how to improve singing & voice quality

gustavowoltmann

HI, as you know singing is like a language, a body language.

what can you do if you don’t have a good voice but want to sing?
How can you improve your singing voice?
What are the best singing tips out there?
What should you focus on when you practice singing?

Kathy

I love these exercises. https://youtu.be/QUyV02kTgME

Schönbergian

Registral balance is the key to a flexible, versatile, and balanced instrument - it is more important than almost any other aspect of technique. Unfortunately, it is not well understood by most singers or singing teachers, even those who instinctively know how to achieve it.

Though his channel is solo-focused, I find this man's videos to be among the most helpful and useful on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/user/JussiPaul

The advantage of building the voice this way is that it enables one to use the same technique for all shades of sound. A warm, rounded, blended sound is simply a small modification away from a ringing soloistic sound one might need in a different context. In particular, this technique is easily suited for the demands of Renaissance polyphony which requires a clean, focused sound with very little vibrato that nonetheless projects well and is full-voiced.

I have had great success with this technique both myself and with my students.

sergeantedward

what can you do if you don’t have a good voice but want to sing?

You might not have a good voice now. But you might, after some work. Take what you have, and make it a little better. Tomorrow, do the same.

How can you improve your singing voice?

Work with an excellent teacher, who you respond positively to. Everything else is so far down the priorities list it barely registers.

What are the best singing tips out there?

Work with an excellent teacher, who you respond positively to. This is worth solid gold. Singing tips from the internet aren't for many reasons. One reason: you won't know how to apply them correctly, and you very, very likely will build bad habits into your instrument that take exponentially longer to undo than they did to build.

What should you focus on when you practice singing?

Working with an excellent teacher, who you respond positively to.

You can learn the science and develop an intelligence about singing, from online sources. This is a good one: https://www.voicescienceworks.org/vocology-toolbox.html

Of course you can do breathing exercises, and straw exercises, and vowel exercises. You can make some progress.

But in the end, everyone will be happier to have spent the coin on some lessons than to have languished amid a river of endless information on the internet. With a great teacher, you can progress in a month faster than you can in a year.

View paying for expertise as a time machine. You're creating time for yourself that otherwise you would be wasting, and saving gobs of your own energy, by working with someone who knows the craft.

A good teacher has a long track record that can be summed up like this: almost every single singer leaves his/her voice studio with an improved voice, regardless of voice type or background. (There will be some duds who do not improve. They should be exceedingly rare.) Also, you should be able to admire and enjoy the sound of his/her average students.

M. Jackson Osborn

Listening to good singers and interiorising and imitating their vocal timbre and projection can be helpful and educational. This is in addition to the excellent advice from Schonbergian and sergeantedward just above here. There is no substitute for a fine teacher. Listen endlessly to professional singers (not entertainers!) to absorb sound, technique, delivery, and varieties of tone, control, diction, and expression.

One of the finest voices I ever had in my choirs was that of a man who could well have been a professional singer had he so desired. I early on asked him with whom he had studied, and he explained that every Saturday in younger years he and his friend would listen to the Texaco Saturday afternoon radio broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera and imitate the singers. One would have thought that he had studied with a PhD in vocal paedagogy! (Although opera singers were his 'teachers' his voice was not operatic at all, but that of a fine bass-baritone fit for choral and solo singing.) This is not guaranteed to work for everyone, but can be an indispensable aid to the tutelage of a fine teacher.

bhcordova

Gustav,
There are also several apps for the iPhone and for Android that can help. One of the better ones is Erol Singer's Studio. It's not as good as having a voice teacher, but it will help.

JonathanKK

MJO, a similar observation: I have sometimes heard someone who was a timid singer suddenly make a quite good tone when they were either 1) doing a caricature of an operatic voice with vibrato, or 2) goofing around about something in falsetto.

M. Jackson Osborn

Indeed, Johnathan -
Another experience similar to yours I had in another of my choirs. This involved a lady, an alto, who had a very masculine voice which was not pretty at all. One evening she had been to a cocktail party or something like that and arrived five or ten minutes after the rehearsal had begun. She entered the room semi-soberly gleefully singing like an opera star with a beautiful round crystaline tone like that of a fine professional. The moment she took her place amongst the altos she reverted to her normal raspy male voice. Try as we might, we could never get her to sing as she had sung when imitating a diva. These sorts of experiences reveal that many people do have it in them if only they would let it out. Why they don't I suppose would be a subject for psychologists.

CharlesW

I have often thought that not being able to hear ourselves as other do is part of the problem. Listening to recordings of one's own voice can help correct many singing faults. Now if we could just cure age related voice changes.

dad29

Listening to recordings of one's own voice

Want to hear your voice? Plug one ear with an index finger while singing.

Carol

I know that listening to one own voice can be humbling! Also, when you plug one ear you are still hearing from the inside out, which is not the way others hear your voice.

M. Jackson Osborn

I think that most people react with something on the order of 'ugh, do I really sound like that?' when hearing recordings of their own voices. Humbling indeed, Carol!

gustavowoltmann

thanks every body for sharing such a useful information.
in my opinion at beginners level you must launch a sound recording app on your computer or smartphone. then adjust the audio input setting so that it records a pure unaltered version of your voice. practice singing to various melodious songs and recording the outcome.
karaoke songs are another option as well.there are songs out there that fit your vocal range and style.

jcr

I want to give a second to Schonbergian's offering given above. The approach is a variant of a school begun about 100 years ago or so by an acoustic engineer who proposed a two register theory regarding the voice. Although the two register theory is disputed by more modern science, the success of a number of teachers whose teaching uses it as a practical model cannot be disputed. There are a number of "spin off" teaching practices that utilize it with great success and they range from those who are devotees of Douglas Stanley (the engineer mentioned above) through a good number of variants. I'm convinced that the success of the method is actually rooted in the recognition that the full range of the voice can be achieved through the development of a graded response in the thyro arytenoid group of muscles or the "edge mechanism". I want to thank our colleague for recommending jussipaul's material. I was unfamiliar with him, but the material is very clear and consistent with what I believe to be at the foundation of a sound vocal technique. There are several teachers whose materials would give you the background of this approach. However, this youtube site is very clear and many of those that have written about it shed a good deal less light on the subject.

dad29

when you plug one ear you are still hearing from the inside out

True. We use that for pitch-problem remediation more than 'true the voice.' It can be a wake-up call.

ClergetKubisz

Go to IMSLP and look up the treatises by Francesco Lamperti, Giovanni Battista Lamperti, and Luigi LaBlache. Their books will give you a wealth of information.

Ken of Sarum

I long ago studied with Nicolai Gedda. He showed me to vocalize everything with an extremely soft voice (sotto voce) in my falsetto and then head register (real voice) and then work my way downward. But always sotto voce. This is the beginning of developing a good singing voice. Always using vowels.

jcr

This last is a good description of one of the cardinal principles of most successful methodologies. Gedda studied for a time with Paola Novokova who was a student of Mattia Battistini. The Italian masters recommended bringing the "head" voice down as far as possible. The school referenced above also recommends this. There are some from this two register school who also recommend carrying the "chest" voice up as far as possible. This is a very dangerous practice. It is also shared by a teacher of a few great singers, one of whom said that this teacher ruined the voices of nine of ten students who came to him. The best help is to be found in a competent teacher. The lawyers say that a lawyer who defends himself in court has a fool for a client and an incompetent for a lawyer. Good dispassionate/objective guidance is worth a great deal.

Welcome to the MusicaSacra Forum!

Categories