Get a tuner app like you'd use to tune guitar then try singing something and check how close is your C, using a tuner as a cheat can shave years of agony compared to guessing.
I'm not sure I understand your suggestion. Are you saying that someone should be able to sing a particular note, with no other frame of reference? That's a fun parlor trick, but doesn't really benefit you when it comes to singing actual songs (where the pitch is all relative).
No, I think he means using the tuner to tell how well you sing intervals, etc. Find a center pitch, sing relative to that and keep track of how off you go from the correct notes.
Yes, getting a voice teacher is both the fastest and healthiest way to go about this.
While there are plenty of resources available online and there are countless self-taught singers it's easy to acquire unhealthy habits, which in turn might also limit your progress and ability over time.
Latency can be a problem with anything music-related in an online setting, though. Apart from that, singing is very much a physical activity and some feedback from your body might be missed due to limitations of the medium.
Nevertheless, it certainly is a viable and tested approach (with many teachers and even well-known singers offering personal training online) and worth a try.
I've been singing semi-professionally for the last two decades asas part of a wide variety of musical endeavors.
What you need to do to sing in a choir is very different than what you need to do to front a blues band. Singing in a broadway-style musical is very different than singing, say, bluegrass harmonies.
There is a lot of overlap, but how you approach learning stuff varies quite a bit.
Are you looking to improve in one area specifically? Placement? Range? Sight-singing ability? I agree with another commenter that a voice teacher will help get you started. I studied contemporary musical theatre in college, studied music and took classical voice lessons from a young age, and singing/harmonizing with a group was the most impactful on my own experience. Take a look at local colleges offering sight-singing and similar voice classes.
Personally, I just sing or hum along with music, and if there was one thing I could improve, it'd be the ability to sing in tune. I do the "finger in your ear" trick, but it's still quite difficult to hit a note right, or move between several without sounding like a trombone (glissando).
I absolutely marvel at what pop singers can do with ornaments, seemingly hitting a whole series of notes in rapid succession, in tune. Maybe they're using an autotuner? :-(
Not the op, but say you're looking to pick up a minor hobby with the goal of being able to sing campfire/karoake basics such that it's a tolerable or maybe even pleasant experience for the audience. Inspiration being "not-pretty" talk-singing singer-songwriters - John Darnielle, Bill Callahan, Will Oldham, etc.
Difficulty level: starting from utter scratch, middle-aged.
Find a group ( or start one!) that likes similar music or all types and sit in a room ( or zoom?) and play these songs together- everyone goes around the room taking solos, singing the tune, or whatever they want to do one time through the form. You will get comfortable with that, and you will learn new tunes!
I personally got a lot of benefit from singing teachers who posted daily vocal warm-ups on Youtube that you can try and sing along to, and they tell you what to do and what not to do. Exercises to separately work on and develop your posture, airflow, vocal chord usage etc are useful as you can improve the individual parts. I'd never had any vocal training and am not trying to be amazing - just to improve and have some control and consistency.
Some also post classes, where you can see them coaching others and learn from them.
Listening to podcasts by performers about their daily routine might be useful if you want to know what they need to do to care for their voice in order to be able to perform daily.
I've been playing Piano for ~28 years, almost went professional (Jazz) but ended up doing engineering. My advice would be to find a teacher, if you know nothing about it you need a teacher that corrects you so that you don't develop bad habits. Once you're no longer a novice, you can start learning other things on your own.
When looking for a teacher, I wouldn't try to find "the best" or "most virtuoso" around, but what works for you. Try several teachers, get some sessions with 2-3 and find which one is the one that motivates you the most, and understands you the most. A teacher is like a coach and a partner in an adventure... the most important thing is that they can make you progress and keep you motivated.
I agree, I'd been singing a lot since I was 7, including touring Europe when I was 11. I didn't stop practicing at any point in there but also never had access to professional voice teachers because of the cost.
Taking a single course in college that got me a little one-on-one attention (just one in a class of ten or so) improved my technique so significantly that I can compare recordings of myself from before and after that class and it's night and day. I don't think I'd have figured out what I was doing wrong without that attention, but they were able to hear it instantly and recommend solutions.
And that's with a solid decade plus of experience in choirs prior to taking that class, it's not like I was a true novice. It's just really not as easy or obvious as it looks.
