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Changing to a female lead singer

W

Wasted Bassist

Nov 11, 2008
771
8
34
Fargo, ND
www.myspace.com
#1
Well in the past few months my band has been going through a turbulent period. Our lead singer quit upon the orders of his girlfriend :rolleyes: and after that nobody really had much interest. Well, recently we got together and jammed a few times and decided that we loved doing this too much to let him ruin it, so we began looking for a new singer. We went through a lot of really strange options before coming to our current singer. She's a friend of everyone in the band and had actually done a few songs with us at shows. We brought her in and ran through some of our usual songs, a few covers that originally had male vox and a eight or nine originals that we wrote before. Most of them worked accpetably well with the female lead, except two covers (Killing in the Name and Fat Lip) that we arranged so she could do backups while our lead guitarist sang lead.

My question is, have any of you gone through a change of singers in which the replacement was a female? I know we're going to have to change up parts of our set and it can't just be a straight swap. My only problem is that the only female led bands that are anywhere near our genre I can think of are Paramore and Damone (both are a bit of a stretch).
 
#2
Depends on the range of your singer. I'm female and I sometimes come into bands where they want me to do the lead vocals, but I wouldn't attempt to do death metal or really heavy stuff like that. Classic rock, jazz, blues...sure. Lots of rock songs are in the higher range so are easy for women to cover.
 
#4
If you changed to another male singer you would still have to drop/swap tunes. Unless you are making the kind of bread that would warrent an open call for singers with a range from y to z. you will have to deal with some adjustments. I would be thrilled to have a singer you know and can work with.
 
#5
Don't do it. Having a sex change is a very serious procedure, that is not reversable. Needs to be for much better reasons like being a woman trapped in a mans body, rather than just changing the types of songs available to sing.

I don't believe the sex change operation affects vocal chords anyway, once you've been through puberty, the pitch of the voice is lowered permanently.

Randy
 
#8
Based on the mentioned songs, I'm going to assume you're playing rock. Joan Jett, Heart, and the like might fit. Generally female leads need to be at the lower end of the female vocal range to play rock (not that it's required, but it does seem to happen a lot). [Invalid or Expired Link Removed] might be of some help to you.
 

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