This chapter has been full of information and exercises—you might be feeling a bit overwhelmed! The most important contributor to your improvement will be daily practice.
When you’re learning to sing, you’re training sensitive muscles, and it’s crucial that you don’t overdo it. Short, regular practice sessions are far better than occasional long sessions. You will make more progress with 5 or 10 minutes daily than 30 or 60 minutes a few times a week. Be gentle, learn your limits, and have patience.
Here is a summary of the exercises we covered which can be useful to practice regularly.
Breath Support:
- Breath and Dynamics: Practice singing different wordless notes in your range, going firstly from soft to loud. Then loud to soft.
- Find Your Breath Support Muscles: Inhale, letting go of any abdominal tension. Place your hands around your waist, in between your ribs and your hips, and give a gentle cough.
Matching Pitch:
- Practice Matching Pitch: Listen to a note, sing it, assess your pitch accuracy (with an electronic tuner, your own ears while singing, or recording), try again.
- Listen to Yourself Sing: Choose a short, simple melody you know well. Sing it. Audiate yourself singing it. Record yourself singing it. In each case, pay attention to the pitching.
Vocal Control:
- Sighing Through Your Range: Take a good breath and then breathe out with a vocalised sigh. Repeat this, starting from different places in your range.
- Pitch Sweeps: Pick a note from your range and slide down to the same note one octave lower. If this is too far for your range, choose a note a fifth lower instead.
- Sing Half Steps and Whole Steps: Sing through a series of Half Steps (chromatic scale) or Whole Steps (whole tone scale).
- Singing Solfa Intervals: Practice singing “solfa intervals”, first along with the audio or an instrument, then without.
None of these exercises need to take very long, and they can be memorised quickly to use as part of your warm-up routine at the start of each music practice session. Depending on what your focus is and the opportunities you’re seeing to improve, some exercises will naturally become ones you want to practice regularly, while others will no longer be so useful for you.
You will also discover plenty of other opportunities to use your singing voice in Parts II and III of this book which can all serve as further Singing practice too.