Usually local music shops or chains that sell gear also employ or rent space to instructors. Qualifications can vary a lot, which is why I strongly support the suggestion others have made to try out multiple teachers.
For lessons particularly, err on the side of thinking you’re not the problem. You’re paying hourly for this, and if you don’t click with the teacher it could be fairly expensive to “make it work”. Some people are also great artists but terrible instructors. That wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the fact that they are also often completely ignorant of that fact.
Check local churches. If they hae a good choir, the director might teach people or know of teachers in the area. (Growing up, my local church the director of the choir was a first tenor in the US Army chorus for 30 years.)
This is such a brilliant comment: "so you don't develop bad habits."
I went to Japan as an exchange student when I was 16. I had never studied Japanese at all. The thing that surprised me the most was how hard it was for foreign students to unlearn the bad things they learned inside their American classrooms by listening to their friends.
Most of them picked up bad pronunciations, bad grammar practices. Even if they were diligent (which is being generous for the high students they sent over with me), they would hear other students speaking in ways that made sense to them from their perspective of how English works. They would hear and repeat Japanese words in the bad pronunciation style their friends in class did, and those ways make sense. But, none of those practices were what Japanese people did.
I often remark on how fortunate I felt to have only learned Japanese in a setting where I only heard correct pronunciation and heard statements made by natives. In three months I was ahead of others who had studied back in the US for two or three years or more.
I would really love to see if anyone has studied this effect inside the world of software engineering. We pride ourselves in the hacker culture where self-directed learners are glamorized, but I wonder whether having good teachers and getting good feedback early on would make a large or small difference long term. This could be a startling alternative to the "naturally brilliant prodigy" stories we always hear.
I've been teaching coding (on the side) and doing software engineering for the past 10 years. There's a recent surge of self learners who believe in studying coding the way they believe should be studied (which is ironic, given how little experience they have). The moment they got a job, they turn around and proudly talk about "This is how I did it, you learn x, y, z and you can get a job like me" and influence the next batch of self learners. Bootcamps also buy into this ideology.
Instead, the engineers I appreciate on my team has very little to do with what they know. Instead of hiring engineers who only cares about the latest and greatest, I value engineers who: communicate openly, write good tests, and cares about the product enough to fix bugs without having someone create a jira ticket for them, and has good debugging skills.
When I'm not at work, I teach coding to a small group of self learners in my local community by telling them to focus on user experience and writing good tests instead learning every popular libraries out there. Its okay to know only 1 or 2, it is important to know it well. Together, we work on an open source project with 100% test coverage: https://github.com/garageScript/c0d3-app
We hired one of these students who was a core contributor and I hope to hire more directly once more recs opens up onto my team.
I went through one of the bootcamps back in 2014. I’m now a software engineer who cares about good practices, methodology, and design. Some of us take a few years to get there first
If you change the words bootcamp for academia in the parent comments, it still mostly holds. They both are an echo chamber, which usually needs to get "unlearned" to learn the good practices in the industry, if you happen to find a job where they actually practice them.
> This is such a brilliant comment: "so you don't develop bad habits."
Yes, true, but on the other hand, singing comes naturally to some people which makes me think that most other people have already developed bad habits before they even started singing. At least that would hold for me when I started singing.
Therefore I'd say that the technical aspect of singing == unlearning of bad habits.
I agree that this is a large part of it. I did Alexander Technique for about five years, and that helped me unpick a lot of bad habits. It helped my singing, teaching me to stop getting in the way of my voice. It also helped me with broader problems like my posture when I'm using a computer.
Having some sort of teacher also does a better job of holding you more accountable. So that you're a little more motivated to stick with it which is critical early on before the bug bites or before a habit/routine forms.
Music is my life-long passion, and I took rock/pop singing lessons for some time so I feel I can relate to where you are and give some actionable advice.
There is only one thing you can do: find a good teacher. You don't have experience related to singing, so you are not even able to diagnose what you are doing wrong and start working on it. You accidentally start pushing yourself into direction opposite to what you should be doing as I did at some point. Also, it's important to find a good one: if a teacher suggests something, then you try it for a few weeks and nothing changes, then maybe it's time to find another one. I'm not saying you can learn everything in a month, but you should at least notice something is changing and and understand what exactly you are working on. If the teacher can't explain what exactly you should improve (and how) other than "sound better" then likely it's not a good teacher. I cannot stress how important is finding the right teacher. Two lessons with right guy I found were much more effective than everything else I did beforehand for years (youtube tutorials, lessons with other people, trial and error). Don't try to be cheap: few weeks with someone who knows what they are doing can take you further than months with someone who doesn't (obviously I'm not saying that all good teachers are expensive and all cheap are bad. What I'm saying is that there is SO MUCH DIFFERENCE between an average and a great teacher that it's often worth paying for example twice as much). One more thing about teachers is try to get demos of their students and see if you like how they sing.
