Table of Contents

Cover

Introduction

Part 1 Exposing Lies and Traps

Chapter 1 - The Big Lie

The phrase “You either have it or you don’t” is a load of crapola.

Chapter 2 - The Biggest Barrier Sometimes Isn’t You

Of 99% of all the people who give up singing, this is the reason.

Part 2 – Conceptual Placement

Chapter 3 - The Concept of Concepts

The absolute, rock bottom, bare essential, fundamental ability needed to sing.

Chapter 4 - What is a note?

Discovering what a note truly is, where they go, and how to put them there.

                Sound

                Tone

                Relative Pitch

                Ladder

Chapter 5 Intonation

Part 3 - Pitch

Chapter 6 - Your Natural Note

Everyone has their own note. This is where we find yours.

                Range

                Piano Notes

                Pitch

                Natural Note

Chapter 7 Mastering Pitch

The chapter title says it all.

Part 4 Resonance

Chapter 8 – Your Instrument

Musical instruments create sound and your voice is an instrument, not much different than a guitar.

Chapter 9 - The Three Voices

The three voices and the basics of voice resonance

Throat Voice

Mouth Voice

Nose Voice

Part 5 Shaping

Chapter 10 - Basic Resonance Modulation

The start of how to stop sounding like an amateur.

                Throat, Mouth, and Nose Combination

Chapter 11 - Advanced Resonance Modulation

Mastering the sound that comes out of your mouth like a pro.

                Vowels and Voices

                Neutral Singing Position

Chapter 12 - Accents

The secret to mastering any genre of music.

Part 6 Vibrato and Volume

Chapter 13 Vibrato

The icing on your sound cake and it comes in two flavors, Pitch and Amplitude.

                Pitch Vibrato

                Amplitude Vibrato

Chapter 14 Volume

We know what it is. The question is when?

Conclusion

Wrapping things up with a final message.

Drill List

Listening Drills

Singing Drills

Car Drills

Singing From Scratch

With the Conceptual Singing Method™

by

Michael Graves

Copyright © 2015 Michael Graves

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof or any revisions by the author may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law.

Please purchase only authorized electronic or printed editions of this book and don’t participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.

If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with, or ask them to buy their own copies. This was hard work for the author and he appreciates it.

This book is a general educational product. As individuals differ, then results may also differ.

Cover Designed by: Haley Graves

Edited by Marlene Poole

Published by Performer Factory Publishing

www.singingfromscratch.com

www.performerfactory.com

Introduction

You Found ‘It’

With the seemingly endless sea of books, videos, courses, opinions, “authorities”, and gurus on the subject of singing out there, the question is what makes this book any different?

Every once in a while a given subject of study will have a source that will leave the fluff, flourish and falsities on the cutting room floor and simply provide a basic field of proven facts, tools, and methods that achieve the desired result in the most expedient fashion possible.

That is what I strive to provide here. The information I provide is what you need and only what you need to get you singing, and well.

So, if you were expecting a book on how to stand and breathe, you have come to the wrong place. I’m confident you already know how to do both.

If you were looking for particular methods in how to warm up by over exaggerating your vowels and making funny sounds, again, wrong book.

If you are looking for all the mathematical and notational particulars of music theory, keep looking.

That’s not to say that music theory, warm-ups and posture aren’t important factors in maximum vocal production. But those concepts and factors aren’t as important as they are sometimes made out to be, and other than a few basics, are beyond the scope of this body of work. Not to mention there is a much, much, much more basic ability that must be in place first.

And this basic ability is truly the pivotal point in all people that determines whether or not one can sing.

Unfortunately, the ability is viewed as a switch that is either turned on or off. When talking about singing, I’m sure you have heard someone say “You either have it or you don’t”? But I guarantee that 100 times out of 100 if you ask them what ‘it’ is, they don’t know; not really.

Oh you’ll get several answers like ‘natural talent’ or ‘a gift’ or ‘ability’ or ‘something you’re born with”, that sort of thing. None of which are really an answer.

What is ‘it’?

The answer is actually very simple and demonstrable. ‘It’ is simply the persons’ ability to fully get the concept of singing. That’s it in a nut shell.

What does ‘get a concept’ mean?

Picture a dog in your mind and answer these questions. What color is the dog? How big is the dog? What body position is the dog in? What is the dog doing? What does the dog sound like? What is around the dog? What is the dog on? What does the dog smell like? What else is happening in the room around the dog? What does the room the dog is in smell like? What noises are happening around the dog?

Got a picture? Good. That’s a concept. And the more questions you were able to answer, the more complete of a concept you have. You might have even had your concept develop as the questions went along.

Regardless, as you can see, the idea that “you either have or you don’t” is wrong. You obviously have “it” because you have just demonstrated that you have the ability to get a concept. So let’s drop that lie and leave it lying on the side of the road for good and move on.

And, as you can see, the idea that the ‘it’ factor is a switch that is either on or off, is wrong. Actually, it’s more of a rheostat, a dimmer switch. The more complete concept you have of singing the better you are at it.

So if the extent of your concept of singing is opening your mouth and making noise, then that is as good as you are going to be. If you increase that concept to encompass general notes and rhythm, you will be better, probably good enough to sing in the shower and have a good laugh on karaoke night.

But if you could fully conceptualize almost automatically and in an instant the entire scope of the sound, shape, and texture of every note you are singing within the concept of the whole song and performance easily and fluidly, you would simply be an amazing singer.

The purpose of this book is to turn on and increase, the conceptual ability you need, to be as amazing of a singer as you wish to be. The theory and practical drills I lay out in this book are designed to train your conceptualization skills.

The way I do that is to cut through the malarkey and provide you with a solid foundation of rudimentary concepts to build on, and then from there go into the core seed components for you to expand your capabilities.

If you are a professional performing vocalist looking to improve upon your already established ability, read this book to fill in the blanks of the basics that you don’t know you missed, and then move on to advanced techniques. I will cover some advanced techniques and methods here, but will get more into them in depth perhaps in another book.

Workable knowledge is the greatest asset one can possess. But knowledge is only as useful as it is workable and complete. So at times some of the subjects I go into in depth may seem too basic, mundane, unimportant, or even irrelevant.  They aren’t. They are the necessary foundation building blocks of the aforementioned conceptual ability. Skipping over them would be defeating the purpose of this book entirely and you will not get the full gains you are seeking.

When I say foundation, I mean the foundation of the foundation. I’m not talking about the slab the house is built on. I’m talking about the sand in the concrete that the slab is made out of. And THEN we go from there. Do you know what happens to a house that is built on a slab that was poured with poorly mixed concrete? Minimally it is a very weak structure and not much can be added to it. Worst case, it falls apart. So even if you are an accomplished singer, go through the motions of the “small” stuff. You might be surprised to find that your mixture was a bit off.

Luckily you don’t have to rebuild. Just add in the missing ingredients.

The drills provided throughout the book may seem to easy, basic, or just plain weird. But they are placed in the book in a specific order whereas the next drill in line is built upon the fundamental understanding of the prior drills. These drills are specifically designed to train your mind, ear and voice for singing. So, do the drills as they come up in the book. If you find you are not doing well or progressing with a drill, go to the PREVIOUIS DRILL and run it a few more times and try the new drill again.

