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  #1  
Old 04-09-2016, 05:03 PM
AusSi AusSi is offline
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Default Learning to Sing Advice

Hey All,

So I have really started to get singing with my playing down, but I sound just horrible, no supprise really considering i have never practiced before.

I mostly want to sing jack johnson style stuff, I thought it would be a good idea to get some tips from you guys on where to start learning? As i feel like i am in a big sea of lessons at this point, dont know where to start.

Regards,
Simon
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  #2  
Old 04-09-2016, 05:27 PM
Pitar Pitar is offline
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The art of singing requires much practice to become accomplished. A singer who can make that claim, but never attempted to simultaneously play guitar before, will find his singing suffers greatly from the mechanical distraction of playing guitar. Conversely, the same holds true.

Combining the two acts is a whole other level of practice and will continue to be for quite a while. Being able to naturally play the melody and give proper treatment to the lyrics requires much focus and practice that challenges a person with each new song. I hear some pretty good recordings people put up but they are studio renderings, meaning, the guitar and vocal tracks may well be separately recorded. I record a song as I would play it live to keep it real for me. This means a high degree of development is necessary before I go live.

As I recall, it took me a year to become accomplished with finger picking and an additional year to maintain that level of play while singing along with it. Since then I've developed my singing and playing to best complement each other. Having developed into an instrumentalist as well, it takes some discipline to quiet down the guitar to allow the singing enough room to (properly) carry the weight of the song.

learning to sing and play is a huge accomplishment and I highly recommend as much time practicing it as possible. I doubt any formal lessons will make you develop quicker. Get a few songs you enjoy and learn them to the point of putting passion in your vocal delivery. Rote singing of the lyrics isn't enough. You have to make your audience believe in you as a singer. That's the key to success for any singer-song writer as well the mark of a good cover artist.
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Old 04-09-2016, 05:46 PM
RayCJ RayCJ is offline
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For me, as I learned the guitar parts of the song, I hummed the melody and gradually converted the humming to the words of the song.

The first song I learned to play & sing was Cat Stevens "Father and Son". It took about 2 weeks of daily practice. If things are not going well on a particular day, give it a break, try again later and give yourself the mental OK to quit for the day if things are going really bad. No sense in torturing yourself.


Ray
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Old 04-10-2016, 06:25 AM
JonPR JonPR is online now
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Quote:
Originally Posted by AusSi View Post
Hey All,

So I have really started to get singing with my playing down, but I sound just horrible, no supprise really considering i have never practiced before.

I mostly want to sing jack johnson style stuff, I thought it would be a good idea to get some tips from you guys on where to start learning? As i feel like i am in a big sea of lessons at this point, dont know where to start.

Regards,
Simon
One on one lessons are obviously the best advice, but if that's not practical (or too expensive), there are exercises you can do yourself.

IMO, the first thing is to find your current range: what's the lowest note you can sing, and what's the highest (ie that you can get comfortably and hold, without cracking or wobbling).
You can do this by humming to your guitar, trying to match the note you hum to a note on the guitar. I suggest starting at your normal speaking pitch, just holding a note as steady as you can. Match that note on the guitar.
If you're an adult male, that note is likely to be somewhere on the A string, quite low - maybe even lower (on the bottom E).
See how much lower you can go - still holding the note strong and steady.
As a rough guide, the bottom of classical bass register is (handily enough) bottom E on guitar.
Most untrained voices can cover an octave, just about, reasonably well. If you can sing that low A, but no much lower, you should be able to get up to the A on 3rd string fret 2.
If you're a natural tenor, you may struggle to get down to that bass A, but should find a lot easier to go high.
Male country singers are often in the bass or baritone registers. Johnny Cash was a bass - but with quite a big range (listen to I Walk the Line to hear him exercising it!).
Rock singers tend to go for the tenor range, even if untrained for it - that's because male voices express passion and intensity when raised that high. Neil Young is a tenor, singing an octave higher than most men would find comfortable.

The point of finding your own range is to enable you to adjust the keys of any song you sing, so that the song's range comes within yours.
Then the main thing you will need to practice is breathing, and giving the voice more power. Pick a note on the guitar (within your range), take a breath, and sing that note for as long as you can. Try different vowel sounds.
Play a chord and see if you can sing each note in the chord (as far as your range will allow).
You don't need to shout, but give the voice the kind of power you would if speaking to a room full of people - not just conversing with one person next to you.

