Voice Lessons and Singing Tips - How to Project Your Voice

Many singers struggle with voice projection. They all want to know how to sing with a powerful, loud, strong voice. Once you have established good breathing techniques here are some things a singer can do to improve their voice projection.

1. Lift your soft palate. It gives much- needed space to the back of your throat to allow more sound out. I've seen singers sing with lots of effort, but that effort is not reflected in their volume because they are simply not giving more space in the backs of their throats.

2. Relax your tongue. For many, this is a positive side effect of lifting your soft palate. A tense tongue will over work your throat which actually tightens and diminishes the sound. Here's an exercise you can do to help you accomplish this. Begin talking as if your tongue is fat and heavy, as if someone has numbed it. You can even practice by reading this paragraph out loud. You can practice singing 'Amazing Grace' or some other familiar tune in this manner while focusing on not allowing your tongue to 'get in the way'. As you practice, you will hear your voice begin to free itself.

3. Keep your vowel forward. Be sure to keep vowels relatively bright by singing I the mask. It will allow your voice to feel as if it is floating. A good way to learn how to 'float' your voice is by doing lip trills on ascending and descending scales. Lip trills allow your voice to have an ideal placement since you are more focused on keeping the trills going rather than focusing on your voice. This makes your throat relax since your focus is your lips instead of your throat. Your voice will project effortlessly with this technique.

4. Sing through your consonants, don't swallow them. There's the old warm up that comes to mind: "the tip of the tongue, the teeth and the lips'. Keep the consonants at the tip of your tongue and keep them light and easy to sing through. For example, If you are singing on a nonsense syllable of 'da' in the exercise 'da- da- da- da- da', the /d/ sound should not involve your entire jaw to close and all teeth touching. This makes it hard for the back of the throat to stay in a good position for singing. Instead, the tip of your tongue should be behind your top teeth. This way, the /a/ is much easier to sing through regardless of pitch.

Singing with a strong voice can happen by practicing the correct vocal techniques. If we learn to sing with less emphasis on our throats and we will emerge as better singers.

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Record Yourself Singing: Do You Sing Harmony With Your Vacuum Cleaner?

Do you sing harmony with your vacuum cleaner? Some people will find that question strange, but a lot of you will know exactly what I mean. You may be vacuuming away and notice that the sweeper has a constant pitch. You can hum along with it a 3rd up or down. Or you could get wild and try some 5ths or even 2nds. I think it's a symptom of frustration that you don't have anyone to sing ACTUAL harmony with.

So you turn to appliances, car dingers and horns, etc. Though there is (probably) no permanent harm that can come of such behavior, it may please you to learn that you can now sing harmony...wait for it...with yourself! Yeah, yeah, I know. You experimented in high school with recording into your smart phone or boom-box-type recorder, and then sang along with it. But that was cheesy. You may have even frightened your friends with 4-part vocal-bouncing experiments using two or more portable tape recorders, resulting in grotesque semi-audible, music-like hissing noise. But that does not approach the kind of thing possible today! It's even easier and much less painful...to all involved.

All you need is a computer (since you're reading this, I'm assuming you already have one), and a microphone you can plug in to said computer. You CAN do this with a $5.00 mic going straight into your sound card, especially if you want to try this like RIGHT now. But if you have a USB mic, things will sound much better. You can pick a decent one up for between $20 and $50. The only other thing you need is recording software, and there is even a program you can download FREE. It's called Audacity, and is amazingly capable for such an inexpensive (did I mention, "free"?) program.

Audacity will get the job done. You can find a step-by-step on that on the Home Brew Audio website. I actually use Reaper (by Cockos) to do my multitrack recording. It, too, is affordable. It's free for evaluation period, which is 30 days. But it won't ever stop working! Cockos knows that it sometimes takes longer than 30 days to evaluate. When you are ready to buy Reaper, it will only cost you $40 for a full license, unless you start making $20K per year with it! Yeah, you heard right. The full license, which costs $150, is the exact same software, with the exact same functionality and capability as the $40 "discount" license. Cockos merely stipulates that when you start making $20,000 a year using Reaper, you'll need to pay for the full license. It's all on the honor system! That kind of thing is really almost unheard of. Even at such a low price-point, though, Reaper really is far more flexible and capable than Audacity in the realm of tracking and mixing audio. Either way you decide to go, you can create some truly stunning, dare I say, "mind-blowing" harmony sounds with just this modest home recording setup.

Check out some of the really cool self-harmony things you can do with just your computer, a mic, and some cheap software at the Home Brew Audio website.

Learn to record and produce professional sounding audio from home. With fun and short video tutorials we'll show you how to start with a $0-$5 budget, and then how to improve your studio for a few dollars at a time as your knowledge and confidence increase. If you would like to start doing home recording on computer in the next hour, visit us here: music recording software

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Voice Lesson and Singing Tips: How to Be a Better Singer

Many people sing for personal enjoyment and want to know how to improve their singing. Still others sing as their vocation and find themselves struggling at times to create the sounds they want and want to learn to sing better. There are some key things one can do to improve their singing voice regardless of whether you are a beginner or advanced singer.

1. Breathing techniques- Strong breathing techniques lay the foundation for vocal endurance and vocal control. Being aware of when and how you inhale and exhale will enhance any singer's skill. There are several exercises one can do to achieve great breath control. The first being bending over and taking in a deep breath to feel the pressure in your back and against your belt area. If you practice this breathing technique, you will begin to teach your body how to expand while breathing to sing.

2. Projection techniques- This explores how to make sound, independent of 'singing sounds'. This is where you repeat nonsense syllables. It works great because it takes a singer's mind off of 'singing'. You learn to engage not only your voice but also your body as a total instrument. It frees the voice, because you are learning to free your throat and allowing your voice to sound more natural, as if speaking. One such exercise is doing a surprised sounding 'WOW'. To be surprised, the entire body is engaged and a quick breath is inhaled. There is usually extreme facial movement and maybe even hand and arm movement. The voice is then thrown out. If you start of with a fast 'WOW' then move to a slower 'W-O-O-O-O-W' while keeping the same intensity you are learning to project your voice for singing.

3. Tone control- This is where your singing starts to sound polished. You learn to avoid sounding 'shouty' along with was to attack, sustain and release notes. Many times this can be achieved with something as simple as bringing the corners of your mouth forward. There are several positive side effects of a forward mouth. One is that your voice will sound richer and fuller. The second is that you will inadvertently relax your tongue which will give you a rich natural vibrato as well!

Singers will find that in this process their voice has become stronger and more powerful. They are able to sing more challenging music with ease and find themselves singing more comfortably for longer periods of time. They are, indeed, better singers!

I want to hear from you! If this article was useful, please let me know your comments!
Sign up for my FREE 7- Day Ezine on the "Secrets to Great Singing' at http://www.dileesahunter.com/.

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