While I’ve been a student of the voice and singing for most of my life, as well as a professional singer, I have spent the past year immersed in figuring out how to rapidly improve someone’s singing voice, even if they weren’t necessarily born with much ‘natural’ talent.

I believe strongly that singing is something that can be learned by anyone with the right techniques and exercises.

So, I’ve identified what I think are the key elements of what it takes to really improve your voice, and I’ve created a step-by-step, 8-week method that is guaranteed to take any singer to a new level of singing ability.

I have developed 8 specific areas that I think every singer should focus on and improve in, but I want to give you what I consider to be the top 3.

1. Agility

This one sometimes takes people by surprise, because they either don’t know what exactly it is or necessarily how to apply it to singing.  Agility is the ability to move quickly and effortlessly from one note to the next, landing on the right notes without having to slide up or down to nail the note.  This is most often heard with vocal trills and runs but also has its place in developing a free and beautiful vibrato.

2. Mix Voice

Developing a strong mix voice is one of most important pursuits of any serious singer as it relates to both eliminating cracks and breaks in the voice as well as being able to sing high notes with power and without strain. The mix (or ‘mixed’ or ‘blended’) voice is the blend between your two primary registers, your chest voice and your head voice.

Instead of straining on the higher notes, a strong mix voice will help you to effortlessly nail these notes, and with greater power.

3. Resonance

This is the area that will separate you from the thin, timid sounding voice to a full, powerful sound voice.

Resonance is a quality of sound that is fuller and louder because of the reverberation inside the various resonators inside your chest, throat and sinus cavity.

Most people think that fullness and volume come from pushing harder, but the truth is that you can have a very powerful voice, with little effort when you are properly using the resonators built into your frame.

Hopefully you learned something here and have found this helpful.

I welcome your comments and questions. I always respond to them, personally.

I would love to hear in the comments below about what you most want to learn and why, and maybe what you most struggle with.

Godspeed to you!

Aaron

How To Sing With Better Pitch

I want to give you a couple of exercises that can help you to sing with better pitch. Singing out of key is one of those things that are mostly unforgivable, as far as an audience is concerned. So, if your pitch is weak, and you would like to eventually sing for crowds of people, then you’ve got some work to do. But don’t be discouraged; you can get there. And hopefully these exercises will help.

The first exercise is a matching exercise. And you will need some kind of instrument for this one, for both of these, actually. A piano, keyboard or guitar will work just fine. And, if you don’t have any of those you can use the keyboard in Garage Band, if you have a Mac or find one online to mess with, which should be relatively easy.

Okay, hit one note, any note. It’s better if it is someone in the middle of your range, but any note will due, really. Listen to the note; let it sink in. Try to match the note. Do this a few times with the same note, and then move on to another.

It might be a good idea to invite someone else to listen along, if you feel like you can’t tell if you are matching the pitch well.

The next one is sliding. Hit a note and see if you can slide up to it, or down to it.

These should help. And a good set of vocal exercises will help strengthen your voice and give you more control, too.

Hope this helps!

Aaron

Can Anyone Learn How To Sing?

This is a question on a lot of people’s minds, so let’s address that here. If you have to move on before reading the rest of this blog, let me give you the short answer first. Yes. Anyone can learn to sing. Let me explain why I believe that to be true.

First of all, anyone can learn singing technique. It’s just a matter of finding the right information, applying it and practicing it. Anyone who has the desire can do that.

The second part of learning how to sing has to do with what I said last there, “…practice it.” Vocal exercises are basically just repetitive practice of different vocal technique. And this is two-fold. The first thing you’re doing is burning the technique into your mind, so that it becomes second nature. And, second, you are exercises the muscles in your voice, so that they becomes strong and respond correctly to what you are telling it to do.

Doing regular vocal exercises helps just about every aspect of singing. It warms your voice up; it helps you sing with better tone; it helps you sing with more power; and it helps you extend your range, sing higher notes.

So, can anyone learn to sing? Yes, anyone who has the desire and the discipline.

I hope some of this has been helpful. Thanks for reading!

Aaron

How to Sing Vibrato

Some will tell you that singing vibrato is something that just happens naturally. This isn’t necessarily true. It is something that the singer has control over and can turn it on and off. And the singer can also control the rate of oscillation. To slow is called a wobble and too fast is called a shake. There is a middle ground somewhere around 7 oscillations per second.

Now, vibrato is an overflow of a healthy voice, but, again, it’s not just natural. And what I mean by that is it’s not that you either have it or you don’t. So, if you don’t have it you can’t have it. That’s just not true. Anyone, with some work, can learn to sing with vibrato.

Because vibrato is an oscillation of pitch, you can sort of get a feel for it, a starters vibrato of sorts, if you slowly oscillate between two pitches back and forth and get faster and faster.

Another practical way to give it a try is to mimic an opera singer. Many people discover their vibrato just by horsing around at first. Once the voice starts to get a feel for this oscillation, it will begin to develop it for real.

Another thing you can do is make the sound that kids make when they are mimicking a ghost, “OOOoooOOOooOOooOo”. These silly exercises will help give you a start in singing vibrato.

Hope this is helpful!

Aaron

If you choose to learn how to sing from your diaphragm here is actually the simplest and most efficient method to accomplish that. This will not only help you learn to carry the notes for longer, however additionally  you will be able to have more accurate pitch.

Check out this movie if you aspire to learn this singing technique.