Another piece of advice: get used to recording and listening to yourself. It's frustrating, but it's second best thing I did after finding a good teacher. I can't imagine making progress on singing without recording. And you can record yourself on a smartphone/laptop/whatever for practice purposes, no need to buy any audio equipment.
There are a thousand different techniques to learn how to sing and many people stick to their "tribe". If you're smart, you'll look beyond whoever teaches you first and stay open to other techniques with different approaches or opinions. Stick with what feels good for your body. If your throat hurts, stop.
Now, having said all that. I have had really positive experiences with a teacher who teaches CVT (Complete Vocal Technique). I'm sure a huge part of this was the individual teacher I found, but every lesson I walked away feeling like I had learned something new and had improved my technique. If there's a licensed CVT teacher near you, I'd highly recommend trying them.
I also highly recommend Complete Vocal Technique. It breaks down the voice in a unique way that I think particularly appeals to engineers and teaches you how to re-create any style safely by using correct vocal support, vowel choice, mouth position, etc...
My vocal coach (Greg Delson) is incredible and teaches Complete Vocal Technique. He does online lessons, group lessons, etc... that are worth looking into:
Get a teacher for sure so that you can learn to sing without damaging your vocal chords. I’m not a singer but my impression as an outsider is that opera singers are particularly likely to know the physical/anatomical concerns, since they learn to project without microphones.
Getting a voice teacher made a huge difference for me. I wouldn't have been able to make anywhere close to the same progress on my own.
Having tried it, I think singing is poorly suited to self-learning. In my experience, vocal lessons are designed around identifying and overcoming problems and habits that are unique to each person. Identifying problems is done by ear or by observing subtleties in body posture, which require experience and training.
Depending on the style, this can be difficult. Human audiences respond to vocals which convey passion. A lot of times, passionate singing strains the voice.
Singing judiciously limits you creatively in the short term. Singing passionately can limit you creatively in the long term, as you burn out your instrument.
Plug for my friend’s “start-up”/company that I’ve used to find online piano teachers to great success, but they also do vocals as well as many other instruments: ToneRow.com.
She is a piano prof at Juilliard and I believe runs one of their startup/business courses, so she’s put a lot of careful thought into this (but I’m sure would appreciate feedback).
Disclosure: I am completely unaffiliated with her company, but have been using it during this period of SIP. If you have any questions or feedback about TR, feel free to reach out.
Singing is not something that someone teaches you, it's just something you do because you're inspired to in the moment.
You need to just sing. Sing along with your favourite songs, sing with heart.
Then ... you may either want to get a bit of coaching, possibly sing with a choir.
Most singers were really quite good before they had formal coaching, and many have never had any coaching at all.
One of the more challenging things is pitch ... some people sing out of tune, have no idea, and it sounds bad. Oddly, this is something a 'voice coach' will have difficulty fixing. This tends to be something that people 'have' or they 'don't' - it can be learned surely, but it's oddly not a 'singing specific' issue. Playing around on a piano, singing the notes, trying to get them to match. So if you have a pitch problem, it will be a separate can of worms, but the more musical exposure you have, via anything, the better you'll get.
This is bad advice. Pitch does seem to be something you have or not (research suggests most kids are pitch perfect and lose it to various extents) but the other parts of singing well are highly technical skills and a teacher will help significantly. Larynx placement, anchoring, muscle relaxation, breath control... etc are all difficult skills to master.
There's a reason that so many pop/rock singers ruin their voices, it's because they don't get training.
This is a little misleading, to the point of being wrong with respect to the 'health warning'.
First - unambiguously, the vast majority of people who sing learned to do so reasonably well before any hint of real coaching, other than possibly little bits that a student/church choir teacher may be able to help with.
