How To Train Your Own Voice For Singing

How to Train Your Own Voice For Singing

Silvio Famularo

Copyright 2011 by Silvio Famularo

Smashwords Edition

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Table of Contents

1 Introduction

2 A good voice

3 Using the sinuses

4 Listening to the sounds you make

5 Warming up the voice

6 Practising

7 Breathing

8 The open throat

9 Supporting the voice

10 Getting the High notes

11 Low notes

12 Singing softly and loudly

13 The mouth

14 Diction

15 Singing songs

16 Things you shouldn't do

17 Ten essential principles to remember

Introduction

For most of my life I’ve wanted to be a top rate tenor. As a young man it was my dream to be singing in the great opera houses of the world. I always believed it was my destiny and that I had it in me to achieve my dream. But obviously my dream didn’t eventuate. However, I still believe it would have been possible to achieve that goal if I had known as much about singing when I was younger as I do now. At seventy-five it’s a bit impractical to expect that I can still make it to the top, but it’s never too late to pass on the knowledge I’ve learned in order to help others overcome the frustrations I went through in order to get my voice to where it is now.

So to begin with, we might as well ask the question, What is singing?

Singing is musical sounds coming out of the head. The voice is formed in the head, not in the throat, as most people believe. This is very easy to prove. When we whisper, air passes up from our lungs, through our so-called vocal cords, which sit in our throats, and out through our mouths, but no vocal sounds are made. It is only when we allow the air to pass through the sinuses, which are situated in the upper front part of the head, commonly referred to as the mask, that vocal sounds are made. You can even send air, which has to pass through the vocal cords, out through the nose without making a sound, but you can’t send it through the upper head cavities without making a sound.

Unless a person’s vocal organs are physically impaired, they will have a voice. If they have a voice, they can speak. If they can speak, they should be able to sing, just as most people who can walk are able to run. Singing is merely speaking in melodic form.

Learning to sing is a very different process from learning to play a musical instrument. With singing, you already have the instrument. It’s something that God has already provided us with. However, the big difference between learning to play a musical instrument and learning to use the voice is that to learn to play the instrument you have to develop a lot of new good habits, whereas, with voice development we mainly have to concentrate on getting rid of bad habits.

When we were born, God gave each one of us a naturally good voice with its own unique sound so that we are able to distinguish one voice from another. But, unfortunately, as we grow up we tend to spoil our voices with acquired bad habits.

To prove my point, let’s observe the English language as it is spoken. Not only do Americans pronounce words differently from the English, but also within both countries there are hundreds of different accents spoken. Even within many large cities you’ll find many different accents spoken by different groups of people. A Russian, a Dutchman, a Korean, as with people raised in all other countries where English is not the first language, will all pronounce English words with a distinctive accent conditioned by the habits they developed learning their own mother tongue.

If I haven’t made my point clear yet, what I am trying to say is that the sounds we make are produced by vocal habits. If we sing badly, it is because we are using bad habits when we sing; if we sing well, it is because we have developed good habits. The duty of a voice teacher is to show people how, or at least help them, to develop good vocal habits.

Nevertheless, even if we all sang perfectly, we would still all sound different because we are constructed differently in shape, size and texture so that each person has his, or her, own unique sound.

Bear in mind that learning how to improve the quality of your voice and learning how to sing are really two different areas of learning. For instance, you can learn to sing songs using your voice the way you are accustomed to using it, and may even sing them with much expression and musicianship, but this is unlikely to improve your voice. In fact it might even make your voice worse if you continue to sing with too many bad vocal habits. On the other hand, one can have a naturally well-developed, resonant and free flowing voice, yet be a lousy musician who sings off key and without much expression.

In my opinion there are a good many people around, being good musicians, who would qualify to teach how to sing songs, but there are relatively few people who know how to produce a good voice. Consequently, there are loads of people who have paid lots of money to singing teachers for voice lessons only to end up losing both their money and their voices. If you dedicated several years to learning to play the trumpet from an incompetent trumpet teacher and didn’t make much progress, at least the instrument on which you practised would still be okay; but this is unlikely to be the case with an incompetent voice trainer. A bad voice teacher can spoil a voice. You don't improve your voice by re-enforcing bad vocal habits.

Please note: while in this book I’ll be providing you with a lot of tips and guidelines for good singing, this book is mainly concerned with showing you how to improve your voice.

The Key Principles

The very first, and the most essential, step towards improving your voice is to think about how you are going about it. This is really why people take singing lessons. Since they don't know how to go about it themselves, they pay someone else to do their thinking for them

My aim with this book is to get you thinking so that you can do the job of improving your voice yourself. In some cases, because of preconceived ideas, you may disagree with some of my ideas and suggestions. However, if I can motivate you to think more seriously about how you are going to improve your voice, you will have benefited from the book.

If what I teach differs from what you have already been taught, don't be surprised. The one thing that most singing teachers have in common is that they often disagree with each other.

The paths to good voice production are elusive. Some people refer to them as the secrets of voice production. The fact is that nobody intentionally keeps them a secret; it’s just that not that many people know the key principles for developing a voice to its full potential. However, I am going to be bold enough to say that after many decades of study and searching for the answers I’m confident enough to say that I now know how to do this.

I’m not promising a magic formula that will make you a first class singer overnight, but I believe I can start you on the journey. Whether you want to take the time to pursue the journey is up to you. I certainly didn’t know the answers in my earlier years when I was an exceedingly enthusiastic singing student. Now that I believe I know a lot of the answers, I am keen to share the knowledge I have gained with as many people as I can through this book. My hope is that it will save many people from wasting time and money, as I did, undergoing fruitless singing lessons where much of what I did