And stick with me. Don’t skip around. As it is with the drills, all the information in this book is in a specific order whereas your understanding of each part and chapter is based on your understanding of the previous parts and chapters. Absorb everything and be sure to test all theories and methods for yourself. Don’t take my word for it. Examine everything you read as you read it for its merit. Put every drill through its paces and see if it produces results for you. If it doesn’t, discard it and move on to the next. Don’t hold on to it.

The point is, don’t just read this book. Absorb and understand every bit you can. Explore every aspect and wring every drop of usefulness you can out of every drill.

I promise, by the end of everything, not only will you have a solid foundation on which to build your conceptual singing ability; you will also be singing better and well on your way to further advancing your proficiency.

And more importantly, you will have a blast!

But one last request before we get started. I’m going to have you do your very first “drill”. And you should do this before you go ANY FURTHER. It really isn’t a drill because you won’t actually get any vocal ability wins from it…yet. Trust me. You want to do this.

Introductory Singing Drill – Scratch Vocal

Choose a song and record yourself singing that song either along with the original or a cappella (without accompaniment)

Now set that aside for later. This is part of your ‘before and after photos’.

Part 1 Exposing Lies and Traps

Chapter 1 - The Big Lie

It is a widely accepted “fact” that the ability to sing is inherited at birth. You either have it or you don’t. It is an established “truth”. The only problem with that is, it’s a load of crapola. It is a lie told to practically everyone who has given up singing, and usually right before they give up.

It would be the same as saying some people are born with the ability to walk and some aren’t. You either have it or you don’t. Other than being born without legs or a severe physical disability rendering one unable to walk, it’s an absurd statement.

The corollary would be that unless you were born without vocal cords, or your vocal cords were physically damaged rendering you unable to form sound, it’s just as absurd to think you can’t sing because you weren’t born with the ability to do so.

With that said, some babies learn to walk sooner than other babies. Just like some learn to speak their first words faster than others. Some babies, while growing up through childhood and then into adulthood, learn how to develop their ability to walk and run into more advance levels of proficiency, thusly becoming athletes of various sorts. The same principle applies to singing.

The same laws of biophysics that govern the runner’s ability to run also govern the singer’s ability to sing. Leg muscles and vocal cords are made of the same stuff, muscle fiber and tissue. They are both muscles and tissue. There are of course other things that contribute to the vocal cords ability to make the sound, which we will get into a bit later. But, unless you were born without these common physical human body parts, you can sing…and very well. That’s not theory. It’s not a lie. It’s a fact.

There is one caveat. Not everyone is going to sound the same.

I know that may seem like an obvious statement. But you would be surprised how many people I have worked with that wanted to develop their singing skills with a pre-conceived idea of what they wanted to sound like that was way off of what their voice was capable of producing.

You may be thinking “Wait a minute? I thought you said anyone can sing.” I did. But, the chances of a 200lb 6’ 2” tall man sounding like Celine Dion are pretty thin.

No one person is ever going to sound exactly the same as another. Not even identical twins can accomplish this. Voices are as distinguishable as fingerprints or retinas. So some people may come close to sounding the same, but never really the same.

So, you will never be able to sing exactly like Celine Dion or Luther Vandross or Beyoncé or Kenny Chesney or Taylor Swift etc. That IS physically impossible. If you have a similar physical composition vocally you might come close, but never be exactly the same.

The point is, your goal should never be “I want to sing like [insert famous name here].”

Your goal should be more accurately stated as “I want to sing AS GOOD AS [insert famous name here].”

Proficiency is the measure, not the sound. The goal is to be as good a singer as you want to be.

THAT is totally obtainable. THAT is what anyone can do. That is the truth.

However, when talking about famous singers, there are two things that make up that particular creature.

1.       Vocal ability (to greater or lesser degrees) and,

2.       Performance ability (again to greater or lesser degree)

How they are famous is an entirely different subject that could have an entire book dedicated too it having to do with things like the subjectivity of the audience, marketing, demographics, etc. etc .etc.

Even the concept of fame is relative and subjective. How famous is famous? In the context of this study, it doesn’t really matter. To any degree of fame, any professional singer possesses both of the two core abilities mentioned above in greater or lesser degree.

Vocal Ability and Performance Ability.

Those are the two things you need to work on if you want to be a singer.  Both of which I will show you how to develop and/or improve in yourself regardless of your current level of proficiency. And, like singing, performance ability isn’t reserved for the chosen few. It is native to all, and developed to greater or lesser degrees later.

But, whether you want to be the next American Idol, or you want to sound better at Thursday night karaoke, or you just want to sound better in the shower, the one thing that is primarily important is the ability to sing.

Chapter 2 - The Biggest Barrier Sometimes Isn’t You

Unfortunately the most difficult barrier I sometimes find in most aspiring vocalists is getting them to believe that they can in fact sing. And there is usually an insidious reason why this is difficult. I will get into that in a moment.

But first, there is a simple test that you can do to determine whether you can sing or not.

Say your name out loud. Did you do that? Good. Did you hear anything? Good.

You can sing. From there it’s just a matter of how well. And that can be developed. Anyone who can speak their native language has already demonstrated that they have the ability to develop vocal ability.

As a matter of fact, the first thing we do, in a way, is sing. The first WAAAAAAAHHH that comes out of a baby’s mouth is a note. Plain and simple. It may not be what we all consider to be singing exactly, but the mechanics are the same. Whether it is pleasant or not is debatable, and would be an opinion relatively based on who was listening. To the mother who just gave birth to that voice, it is probably the prettiest song she has ever heard; to the stuffy business man in first class, probably not.

What we conventionally consider singing, in its simplest definition, is actually just making sounds, combined with words and put into form that is commonly considered singing.

Even those who “can’t carry a tune in a bucket” are still singing when they are warbling away in the shower.

“Yeah, but it doesn’t sound good.” That may be true, but notice I said above “put into form that is commonly considered singing.” The commonly considered singing part is subjective opinion.

What is subjective opinion? Well according to Oxford Dictionaries the words are defined as follows.

Subjective: Based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions.

Opinion: 1. A view or judgment formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge. 2. The beliefs or views of a large number or majority of people about a particular thing.

So, for our purposes, subjective opinion is the opinion of the listener based on their education, background, influences, culture, intentions etc. Notice I put the word intentions in there. More on that later.

Essentially, at its core, Subjective Opinion is based on an agreement of what the listener, his circle of family, friends, groups, and culture consider good or bad. It sounds good or bad because everyone around us has told us what sounds good or bad and we agree with it. We don’t come out of the womb with our opinions, they are either given to us or hopefully we form them from our own observations.

Rare is the person who loves all types of music regardless of what it sounds like. Just about everyone I know has their loves and hates. The important thing to remember is that it is subjective opinion.

And to quote Hamlet, “ay, there’s the rub”. Therein lies the root of the problem why most people who once liked singing, gave up on it. The reason they gave up and no longer developed their vocal ability was due to the subjective opinion of others.

Of 99% of all the people who give up singing, this is the reason.

