Singing Technique 2

The Development Of Tone

Expressing your emotions through your tone of voice is really important in singing. My development of tone has improved greatly over the past few months, by using the Shelley Kristen exercises
and building up the strength of my voice this has improved the development of tone.  Shelley Kristen has a wide range of vocal exercises that help improve different elements of your voice. For instance,
-ng placement helps the development of the general tone of your voice.

Projection

Projection is a very important part of singing technique, as to sing you want people to be able to hear you, exercises like Shelley Kristen's hey you are great for this. I like the way her tutorial takes you up and down the scale, and being nasal also helps you with forward placement, thus helping you practise projection and forward placement at the same time. Posture is also key for projection, as if you are slouched you won't be able to project your voice as well.  

This is a helpful YouTube video by Australian singing coach Kerri Ho about forward placement, which means focusing your sound into a specific area where you feel resonance. 

Breath Control 

 Breath control is so important whilst singing, as without it you will be gasping for air all the time. It is especially important when holding those amazing long notes without faltering, a good exercise for this is manyya, and I found Shelley Kristen's tutorials very helpful. She divides them up into "straight-line" and "vibrato" with separate exercises for male and female singers.

Range 

Vocal range is when where you sit between the scale, and your ability to sing high and low notes. We tend to describe singers who can sing at the higher range as sopranos (usually women) and at the lower range baritone (usually men).   There are different styles of voice, e.g. classical, pop, R&B Jazz, and singers tend to start off with one or two styles. Young people or children will widen their range of styles and when they get into adulthood they will tend to stick to one style. 

It is important that you keep improving your range on a weekly basis as this will widen your choice of songs that you will be able to sing.  You will find that you will have much more success with your singing by using scales and arpeggios  for developing your range, you should slowly increase the range of notes you can sing to improve your vocal range.

Flexibility 

It is important to be flexible with your voice as this may get you more work in the future, and you'll potentially have more fun in your career, this links back to Vocal Range.  Flexibility also includes style and genre of music and singing style, try widening your range, try things like classical and folk singing, as this will also improve the quality of your voice.  Classical and folk are great to start off with, as it's easier to move to other genres, as you get the basic techniques from these core genres. 

Diction 

Diction is an extremely important part of singing as it links to pronunciation, you need to be understood whilst singing. It is all well and good producing a beautiful sound, but that is only part of it, singing is an art form in which you are setting a story. 

A great way of improving diction is by doing tongue twisters and doing simple exercises like pretending to chew a piece of gum, and generally keeping the mouth moving, over enunciating whilst speaking is also great as you can utilise it in your singing.