You are born with the impulse to sing and you want to sing well. Nearly everyone has the physical equipment from birth, but you may have problems in actually finding it.
Your Body Is Your Voice
Your voice is a musical instrument, and it is all in your body. In music education generally, but most especially in vocal training, body awareness is crucial. The problem is that you can’t see or touch the voice as you do with a clarinet or piano. The parts of the instrument are all buried inside you. So how can you get access to them?
One powerful way is to use tricks of imagination in vocal training. Here are a just a few of many that work with young singers –and sometimes with adults too. (Of course, all the basic rules of posture and breath management apply in these exercises.)
Singing Posture
To get an erect but easy posture before singing, pretend you are a string puppet. Now between thumb and forefinger hold the string attached to the centre of your puppet-skull. Gently pull your body up until `straight and tall. That’s the singing posture. Now let the puppeteer hold the string and put your hand down.
Abdominal Breathing
For correct breath management keep shoulders still and suck in air so deep that you feel “pear-shaped”. Or swell the belly until you feel “like a giant balloon with a tiny head and chest sitting on top”. Keeping eyes closed at first helps you rely on the kinaesthetic sense to know if the breath is where it should be.
Improving Vocal Resonance
When you warm up your voice the back of the mouth may be rather tight or sluggish. Open it up in your singing exercises by imagining you are easily holding a whole apple in the back of your mouth. Notice how “rounded” the tone becomes!
Enhance the resonance even more. Lift the “ceiling” of your mouth to feel like a huge tall space, like a cathedral. Now let your voice fill it. (For youngsters with no experience of a cathedral you might substitute another more familiar building.) Exploring the voice with this in mind leads towards a ringing tone quality.
To develop good forward placement of the voice, make “trumpet lips”. By flaring the lips to feel like the bell on a trumpet, you can project the voice much more strongly without straining to increase volume. Try it. On an easy note sing moderately loudly “two tunes to you” with lips in normal speaking position. Now repeat at the same volume using “trumpet lips”. Notice the sensation of much greater sound even though you didn’t try to amplify it!
Extending VocalRange
Developing the upper vocal register (or “head-voice”) is often quite a task for singers with little training. The singer should not think of the higher notes as goals to climb to and to reach for. (You can often see beginners physically doing that with tense necks, lifted chins – terrible for the voice!). A more helpful image is required. If singing ascending scales, from the start imagine you are standing on the highest note. With a rope you are drawing up your voice in a bucket from the bottom of a well. This tends to put the singer in a far more commanding mental position from the start.
You might be learning a song and come to a rather challenging high note. Prepare for that note by imagining you are a bird hovering above and looking down on it – before you sing it.
In developing the low register (chest voice) firstly remember to keep the volume fairly soft to prevent damage to the larynx. Young children can pretend to be big, tough pirates and sing “Yo-ho-ho”. Or be an elephant and using a low key sing the song “Hey-dee, hey-dee ho/the great big elephant is so slow…” You can also use the bucket-in-the-well technique in reverse, lowering the voice down to the depths.
Getting the Feeling of the Song
The rhythm, dynamics and mood of a song are especially helped by imagination. A smooth rise and fall may come from the thought of a swallow swooping and skimming over the surface of a lake. At a more leisurely pace imagine you are a pelican gliding on the thermals. A darting and scampering piece may fit the image of a mouse hurrying to find food and get back to its hole before the cat sees it. A choir singing undulating tunes like The Skye Boat Song often benefit from pretending to ride up and over one sea-swell after another. Of course devices like these may initially lead to excessive accents, exaggerated tempo and so on, but you can always back off a little later.
While it has its place, theory can stifle vocal development, especially in the early stages. Imagination makes singing lessons more effective, as successful singing teachers know. Why not invent imaginative singing exercises of your own? And perhaps go even further and enlist drama as an aid.
The copyright of the article Singing Tips Using Imagination in Music Education is owned by Stephen Crabbe. Permission to republish Singing Tips Using Imagination in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
Singing Tips Using Imagination
10 Tips for Learning to Sing Well
The human voice is one of the most fragile instruments, and is incredibly difficult to master. If you want to learn how to sing well, it's going to be a long battle, but here are some great tips to help you avoid some common pitfalls.
1. Breath from the diaphragm, not the lungs. You need to really control the air that you're expelling when you sing, and breathing from the diaphragm gives you more air to work with. To do this, breath so that your stomach goes out rather than your chest when you inhale. When you practice, try to focus on using the same amount of air for low notes and high notes. This will help erase the break between your registers and give you more steady tone.
2. Run through scales-a lot. If this was guitar, it wouldn't be different, and the human voice is a lot less accurate than a guitar. You need to get your sense of pitch down, and you need to train your voice to reach higher and higher if you want to really hit all the notes in your range.
3. Don't strain your voice. Practice is a good thing, but don't try to sing too high or you might damage your vocal cords. Go slow and steady and you'll sing well in no time. Keep your practice time to an hour or so a day, then move up if you feel like it. If you ever feel like your voice is straining, or if you feel soreness or pain, stop right away.
4. Listen to criticism. Singing well takes a long time, and in the meantime you're going to hear people say a lot of bad things about you. If you notice a trend, recognize that people are probably making a good judgment and try to work on the problem aspect of your voice. Don't let anyone get you down who really has nothing to say other than, "you suck," though. You don't see them trying to do this, and they have no idea what they're talking about.
5. Make recordings of yourself. This is the only way to hear your problems, because you can separate yourself from your voice and listen to what other people hear. You may not like this at first, but keep at it; you'll improve vastly, and you'll start to notice stuff you like about your voice and really expand on those things.