were to go form here

[sammy1]

hi all just started trying to sing a couple of months ago. any advice welcome and don't be scared to be brutal, I don't really know what im doing. I know i off lots of notes in recording which I think will improve with practice more looking for advice on technique and if im on the right track. excuse the crappy mic quality and guitar playing

 

https://soundcloud.com/user959946488/1a-1

 

thanks

[kickingtone]

The first thing I decided, when I started singing, was that my ear must be more educated than my voice. If you can't hear it, you can't fix it. (Not everybody agrees. Some people argue that a coach can help you to hear it, after you start to fix it).

 

The second thing I decided was that the most basic building block was going to be 'pitch'. If the pitch is wrong, there is little point in trying to do anything more with the note. If a striker or golfer can't hit the ball in the right direction, there is little point in adding power.

 

So I started a cappella with songs that are more or less only about pitch -- children's songs/nursery rhymes. If you want brutal honesty, it is a good place to start. There is nowhere to hide -- no complexity to excuse pitch errors, no instrument to drown out the mistakes, no emotional distractions and related mental inventions to fool your ear. You will quickly know if you are hitting that note. If not, then you have a solid direction for investigation, and critically, a sense of knowing what you are correcting, which you may not get if you blindly follow a packaged course. Then you can add power, and more questions will follow. A natural direction of progress will unfold.

 

If your ear is improving, you are sounding closer to what you want (or what is required by a particular genre) and feeling more relaxed and confident, then you are on the right track. Record yourself in a couple of weeks time, post it up, and compare.

[highmtn]

@kickingtone,

 

You are correct in your statements about the importance of pitch to a singer. There's no ignoring it. Here is a video of a student I am helping on another forum. Hopefully you can access it. I don't think the video is marked as private.

 

Early on it was evident the student had pitch issues. In this video the student is teaching himself to listen for his pitch and to home in and find it. He is teaching himself. He is getting better. He started from a point of having no concept that he was off-pitch. His melodies bore no resemblance to the song or scale. You can see him making corrections now and see the gears turning in his head as he listens. Students with pitch issues will have to train their ears and their brains to become pitch-seeking missiles, listening and making corrections on the fly, until they are centered on the target note.

 

 

 

 

[sammy1]

Ok thanks for advice , so taking from your posts it is my pitch I need to work on most/first up? And what is the difference between pitch and key (or is there a difference?). Sorry I am very new to this.

[sammy1]

I worry If my ear is not in tune then I am practicing getting worse at something, if you know what I mean.

 

[highmtn]

@sammy1,

 

No your pitch isn't that bad. I actually was responding to @kickingtone's comments about pitch, not your recording. I think you need to focus more on breath and support. By the way, your guitar playing isn't bad, either.

 

You need to learn a bit about diaphragmatic breathing and also breath support and that will improve several things about your voice. Support does help with pitch and also with vocal stability. You should also do some vocal exercises to help build your range and strength, which will help with stability. I'm talking about doing scales on prominent vowels, as in scales on the AH vowel, on a 1, 3, 5, 8, 5, 3, 1 scale. Start at about G2 and move it up a step each time you complete the scale, taking your starting notes up to around C 4, scaling up to C5. That will work your vocal muscles and condition your vocal cords to do more than they are capable of now.

 

Bob

[sammy1]

thanks so much for your advice

[kickingtone]

I worry If my ear is not in tune then I am practicing getting worse at something, if you know what I mean.

 

 

I was only giving a general approach for determining areas needing attention.

 

I tend to pick the simplest short, uncluttered section of music that exposes imperfections in my singing in an obvious way..Then I have something concrete to work on.

 

Keeping it short and simple, means more repetitions, more focus and more practice.

 

Two of the non-negotiables for successful completion of the exercise are...

 

1. Singing on pitch.

 

2. Being relaxed. (no tension anywhere).

 

My answer to "where to go from here" comes from finding out why I am having difficulty during an exercise.

 

First, I really have to hear what is wrong, and be able to hear what is right. Then, when it goes wrong, I have to pay very careful attention, and feel it going wrong. That is a crucial window of opportunity, because things that "magically fix themselves" can "magically break", especially under pressure. What you consciously feel and fix is far more durable, and you will have earned it.

 

Then I am in a good position to try to fix it, and to understand what people are advising, (rather than blindly following).

