Learning How to Sing (Apr. 23)

The first time I ever sang in front of anyone was in Solomon's Island on the boardwalk about 9 years ago. I had my dad's acoustic Fender and I remember standing between my friends Steve and Kendall, who were both egging me on to sing an early John Mayer song. My voice was terribly breathy, hard to control, and soft. Every time I sang I had this feeling. I couldnt control dynamics or tone, only struggle and push to get the notes to barely sound good enough to not be embarrassed. I just dropped into the water with no idea how to swim. Regardless, they seemed to enjoy it and so did the many other people at open mic nights I played at over the next few years. So I kept doing it. Lesson 1; you cannot accurately judge the quality of your own voice based solely on what others tell you, whether they say good things or bad things. You need to record yourself. You need to get into your own world and only allow yourself or a seasoned vocal coach to be your judge. Simply thinking "hey I must be a good singer because all the people at the open mics tell me I am" are what creates the blooper reels for American Idol auditions.

Now after 9 years of fumbling with my voice, with no idea about technique other than hear-say, I finally made my first stepping stone of progress to knowing what to do to really improve my voice. Listen carefully: what it feels like to you when you sing is what it sounds like to others when you sing. If your throat feels tight, and fighting against what you want it to do, people will hear that in your voice, even if, for the most part, you are singing in key. My first stepping stone was this realization: singing is not actually hard to do! Any idiot with the smallest amount of talent can be at least a good singer if they practice enough. All problems from singing occur when your mind works against your actual voice. All you need to do is sync up what you think your throat and breath are doing with what they are actually doing. How do you do this?

Just check out this book: "The Secrets of Singing by Jeffrey Allen".

Here is link to the guys website: Secrets of Singing website.

This was recommended to me by a teacher at Berklee. It's fantastic, I cannot praise it enough. Get it! No I am not getting paid for saying this.
It takes a different approach. If you really practice daily, significant progress will occur rapidly, within a few months. All the lessons are based on visualizing certain things while you are practicing in order to manipulate your voice to get it to sync up with your mind. Once you do that, the later lessons are just refining little things, but most of you probably wont even care, you will sound plenty good after the first few basic lessons.

I have months and months of work to do before I get my voice to a level I will happy with, but this book is the perfect tool to sync your mind and voice together so when you think you are singing with an open throat, you aren't actually closing it or when you think you are using proper breath support you aren't actually pushing too much air. If you can sync up a few basic concepts, your singing will improve DRASTICALLY. It will feel easy and sound smooth and full. People who are "naturals" already have their mind and voice synced up. The way their brain works just so happens to be wired to make them sing with correct technique (more or less) from the first time they do it. So odds are you are like me, not one of these people. If you struggle with your voice and it just doesn't feel right when you sing, I seriously recommend that book!

Struggling singers unite! I have been practicing out of the book just for a few days and have noticed small progress.
I will post my progress in a few months.

Sing on.