(I said "current" range above, because with practice you should be able to extend it - probably more upwards than downwards.)
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Old 04-10-2016, 08:42 AM
stanron stanron is offline
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Three things stand out to me. Breathing, pitch and diction.

You'll hear lots of references to breathing and you might think "Breathing? I've been breathing all my life. What's the big deal?"
The point is that you need to have enough breath to complete lines of text logically. For instance

"Somewhere over the [breath] rainbow"

is bad breath control.

"Somewhere [breath] over the rainbow"

is better because the break fits both the music and the logic of the text. Better still would be having enough breath to be able to do the whole line without a break.

The muscle that controls breathing is called the diaphragm and an internet search on how to use it should prove rewarding.

Pitch is something that guitarists can be a bit cavalier about. After all, that's what frets are for, right? Not when you are singing. Singing is a bit like playing slide. You have to listen and decide when you are on pitch and when you are not. And if you are not on pitch you have to correct it. This is only for the brave but if you have a digital automatic tuner try watching that when you do JonPR's exercise playing notes and then singing them.

Diction is about making words clear. You may or may not have noticed already that when you sing long notes, most of the time you are singing vowel sounds. The consonants come right at the beginning and right at the end. Two big mistakes you can make are not making them clear at the ends of words and not separating the consonant at the end of one word from the consonant at the beginning of the next. The lyric phrase "your eyes" crops up in song after song. It is nearly always sung "your Rise" and it drives me mad! I’ve heard some top singers fall for this. Have you ever heard an adult talking to a naughty or stupid child when they speak ver-y slow-ly and clear-ly. That is not altogether bad singing diction technique. Try to make the words clear.

The timbre of a voice can be important. Nat 'King' Cole had a warm throaty vibrato in his voice that gave his singing a highly intimate quality. All voices are different but if you admire a particular singer then by all means try and copy that sound.

For the more advanced singer discovering and using those parts of the body that resonate and dealing with that point where you voice begins to break are worth study.

Over all there should be pleasure. If your singing gives you pleasure don't be afraid to show it. There's a good chance it will give others pleasure too. If it doesn't give you pleasure, change it until it does.
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Old 04-10-2016, 11:59 AM
Hotspur Hotspur is offline
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Get lessons.

Singing is weird. In my opinion, it can't be learned in the same way a lot of guitar playing can, with youtube videos and the like.

Some much singing technique is invisible to the untrained viewer, but obvious when you have learned it. I mean, I can watch the "ha ha let's all laugh at how bad they are" singers on American Idol and see four or five fundamental aspects of technique that they're doing wrong, but to most viewers they just sound awful, like they have no talent.

The basics of singing technique include opening your mouth more than you think you need to, expanding your chest muscularly so that it doesn't expand and contract with your breath, singing out in front of you, and eliminating as much other tension as possible. That last one if tricky, as we're often completely unaware of where we're holding tension.

For example, when I sing high notes, I have a tendency to reach - to lift my neck and shoulders like I was reaching for a note that was physically higher than other notes.

So much of maximizing your singing potential is locating the ways where you're holding and just getting out of the way. Easy to say, hard to do.

Another aspect of being a good singer is having a good ear. You MUST train your ear. I recommend the functional ear trainer (a free download from miles.be). If you have a hard time playing a simple melody that you can on your guitar without a lot of hunting and pecking, you're going to struggle when you sing - you'll sound "pitchy" - lots of little corrections when you start to sing a note, realize it's not exactly the note you want, and try again.

Investing in a few months of singing lessons, for me, paid huge dividends. I went from somebody who was not confident in singing to someone who regularly gets compliments from strangers when I sing in public.

Once you've got your singing fundamentals down, it's just going to take time and practice to lock in doing it while you play the guitar. There's no shortcut.
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Old 04-10-2016, 12:35 PM
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fazool fazool is online now
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[quote] Learning to Sing Advice[/quote} well, start out gently - use constructive criticism and sing advice about the topic not person
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Old 04-10-2016, 01:41 PM
rlawton rlawton is offline
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Default Singing IS weird.

