How to Sing Well

Singing is a skill based on muscle memory. It is an extension of speech. To become a "good" singer you must be able to breathe properly, sing with power (resonance) and sing on pitch. To become a "great" singer you'll need to add musicality that only comes with incessant practice. Singing is a lot of fun and most likely you will be admired if you're a good singer.

Steps

1. Find a vocal coach. Incorrectly performed techniques can ruin your singing voice. Investing in an experienced vocal coach is well worth the money. If your voice is weak, know that this is usually caused by under-developed muscles or improper use of the resonators (the pharynx, the hard palate, and the nasal cavity). Muscles can be strengthened and with training you can learn how to use your resonators to project a powerful voice. If you cannot afford or do not want the dedication that comes with hiring a professional voice coach, consider joining a local choir.

2. Learn your vocal range. This is essential, as singing pieces written for the wrong range may strain your voice. The tone of your voice is much more important than range. People will love or hate your voice based on its sound character, not how many notes you can hit. Never sacrifice tone for range (stay inside your range). Your range can change over time and with maturity and training but vocal chords can not learn to physically change.

3. Correct your posture. Stand tall with one foot slightly in front of the other one, feet shoulder width apart. This allows you to breathe easily and to allow maximum lung capacity to allow better notes and phrases. Stand up straight, shoulders back and down, floating over your torso. Make sure that your chest is high to give room for your lungs to expand and contract. Relax your jaw, relax your face.

4. Breathe properly. The voice is best described as a wind instrument, because breathing is 80% of singing and proper singing begins and ends with proper breathing.
5. Get to know your singing tools so that you are more familiar with how everything is supposed to move and feel.

Remember the Brittany Altman number one rule is to believe in yourself
* Touch the top of your collar bone. About a half of an inch below your finger is the top of your lungs.
* Find your nipple line. This is the place where your lungs expand the largest.
* Find your ribs. Your ribs move like bucket handles attached to your spine and your sternum. When you breath in, they move upward and make your chest expand, when you breath out, they move downward and your chest decreases.
* Find the place right below your sternum where your rib cages meet. This is the bottom of your lungs and the housing of your diaphragm. The reason your stomach may pooch out when you breath deeply is because your diaphragm is pushing down on everything below your rib cage, not because your lungs are in your stomach.

6. Always warm up before you begin singing or doing practice exercises. You should always warm your voice up in this pattern: middle range, low range, then high range, then back to middle. You should spend at least 10 minutes on each range and do not stress your voice if you're frustrated and cannot hit a note. Warm back down or up to your comfortable range and then try again, carefully. Other things to practice:

* dynamics - Sing a comfortable pitch and start very softly, crescendo to loud then decrescendo back to soft. Do this with many different vowels and pitches. Dynamics are variations the intensity of your resonance (volume, but don't think about it that way). Even the simplest use of dynamics will make your songs come alive, and the more you practice, the louder and softer you'll be able to sing healthily. When reading music, from quietest to loudest, dynamics marks are as follows: pp (pianissimo, very quiet), p (piano, quiet), mp (mezzo piano, medium quiet), mf (mezzo forte, medium loud), f (forte, loud), ff (fortissimo, very loud). When you start out you will probably only be able to sing from mp to mf, but your range will increase with practice.

* agility - Try singing from do to sol to do really fast back and forth, trying to hit all of the notes. Do this in increments of half steps on different syllables. This will help your voice become more flexible.


7. Pronounce your vowels correctly. Words are truly nothing but a constant succession of vowels with consonants dropped in occasionally to create meaning. So practice all your vowels at every pitch (high, low and in between). In English there are very few pure vowels. Normally, we will encounter diphthongs which are two or more vowel sounds elided together. In classical singing, the singer will sustain the note on the first vowel and then say the second on the way to the final consonant. In country, singers like to slide through the first vowel and elongate the second vowel on the sustained note. Where as: a classical signer would sing "Am[aaaaaaai]zing Gr[aaaaaai]ce" and a country singer would sing "Am[aiiiiiii]zing Gr[aiiiiii]ce". If you can, always sing the first vowel for as long as you can before letting the second vowel in. Here are some pure vowels to practice with: AH as in "father", EE as in "eat", IH as in "pin", EH as in "pet", OO as in "food", UH as in "under", EU as in "could", OH as in "home". Try singing all of these vowels while maintaining your core sound which is the resonance in the mask of the face.

