Professional Opera Singer Reacts to DIMASH Performing SOS! Music and Vocal ANALYSIS

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Hi everyone, Peter Barbie here, professional opera singer and music producer. And I just had such a blast revisiting this song from Damash. The first video I ever did was a different performance of this song. And my god, to come back four years later to make a new analysis video for it was amazing. And this to me, this is maybe my I think it's my favorite Dash performance ever.

[00:00:25]and I just gush over the technique and the mastery and the range that he shows off in this video. It's really one of the most incredible vocal performances I've ever seen. That's for sure. So, I hope you guys enjoy as well. I hope you learn even more nuance and gain even more appreciation for what he can do vocally. It's really like like nothing else in the world. Uh so, please sit back, relax, enjoy, and I'll see you after.

[00:00:53]His approach is so soft and intimate and breathy. And what I love is that even when he's singing this softly, he always maintains impeccable technique, right? That's he's he's an absolute technician with his voice and knows how to do everything he needs to do. And so even when he's singing very soft and intimate and breathy, what you notice is we still get this very clean, consistent VB, which he can also do when he's singing fully oporatic in his high tenor range or even in his high soprano range. Uh it's really really wonderful.

[00:01:53]But I think Dimash is so good at starting these songs off at such an intimate soft place to give it more runway for building later and to to make the contrast between the intimacy and the extreme parts uh even more stark.

[00:02:14]Right? So we have the softest of the softs and the loudest of the louds. And the only way you can do that is if you start off very very very soft and intimate.

[00:02:27]in French, of course.

[00:02:41]>> It's like and it's like almost being whiser whispered. I mean there there are even some moments in that singing where it is actually whispered where the vocal folds don't even actually come together. You know a whisper you can still understand a whisper. That's cuz it's based on the tongue and how the vocal tract is shaped. But a a whisper is without phonation. So there are actually moments in there when his voice the actual pitch completely stops but the but the the you know the sound continues the whisper continues but he's just he's he's willing to go that soft and intimate which I really admire about Yeah.

[00:03:32]Ah.

[00:03:50]Wow, I love this is phenomenal. So, if I recall, the first video I ever made for Dash was a video for this song, but not this performance of the song. And it has been over 4 years, I think, since I've since I've broken this down. So, I haven't heard this song since, and I've never seen this performance. So, I knew this would be an interesting one to do, just to go back and dive dive back into where my demos journey started. Um, he gets into this section where which is the tonic of the key we're in, B minor.

[00:04:31]And he he starts down in a B, this pitch right here.

[00:04:36]This one, a B uh B2. and then goes from there smoothly way up, not near the top of his range, but but but goes over a number of octaves just in this first ascending moment and keeps the voice in that intimate place.

[00:04:57]>> Not yet. In a second.

[00:05:13]So, so this he goes through this arpeggio up to that high B. So, it goes over two octaves. And what's amazing is that even when he's keeping his voice in this softer mixed place, his vocal folds can really still come together. He just gives us like 10% of his power on this high B here. And it's so unbelievably controlled. And it's not in a it's not in a pure falsettoy thing. It's in his it's in a more it's in a some kind of mix voice. And so he's able to get his vocal folds together and get a really pure tone already showing us the beautiful VBR and just a little hint of that of that classical training and that classical technique there. It's just a It's just a beautiful ascension over those two octaves. Then he goes up even higher right after.

[00:06:13]Listen to that. He starts it. He starts it in a very light falsettoy head voice and then adds power into it. He goes from a pure a pure falsetto and then connects it back to a mix voice. And that's when you hear the vocal folds really come together. very difficult to do.

[00:06:36]>> Yeah.

[00:06:44]Right. Right. Right.

[00:06:48]So E5 to F sharp five above 10 or high C and extremely. So now that is properly up in that really light falsetto intentionally.

[00:07:03]so light.

[00:07:11]>> And he gets nice he gets nice re chest resonance down all the way on these low B's which is it's not the lowest he can go but it's remarkable for a tenor as high as him that he can do much of anything at that point.