It's misrepresentative to hint that an amateur singer, singing occasionally for fun, will somehow how run into trouble, physically, without this. In fact, the majority of people who 'sing a lot' will never have such problems. I sang in a 16 part Jazz choir in my youth, and have always been involved in music, and I don't even recall anyone in my circle losing their voice or having voice trouble (I don't doubt that it's possible), and I don't recall anyone getting specific voice lessons either, that said being part of a choir helps, but we weren't hugely focused on technique in that kind of specificity. Most non-famous pop act singers have not had any real formal training - it's simply unnecessary.
Singing is a little bit like running, you just need a pair of shoes, if you do it a lot and enjoy it, you will get better and it will mostly come naturally. If you are part of any kind of singing group, like a choir, you'll pick up some really simple things that will take you a really long way. If you want to get even better, you can get some coaching, but you don't need it.
The other thing I will add is that a 'singing coach' might move you into a more formal way of singing that might clash with your own creative sensibilities. Many old-school rock stars sing 'terribly' from a technical perspective, but they didn't know better, it's just 'how they do it' and it enabled them to have their own unique flavour. A singing coach early on who moved them into a more 'choral' way of singing ... might have taken that uniqueness away.
In every children's choir, there are a handful of great singers who haven't taken highly specific instruction with respect to technique, singing is natural. Probably a 10 minute, basic youtube instruction would go quite far in terms of basic things just as it might be for amateur running tips.
Big caveat: in my own personal experience, everyone grew up with music i.e. choir, instruments, etc. which will lead to different outcomes and perspectives than someone who has absolutely no exposure to music.
I feel this is very very wrong and damaging, I'd like to make sure anyone reading this comment has a balancing comment to read against it, mainly about the pitch thing. The kind of thing I wish I'd been able to read 10 years ago.
First, you're probably not tone deaf. If you can differentiate between one note and a note a semitone away, you've got enough pitch to sing. If you can watch two youtube videos, think one sounds good and one sounds bad, you've got enough pitch to sing.
I spent a long time worrying about this because I struggled with pitch a lot, and then even though I could eventually (with a lot of adjustment) get my voice to make a sound at the same pitch as a piano key, it didn't sound "right" or "good". Even though the tuner told me i was right on it. Also the pitch always seemed different inside my head to listening back to it.
In the end it turns out it's all about frequencies. Your voice is making a whole bunch of them when you vocalise, it's not just a simple sine wave, and these resonate at different places, and sound different inside your head (to you) and outside (to everyone else). When I had the pitch issues, I actually mainly had placement issues. Good placement feels like cutting off the lower half of my voice, but is pretty much just you making the right frequencies and more importantly avoiding making the wrong ones. To a natural singer this probably sounds like crazy talk, but to someone who always sounded bad, this is life-changing.
So yeah, ignore the parent comment, find a good teacher who started from nothing and can teach you placement (I still recommend https://bohemianvocalstudio.com/), and practise like crazy. You'll never look back.
Find a teacher. Generally as a rule Classical/Lyrical/MT styles require more technique than Rock or Jazz (they require technique to not hurt themselves but the style aspect is personal and harder to teach) so I'd recommend getting a teacher who knows the former well.
Classical/Lyrical/MT (what is MT?musical theater??)styles do not require "more" technique. They require different techniques that have a long pedagogical history. The style is not harder to teach. Classical music has many styles (Renaissance, Classical, Romantic, Chanson, Bel Canto...) and they are all as teachable as popular styles. I guess this bothered me because there is this incorrect hierarchy people ascribe to classical- like it's a higher art or something. This is misleading. I'm a classical musician. If anything, the "training" makes people think they need to ask permission for everything and keeps them chained to someone else's ideas and removes a lot of their own confidence. Then, they spend the rest of their life trying to undo this damage while they try to sing show tunes with some kind of relaxation "of the street" and without constant judging of themselves. See: Dawn Upshaw's popular musical recordings or Renee Flemming's.
Get regular Skype lessons with Kegan from https://www.bohemianvocalstudio.com. He also has YouTube videos up so you can get a taste for what he focuses on first. Don't worry if he doesn't sing in the exact style you want, because it's all about foundational principles. It's life-changing stuff.
If that won't work for you and you're set on in-person lessons, try to find someone who was never a natural singer, and had to learn everything from scratch. They'll be able to pass on more than someone who started with a basic natural ability.
Agreed. I trained under an opera singer in college, which couldn't be further from the genres of music I play in, but the underlying principles of bel canto singing were transformative for me.