Also online singing lessons are a great and cost effective way to get lessons and get better more quickly. And with online lessons you can get an entire systematic program for the cost of about one or two private lessons, which is great financially. Also because you get all of the lessons upfront you can tailor your system, you’re learning system to how you learn best. For example if you are fast learner then you can take a bunch of lessons back to back. If you are a slower learner then you can take your time, and you don’t have to try to keep up with a class or pay a private instructor more money because it’s taking more time.

The best thing about singing lessons is that they can help you correct bad techniques that you don’t even realize that you have. You may be singing in a way that is actually damaging your voice and not even know it. And with a systematic, step-by-step learning program, you can get rid of these bad habits and instill good habits, so that you can sing better and have a longer career.

Another great thing about online singing lessons is that you can take the lessons in your own home and you do not have to go to the local community college or go to a vocal studio and pay a bunch of money. All you have to do is sign up for the program and take the lessons at your speed and at your pace in your own home, which is very convenient. And you get to keep all of the lessons so you can take them as many times as you feel that you need to.

I just finished a singing lesson program myself, and I have not only added almost an octave to my singing ability and my range, but I also corrected some of my own bad habits. I went some online singing courses and found it to be extremely helpful. I am now going through his advanced program and am finding it to be very helpful as well. And it also comes with a bunch of vocal exercises that I use daily to help warm up and improve my voice. I am already noticing that my vocal stamina is much more than it was before. Also I am able to hit higher notes with less strain in my voice, which is a really great thing.

So if you want to learn how to sing better then I would recommend you trying out these singing tips.

I’m guessing that you have heard that you are not supposed to sing from your throat but from your diaphragm. This is true, but maybe nobody has ever explained to you what exactly that means and how to do it. So that is what I want to do for you in this article.

I also want to teach you how to sing higher, how to sing higher notes, but more importantly, how to sing higher without strain and tension in your voice. Because that really is the trouble when it comes to singing higher.

Okay lets get back to the question of how to sing from your diaphragm and not from your throat. Singing from your diaphragm will give you more air to work with and help you sing with more resonance because you are working with more resonators when you sing from your diaphragm.

When you sing from your throat you eliminate most of the resonators and the sound comes out thin and abrasive. So here is how you sing from your diaphragm.

First of all you need to make sure that your posture is correct, and what I mean by that is having your head, neck and torso in alignment as it would be if you were standing up against a wall.

Once you have your posture down it is just a matter of taking complete breaths sing and making sure that your chest does not collapse as you sing and that your chest stays in a high position.

Okay let’s talk about how to sing higher notes without the strain in your voice. I have got two main tips for you that will help you to not only be able to sing higher notes but to be able to sing them with ease and without tension in your voice.

The first one is doing vocal exercises with lip trills, which takes the tension off of the vocal chords and put it on the lips. And this is fine to have it there because waking up the muscles and the lips in the face is actually a good way to warm up your singing system.

So that will get you halfway there, and the next thing that you can do is bend at the waist when you are hitting the higher notes, which will help you to hit even higher notes with less strain.

One place that you can find great tips like this is with an online singing lesson program called singing success. I believe in this program enough that I have written several singing success reviews so that you can have an understanding of what is out there and what works.

Until next time guys,

-Aaron

So, I want to give you one more warm up exercise here and then give you a strengthening exercise as well. Okay, for the warm up exercise, start with a “Zzz” sound and voice the following pattern: 1-3-5-3-1. Start in your middle range. After completing the pattern each time, raise the key of the “1” ½ to 1 key up, until you get into a comfortably higher range. This is a great exercise to follow after the one I gave you in the previous post.

Okay, for the strengthening exercise I would like you to use the vowel sound /o/ as in “note” and do the following pattern: 1-2-3-4-5 then directly to 8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1. This is a full octave exercise, which will push your voice a little more and should be more challenging. As I asked you to do in the first exercise, start in the middle of your range, and raise the first note slightly after each completion of the exercise.

Enjoy!
Aaron

So, I want to give you a few of those here, but I want to say one more thing first. Your voice, just like the other muscles in your body, responds to stimuli, exercises, at first with a lot of change. But, as you do the exercises, over and over, the law of diminishing returns comes into effect, meaning that the same exercises are not as effective after some time. So, it’s important to switch up your routine every once in a while, monthly is a good goal.

Okay, here is a good vocal warm up exercise to get you started. It’s a great one to do in the morning, when your voice is tired, and you need for it to wake up, without pushing it too hard. It’s a closed-mouth exercise, which I think is the best as a first of a series of morning exercises.

This exercise starts around your middle range and descends. So, with mouth closed, hum “Hmmm”. Do this at a comfortable volume, and do it a few times. When your voice starts to fell a little bit more limber, do it at a higher volume.

Aaron

The chest voice is basically the register that you speak in. The head voice is sometime called the calling or the call voice, because if you call to someone several feet away, you will use this register, the head or call register. Falsetto has a more airy, hiss kind of quality to it. It’s not a register you want to spend too much time singing in, usually, since there isn’t much power nor vocal cord connection. And only professional singers develop the whistle register, generally, and often time in the operatic genre.

Okay, there are some of the basics about registration. Let’s talk about your mix. The mix comes about by erasing the cracks in your voice and having one big, smooth voice from top to bottom. This takes time and practice, of course, but it is possible and can happen even more quickly than you might imagine.

One exercise you can do to develop a strong mix is called the siren, because that is exactly what it is, a mimic of the sound of a siren. Try that out. In order to produce this sound, your mouth is in a flat vowel position, which helps you be able to smoothly go through the breaks between registers, and it builds muscles that eventually help blend the registers together, giving you a strong mix.

Aaron