[00:07:28]Should he love?

[00:07:45]>> Yeah, the the the Damash's vocal control is really absurd.

[00:07:50]It's like he really can do so many things. That's always been what I admire most about him is twofold. It's his versatility as a singer to be able to sing so well in so many different genres, including even the classical world. And you can be good at a lot of genres and have no idea what you're doing when it comes to classical or opera cuz it's so different. The training is so different. But even that, he can sing at a very high level in the fully classical the fully classical setup. He can do jazz, he can do pop, musical theater. Um, so that and then just his sheer vocal range is just it's about as it's about as crazy as it gets on the planet. Um, and to be able to actually sing throughout it, not just phonate, not just make noise throughout it, but actually be able to use it in performance really remarkable.

[00:08:52]like that right there.

[00:08:56]See, that's me making a noise. That's him actually singing. So that's F# five and that is that is in full oporatic soprano style singing where he is very obviously in his head voice at this point, right?

[00:09:09]He's not connecting this down to anything lower, but it's very it's got so much vocal fold closure and presence and resonance and the VAB is absolutely pristine. It's like a sine wave.

[00:09:22]Uh, and you hear him so you hear him do all this stuff, which if you don't know a lot about singing and a lot about the voice, it might just seem like, oh, he's just like singing soft or like whatever.

[00:09:33]It's already what he's doing extremely technically difficult. But then when he hits that oporadic soprano note, no matter who you are, no matter what you know about music, you're gonna be like, "Wow, that's a did not, you know, I did not expect that to happen." Basically, notice how he adds warmth into the sound, too.

[00:10:00]He's going to drop his larynx. Damash does do a little bit of darkening with the tongue, which you wouldn't probably want to do if you were singing with no microphone with an orchestra because using the tongue to darken the sound can block some of the resonance that you need, say, in a in a in a in a in an acoustic setting. But on a microphone, you can do it and it just sounds darker and bigger. It even it sounds even bigger without without that actual resonance because it's a darker kind of it sounds like it would be more powerful because there's something about a dark voice that sounds more powerful. So he uses it in a very smart way here because it just adds a little bit of like freakiness to the voice.

[00:10:53]Motherfly insane. absolutely insane. In this in the second section, he goes now into like proper chest connected tenor notes, but it's still it's still not it's still it's like upper middle for his chest voice, but we're not anywhere close to the top yet, you know. And when we got to that last note, then we're we're we're starting to get into the freaky range. But this whole middle section, it's very kind of speech-l like delivered. We're not getting a ton of like big sweeping melodies. He's away from the oporadic technique for a little while. Um, let's see what pitches he's on here.

[00:11:58]>> So, that's the that's the F sharps, the lower F#. So, F# 4. So, that's getting up into a tenor's upper range for pure chest voice, right? Not not extensions, but it's getting towards it. It's not the top. It's getting towards that top section.

[00:12:14]this crazy delay on every note. That'd be crazy in the space wherever people are watching this.

[00:12:20]Well, I guess it's a live digital show, so maybe there is no audience.

[00:12:34]>> See, like he goes he he starts that note in chest voice and then pulls off it into a head voice and then does that little riff down. It's like tiny moments like that that really show technical proficiency and mastery of your instrument. The the big flashy loud notes are impressive. They're very impressive and they're going to impress anyone that's listening. But if you're if you're a singer and you know about the voice and you've trained the voice like I have. I'm just a a a big music nerd that happens to also sing professionally. Um there's so much appreciation for the tiny nuance that he does. these tiny little things that show like it goes from being like uh a great singer to like an elite singer or a great singer to like a worldclass singer, right?

[00:13:33]My teeth.

[00:13:45]So this is this deos.