I was in choirs growing up, and the one thing any singing teacher will start you with is: learning how to breathe from your diaphragm.
If you need a place to get started, you might just look for a few YouTube videos or tutorials about that. It gives you extra volumes of breath, so you can belt out the notes and hold them longer. Everything else follows from that.
For everyone saying "find a teacher": what specifically will the teacher will pick up on, that I can't pick up on my own listening voice recordings of myself?
The situation is, I've known that I should find a teacher for many years. However, I can be quite stubborn and have instead been recording myself playing guitar/singing for the past several years. With debatable progress.
I know I should find a teacher, but what should I look for? My guitar is fine.. I've played since I was 12 and had a lot of lessons back then. So I feel better about self-studying guitar.
I've also been singing for that long, but without any actual instruction. Help!
> what specifically will the teacher pick up on
Singing is not at all intuitive, and it is likely that the actions to take towards a goal will be counter productive and place an upper limit on your progress.
For example, if you try to sing a note on the top of your range you will likely resort to "muscling" the note by adding tension, but this approach if far from optimal, and will limit the amount of range you can add.
This is coming from me as a semi-professional classical vocalist, but I will also admit that my advice is likely much less useful for people interested in the kind of singing common in country or indie/folk music, as these kinds of music require much less technical complexity in their vocal production.
> I've ... had a lot of lessons.... So I feel better about self-studying guitar
> I've also been singing ... without any actual instruction.
> Help!
So what's the difference between the thing you feel better about and the thing you feel worse about? What did you learn from your guitar teacher that you wouldn't have learned alone? It won't be the same for voice, but it'll be analagous.
More specifically, for learning, feedback is best when given immediately. A voice coach would be able to give immediate feedback, rather than you (potentially) discovering it later on on your own.
Also, an experienced coach will be able to match your weaknesses with exercises specifically chosen to address the challenges you are facing. Exercises appropriate for your current level and practicing the skills you need.
Finally, there is a lot of subtlety in vocal technique. There are tons of things that most people do not notice in self-observation or through recordings that a coach can pick up on and help you through.
You don’t need a teacher. Seriously. The teacher thing is not the mindset you seek. Or rather, your best teachers are the great musicians you listen to over and over and admire from recordings and from your life. Jerry Reed had his own very strange way of playing guitar- it was so cool, Elvis hired him to play guitar on a record because he could not reproduce it.
Join a choir! Find one with suitable level, and with the kind of repertoire that you like, and with a teacher that actually teaches the technical aspects.
But it doesn't really matter actually, because once in a choir you will meet people, learn from other people, learn about other choirs, and it's quite normal that people switch to different choirs every so often.
Also, people say that a choir is important for one's musical development, and I have to agree (having done solo singing before singing in a choir).
PS: the first few sessions may feel overwhelming but this is quite normal and most choir members have learned that new people will need some time to get accustomed to singing. In my experience, most new people will sing along very softly, and then suddenly after a few weeks they will become more confident and more audible. This is totally normal.
PPS: until the covid19 situation is over, perhaps "online" lessons as others have mentioned are a better idea.
I've been paying a tutor to teach me korean for a year with a twist. I told my tutor to not teach me anything, all I want is honest feedback about how I sound. What accent I make and how to say things a certain way. She just listens and tells me the impression I give off.
With her feedback I am able to self adjust to reflect my personality when I speak Korean.
Personally, I feel like getting a tutor to "teach you" something in the artsy space may slow down your search to find your own voice that resonates with you. Maybe you can pay a tutor to just "listen to you" and tell you what you sound like to the other person.
On the other hand, if your goal is to just to imitate other singers, I would suggest getting a tutor to teach you like many other are suggesting.
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[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadWhile there are plenty of resources available online and there are countless self-taught singers it's easy to acquire unhealthy habits, which in turn might also limit your progress and ability over time.
Latency can be a problem with anything music-related in an online setting, though. Apart from that, singing is very much a physical activity and some feedback from your body might be missed due to limitations of the medium.
Nevertheless, it certainly is a viable and tested approach (with many teachers and even well-known singers offering personal training online) and worth a try.
I've been singing semi-professionally for the last two decades asas part of a wide variety of musical endeavors.
What you need to do to sing in a choir is very different than what you need to do to front a blues band. Singing in a broadway-style musical is very different than singing, say, bluegrass harmonies.