Subjective opinion in and by itself is not necessarily a bad thing. It is a good thing in most cases. We all have them. Some people like milk and some don’t. Some people like snow, some don’t. Some people like the city. Some people like the country. Some people like Rap and dislike Classical and vice versa. Variety is the spice of life I’ve heard. Subjective opinion is fine. It’s inevitable really.

But, when a person force feeds their negative subjective opinion on another, that can be bad.

There are two reasons I am bringing this up. One is to help you look back and recognize where someone possibly did that to you. Secondly, I want you to be able to recognize when someone tries it again. That way, you can brush either off and continue with your singing endeavors and not let it get the better of you.

They usually come in as insidious backstabbing phrases like “You shouldn’t try so hard”, or ”Some people just weren’t meant to sing”, or “I’ve heard better”, or my personal favorite “don’t quit your day job.”

These are just a few examples of rusty edged infectious negativities, which slowly and sneakily carve the willingness to create, right out of a would-be singers’ soul. I make it sound horrible because it is.

NEVER, and I repeat never, is such a phrase delivered with helpful loving intentions by the person speaking it. I don’t care what anyone says. It’s just not true.

Sometimes it’s someone you usually trust and they are in a bad mood or angry with you at that moment. If asked later, they would probably say they didn’t mean it. I d on’t know anyone, including myself, who isn’t guilty of that every once in a while.

And sometimes people are just out right evil and are knowingly stabbing you in the back.

Whenever I see this happening I jump right in and make sure the singer understands what is happening so that he or she keeps on keeping on and can spot any further assaults from that front.

So just be aware of bad subjective opinion because it is the biggest barrier standing between you and advancing toward your singing goals.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but that entitlement doesn’t extend to forcing it on another.

I feel it is important to add that you should apply the same rules to yourself. If you find you are putting yourself down and being overly critical of your own singing, knock it off. Every single thing on this planet is a work in progress. Nothing is ever completely perfect. Not one singer is ever completely satisfied with their ability. In fact, that drive for perfection is what made them as good as they are.

Hold on to your success, and stay objective of your failures so that you may learn from them. Those failures belong to you, not the other way around.

Now let’s get to work.

Part 2 Conceptual Placement

Chapter 3 - The Concept of Concepts

In the introduction, I touched on the concept of singing and how important it is. Essentially it is the starting point, the main foundation, the basic ingredient to singing. Your ability to conceptualize what you are going to sing is directly proportional to your proficiency in singing it.

We get a concept of everything we are GOING to do consciously before we do it. One of the most common descriptive phrases for this ability is “The mind’s eye” which refers to the human ability to visualize or see things with the mind.

Now, beyond the various religious and spiritual references to the concept of a ‘mind’s eye’ a.k.a. ‘third eye’, ‘inner eye’, or ‘the mind of Christ’, the concept of a the ‘mind’s eye’ is scientifically proven to exist, although not understood. Physiological activity has been measured and detected using fMRI or functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Even one of the top opinion leaders of the science that is the polar opposite, philosophically, to religion and spirituality – psychiatry - acknowledges the existence of the ‘mind’s eye’s’. Dr. John Ratey, associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School said this:

“As humans, we have the ability to see with the mind’s eye – to have a perceptual experience in the absence of visual input. For example, PET scans have shown that when subjects, seated in a room, imagine they are at their front door starting to walk either to the left or right, activation begins in the visual association cortex, the parietal cortex, and the prefrontal cortex – all higher cognitive processing centers of the brain.” From his book The Users Guide to the Brain.

So, the consensus is the ‘mind’s eye’ is for real. We as humans do see things with the mind before we do them. It has been experienced and even scientifically measured, if not fully understood by science. The brain is connecting with something and that something is getting a concept before acting. Whether it is the mind, an undefined part of the brain, or what is commonly known as the spirit, is an entirely different subject.

The point of fact is we get a concept before we consciously do anything. That includes singing.

Singing is creative process. Obvious statement, but it is worth stating so that we can compare it to other creative processes.

At its core the creative process of singing is no different from the creative process of carpentry. Yet, the subject of the creative process of singing carries around it this shroud of esoteric mystery, where carpentry certainly doesn’t.

If you ask a professional singer (and I have several times) what their creative process is the answer usually contains and explanation of the way they move their bodies, or breath, or position themselves in relation to the band, their facial expressions, how they pronounce their vowels or clip their consonants, etc., etc.

But I ask them, “Yeah but what do you do before that?”

They come back with more answers like warm-up routine, foods they eat, special teas, setting the room, spending time with the performance venue, and sometimes even things like physical exercise and meditation.

This list goes on and on. Creative people can come up with some very creative ways to answer the question. While all of the answers are very interesting, and some of them even useful, none of them are correct. Every single answer is an explanation of preparing for the creative process, or carrying out the results of the process, but not the nucleus of it. And when confronted with the final question of what a creative process actually is, at its core, the answers generally stop coming, because they don’t have one.

The creative process is simply the process of creating. And it is not a mysterious thing.

Does the creative process of cooking seem mysterious? Does the creative process of gardening seem mysterious? Does the creative process of carpentry seem mysterious? People who can’t cook learn to cook all the time simply by watching Rachael Ray. People who have never planted a thing learn to garden by asking the clerk at Home Depot garden center.

When a carpenter sets out to build a table, sawing and hammering isn’t the first thing. Neither is picking out the tools. The first thing he does is get a concept of the table he wants to build.

The definition of concept we are using is,

Concept – an idea of something formed by mentally combining all its characteristics or particulars; a construct.

The entire concept may come to him in an instant. Or it may be an idea for a special table he’s been rolling around the noodle for a couple of days. Either way, the concept is the nucleus of the creative process.

In his mind he builds and sees the entire concept of his table. And depending on his knowledge and experience with carpentry, the concept may be either extremely detailed or generally vague.

If one carpenter can only see four wooden legs supporting a flat surface, he will end up with a basic table to match his basic concept.

But if another carpenter can get the concept of four oak table legs slightly tapered from top to bottom that are beveled at a 45 degree angle on the vertical edges and inset into the bottom of a rectangular solid oak table top with ¼ inch routed grooves a ¼ inch deep that are set back from but parallel with all four sides at 3 inches, with the same beveled edges all sanded almost shiny smooth and stained with a deep walnut stain, that is finished with a three coat satin finish; then he obviously has a better concept. Therefore, the table will be as detailed as his concept if not more by the time he is finished making it.

The difference between the two carpenters then is obviously their level of concepts. And the difference in those is based upon each of their own level of proficiency. And that is based upon experience and knowledge, and in that order. You can read all about woodworking for years on end, but until you pick up that first tool and start crafting, you won’t have the experience.

So it is with the concept of singing. This book will give you the tools necessary to truly start gaining positive singing experience. And as that grows, so will your proficiency in getting the concept of singing which will increase your experience. As you can see it’s a snowball effect! This is called the Conceptual Singing Method™!

Chapter 4 - What is a note?

When you sing, a good part of what you are doing is singing notes. And if you are singing well, you are singing them in tune. So a simple instruction on how to sing well is to make sure you sing in tune, right?