8. Practice scales. You need to do this often if you have pitch problems. Most coaches will recommend 20-30 minutes a day when starting out. Practicing scales will also strengthen the muscles used for singing and give you better control. To practice scales, identify your range (tenor, baritone, soprano, etc...) and know how to find the notes that cover your range on a keyboard or piano. Then practice the major scale in every key moving up and down using the vowel sounds. At some point you can start working in minor scales as well. Solfege (Do,Re,Mi,...) is also an effective tool for improving pitch problems.

9. Be reasonable with your self-expectations, regardless of where you are coming from, if you can devote 20 minutes or more a day to practicing scales and songs you can expect measurable improvement within four weeks. Most pitch problems can be corrected within 3-4 months. Understand that your progress is linked to your ability to practice daily (as with most training). If you only do 15 minutes a day, a few days a week, you could spend a year or more. If you devote yourself you could completely transform your voice in three months. Everyone is different.

10. If you're having some trouble than I suggest that you try making some sounds of things you know. For example: Cow Sounds, Mooo. Horse sounds, Neigh breee breee etc.

Tips

1. A good practice technique to find resonance is to sing while bent over the back of a chair. Feel the mask of the face (the area around the nose, under the eyes and the top of the teeth) vibrating. This is the body's microphone. Always try to place the tone in the mask of the face.
2. The best kind of nutrition for the voice is water. Water will do many wonderful things for the voice and is also very essential to your body. If you are sick, pineapple juice may clear the throat of phlegm but don't make a habit of anything besides water. Don't drink milk or orange juice before singing. Your voice will sound "blocked" by something. Sugar coats your throat. Imagine trying to stuff maple syrup in a flute to make it sound better!
3. There are two different registers of the voice, the head voice and the chest voice. In popular music, singers rarely produce sound for the head voice since it is harder to sound like you are speaking in your head voice. Popular singers do not like to venture much from the speaking voice. The chest voice actually feels like it is coming from the chest. You can feel the registers change if you sing up a scale from your lowest note to your highest note. Your head voice is what you will be using primarily in classical singing. Even though there may be breaks between your registers, you can train and practice to eliminate those breaks. An advanced singer can continually move from chest to head voice and back again without any vocal disturbance.
4. A big area of concern will be the break in your voice. Women and men both have that. It is called the passagio ("passage" in Italian). This place is different for each singer and can be trained to not break when sung through.
5. Get in shape. You'll be able to breathe better if you are in good physical health.
6. Avoid a nasal sound-sing from your diaphragm. If you think you have a nasal sound, try breathing through your nose and your mouth at the same time.
7. Avoid screaming when you are singing. To do this, raise the soft pallet (as in drinking through a straw or yawning) and place the tone in the mask of the face.
8. Visualize a column of air rising from your diaphragm, through your chest, and up through your facial mask. This technique will help your vocals be strong and present, and will greatly enhance the ease of singing.
9. It is helpful to imagine a gumball in your mouth. Think of a large round gumball or any object that is round, like a bouncy ball. Thinking of this creates a space in the back of your mouth, allowing a deeper, more mature-sounding voice.

Sing with Feel, Passion and Emotion

Firstly, singing is about communication. You are telling a story or delivering a message to your audience in a musical tone instead of giving a lecture or reading a poetry.

Take the example of a speaker delivering a speech, the bad speaker will deliver the speech in a deadpan manner or worse reading off a script. A good speaker will be full of life, punctuating his speech with emotion and passion, using a soft voice to coax sympathy and an authoritative voice to capture attention. Sometimes the good speaker speaks slowly to get his point across and then speak quickly to inject urgency into his message.

Now, good singing is not just about having a good voice, it is about how you convey your message to the audience that they not feel you but have an emotional reaction to your singing.

It is because of this reason, before you put musical tone to your lyrics, you have to read the lyrics out loud and then phrase the lyrics with cadences as if you are telling a story. Imagine yourself as the character in the lyrics, and immerse yourself in the position of the character so that you can feel the emotions of the character and so that you can capture how the character would feel if he/she were to be singing the song.

Then you can start to sing in the musical notes. At this point, you will be able to sing with feeling and emotion with the passion of the song. This is time when you start to decide when do you want to hold the notes longer to achieve a desired effect or when to sing faster, softer or louder.

When you are able to do this, along with other good vocal techniques, with every song that you sing, you will get noticed as a singer who is able to capture the feel, emotion and the passion of songs and this skill will put you way ahead of other singers who simply just belt out the lyrics.