[00:13:51]That's that E and F sharp again. But this time instead of doing you can tell that the difference in tambber is pretty pretty extensive. It's pretty stark that he before he did the he did that that same thing essentially. He landed on the same note that F# 5 in the very much classical soprano way of singing. Pure head voice darkens the darkens the sound with his tongue a little bit sounds big and freaky. This one he takes an actual a mix approach. So there's more chest connection in it and the sound is brighter. Uh he's not he's not depressing the tongue at all to darken the sound like he did in his pure head voice. This one he's taking a mixed voice all the way up there, which is more impressive actually uh to do to stretch a mixed voice up there. And it's just like razor sharp. It's like it's got this glorious cut, thiso we call it in opera or the uh the kiato in the sound. If you in opera, you want a kiato skuro sound, which means a light and dark sound, which means you have the you have the warmth of the lowered larynx, but you also have the the squeal, the kiato of a of a voice with a good vocal fold closure and a and a sound that's placed in a in a way where it's going to resonate well. Um, and so we get there's more skuro in when he approaches the the classical head voice like a soprano and more when he when he does this crazy like a rock-like mix belt really. It's in and he's not trying to depress the lyrics and make a darker sound. It's very much like it's more in that rock.

[00:15:27]It's like rock. It's more rock leaning.

[00:15:30]It really is more like a crazy like 80s rock belt.

[00:15:34]And get him in this hand.

[00:15:40]how bright that is.

[00:15:44]>> One more thing because I can nerd about I can nerd about Dash a lot is how he sustains a perfect straight tone.

[00:15:53]Perfect straight tone and then relaxes really uh straight tone actually means you have you have more tension in the voice. a VAB, a clean VBR is a is the most relaxed a voice gets. So to do straight tone properly, you have to properly introduce tension into the sound. Now the funny thing is most people sing with a lot of tension. So most people can't do VB very well. You have to train it the opposite way sort of. Um but anyway, perfect textbook straight tone into perfect textbook textbook VA. It's uh just wonderful. Wonderful.

[00:16:46]What's he doing there? It started.

[00:16:48]There's so much now. There's so much sound. There's like a wall of sound.

[00:16:51]It's hard to hear what he started off doing there.

[00:17:03]maybe singing and it sounds like there's some kind of low E going on, but I can't tell the quality of it. Damas's chest voice, uh, as far as everything I've seen, which is a lot of Dash videos, his chest voice doesn't go that low. But he can he can chest fry. Chest fry means a like nicely breath supported extension of a vocal fry where you can you can maintain a dep depending on the circumstances it can sound a lot like chest voice but it's not a true chest voice connection.

[00:17:32]That's a little bit what it sounds like there because it has kind of the crackliness of a of a vocal fry down in the low E.

[00:17:40]It's not like a weak vocal fry. It's like a vocal fry with resonance.

[00:17:49]I think that's what's happening.

[00:17:53]And then three octaves higher.

[00:18:17]So much control over every single note.

[00:18:20]You can see he's in there. He's He's He's just got it. You can almost see a little VBR he was telegraphing with his hand.

[00:18:32]He like shook his hand a little bit on that VBR.

[00:18:56]Ah, that was a lot. That was a lot in a few seconds. Hold on. Hold on. He did some I his high notes distracted me.

[00:19:06]Oh, yeah.

[00:19:09]He's doing like like some really cool tiny quick riffs here in this kind of down section right here.

[00:19:20]Like little things like that.

[00:19:28]Insane.

[00:19:37]Okay. Okay. So, so he goes from this high F# up to the high B just below sprint high C and then pulls the mic away and he go he like smashes the high B, pulls off it and then as he's pulled off it goes up I guess to the high F# brings the mic back to when we hear that high F# which is is freaky high at that point.

[00:20:04]We're up to an F# 6. F# 6. I think he's phonated from an E2 to an F# 6 in this song so far. Some kind of chess fry on the E2. And then obviously crazy. We're getting up into whistle tones here on the on the F# 6.

[00:20:25]That delay is crazy. That's how you make one voice sound like a a chorus, right?