See, every note in a song has its place. How high or how low and when it is sung. Since we are talking about being in tune, we are going to concentrate on how high or how low making sure the notes are in their right place. But in order to do that we have to make sure we can even get the idea, or concept of where they should be placed. This is called Conceptual Placement, and it is the basis of the conceptual singing method. As covered before it is the ability to conceptualize where the notes need to be. That is how we learn to sing in tune.

For someone who can’t sing well, saying the statement “sing in tune” is the equivalent of saying ‘fly a rocket to the moon’. You know it’s possible. You’ve seen others do it. But you can’t seem to get off the ground. Maybe it’s because you don’t know what makes up a functioning rocket and how to build one. You already have the general concept of a rocket, but so does the 5 year old boy who builds one out of card board box. And quite literally, that won’t fly. So the answer seems to lie in increasing ones’ ability to fully conceptualize a well sung note.

Fortunately a note sung in tune is MUCH easier to learn about and produce than a space rocket. First off there are a lot fewer parts to a note. And luckily you have them right now, free of charge, at your disposal. But before we get into the parts, it’s important that I say this.

It is at this point where things can very well fall apart. The only way someone fails at something they are physically capable of learning and doing, is by not understanding the raw basics and words of the subject they are pursuing.

The understanding of the basics of a subject can be obtained as naturally as falling down and thereby learning that gravity works or it has to be learned, as in driving a car. What if you weren’t taught which pedal was which, what the steering wheel was for, or even what the definition of a pedal and steering wheel was? What if you were thrown the keys and told to have at it? It’s possible you would have figured it out…eventually. That is assuming of course you didn’t wrap the car around a tree.

Therefore, as mundane as it may seem, as irrelevant as this may seem at first, we are going to break things down to their physical basics so that you have a complete and workable understanding of them. It may not seem like it, but this is vital for any singer regardless of proficiency level. A full understanding of the basics gives you the foundation which, once grasped, makes singing easy.

So bear with me and don’t go past any words you don’t fully understand! If I don’t give you a definition and you don’t understand the word, look it up.

With that said let’s take this thing called ‘note’ apart, down to its nuts and bolts, and see what it’s made of.

Sound

First off, let’s take up sound because without it, singing a note would be impossible.

If you have ears, you know what sound is. You may even know that sound is really tiny waves of air that move against the eardrum to be registered to the brain as sound. If you didn’t, you do now. But to go a little further with this, those tiny little air waves go through the air like rings on a pond after the dropping of a stone.

If you clap your hands right now, you will hear the clap. What occurred is the force of the hands coming together displaced air and created a set of pressure waves through air, to the ear, with each wave hitting the eardrum one by one, but REALLY fast. Those are sound waves. Sound waves are literally waves of air.

If you have ever watched a stereo speaker, you have observed this first hand. The speaker is actually jumping up and down, pushing air and creating sound waves in the air that eventually hit your eardrum.

Each of those little waves, like ripples on a pond, hit the ear one by one at a certain speed, with a certain amount of distance between each wave.

That distance is called wavelength.

How frequent each wave hits the ear is the frequency.

And therein is the very basic ingredient in this whole singing thing. You will come to realize why very soon.

But first we need to break this down and look at these waves, not as ripples, but as waves on a beach hitting the shore as they go into the ear.

As you can see, each wave goes in and hits the eardrum registering as sound. But let’s go a little deeper

Let’s take a look at wavelength.

As said before, wavelength is the distance between two waves through time. It is quite simply the length between two waves.

And as said before, how frequent each wave hits the ear is the frequency.

Each wavelength is measured in oscillations. The definition of oscillation that we use here is repetitive variation, sometimes known as vibration.

So, one oscillation would be the measurement of one wave from its beginning to its end, where the next wave starts.

And frequency is the number of oscillations (waves) per second. Cyclic things like oscillations that are measured in time by seconds are measured by the unit hertz. One hertz is one cycle in one second. So one oscillation would be 1hz or 1 wave hitting the ear in one second. 20 oscillations in one second would be 20hz, which by the way is the lowest frequency the human ear can detect. 20,0000hz (20khz) would be the highest.

Now we have all heard of amplifiers right? Plug a guitar in the amp and turn it up! Amplify it! Well that comes from the word amplitude. That is the amount of pressure each wave packs. Sound can be several waves in a second with each wave packing very little punch. But, if you increase the amount of pressure each wave carries you get amplitude better known as VOLUME!!

It can be graphically represented here.

Notice that the frequency didn’t change, just the volume.

That gives you the 4 basic building blocks of sound; wavelength, amplitude, oscillation, and frequency.

Enough theory for the moment though. Let’s start training the ears. Do the following drills before moving forward.

Listening Drill 1 – Conceptual Placement - Sound

Snap your fingers or clap your hands and visualize the pressure waves created by the displacement of air caused by your fingers or hands moving through the space between you hand and ear, finally reaching your eardrum. Repeat until you can completely and easily visualize the sound waves.

Listening Drill 2 – Conceptual Placement - Sound

Listen to the various sounds around you and visualize the source creating the displacement of air and the pressure waves moving through space to your eardrum. Repeat with four or five individual sources, or until you are confident in your ability to easily visualize sound from other sources.

Tone

Here’s where things get interesting. The short technical definition of tone is:

Tone – A sound of distinct pitch, quality, and duration.

That’s the basic definition we need to break it down into its aggregate parts. Again, don’t skip this!

Let’s start with ‘Pitch’.

Frequency is actually the stuff of what pitch is made of. Pitch, as we hear it, is simply how high or how low a sound is. Julie Andrews has a high pitched voice compared to Barry White who had a low pitched voice. So high sounds are high pitched, like the ding of a hotel desk bell. Low sounds are low pitched, like the sound of distant rolling thunder.

When a high pitched noise is heard by the ear, it means that the frequency of the air waves is fast and high in number per second. The opposite is true for low pitch or low frequency.

But let’s take a look at these.

So, in fact, pitch and frequency are synonymous. And as you can see the waves are more condensed in the high pitch than they are in the low pitch.

Listening Drill 3 – Conceptual Placement - Sound

Listen to various sounds around you and find high pitched and low pitched sounds. Visualize the difference in frequency from its source as to high wave density or low wave density. Repeat until you can confidently and easily visualize wave density based on pitch.

Ok, back to the definition.

Tone – A sound of distinct pitch, quality, and duration.

Distinct Pitch? Huh?

During the course of normal conversation, our pitch fluctuates greatly and doesn’t really stay on any one pitch for very long at all. There is no structurally defined rhyme or reason to it, it just flows. When we ask a question, our voice usually goes up in pitch at the end. When we make a statement, it goes down.

We have these general communicative nuances we use, but pitch wise we are all over the place. Up and down and up and down in pitch we go. We don’t really give it much thought and we are certainly not consciously holding our pitch to a specific frequency for any specific duration. That would be intentional pitch. That would be distinct pitch. You probably already have recent examples of this from the previous listening drill.

Another good example of distinct pitch would be a robot voice, also called mono-toned voice. The robot is maintaining one single pitch frequency while saying his words “take me to your leader”. Well, look at the word ‘mono-toned’ itself. Now that we have a better understanding of the definition of ‘tone’, it really makes sense. ‘Mono’ means one or single. Get it?