 

When I started out, the first thing I posted for review was four lines of the children's song, "pop goes the weasel"! :-)

 

All I wanted to know, at that point was if my ear was out. Someone was kind enough to review it, and said it was on pitch apart from the "pop", which was flat.

 

In trying to fix the "pop" I learned a host of things, including "breathing control", "vowels having different requirements" and "cord closure". The shape of the higher pitched 'o' vowel was compromising my cord closure, and therefore my breath support, and my subconscious remedy was to substitute the note, making it flat, or just the wrong note. All the information from fixing the "pop" was transferable to my approach, in general.

 

There is a point in your clip where you take a breath in the middle of a phrase. Can you sing the song without taking that breath? If not, you can isolate the area, and work on fixing it, a cappella.

[kickingtone]

Here is a video of a student I am helping on another forum. Hopefully you can access it. I don't think the video is marked as private.

 

Very interesting, and funny you should post it. Only a week or so ago I started doing the same thing. I am discovering some odd things!

 

I am OK with groups of notes. But I can be WAY out with a single note, singing a perfect fifth out, or even a whole octave!

 

If the note is out of context of other notes, I think I sometimes zero in on one of its partials (maybe the loudest). :-(

[highmtn]

Yes, @kickingtone. On the other forum another student posted a demo where they are singing along on pitch. Then they misjudged a single interval, and from that point on, they were singing everything off by the amount of that incorrect interval. In other words, they took a wrong turn and everything from there on was off by the same amount.

 

Part of learning to sing well includes hearing notes, as well as hearing correct intervals between notes, and being able to maintain those concepts while actively singing. If you make intervallic jumps correctly, you will have fewer problems maintaining correct melodies. Many times the intervals that are hard for some ears to discern are the closer, smaller intervals when descending in pitch. Maybe because high notes are emphasized so much, our listening is less critical when going down in pitch, and we get off-track, so to speak. Once we get off track, it may be hard to find our way back on-pitch quickly.

 

Bob

[kickingtone]

highmtn

 

Even more bizarre, I have discovered that my isolated note pitch problem disappears when I am not listen through my headphones! Straight from my laptop, I am fine repeating the pitch to within 2-3 Hz.

 

With some of the earliest clips I recorded, interval errors became obvious when I played the clip in a loop. The end and beginning wouldn't match. Part of the reason for the errors was psychological. I was singing old tunes from memory, and I would replace subtle sharps and flats with "something close" (but easier to sing) and "convince" myself that it was correct. That created drift. Now, I take more time (probably not enough, yet) listening to the original. I should also soon start to practice singing along to backing tracks, for absolute pitch practice.

 

I am a bit cautious about learning standard intervals. I think it could bias me against non-standard intervals. I am tempted to treat all intervals equally. After all, in terms of expression, there is nothing special about a standard scale. It wan only designed to make tuning easy.

[highmtn]

@kickingtone,

 

The standard scale forms a sort of framework or matrix that we can use to standardize our pitch references. Beyond that is the ability to navigate outside or in-between those intervals. But without a reference, we experience what you mentioned when you formed loops from your recorded clips and found that the ends did not match one another. That's what happens when we fall off the framework.

 

I do recommend that singers who submit acapella tracks for feedback re-record their demos with backing tracks. It's hard to tell whether they are in-between standard concert-pitch notes otherwise. For instance, their A4, instead of A 440 could be A 450, and so forth. Once off track, everything following will be off-track. The notes may be right in a relative sense, but they are not right in an absolute sense.

 

I understand that you like to take a more independent approach to singing. I tend to take the more standardized path with the standardized pitch. It's easier when it's time to sing along to instruments that are in tune with the rest of the world.

 

: ^ )

 

Bob

[kickingtone]

@highmtn

 

The looping problem was due only to fact that I hadn't listened carefully to the original. It doesn't happen any more, even though I am still not familiar with standard intervals.

 

As you said, you may have to "navigate" in-between the standard interval, anyway, perhaps hitting an A 450. The question is, do you get there by interpolation, or directly. I think it is possible to hear A 450 directly, as a note in its own right. After all, they must have been doing this for centuries, before any standardization. There are also genres across the world that have different standards. To some people, those genres now sound awkward or out of tune, because they have biased their hearing.

 

That is the reason I am approaching standardization with caution -- to be able to be in tune with genres across the world.

 

I want to be able to recognize the standard without becoming dependent on it.