There is a lot of overlap, but how you approach learning stuff varies quite a bit.
I absolutely marvel at what pop singers can do with ornaments, seemingly hitting a whole series of notes in rapid succession, in tune. Maybe they're using an autotuner? :-(
For what it's worth, I've improved my ability to sing with accurate pitch, by imagining the pitch in my head before I sing it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melisma
https://www.youtube.com/user/EricArceneaux
Start with the warmups, work on breath fundamentals, and sing for the love of singing :)
A good vocal coach in person is fantastic, but expensive.
Difficulty level: starting from utter scratch, middle-aged.
Particularly I'd mention Eric Arcenaux: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5hS7eukUbQ
Listening to podcasts by performers about their daily routine might be useful if you want to know what they need to do to care for their voice in order to be able to perform daily.
https://www.udemy.com/user/ericarceneaux/
When looking for a teacher, I wouldn't try to find "the best" or "most virtuoso" around, but what works for you. Try several teachers, get some sessions with 2-3 and find which one is the one that motivates you the most, and understands you the most. A teacher is like a coach and a partner in an adventure... the most important thing is that they can make you progress and keep you motivated.
Good luck :)
Taking a single course in college that got me a little one-on-one attention (just one in a class of ten or so) improved my technique so significantly that I can compare recordings of myself from before and after that class and it's night and day. I don't think I'd have figured out what I was doing wrong without that attention, but they were able to hear it instantly and recommend solutions.
And that's with a solid decade plus of experience in choirs prior to taking that class, it's not like I was a true novice. It's just really not as easy or obvious as it looks.
For context, I'm an amateur guitarist with an interest in singing Sufjan Stevens songs.
For lessons particularly, err on the side of thinking you’re not the problem. You’re paying hourly for this, and if you don’t click with the teacher it could be fairly expensive to “make it work”. Some people are also great artists but terrible instructors. That wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the fact that they are also often completely ignorant of that fact.
"music lessons near $location"
the challenge will be entirely in trying them to see who you like, not finding them.
I went to Japan as an exchange student when I was 16. I had never studied Japanese at all. The thing that surprised me the most was how hard it was for foreign students to unlearn the bad things they learned inside their American classrooms by listening to their friends.
Most of them picked up bad pronunciations, bad grammar practices. Even if they were diligent (which is being generous for the high students they sent over with me), they would hear other students speaking in ways that made sense to them from their perspective of how English works. They would hear and repeat Japanese words in the bad pronunciation style their friends in class did, and those ways make sense. But, none of those practices were what Japanese people did.
I often remark on how fortunate I felt to have only learned Japanese in a setting where I only heard correct pronunciation and heard statements made by natives. In three months I was ahead of others who had studied back in the US for two or three years or more.
I would really love to see if anyone has studied this effect inside the world of software engineering. We pride ourselves in the hacker culture where self-directed learners are glamorized, but I wonder whether having good teachers and getting good feedback early on would make a large or small difference long term. This could be a startling alternative to the "naturally brilliant prodigy" stories we always hear.
Instead, the engineers I appreciate on my team has very little to do with what they know. Instead of hiring engineers who only cares about the latest and greatest, I value engineers who: communicate openly, write good tests, and cares about the product enough to fix bugs without having someone create a jira ticket for them, and has good debugging skills.
When I'm not at work, I teach coding to a small group of self learners in my local community by telling them to focus on user experience and writing good tests instead learning every popular libraries out there. Its okay to know only 1 or 2, it is important to know it well. Together, we work on an open source project with 100% test coverage: https://github.com/garageScript/c0d3-app
We hired one of these students who was a core contributor and I hope to hire more directly once more recs opens up onto my team.
Yes, true, but on the other hand, singing comes naturally to some people which makes me think that most other people have already developed bad habits before they even started singing. At least that would hold for me when I started singing.
Therefore I'd say that the technical aspect of singing == unlearning of bad habits.
Source: I'm a vocalist in a big band.