So, distinct pitch is a sound held at a specific frequency for a specific duration.

The word quality, for our purpose, is not how good or bad a sound is, but what emotion or ‘color’ it conveys. Songs can be sung with sexy quality, angry quality, determined quality, timid quality, or dark quality, etc. etc. You get the idea. But more importantly, it also means from what type of source the sound was formed. For instance, a piano and a guitar, although both instruments sound different, they each have a different quality of sound.

And duration is pretty self-explanatory. It’s how long the sound is…well…sounded.

That generally covers the definition of tone. And some would argue that it is also the definition of a note. And to a degree they would be right. But the definition falls short in workability in regards to singing. A whaling child can hold a pretty long tone at a pretty distinct pitch, and usually high. But that isn’t considered singing. And it creates a definition gap for us in regards to learning how to sing.

In order to complete our definition, we need to go back to pitch.

From our definition of Tone we already know that high pitch = high tones, and low pitch = low tones. But to have a workable definition of Note, we have to expand on pitch by adding relativity.

When we throw in relativity we get a more accurate definition and clearer concept of pitch.

Relative Pitch

Outside of this book and technically speaking a note is the physical notation on a piece of paper representing a tone in music. And they look something like this.

When you have more than one note it looks like this.

As you can see, each one has a specific place. And each one represents a specific pitch. From left to right they would go from lower to higher in pitch if played by a piano or sung by a voice.

As promised, I’m not going to dive into music theory here. However, this is the easiest way to graphically represent note relativity.

Each note is relatively higher or lower in pitch depending on the notes around it. But here is the important part. Each one is considered a note not only because it is on paper and represents music, but because each note is of the same family of notes in that song and thusly related.

Think of it this way. If the song is a family, then the relative notes would be the individuals in that family. But unlike some actual families, notes work well and mingle well with the other notes in their own song family.

Usually different notes from different songs don’t mix. There might be some crossover similarities and shared frequencies here and there, but over all they won’t mix together and sound good.

To use the above metaphor, if you put the Kennedys and the Clampetts in the same room you might see a few similarities. Sure both families are human, consist of brothers, sisters, cousins, and are rich, etc. But beyond that the similarities tend to disappear.

Take a moment and recall a time when you heard two songs playing at the same time. Better yet, do the following drill.

Listening Drill 4 – Conceptual Placement - Sound

Position two music players on either side of you and simultaneously play two different songs, one on each player. Repeat the process using songs from different genres on each player, i.e. rock on one side and country on the other. Repeat the process if possible using to different cultures, i.e. American Rock and Chinese Traditional. Pay particular attention to notes that are playing at the same time and their pitch.

In the drill, you no doubt encountered notes that clashed. Their pitch was not relative.

Each note has its own relative pitch.

I’m sure you have heard the word key thrown about in regards to singing. Like “that note was way off key” or “he tends to sing off key”.

Well now we can cover a simple explanation using the family metaphor.

Every family has a leader. And usually the father is considered the head of the family, although, in many cases it’s actually the mother. But to keep things simple, let’s pretend and say Dad is running the show. He would be the key that all the other members are related to. He is the root of the family tree.

If he were named James Smith, then all of the other members of the family would be members of the Smiths. James would be the root to the family tree. And the word key when used in music can refer to two different things. It can refer to the collection of related notes, or the whole tree. It can also refer to the main note that the rest are related to, or the root of the tree.

Coincidentally, the key note in music is often referred to as the root.

That is why sometimes someone is considered to be singing off key. They are singing notes that are not part of the key. But more specifically, they are singing tones that are not in relative pitch/frequency to the other notes.

Remembering the drill from above, you can probably recall plenty of notes that clashed. The songs were being played in different keys so none of the notes between the two songs were related.

Now, with the addition of the concept of key, we can finally put together a working definition of note.

Note – a tone of relative pitch to other tones in its key that can be combined to produce music.

A simple example of this would be the song Row, Row, Row Your Boat. The first ‘row’ in the song would be the lowest relative pitch and, in this case, the key or root. And the first ‘merrily’ would be the highest relative pitch with many little relative pitches in between all in the same key. And because they form a song, they are notes. Here is a graphical example, sort of like rungs on a ladder.

The vertical line is the range of the song from lowest up to highest. The horizontal lines create the spaces which are the notes in the key of the song. If you were to sing this, you would do so from left to right but focusing on the up and down. Notice that 6 & 7 are blank. It’s because those notes are skipped in the song. They are part of the key, but in this song they are not used. In singing it, you would jump up to 8 to sing the first merrily.

Ladder

When doing the upcoming 4 singing drills, keep in mind I understand we haven’t gone over any technique on how to sing in key yet. Right now we don’t care what you sound like, simply that you are moving up and down in pitch. The purpose of these drills is to establish a rudimentary skill of conceptualizing the notes you sing vertically. I use to picture a ladder when doing this, and still do when tackling a particularly difficult vocal piece and I am having pitch problems.

The important thing is to have you thinking vertically when getting the concept of singing. This will get you started, and with practice you will apply this skill to all future singing. So spend some time on these drills regardless of how elementary they may seem.

Singing Drill 1 – Conceptual Placement - Ladder

(a) Sing the song while reading the words on the graph, then (b) sing the song while visually focusing on the number for the word/note you are singing. Repeat both in order until confident you can easily sing the song while focusing on the numbers.

As stated before, the basic concept I have all my students build upon is sort of like a ladder. It is a simplification of the mental concept of singing vertically. Think of is as mental training wheels to get you thinking vertically in terms of pitch and note placement that you will no doubt grow out of.

For simplicities sake, I will refer to it as ‘the ladder’ from now on. Afterwards you can call anything you like if you need to. If you don’t like that name, that’s fine. Call it The Structure, The Cornerstone, The Thing, The Rig, Fred, or whatever or nothing at all. Naming it is really not that important as it will only come up when talking about it with someone else. And sooner than you think, you won’t even have to remember to use it. You will soon start getting the concept of singing vertically without it. It will become as natural as opening your eyes to see.

Here is a graphical example of the ladder with the numbers for future use and for the next drill. And in order to focus more vertically and conceptually I’m removing the words but leaving the numbers…for now.

Singing Drill 2 - Conceptual Placement - Ladder

Recalling the previous drill and while looking at the ladder image, sing Row, Row, Row Your Boat. Focus on the rung for each word/note as you sing it , like before. Refer to Singing Drill 1 as needed. Repeat until confident you can easily sing the song while focusing on the numbers on their rungs smoothly and without referring to the previous drill.

Words and numbers represent concepts not the other way around. In other words (no pun intended), words and numbers are used to verbally communicate mental concepts that would not otherwise be communicable. If we were all telepathic, we wouldn’t need words or numbers. We would just mentally communicate the concept to someone. But, since most of us aren’t telepathic, we have to use them.

If someone asks you what type of pet you have, you picture Fido or Fluffy in your mind then you say the word ‘dog’ or ‘cat’. And if you have more than one and they ask you how many, you say the number needed to convey your concept. But the very first thing that happens is the concept.

