Learn to sing

Singing is muscle work: the folds in the throat, the breath, the face. A few minutes of easy sound before anything else lets them wake up gently, the way a runner walks before running. A cold voice tires sooner and cracks more. Before a performance, give it ten or fifteen minutes. And “no pain, no gain” is false for singers: any strain is a stop sign.

Reach both arms up, then let the upper body hang like a rag doll. Yawn wide. Roll the shoulders; tension hides there first. Rub the hinge of the jaw. Then stand with the weight on both feet, knees soft, the chest comfortably high, the back straight, the chin level, and the hands still; check the side view in a mirror once. The tip of the tongue rests behind the lower teeth. Good posture is where good breath starts.

The sound rides on air. Breathe low and silently, so the belly, the sides and the back widen and the shoulders stay still; a gasp means the throat is not open. Then let the air out slowly and evenly. Too much air is as bad as too little: an overfull breath leaks out as a breathy tone or makes you clamp the throat. Running out of air in a phrase usually means spending it too fast, not taking too little. Two small drills: blow one breath out in five short puffs, as if at five candles; and breathe in, hold and breathe out for four slow counts each, adding a count every few days.

Low notes come with the fuller chest sound, high notes with the lighter head sound, and somewhere in the middle the voice changes gear. The old teachers wanted one even scale with no audible change, and that is still the aim. Sirens and lip trills carry you across the place without a bump; the mix is what you find there, a little of each. Two rules: do not force the heavy low sound upward, and do not carry the light high sound all the way down, or the low notes lose their body. For men, singing high notes in falsetto cannot hurt the voice and teaches the ear what the top feels like without effort.

The vowel is the sound; the consonants only shape its edges. Make vowels tall, not wide: the jaw drops, the lips round, and the shape stays the same whether you sing softly or loudly. Sing the five pure vowels in the middle of the voice until they seem to come from one pipe, then even their color out, the bright ones a little darker, the dark ones a little brighter. On a word with two vowel sounds (night, low, day), hold the first one for the whole note and add the second only as you leave it. If you press on high notes, ee helps; if you push, oh helps; uh finds your natural voice.

A consonant is a quick touch that must not stop the tone. Voiced consonants (m, n, l, v, z) take the pitch of their vowel; p, t and k are only points. Keep an s short, or it hisses like a leaking tire. Land the last consonant of a phrase crisply, on the cutoff. To learn a line, sing it on its vowels only, then put the consonants back without losing the flow. Tongue twisters, spoken slowly, wake up the lips and the tongue.

A good tone is free, steady, smooth and ringing, and it comes from letting the voice sing rather than making it. The 1929 teacher put it this way: “Tension is the singer’s worst enemy; nothing is right so long as a vestige of it remains.” A metallic ring that comes from forcing is not resonance. Breathy tone is usually the folds not meeting, and humming fixes it better than any breathing drill. To test for a nasal tone, pinch the nose while singing a vowel: if the sound changes, it was going through the nose. Soft singing needs more support than loud singing, not less.

Stop a note or two before it strains. The range on this page is the range that feels easy, not the widest you can reach. It will grow on its own with daily practice; pushing only sets it back. If the jaw pushes forward or the lips tighten as you climb, that is the top for today. When a song sits too high, change its key instead of straining; the Capo and key page does that for the chords.

Hear the note in your head before you sing it; the throat adjusts by itself. Singers who slide up into each note are guessing, and singers who land on it have heard it first. Very few people are tone deaf; most out-of-tune singing is fear, and goes away with practice. A semitone is the smallest step, from one key on the piano to the next; a tone is two of them. An interval is the distance between any two notes, and the best way to learn one is a song that starts with it: Happy Birthday opens with a tone, Greensleeves with a minor third, Here Comes the Bride with a fourth, Twinkle, Twinkle with a fifth. If you cannot hear yourself, cup a hand behind one ear.

A natural vibrato is a gentle wave of about six times a second, a quarter of a semitone wide. It comes by itself when the breath is steady and the throat is free; it is not made. Slower than that it becomes a wobble, faster a tremolo, and both come from tension. A perfectly straight tone is its own skill, worth having for choirs and harmonies.

A crack on the way up: go back to lip-trill sirens, softer and slower, and do not stop at the crack. Tight high notes: sing them softer on oo and let the jaw hang. A breathy tone: hum, or sing on vvv and zz before open vowels. A nasal tone: the pinched-nose test, then open the mouth more. A tired voice: stop for the day; do not sing through tiredness. Hoarseness that lasts more than two weeks after rest is for a doctor.

“The voice will stand a great deal when it is rightly used and very little when it is not.” Drink water through the day, six to eight glasses. Sleep enough. Do not shout, do not whisper (it tires the folds as much as shouting), do not clear the throat hard; sip water or gargle instead. Rest the voice when a cold starts. Do not sing on a full stomach; smoke dries the throat. Give the voice quiet hours, a lunch break without talking. And do not try to sound like a singer you admire; their voice is theirs, and forcing yours into its shape is how voices get hurt.

Two minutes of stretching and breath. Three minutes of warming up: lip trills, a siren, a hum. Three minutes on one thing, the exercise that is hard this week. Two minutes on the hard bars of your song, not the whole song. Then a short cool-down: soft humming and a few easy slides downward. Four to six days a week; when time is short, shorten the session before you skip a day. Write two lines afterward: what was easier, what was stuck. And practice an exercise after it goes well, not before; that is when it builds the voice.

Nerves are air that has nowhere to go: breathe low three times before you walk on, and know the first line so well you could sing it in your sleep. Mark your breaths on the lyric sheet. Rehearse the whole song once standing up and without stopping. Hold the microphone a hand's width from the mouth and keep it there; turn the head and the microphone together. Sing to one person at the back of the room, and forget yourself in the song.