There is only one thing you can do: find a good teacher. You don't have experience related to singing, so you are not even able to diagnose what you are doing wrong and start working on it. You accidentally start pushing yourself into direction opposite to what you should be doing as I did at some point. Also, it's important to find a good one: if a teacher suggests something, then you try it for a few weeks and nothing changes, then maybe it's time to find another one. I'm not saying you can learn everything in a month, but you should at least notice something is changing and and understand what exactly you are working on. If the teacher can't explain what exactly you should improve (and how) other than "sound better" then likely it's not a good teacher. I cannot stress how important is finding the right teacher. Two lessons with right guy I found were much more effective than everything else I did beforehand for years (youtube tutorials, lessons with other people, trial and error). Don't try to be cheap: few weeks with someone who knows what they are doing can take you further than months with someone who doesn't (obviously I'm not saying that all good teachers are expensive and all cheap are bad. What I'm saying is that there is SO MUCH DIFFERENCE between an average and a great teacher that it's often worth paying for example twice as much). One more thing about teachers is try to get demos of their students and see if you like how they sing.
Another piece of advice: get used to recording and listening to yourself. It's frustrating, but it's second best thing I did after finding a good teacher. I can't imagine making progress on singing without recording. And you can record yourself on a smartphone/laptop/whatever for practice purposes, no need to buy any audio equipment.
Now, having said all that. I have had really positive experiences with a teacher who teaches CVT (Complete Vocal Technique). I'm sure a huge part of this was the individual teacher I found, but every lesson I walked away feeling like I had learned something new and had improved my technique. If there's a licensed CVT teacher near you, I'd highly recommend trying them.
My vocal coach (Greg Delson) is incredible and teaches Complete Vocal Technique. He does online lessons, group lessons, etc... that are worth looking into:
https://www.landlights.com/vocal-instruction
https://www.instagram.com/landlights.music/
Having tried it, I think singing is poorly suited to self-learning. In my experience, vocal lessons are designed around identifying and overcoming problems and habits that are unique to each person. Identifying problems is done by ear or by observing subtleties in body posture, which require experience and training.
https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/taking-care-your-voice
Singing judiciously limits you creatively in the short term. Singing passionately can limit you creatively in the long term, as you burn out your instrument.
She is a piano prof at Juilliard and I believe runs one of their startup/business courses, so she’s put a lot of careful thought into this (but I’m sure would appreciate feedback).
Disclosure: I am completely unaffiliated with her company, but have been using it during this period of SIP. If you have any questions or feedback about TR, feel free to reach out.
You need to just sing. Sing along with your favourite songs, sing with heart.
Then ... you may either want to get a bit of coaching, possibly sing with a choir.
Most singers were really quite good before they had formal coaching, and many have never had any coaching at all.
One of the more challenging things is pitch ... some people sing out of tune, have no idea, and it sounds bad. Oddly, this is something a 'voice coach' will have difficulty fixing. This tends to be something that people 'have' or they 'don't' - it can be learned surely, but it's oddly not a 'singing specific' issue. Playing around on a piano, singing the notes, trying to get them to match. So if you have a pitch problem, it will be a separate can of worms, but the more musical exposure you have, via anything, the better you'll get.
There's a reason that so many pop/rock singers ruin their voices, it's because they don't get training.
First - unambiguously, the vast majority of people who sing learned to do so reasonably well before any hint of real coaching, other than possibly little bits that a student/church choir teacher may be able to help with.
It's misrepresentative to hint that an amateur singer, singing occasionally for fun, will somehow how run into trouble, physically, without this. In fact, the majority of people who 'sing a lot' will never have such problems. I sang in a 16 part Jazz choir in my youth, and have always been involved in music, and I don't even recall anyone in my circle losing their voice or having voice trouble (I don't doubt that it's possible), and I don't recall anyone getting specific voice lessons either, that said being part of a choir helps, but we weren't hugely focused on technique in that kind of specificity. Most non-famous pop act singers have not had any real formal training - it's simply unnecessary.
Singing is a little bit like running, you just need a pair of shoes, if you do it a lot and enjoy it, you will get better and it will mostly come naturally. If you are part of any kind of singing group, like a choir, you'll pick up some really simple things that will take you a really long way. If you want to get even better, you can get some coaching, but you don't need it.
The other thing I will add is that a 'singing coach' might move you into a more formal way of singing that might clash with your own creative sensibilities. Many old-school rock stars sing 'terribly' from a technical perspective, but they didn't know better, it's just 'how they do it' and it enabled them to have their own unique flavour. A singing coach early on who moved them into a more 'choral' way of singing ... might have taken that uniqueness away.