In fact, if you did your own little mental test right now, you would find that it’s impossible to think of a word without getting the mental concept first. You can’t cheat by looking at things around you. It has to come from you. And you can’t cheat by looking at printed words from somewhere else like this book. That would be receiving my concepts. The only way it is a remotely similar possibility is if you see a word in your mind. And even that is a concept of a word that represents a concept which would be waste of time. Just getting the concept is much quicker and more efficient.

Therefore, in order to make sure we build the most efficient foundation possible, we need to strip the numbers out of the ladder as well. So, use the following image for the next drill and whenever needed.

Singing Drill 3 – Conceptual Placement - Ladder

Recalling the previous drill and while looking at the rung only ladder image, sing Row, Row, Row Your Boat. Focus on the rung for each word/note as you sing it like before. Refer to Singing Drill 2 as needed. Repeat until confident you can easily sing the song while focusing on each note’s rung smoothly and without referring to the previous drill.

Now it’s time to take off the training wheels. This next drill may seem cumbersome at first and feel free to look back at the ladder as you need to, but keep at it until you start to feel natural doing it.

Singing Drill 4 – Conceptual Placement - Ladder

Without looking at the image, visualize your own mental ladder and sing the song, focusing on each corresponding number and rung. Repeat this until confident that you can easily sing the song smoothly with your own visualization.

Now it’s time to give your voice a rest and work the ears.

Listening Drill 5 – Conceptual Placement - Ladder

Listen to a song you are very familiar with and visualize generally where the notes that are sung would fall on the ladder. Concentrate on the chorus, then the verses, then the entire song as a whole. Repeat until confident that you can easily visualize the placement of all the notes you hear in the song. Repeat with other songs as desired.

I would like to insert a note here. As we go along through the book, I will introduce Car Drills. These will be listening and singing drills that are not an integral and required part of the program and can be done at anytime and anywhere really. I simply call them Car Drills because that’s where I usually do them.

DISCLAIMER: DO NOT DO ANY CAR DRILLS IF IT INTERFERES WITH YOUR CONCENTRATION ON DRIVING. BY DOING THEM WHILE DRIVING YOU AGREE TO HOLD FROM LIABILITY THE AUTHOR OF THIS BOOK AND ITS DISTRIBUTORS OR ANYONE ELSE CONNECTED TO THE AUTHOR OR THE BOOK. IF YOU CAN NOT DRIVE AND VISUALIZE JUST DRIVE. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

Now that we got that out of the way, here is your first one.

Car Drill 1 – Conceptual Placement - Ladder

Listen to various songs, familiar and unfamiliar, and visualize where the notes would fall on the ladder.

Well that’s it for the nuts and bolts. We have covered the anatomy of sound, and its parts; wavelength, oscillation, amplitude, and frequency. We have covered the definition of tone, the ancestor to note, and finally answered the question of ‘What is a note’ with a workable definition. All of which gave us the nuts and bolts. And with them, we have started establishing the rock solid foundation of the ability to easily get the concept of singing. And even though we weren’t concerned with being in tune, as you went through the drills, you might have noticed an improvement in your ability to sing in tune. If not that’s fine we weren’t really going for that. It was just a possible bonus. Being stably in tune is what the next part is all about.

Chapter 5 - Intonation

Intonation

In-ton-ation is just a fancy word for ‘being in tune’. But frankly it is the biggest hurdle to overcome when singing. And it doesn’t ever completely go away no matter who you are, how famous you are, or how good you are. EVERYONE sings bad notes now and then. It’s a fact of life as a singer. So don’t put yourself under the illusion that you can practice your way to never singing an off key note. Never going to happen. But there are theories and drills even the most accomplished vocalist could do to greatly reduce the amount of bad notes that occur.

But what does it even mean to be in tune? Obviously when we hear notes that clash we generally know that they aren’t in tune. But what does it REALLY mean at the basic level? That is what we are going to get into now. We are going to answer the question,

What does ‘in tune’ mean?

And answering that question is what changes a non-singer into a singer. Bold statement for sure, but it doesn’t make it any less true. After this, the rest is simply a matter of practicing until you get as good as you want.

And, oddly enough, to move forward we have to go back; back to the family metaphor.

How closely related can someone be in a family? How can we visually tell if someone is related? Usually there are similarities like facial features and body composition that are the telltale signs of relation. A boy has his fathers’ eyes or his mothers’ nose. A daughter has her mothers’ hair or mouth. So, based on those visual similarities, what is the closest relation in a family? Most would say mother to child, and that’s pretty close, but not the closest. Even brothers or sisters wouldn’t be the closest…unless they were identical twins.

Visually speaking, identical twins share the most relation possible in a family. The majority of the time the similarities are so striking, that people can’t tell them apart. They are visually the closest thing you can get to two people being the same person.

When we apply this metaphor to notes, we would be dealing with sound. So, if two instruments or voices were playing the same note at the same time we would find that the notes sound almost exactly the same. And if the two instruments, say pianos of the same make and model that were tuned properly, played the same note at the same time, you would barely be able to tell those two notes apart. In fact, if you were standing between those two pianos you would barely be able to tell from which direction each note came from.

Here’s why.

Each note is almost a physical duplicate of the other note. Not only is each note of the same quality because it came from a piano, and not another instrument, it is on the same frequency. Remember, this is a sound wave. Let’s say it is the sound wave of piano 1.

And let’s say this is piano 2 playing the same note.

We can see it is the same note because it is the same frequency. But they are not exactly the same. Other than the slight, almost molecular differences in the wires inside the piano and other mechanically unique differences, there is time to consider. If both pianos struck the note at the same time, it still would REALLY be at the same time. There are milliseconds to take into count. So they would look like this.

The two things that would make the difference in how you perceive the sound would be the uniqueness of the instrument and the moment each was played. Other than that they would be perfectly in tune. As a matter of fact if you recorded piano 1 playing a note and then copied that recording, and then played both recordings back simultaneously and exactly, you would not hear any difference. It would come out sounding like one piano because both recordings are of “two” pianos that have the exact quality of sound playing exactly the same frequency at exactly the same time. Change any one of those three things and you will hear a difference, if only slightly.

That is what being in tune is. If you are singing along note for note with someone or an instrument, you are trying to match as closely as you can the exact frequency and quality of the same notes in time. It is what is known as ‘unison’.

If you are singing by yourself or with backing instruments, and you are singing your own notes in a song, you goal is to sing each note in its proper frequency that keeps it relative to the key you are in. If you are singing with instruments they will be playing in the same key that you are supposed to be in. So your goal is to sing each note relative to your key, which would also make them relative to the notes the other instruments are playing. If you do that, you are singing in tune.

Let’s take a look at that graphically using the ladder. And we are going to say that the ladder is the key with all of the relative notes of the key on their proper rung.

What you are striving for to be in tune is to sing the correct frequency of the relative note you are supposed to be singing at the moment. The way to do this is to get the concept of singing the correct frequency. And the way to get the concept of singing the correct frequency is to practice singing in the correct frequency. I know this seems like a catch 22 but the next set of drills are designed to handle that.

