a session tape where he's in the control room singing a part he wants to hear played over the talkback and he's in perfect tune with the part, without having a piano in front of him.

Semi-off topic: Was Minnie Ripperton or Mariah Carey doing a falsetto when they hit those really high notes on a song like Lovin You?

Who in the world of music DO you consider falsetto?  I mean, under your criteria, Brian Wilson, Del Shannon, Frankie Valli, Jackie Wilson, Barry Gibb, Marvin Gaye, Al Green, Lou Christie, Jeff Lynne, and Michael Jackson didn't sing falsetto!!

Whistle register, which most vocal theorists think is only available to women, but yeah, the vocal folds create a little hole like you'd whistle the Andy Griffin theme through, and you get another octave or two up there.


I haven't put in the same amount of hours on those guys as I have listening to Brian, so I wouldn't care to speculate.  As I mentioned, it can be hard to tell, because some people are able to cultivate a reasonably strong falsetto.  I was listening to some ELO at my workplace, the bookstore, and thought that Lynne seemed pretty falsetto-ish to me, but I could be wrong.  The only reason why I'm so adamant about Brian is because I've listened to him so much.

Part of the reason the distinction can be useful is because there are so many effects you can use with your voice.  For instance, Mike Love sings his lowest bass notes in what Voice teachers etc. call "vocal fry" register, which is actually like a low falsetto.  This is also what the extreme Russian basses use to go way down to low C1s or whatever it is they hit.  And then there's whistle register, and then there are the different things you do with your larynx, so like for Broadway kind of singing, there's this thing called belt, which is a specific larynx/register combo that just gets you a certain sound.  It's kind of like music notation actually.  You don't need to know how to notate a C chord to know what a C chord is or to play one, and likewise you can memorize very complicated pieces of music by ear.  But when you want to communicate subtlety very quickly, nothing works better than writing it down for somebody who reads music well, can see the dynamics and articulations and the notes.  And so in the Jingle voice over world, let us say, having this terminology makes sense.  "Yeah, we're looking for a more falsetto sound for this coommercial,"  or "can you make it less belty?"

Alright, so here is me singing the California Girls chorus in three different ways:

https://www.yousendit.com/download/T2pFK3BQYWIwZ252Wmc9PQ (https://www.yousendit.com/download/T2pFK3BQYWIwZ252Wmc9PQ)

1.  A quite breathy falsetto, best I can do because I don't work to cultivate this very much.

2.  This is fully supported head voice, in pop mode.  The cords are firmly adducted, and I'm really going for a Briany sound here, holding off any kind of vibrato.

3.  This is my opera voice, for what it's worth.  I haven't sung this way for very long, but you can hopefully hear the difference between this and the last one, same register, but different stuff going on to make it sound fuller.  You can hear that the vibrato is there.  If I were better, it would sound even more full, of course.  You'll also notice that I slide up from F sharp 4 to B4 to D sharp 5, without a break of any kind, in full head voice the whole time.  Note that i intentionally made this sound ridiculous because to sing it any other way would make it sound even more ridiculous.

Keep in mind that I move the mic back each repetition, 1 is about an inch away, 2 a foot, 3 about 3 feet away, there's a big volume difference and part of the reason it can be difficult to tell the difference between registers is that Mics can make falsetto sound bigger than it is, although not in my case.

so i guess in the true sense of the word, nobody really sings falsetto

The problem here might be that Brian was never formally trained in his prime. I myself have never heard of him having dedicated vocal training during the 60's. He would never have thought of himself as singing a proper falsetto, or proper head voice, as he sung his high parts. He just sang depending on how his voice worked that day.
This doesn't make them any less musical, obviously, but somewhat harder to peg with ordinary musical terms.

It's not really a theremin on "Good Vibrations", you know...  ::)

aeijtzsche - to try and clarify my understanding of the differences further I would like to refer to Carl's singing for a minute.

If we take the I Can Hear Music verses as an example, I hear this to be sung in head voice until breaking into falsetto for a moment at the last line of the verses such as on 'maybe that's why...' in the first verse.  Do I understand this correctly, or is it rather a case of high chest voice breaking into head voice rather than head voice breaking into falsetto at that moment?

the main verse to me is not head.  You can hear the push in his voice from the chest, but it's so high that it blends a bit with the head.  That's how I do it, but it's really hard to do it from the chest, opposed to nothing but head, which is easy.  And I'm preeeetty sure it's also chest cause doing it from the chest is how i get the same tone/voice that carl gets.

I'd say on the the "the way that it iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiIIIS" at the very very end it pushes up to low head voice, but still in the back of the throat.  That's where that quick vibrato at the end comes from i think. 

Surely you would like to be precise with terminology, AGD?  I would think you would get this, as a tireless corrector of misconception and misguided historiography, the desire to question long-held ideas in search of truth.

 
Not at all.  Think of Matt Sharp of Weezer singing on the Blue album.  That is pure falsetto through and through.  "Say it Ain't So"...  Matt couldn't do anything with that tone, dynamically.


Listen, I know you all have better things to do than read scholarly articles on the voice, but I can tell none of you have read those links and very likely not listened to my clip.  I don't expect you to.  But unless you do, how do you expect to understand the distinction?  Ron says it's common sense.  No it's not.  There is information out there, hundreds of years of singing tradition, cutting edge research (not just for singing but for therapy for people who have voice injuries or speech pathologies), and really quite a critical mass of information that backs me up.  If you choose to ignore that, that's your business.  I can see where it would be quite fun to wind me up and get me all worked up here--and that is certainly what will happen if people pretend that you don't need to research something to understand it.