In every children's choir, there are a handful of great singers who haven't taken highly specific instruction with respect to technique, singing is natural. Probably a 10 minute, basic youtube instruction would go quite far in terms of basic things just as it might be for amateur running tips.
Big caveat: in my own personal experience, everyone grew up with music i.e. choir, instruments, etc. which will lead to different outcomes and perspectives than someone who has absolutely no exposure to music.
First, you're probably not tone deaf. If you can differentiate between one note and a note a semitone away, you've got enough pitch to sing. If you can watch two youtube videos, think one sounds good and one sounds bad, you've got enough pitch to sing.
I spent a long time worrying about this because I struggled with pitch a lot, and then even though I could eventually (with a lot of adjustment) get my voice to make a sound at the same pitch as a piano key, it didn't sound "right" or "good". Even though the tuner told me i was right on it. Also the pitch always seemed different inside my head to listening back to it.
In the end it turns out it's all about frequencies. Your voice is making a whole bunch of them when you vocalise, it's not just a simple sine wave, and these resonate at different places, and sound different inside your head (to you) and outside (to everyone else). When I had the pitch issues, I actually mainly had placement issues. Good placement feels like cutting off the lower half of my voice, but is pretty much just you making the right frequencies and more importantly avoiding making the wrong ones. To a natural singer this probably sounds like crazy talk, but to someone who always sounded bad, this is life-changing.
So yeah, ignore the parent comment, find a good teacher who started from nothing and can teach you placement (I still recommend https://bohemianvocalstudio.com/), and practise like crazy. You'll never look back.
If that won't work for you and you're set on in-person lessons, try to find someone who was never a natural singer, and had to learn everything from scratch. They'll be able to pass on more than someone who started with a basic natural ability.
If you need a place to get started, you might just look for a few YouTube videos or tutorials about that. It gives you extra volumes of breath, so you can belt out the notes and hold them longer. Everything else follows from that.
The situation is, I've known that I should find a teacher for many years. However, I can be quite stubborn and have instead been recording myself playing guitar/singing for the past several years. With debatable progress.
I know I should find a teacher, but what should I look for? My guitar is fine.. I've played since I was 12 and had a lot of lessons back then. So I feel better about self-studying guitar.
I've also been singing for that long, but without any actual instruction. Help!
For example, if you try to sing a note on the top of your range you will likely resort to "muscling" the note by adding tension, but this approach if far from optimal, and will limit the amount of range you can add.
This is coming from me as a semi-professional classical vocalist, but I will also admit that my advice is likely much less useful for people interested in the kind of singing common in country or indie/folk music, as these kinds of music require much less technical complexity in their vocal production.
> My guitar is fine
> I've ... had a lot of lessons.... So I feel better about self-studying guitar
> I've also been singing ... without any actual instruction.
> Help!
So what's the difference between the thing you feel better about and the thing you feel worse about? What did you learn from your guitar teacher that you wouldn't have learned alone? It won't be the same for voice, but it'll be analagous.
More specifically, for learning, feedback is best when given immediately. A voice coach would be able to give immediate feedback, rather than you (potentially) discovering it later on on your own.
Also, an experienced coach will be able to match your weaknesses with exercises specifically chosen to address the challenges you are facing. Exercises appropriate for your current level and practicing the skills you need.
Finally, there is a lot of subtlety in vocal technique. There are tons of things that most people do not notice in self-observation or through recordings that a coach can pick up on and help you through.
But it doesn't really matter actually, because once in a choir you will meet people, learn from other people, learn about other choirs, and it's quite normal that people switch to different choirs every so often.
Also, people say that a choir is important for one's musical development, and I have to agree (having done solo singing before singing in a choir).
PS: the first few sessions may feel overwhelming but this is quite normal and most choir members have learned that new people will need some time to get accustomed to singing. In my experience, most new people will sing along very softly, and then suddenly after a few weeks they will become more confident and more audible. This is totally normal.
PPS: until the covid19 situation is over, perhaps "online" lessons as others have mentioned are a better idea.
With her feedback I am able to self adjust to reflect my personality when I speak Korean.
Personally, I feel like getting a tutor to "teach you" something in the artsy space may slow down your search to find your own voice that resonates with you. Maybe you can pay a tutor to just "listen to you" and tell you what you sound like to the other person.
On the other hand, if your goal is to just to imitate other singers, I would suggest getting a tutor to teach you like many other are suggesting.