Singing Drill 5 – Conceptual Placement - Frequency

Sing the song Row Row Row Your Boat while visually focusing on the frequency for each note you are singing on the Frequency Ladder image. Repeat until confident you can easily sing the song while focusing on the frequency.

Singing Drill 6 – Conceptual Placement - Frequency

Repeat Singing Drill 5 while noticing that the higher the note you sing, the tighter the frequency, and notice that the higher frequency you sing, the tighter your vocal cords get. Repeat until confident that you understand the correlation between tightness in frequency and tightness of vocal cords.

Singing Drill 7 – Conceptual Placement – Frequency as Notes

Without looking at the image, visualize your own mental frequency ladder and sing the song, focusing on each corresponding note and frequency rung. Repeat this until confident that you can easily sing the song smoothly with your own visualization of the frequencies.

Listening Drill 6 – Conceptual Placement – Frequency as Notes

Listen to a song you are very familiar with and visualize generally where the notes that are sung would fall on the ladder. Repeat until you can easily visualize the frequencies. Repeat with other songs as desired.

Car Drill 2 – Conceptual Placement – Frequency as Notes

Listen to various songs of varying familiarity and visualize generally where the note frequencies that are sung would fall on the ladder.

As you could probably surmise, the goal of the above exercises is to establish and increase your ability to vertically visualize the frequency or pitch of the notes you sing. At the same time they train you to relate the pitch of the note to the relative tightness in your vocal cords. Therefore, you can get the concept better of the note or notes you want to sing.

Incidentally this is the foundation of absolute pitch, widely referred to as perfect pitch. Someone with perfect pitch has a very detailed concept of pitch. Their detailed concept is developed no differently than I have describe before. The person has developed it through experience. They 1) hear the note, 2) sing the note, and then 3) recall and get the concept of when they sang the note properly in order to identify it or sing it again. The number of times they go through step 1 and 2 before they are able to do step 3 depends on each individuals understanding of the very fundamentals you are gaining from this book.

We are not of course looking to develop absolute pitch at the moment. You can use the fundamentals you gain to develop that if you wish, but for now we simply need to train you to relate the pitch of the note to the relative tightness in your vocal cords. If you do not feel confident that you can comfortably and easily get those general concepts, go back and do Singing Drills 5, 6, and 7 and Listening Drill 6 until you can. It is extremely important that you feel confident before moving forward.

Part 3 Pitch

Chapter 6 - Your Natural Note

Range

You may have noticed a pattern in the way I present things. I give you some theory and then the drills to practice that theory. I’m going to continue to do that, but now we kick things up a notch. The theory is going to get a little more involved and so are the drills.

As promised before, I will only cover as much theory as need to accomplish our goals. My goal in this is not to provide you with enough information to obtain a masters’ degree in music theory from Juilliard. My goal is to get you singing and kicking butt doing it.

In order to do that, there is actually very little theory needed, relatively speaking. Remember the idea is to provide you with enough tools to fully develop your ability to conceptualize singing. And to do that we need to find out what your note is.

I’m sure you have heard the term ‘vocal range’ before. That is simply the highest note someone can sing, the lowest note someone can sing and every note in between. So, it is the highest pitch you personally can produce vocally, the lowest pitch, and all the pitches in between.

In the middle of your range is your note. It is the pitch that is smack dab in the middle of your range. It is the most comfortable note for you to sing. It is the note that is your natural note. From that note is where we start really honing in on developing pitch and quality. That is your Natural Note.

Finding your natural note is really simple. If you’ve ever been to the doctor and he has put a stick in your mouth and told you to say ‘aaahhh’, then you have sung your natural note. Yep. It really is that simple. Open your mouth and say ‘aaahhh’. That’s pretty much it. Clear your head and don’t think about any songs. Don’t think about high notes or low notes. In fact, don’t think about notes at all. Just open your mouth and say ‘aaahhhh.’

What is your average?

Now your natural note can vary a bit in pitch depending on other factors. Sometimes when you have a cold, your natural note is lower. If you are under a lot of stress or angry, your natural note may be higher. It can also vary from minute to minute to some slight, almost imperceptible degree.

Therefore, what we need is an average. And in order to get an average in anything, you have to measure it. If you want an average distance, you measure with a ruler in inches, feet, yards, and miles. If you want an average weight you measure with scales. In music we measure with defined and codified notes.

The reason I say defined and codified notes as opposed to simply ‘notes’, is because as we have covered, any pitch is a note technically. And any pitch of any duration held for the purpose of singing is a note whether by yourself or with others.

But defined and codified notes are simply those notes in a system of measurement called Musical Notation. Musical Notation, for our purpose, is defined as any system used to visually represent music through the use of written symbols.

However, the world of musical notation is vast and can be more often than not, confusing. There are other ways to measure music though. It can also be measured with an instrument like a piano for instance. In a moment, I’m going to show you how to measure your voice with a piano easily, quickly, and with no prior musical experience needed.

Keep in mind though the very structure of this book is based on conceptualized singing, not technical theory singing. As we move forward, don’t get too fixed on the technicalities and remember the purpose is to get away from technicalities and into simple conceptualization.

So why go into this stuff at all?

If only briefly, an explanation to why it exists is important for you. As you move forward in this book and in your singing and performance career, it’s important that you can differentiate between theory and concepts. That way you can always separate the two out from each other. I’m only going to go over a general explanation, so don’t get discouraged. I will be brief, but it is important.

They are actually opposites yet complimentary, a yin and yang. One is mental and one is physical. Concept is mental and theory is physical. Concept is king. But theory has it value as well. It really has only one value, but it is value all the same. It is the measure of its master, concept.

You and I could be standing on the observation deck of the Empire State Building and say that the distance to the Hudson River is far, and the distance to the elevator doors is near. We could stand at the head of a lane in a bowling alley and say that the ball retriever is close and that the pins are far away. Distance at that point is relative to our perception as we stand there together.

However, if we wanted to tell someone later who wasn’t there how far it was to the Green Monster (left field wall) at Fenway from home plate, we would say about 315 feet. If we were in Europe or pretty much anywhere else other than Burma, Liberia, or the United States, we would say roughly 96 meters.

The point is, in order to convey a distance to someone else who isn’t actually at the location of the subject distance, we have to give an agreed upon representation of measurement of distance. You and I and the person we are explaining the distance to agree upon how long a foot or meter is. So if we are sitting at a coffee shop together and we say ‘315 feet to the Green Monster’, they get the concept of the distance discussed and can understand us.

If I were to say, ‘yeah a little over 4 and ½ chains’, both of you might look at me like I was off my rocker. Unless of course either of you were a land surveyor that is. A chain is a unit of measurement that is 66 feet long. It was born out of local medieval measurements in Britain based on the clergyman Edmund Gunter’s chain and was established in 1620 as standard. One chain is 66 feet long. There are 80 chains in a mile. This system of measurement was still used up until 1960 in some areas. Before that each little shire, village, and hamlet had their own local units of measurement.

Of course as the population grew and villages became towns and towns became cities, those unique measurements wouldn’t do and had to be done away with and be replaced with a much more widely accepted, defined, and codified units of measurement. I guess Gunter did a lot of measuring because his unit was the one chosen. That way everyone was on the same page regarding distance.

