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Underground > Radio & Music >

How do you sing?

All Acting Regiment

10:30 / 27.03.05

This isn't Legba, this is his mate using this board by his permission.

So- how do you sing? How the hell do you get your voice to sound like anything other than a nasal whine?

19:39 / 27.03.05

Long, technical answer (as myself):

It's all in the breathing. Breathe from your belly, sing from your chest.

Singing is a physical discipline, like yoga or running; as with any exercise, you've got to care for your equipment (drink lots of water, lay off the smokes, don't strain) and warm up/stretch before heavy exertion (e.g., sing ascending & descending scales on the various vowel sounds, starting from a half-tone higher each time).

And, y'know, work at it. Singing is a spontaneous, instinctive expression of emotion and selfhood, yes, but it is also a learned set of physical and and artistic skills—breathing, tone production, articulation, vibrato, relative and absolute pitch, et cetera—that will only improve if you apply yourself to their improvement—by listening, by noticing, by experimenting, by trying, by singing.

Short, encouraging answer (as your mom):

Honey, you have a perfectly nice voice. Don't let anybody tell you different.

Tryphena Absent

20:07 / 27.03.05

You really do just have to sing all the time, really loud and sing as low and as high as you can. I used to sing for years, at least 3 times a week and my vocal range really stretched in the periods where I was using my voice the most. If I had to lay off for a while than it would shrink down again. Your voice is an instrument like any other, it needs to be used and tuned regularly and to forget that is to get out of practice.

Things like vibrato and tone and pitch, there's no point thinking about those things unless you are taking lessons or already know about music.

Brigade du jour

23:18 / 27.03.05

That's funny, someone once told me I had 'natural vibrato', and I was only vaguely aware what she meant.

Funnier still, I'm listening to Minnie Riperton as I read this thread, whom I consider one of the most amazing singers I've ever heard. Like the range of Mariah with the guts of Aretha.

I don't know how you sing, just go for it. Unless you really want to learn proper technical stuff, in which case find a teacher. Preferably one who sings publicly hirself, I suppose.

23:27 / 27.03.05

Things like vibrato and tone and pitch, there's no point thinking about those things unless you are taking lessons or already know about music.

Nonsense. They're common-sense concepts that any singer, trained or untrained, needs to take into account—whether they use that precise terminology or not.

Tone simply means that your voice sounds different depending on your posture, if you're singing through your nose or from your chest, how you're breathing, how widely you open your mouth. This is something that occurs to every child who's ever held a long note and pulled funny faces and listened to her voice go waaaaa-eee-ooo-eee-ahh-oi-oi-oi-oi-oi.

Pitch just means if you're singing the tune properly. Relative pitch means singing tune all the way through and having it be recognizable—i.e., you're in tune with yourself. Absolute pitch means singing in tune with the backing music, if any. (It sounds like it should be the other way around, but it ain't.)

And vibrato is that wobbly sound in a trained voice. You'd know it if you heard it. It is, to little kids, the signifier that epitomizes "grown-up music."

05:31 / 28.03.05

i can't hit pitches accurately and it really bothers me.

06:15 / 28.03.05

Vibrato is a trained type of music? For serious? I've been able to do that since I was eight and all I've had is three lessons of school choir practice.

Actually, I think people DID say I was quite good at singing last time I hit the kareoke pissed. Hmmm. I always thought I was tone deaf.

11:18 / 28.03.05

I think with singing it's a sad fact that the cliche "Practice makes perfect" holds true. I recently started playing at a folk club locally, and over the course of the last year I've noticed a marked improvement in my vocal abilities. I'm still nowhere near, say, Prince or Pavarotti, but I can hold my own, and I don't feel embarassed to be belting things out in front of people.

I have to say it's a lot easier if you have an instrument to hide behind. My Dad sings at the same club, but he gets up every time and does two acapella songs. And he does them perfectly. He's brilliant.

If anyone's interested, here's me:

Zoom Sings!

Tryphena Absent

09:27 / 29.03.05

Nonsense. They're common-sense concepts that any singer, trained or untrained, needs to take into account—whether they use that precise terminology or not.

Jack, they're people, not guitars, tone and pitch come naturally to every animal that can make a sound. All you have to do is open your mouth and start and you know about tone and pitch. When you start singing the thing you need to be told about is where the sound comes from and what that means to volume.

And no one should be thinking about vibrato unless their teacher has told them to. You can damage yourself if you do (and I'm not talking about your fragile little minds) because vibrato isn't a sound that your throat makes.