[00:20:30]So those delays are happening. That's just an effect that they have on his voice. this mic. And so that's happening on every note. And what it does is you don't hear them clearly like that on every note because they kind of they kind of melt into the background. But that is happening. That's happening the whole time. So what you have is he'll be singing a note and the note he's saying 5 seconds ago is still going and it creates this like big epic subie soupy atmosphere of voice that you don't hear clearly unless everything else is stopped. But it's like a it's a mixing engineer tool basically. In this case, a live performance tool.

[00:21:27]>> Speech, not even singing.

[00:21:46]That's crazy contrast. Like now he's going into like oporatic tenor mode.

[00:21:53]I'm the wrong octave. Yeah. G5. G4. Not super high for him. Now he's in like proper classical tenor mode and but then the the phrase right after that he pulls way off it. The all the instruments behind him kind of quell and he pulls way off the voice.

[00:22:18]>> Right.

[00:22:32]God.

[00:22:43]So now we get this same two octave ascension, right? this all the way up to this one except this time he lets it rip in his in his proper tenor oparatic chest voice and then when he goes up and he keeps in that mix voice instead of going into that really intimate falsetto. So it's really cool. We get to hear throughout this song, he does that exact phrase a number of different ways, right? The first one is very, very soft, intimate. Then he adds a little bit more to it. And then we get to this one where he's just ripping the whole time, like full vocal power the whole time. And how much that changes the feeling and how much that changes the atmosphere. It's stupid how much control he has in that absurd high tenor range up into that even higher mix range. like perfect transitions out of those registers. In and out of those registers when he goes up into that one, he goes from a darker color into a really bright zingy color.

[00:24:07]right there.

[00:24:22]>> No, no, no, no. You're not getting away with that. Without me talking about it, dude. Crazy.

[00:24:29]Crazy. I Oh, hold on.

[00:24:42]is this beautiful. So he get right we get the high belt and then he goes God I keep forgetting there's like five things that happen right and then that's in this crazy mix belt and then he goes up into the soprano pure head voice range up into again that motif we've heard before but an octave higher and then riffs does this beautiful perfectly controlled riff back head voice and brings it back to this intimate place.

[00:25:47]full mastery.

[00:25:50]That is really one of the most impressive vocal performances ever I've ever seen. Um it's just outrageous. It's outrageous what he's able to do. But again, for me, it's the versatility to be so proficient at so many genres.

[00:26:08]Uh, and then just the sheer vocal range.

[00:26:10]I mean, E2 to in a performance to F6. And I know he goes higher than that. You don't have to tell me in the comments. I've got the I've got the demos range. I got it. But just like to see that happen in a performance and have just absolute control over all. Okay. Maybe like where he has the least control is when you get down to that low chest fry range cuz like a who cares and b that's just a place where there there just isn't as much control because of how the vocal folds are coming together there and we don't care about that anyway. We care about the high notes and the amount of control he has over everything outside of that low vocal fry range is like just complete. It's complete. It's complete control, so he can do anything with his voice. Uh, this is really fun. Actually, I really enjoyed revisiting this. Um, it makes sense why this is probably like his most popular song ever, cuz it's just it's really incredible. And it doesn't even get to the point where he's like really trying to like he can go higher, right?

[00:27:17]He can go higher in this, but this to me, this is like his range with full control. If he goes up closer to the seventh octave and beyond, it's like he can do it and it's still it's still great. But I think it goes from like elite control, world class control to like great control, which would be more than anyone else can do up there. But for Dash, I feel like this performance is such a good like picture of what his voice can do like really really really well. Um, anyway, thoroughly enjoyed. Guys, as always, leave recommendations. I always come back to Demos after a few months. Um, uh, you know, his videos have helped build my channel in a big way for sure.

[00:28:00]So, I want to honor that and I want to honor this incredible singer. Hope to get to meet him one day. Would love to have him on the podcast still. So, um, if any of you has a connection, shoot me an email. That'd be super cool. I'll see you in the next one. Peace.