Ariana Grande is sharing just how much work it took to transform her voice for Wicked, and it wasn’t something she could pull off by simply being herself.
During a recent episode of The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast, recorded in front of an audience of 500 film students at Chapman University, Grande revealed she went through “extensive vocal training” to prepare for her role as Glinda.
“It’s just a very different style of singing,” Grande explained, noting that performing as Glinda required her to approach vocals differently from her pop career.
Grande pointed out that while she does have a musical theater foundation and was trained as a young performer, her voice has spent the bulk of the last decade in a pop framework.
“I have a musical theater background. I trained when I was a young girl. I’ve sang classically in my life,” she said. “But never like this.”
According to Grande, the difference became clear when she began preparing to sing Glinda’s parts, which call for a traditional and disciplined classical approach, far removed from the techniques that have made her one of modern pop’s biggest vocal stars.
“There was a large period of my life where I was singing pop and using mostly my mix and my belty range or whistle notes,” she said. “And whistle notes are not the same as operatic soprano, coloratura, that sort of warm classical sound.”
Grande added that the tonal expectations were also entirely different.
“The vibrato and the tone is completely different,” she said, emphasizing that she had to reshape her overall sound to make it believable for the role.
Grande said she began retraining well before the cameras started rolling.
“I had to do a lot of extensive vocal training,” she said. “I started three months before even my first audition, because I wanted to make sure it sounded legitimate by the time I got there.”