As a teacher of singing for over 30 years, I agree with Hotspur that singing is weird. What works with one person will not work with someone else so telling people to do this or do that could make things worse and might even cause damage to the voice.

If you really want to sing better, you need someone who understands singing to help you through the basics of good singing.
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Old 04-10-2016, 02:18 PM
OddManOut OddManOut is offline
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I sing advice to anyone whom I feel is in need of sage advice.

e.g. To the tune of "Highway Star" by Deep Purple

"No way you should wash your car
Gonna rain on to the grou-ound"

Oh...wait...

Seriously, I started with the humming, then with words. The more contrapuntal the voice and guitar parts are, the more I struggle. Practice is the key...
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Old 04-10-2016, 06:57 PM
Clallam Clallam is offline
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+1 to the advice given in this thread already.

I'm a noob with the guitar but I've done a lot of choral singing over the years. A few thoughts from what I've been taught doing that:

A few lessons if that is financially and logistically feasible would be a great start. It's nice to stop bad habits before they start.

You don't want to strain or injure your vocal cords and the muscles controlling them any more that an athlete wants to strain or injure their muscles. Trying to sing too loudly or out of your range is more likely to do that. Warming up before you start singing hard or near the ends of your range is important. If you couldn't talk comfortably to a room that size with that many people in it, don't try to force it and sing. If you would have to force the volume or shout, you need a PA for singing. Your natural range can be expanded with training, practice and a good warmup but there are limits. This is one of the reasons singers are so fussy about which a key a song is played in.

Good posture will help open your chest up to allow maximum movement and will help to open your air passages for free air movement. Then open your mouth enough to let the sound out. Parts of the song will need different openings. Some sounds need a larger opening, some smaller. For the larger openings, a common rule of thumb is to be able to stick two fingers between your front teeth. If they won't fit, which is common with beginners, open wider. Practice in front of a mirror or video yourself to help spot this. Movements of the lips and tongue are most easily demonstrated by an instructor who can then observe and correct your technique.

A lot of your breathing will come from your diaphragm as well as your chest wall. Depending on your background you may need to specifically practice breathing from the diaphragm/chest/both to build some awareness of what has been a purely automatic process. If you have done some other type of activity that taught you this, then you will have this awareness already.

Relax and don't force it. Your body knows how to breathe and talk, it's been doing it since you were a baby. Singing is similar from a breathing standpoint. It's at the vocal cords, where pitch is produced, that things get different.

Breaths go, if possible, where the natural pauses in the song are. It's just like talking, you breathe at the commas and periods, not at random places. Most songs require no deeper breaths than you would use talking to that many people. Rarely, I've performed pieces where we had to specifically rehearse making sure the whole choir started a passage with as large a lung-full of air as possible because it was going to be long and we didn't want the volume to taper off when people ran out of air. There are a few passages where we had to rehearse staggering the breathing so we didn't have an awkward pause when everyone ran out of air and got another breath. That's advanced stuff so don't try forcing it now as a beginner.

Develop your ear. A teacher or friend with a good ear can help develop your ability to sing the right pitch. Without that, try recording yourself playing a note and singing it. A tip that can help is when you are practicing, play the note you need and reach up and block one ear with a finger. It will help you hear the pitch you are producing. Then your ear needs to be good enough to tell if they are the same. If you are practicing singing along with a group or a recording, keep the ear blocked and it will help you monitor yourself. If you watch people dong vocal harmony on YouTube, you will see some professionals doing this right at the start of songs to make sure they start right. Some genres (for example, opera) don't ever do this on stage but the performers have spent a lot of practice time in learning to get that first note perfect, and the ones who can't learn it, don't get to be professionals. In rehearsal, performers in those genres will do it too. (Look at the Three Tenors rehearsal video on YouTube (1:02 to 1:11) for Luciano Pavarotti with a finger on his ear while he hits his first few bars on a song change https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrusdVJ5qcs ).

Last but not least, relax and enjoy the songs you love, no one is expecting perfection, very few will notice a lack of perfection, and none of those will care. They are more likely to notice you are happy and enjoying yourself.
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