Term 3 Listening

Maria Gadú - Bela Flor






Genre: Bossa nova






Guitar playing:


She starts by playing single strings with the soft tip of her finger making the lower frequency of the sound stand out at the start. She also uses the small fifth finger on her left hand to mute the strings and at the same time she uses her right hand to slide her fifth fourth and third finger making a muted effect.






Through out the songs she picks the strings she wants played but when she says the fraise "bela flor" she strums the strings






The vocals






She often keeps her tone very sweet due to the fact that she has a very whispery voice which adds to the sweetness of the song giving the listener a calm relaxing feeling coming from her tone.






The lyrics of the song talks about a (beautiful flower that grew in the river properly referring to a beautiful woman that grew up in Rio)


The way she interprets the song really stands out when she strengths her voice whilst repeating the song






One other thing that I noted is that she has section in the song were she calms her voice and soften her voice other part were she picks the strings harder and harden her voice too, its a hard technique to master but it is a vital bit of skill that needs practicing the reason this is so important its because strengthening and softening the sound of you vocals and the guitar helps determine wether its the verse, chorus bridge






Area of performance






The area that she sings at is quite big there's lots of space in which the sound travels and if there was to be an empty space you would hear an echo because the sound would take a few seconds to bounce back from the hard surface or the wall making a delayed play back of the sound, but since theres an massive audience which sucks in a lot of the sound because of the bodies.The initial sound let alone the reverb wouldn't be able to stand out due to the loudness. To solve this problem everything that needs to be heard has a mic on, thats a standard sure 57mic and the other is a line mic thats within the guitar.The vocals has a little bit of reverb which is noticeable due to the size of the place in which the singer is performing and also theres a small amount of reverb added by the sound engineer, the guitar has a different type of mic positioning then the vocals because the positioning of the mic for the vocal is out side the mouth right at the centre whilst the guitar has the positioning of the mic built internally this makes the sound better if the guitarist wants the focus to be on the lower part of the frequency and also the mid part but not so much for the high frequency.