Theory of Karaoke Lesson #10: Stop The Pop
Jason Burchard

Listen closely to the average singer and you will notice something that the pros know how to limit. It’s all the little pops into the microphone. That little extra burst of air into the microphone can make an annoying sound come over in a song. You can easily learn how to avoid making pops and other sounds in the microphone by paying close attention.

The pops you might make or hear are usually coming from certain stressed letters and sounds. Most obviously, P’s are going to make pops. Watch out for B’s, C’s, K’s and other letters that can make you to create sounds that blow air directly into the microphone. First, what you want to do to avoid the popping is to notice the existence of the possible pop and to control the actual sound from your mouth. More importantly, you want to turn your mouth away from the mic slightly or vice versa. This will get the burst of air to avoid the direct path from your mouth to the microphone. That is in fact what makes the worst popping noise, an al- most bass-like sound coming from the air blown right into the mic.

Now that you know how to control the pop, you can learn how to con- trol some other strange sounds that you’ll notice. Hard T’s and sharp S’s can also create noises that you will want to avoid. These are mostly con- trolled by the way they roll out of your mouth. Pay real close attention to how the pros sing certain sounds. You’ll notice they often sing sounds a lot differently than you would speak. Often certain syllables are de-stressed to eliminate attention to that part of the word. For in- stance, “can’t” is often sung so close to almost leaving out the T sound because it is easy to stress the T too hard before moving to the next word. Another thing that changes it all is that certain genres of music handle them in different ways as well.

See if you can learn from this lesson and avoid the pops and other strange sounds. It will be a small step that can improve your singing in a great big way.