Importance of Choosing the Right Songs

Your song choice can make or break your performance/enjoyment of the song.

You need to choose the right song for your voice so that:

• You won’t hurt your voice while singing
• You’ll enjoy singing the songs more because they’re achievable
• You’ll avoid building bad habits from trying to sing notes that are out of your vocal range

To choose the right song for your voice, first, you need to find out what voice type you are and what...

Almost everybody I’ve come across wants to sing higher, myself included.
Low voices want to sing higher. High voices want to sing even higher.

Benefits

As if people need to be reminded of the benefits of singing higher! They may seem obvious but do you know exactly why it’s good to have a bigger vocal range?

Improving your high notes will make your low notes stronger

High notes need more finesse to sing. You need better breath management, stronger ligaments & muscles, better...

Different Kinds of Performance Anxiety

We all experience stage fright or anxiety in one way or another when we are performing. Stage fright, also known as performance anxiety, can either help or hinder our performance. There are many kinds of performance anxiety. Let us look at them below.

According to Barbara Conable, there are four kinds of performance anxiety:

1. Butterflies
2. Self consciousness
3. Emotions coming from being under-prepared
4. Debilitating fear and panic

Butterflies

The feeling...

Singing is a very abstract activity. Our instrument - voice box/larynx - is inside of our body so we cannot see or touch it. How can we control an instrument that we cannot see or touch? That’s what makes singing so difficult.

Studies show that beginners rely on auditory feedback (how their voice sounds) to control their voice.

We should be relying on our kinesthetic awareness (the sensations we feel) to control our voice.

Two Kinds of Awareness

There are 2 kinds of awareness:

• ...

If you’ve done singing lessons before, you’ve probably done either bubbles (lip trills) or rolling R’s (tongue trills).

Do they help you to sing well?

Breath Management

According to research, this is one of the best warm-up exercises to do.

First, it helps the breathing mechanism to get up and running very quickly. All the muscles that we use for breathing are ‘woken up’ very quickly. These muscles include the core muscles, diaphragm and lungs.

We get to work on...

You have probably noticed that it is easier to sing while standing rather than sitting down. For some reason, your voice does not feel supported while sitting down.

Why is That?

When we are sitting down, our posture is likely to be out of alignment. A good posture for singing is a straight line running down your ear, shoulder, hip, knee and ankle (when standing). While sitting, aim for a straight line from ear, shoulder to hip. So, if that straight line is broken, your posture is bad.

A bad...