Day 14: Back Phrasing

For day 14 we will discuss back phrasing and how we can use this in many of our favorite songs.

Back phrasing, is when we purposely don’t sing the melody on the beat, but instead speed up or slow down certain parts of the melody so the notes fall before, or after the beat, or a particular chord. Try adding in pauses or extra space to breathe. Doing this gives you a lot of freedom of expression to tell more of a story. The goal of this course is to make intentional choices that help you express the meaning of your song!

Today you will be practicing adding in some back-phrasing with a public domain song “Look For The Silver Lining". We recommend using a karaoke track to practice this as it’s hard to play an instrument and back phrase at first if you aren’t used to this and it’s also very hard to feel this without a beat behind you. 

Try listening to some jazz classics like Frank Sinatra singing “Fly Me To The Moon” and Nina Simone’s “Feelin' good” for examples of masterful back phrasing.  See if you can point out any particular moments where this is very clear and obvious. 

For our next day we will be bringing back Cameron to work on adding some of these elements of style into our original song!