Nevertheless, it's still not that important of a debate, rather silly in fact, but there you go.

Just throwing a little humor into the pot, as things were getting a tad heated.  I see your point, but in this instance, "falsetto or not ?" is considerably less cut and dried than looking at something and saying "that's not a theremin".  To Joe Q. Public, saying "falsetto" is akin to saying "xerox" or "hoover", in that he's not thinking of the absolute technical term, but rather "singing in a high voice" as a catch-all phrase.  You're right, very probably, but you'll never convince 99.9% of the listening public - or even fans - of that, so the battle is, in essence, doomed to failure. Or as my father used to say, "it's a wise man who knows when to say "**** it !"".

Wise words, indeed, but, not being a wise man myself, I'm not sure what will happen next.  Besides, I have nothing else to do, besides a crushing amount of research to do for school tomorrow, so you know how that goes.

Amen... Pronounced Ah-men.. rather than the popular A-men. But nothing you can do to change people's minds.  :P

I read every link you sent and watched/listened to both of your singing videos.  That's why I offered up a laundry list of people most known for what everyone calls falsetto, but you call head voice. (again, Brian Wilson, Del Shannon, Frankie Valli, Jackie Wilson, Barry Gibb, Marvin Gaye, Al Green, Lou Christie, Jeff Lynne, and Michael Jackson). And bear in mind, I have never said that you are wrong; just because the majority believes something certainly doesn't make it true.

But, according to the criteria you suggest, you're not talking about just changing minds about Brian Wilson, you are talking about
redefining the notion about almost every popular "falsetto" singer, not only in the listeners' minds, but in the minds of the artists themselves. 

What about when Prince and Mick Jagger went through their high voice phases? Would that be considered falsetto?

To be clear, out of that list, I am making no judgment of vocal mechanism use except for Brian Wilson, because he is the only one I have listened to for hours and hours, often a capella.  I do not know nor do I claim to know how those other people are producing their high voices.

That's really not what I'm trying to at all.  I'm not really trying to change minds or anything.  I don't care what people want to call the various registers and modes of the voice.  I'm just trying to transfer a more precise vocabulary into the discussion of a community who is generally concerned with precision, exactitude, and specialized knowledge.  We are, in a sense, Beach-Boysologists, and as such, we have a technical vocabulary that is specialized beyond popular use.  It's like any subfield.  Let's say we were academic philosophers.  To us as philosophers, things like "will", "intuition", "volition", etc, mean different things than the first entry in the dictionary.

To Beach-Boysologists, terms like "Hal Blaine", "AFM Sheet", "WIBN(TLA)", and "Shortenin' Bread" are either meaningless to the guy on the street, or mean something different.

So, the basic music listener out there can get away with saying something like "Brian Wilson and Mike Love wrote a song called 'Wouldn't It Be Nice' that was recorded in 1966 in a Los Angeles recording studio by the Beach Boys."

But we're specialists, so that's not good enough for us.  We would say "Brian Wilson wrote a song called 'Wouldn't it be Nice', which was recorded in 1965 and 1966, the track in late '65 at Gold Star, the vocals later at CBS on Sunset and Gower.  The track was laid down by session musicians and the Beach Boys came in and put down their vocals later."

Does that make sense?  So it's fine for someone to say, "Brian had a nice falsetto," but for me, that's not specific or indeed correct enough, and I supposed that Beach-Boysologists would be interested in pursuing an investigation like this.

It just makes my head wanna explode to think that Brian's high vocals weren't falsetto--I completely believe they were not. What a MONSTEROUS voice he must've had to have hit those notes in chest voice. It's a gift from....well heaven at least.

I also heard Stevie Nicks say in a Fleetwood Mac documentary that she was gonna put a "high falsetto harmony" on top of the vocal stack--which made me laugh out loud.

What you wrote was really interesting...some of the technical stuff, like approaches to recording and this whole concept of falsetto were probably things that the Boys learned as "on the job training" by trial and error and practical experience, along with the experimentation, contemporaneous to the time periods in which they composed.  

A lot of us tend to look at what what going on in society at the time all this music evolved...Frankie Valli is an unquestioned force in the music sphere, and worked with far more "Four" Seasons than there ever were of Beach Boys...the list on wiki was mind-boggling...

Brian's vision of the effect and the message, I think, affected and affects the way he sings.   The non-composer is not from the same vantage point as Brian, even if he has an "off" night, sings from his heart which may be where his music comes from. That takes nothing from Frankie who is a great performer.  

And, I also liked what you discussed about the vocal register...it brings back the list of keys which a young child's voice would be capable of tone-matching when choosing music for them to sing, which we learned in teacher training in college.   Great post.  Thanks!    ;)  

How bout, who had the better falsetto: Brian Wilson or Barry Gibb??

that's definitely brian.  gibb's nice, but still like kermit.

I always though it was Robin who sounded like Kermit  :p

I am really fascinated by Brian's early voice and was wondering if he isnt just using his head voice in the song "Barbie"? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JO-dQh1WsU (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JO-dQh1WsU)

One thing Ive noticed is that his voice is not doubled as it was done in later more well known Beach Boy songs. To me that might be the difference.

In other words, even though Brian is singing in his head voice its when his voice has been doubled that it sounds more airy and a falsetto.



BK  

No, Robin was Kermit's nephew.

I don't think you have to listen to any of those artists for hours and hours to make the comparison.  Pick a song.. listen to Del singing Runaway.  Listen to Jackie singing Higher and Higher.  They're not blowing out any candles with breathy falsettos.  They are just singing well in that upper range, in what you call head voice.  So are all the others.   Per your standards, falsetto is quite a rarity.