The same goes with music. The history behind music theory is vast, interesting and rich. It evolved into its current codification out of necessity not unlike the chain. We need musical notation to easily communicate the concept of the music to someone who wasn’t there to hear it being sung or played. Of course the more one knows about musical notation, aka music theory, the more one can communicate and understand it. There are a few problems with this though.

The problem with theory

Problem one, as touched on before… it’s a go between. It’s an arbitrator between two points of communication. If you recall after singing drill 2, we talked about words and numbers being a representation of a concept. Well, singing is also a representation of our concept of singing. What if we could telepathically share the joy of song? What if we didn’t have to sing and could simply share our concepts of song through thought? Cool huh?

But since there aren’t many musical telepaths around, we sing. Therefore, singing is a representation of our concept of music. And it follows that musical notation is a representation of a representation, like circuitry of circuitry. And the more circuitry you put something through the slower and less powerful it gets.

So, problem one is the sluggishness of the representation of the representation factor. It just makes communicating your concept of a song less effective than simply singing it.

The second problem is translation. You can know all there is to know about music theory and write the most complicated piece of multi-page music for a song, but unless the reader understands and can translate that notation into their representation of the song, it’s useless.

At the risk of sounding like a dating profile, but to demonstrate a point, I must say that my likes include mountain biking and body building, both of which require a degree of physical activity. I tend to dig into things I’m into in order to get out of them the most that I can. Studying those two hobbies tend to lead me into the subjects of nutrition, biology, chemistry, and physics. Which, more times than I can count, have led me to pages where I am bombarded by hieroglyphics that are supposed to mean something to mathematicians, chemists and physicists.

To me and pretty much the vast majority of the population on Earth, those weird symbols convey about as much understanding as a warning label on a box of poison does to a rat. We know it’s useful information and it’s important somehow, but what does it mean? It’s sort of like the time I walked out of the airport in Korea and looked at a billboard. Huh?

Simply put, if you can read music great. Then you will be able to understand someone who understands music. And you can get together with a bunch of people who write and read music and you all can share pieces of paper to your hearts delight. And you will be able to communicate in that fashion with anyone that is as proficient as you in reading and writing music. However, that field in the grand scheme of things is rather small. Relatively speaking there aren’t that many people in the world that can read music. So your audience is going to be pretty tiny.

So, problem number two is the attenuation of audience. The fewer the number people that can understand your communication the less effective it is.

So how important is it?

The importance of music theory is in its value. Its value is measured by its utilization. In other words, how much music theory do you utilize to accomplish what you want to accomplish as a singer/performer. However much theory you need to accomplish that goal is valuable and important. Anything beyond that is fluff or clutter or both.

It can be argued (and probably will be by some critics) that the amount of music theory one knows determines how good of a singer or musician one is. To those, I say prove it, because I have proof to the contrary. Some of them you might even have heard of like Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Jimi Hendrix, Eddie Van Halen, and a kid from Gary, Indiana who went by the name Michael Jackson.

I think it is safe to assume that each of them have/had some basic rudimentary knowledge of theory. They knew (or know) enough to accomplish what they wanted to accomplish as musicians or singers. And apparently it was/is enough.

That is as much theory as I am going to get into here in order to establish your range and find your natural note. Enough. I need to show you very basic theory, not only to find your natural note, but also to provide more foundation for the more advanced drills.

Do-Re-Mi

I’m assuming that unless you are Nell and have been living in a cabin in the middle of the woods by yourself all your life, you have heard of Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti Do. Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti Do is a technique used to teach pitch that has been employed in singing instruction in one form or another since the eleventh century. There is a name and history behind it that we won’t go into simply because it involves a whole lot more information than is needed to get the point across to you at this moment. In other words, you don’t need to know it. But if you are interested, Google Do Re Mi and have a ball.

Do re mi fa so la ti do are seven words repeating the first word, Do being 1 and 8. Compared to our earlier ladder sketch, it looks like this.

You can see the correlation between the two where Do is 1, Re is 2 and so on. Do is both 1 and 8 because they are the same codified note an octave apart (Octave from the Greek Okta or Eight). Let’s clarify that. Looking at the diagram we can see that there are 7 distinct notes. All popular western music today and most European classical and traditional music is based on a system using 7 basic notes with a repeating note on top.

That note on top is also the bottom and “1” of the next 8 notes above it. And the 8 of that next layer becomes the 1 again if you keep going up. So it would look something like this.

As you can see, it would also apply going down the scale as well where 1 would become 8 and so on. 1 and 8 are codified as the same note. I mean they are both called whatever letter they are called. The letters that are used in Western music are A, B, C, D, E, F, & G. The order in which they are placed is determined by which one you start with. The one you start with is determined by the key.

Remember above when we talked about key where the key note is the note that the remainder of the family of notes is related to by relative pitch? If you need to, go back and review it under the section ‘Intonation’. But to sum it up, there is a note that a song is based on, that is the root of the song that all other notes in the song are relative to. That is the key note, or the key in which the song is sung in. If you are not singing a note that is relative to that key, you are singing out of key.

If you are in the key of ‘C’, you would start with C where C is 1 and it would follow like this

If you were to be in the key of D, the sequence would be D, E, F, G, A, B, C, D. Maybe you have notice a cyclic pattern. Essentially from whatever key/letter you start on, run the normal sequence you learned in grade school going back to A from G whenever needed to get back to your starting letter. For example if you are in the key of B, the sequence would be B, C, D, E, F, G, A, B.

I know this can seem to be dry, but there is a point to this. Keep in mind that this is leading us to finding your natural note. And from there, you will be able to get into some meaty drills using a piano or virtual piano. For now though, follow me a little longer.

Piano Notes

For most of the remaining drills we will be using the piano as a measuring tool. Therefore, we need to go over at least the very basics used. And the key of C is the universal piano key.

The key of C looks like this on the piano. Notice the repeating pattern on the piano and don’t worry about the black keys at the moment.

Right about here is where most people studying music theory drop off the deep end, and for good reason. This is the where the slope goes from shallow wading waters to mile deep trenches in the ocean of music theory. Trying to stay on the surface is hazardous without a guide. One wrong step in the wrong direction a body could drown in the sea of definitions, theories, methods, etc.

So, for the sake of safety and expediency, I’m going to cover some theory in a quick and dirty fashion with adequate explanation and little to no flourish. I’m not going to leave anything out that would keep you from understanding it, but provide you only what is necessary to get across this void and over to the next section. If at some later date you wish to explore all that is music, there are plenty of sources of information out there to get lost in.

 Use the above keyboard image for reference. If you have a piano in front of you or a virtual piano online that would be even better as you could play them and hear them. By the way, simply Google ‘virtual piano’ and several pop up. The best one I’ve found at the moment is: onlinepianist.com/virtual_piano/. Also check the website for this book www.singingfromscratch.com as I will have some solutions there as well. You will need to access one sooner or later for the following drills.

In the key of C every white key from C to D to E and so on back up to C are called whole steps, as in you take a whole step forward or backward when walking. The black keys, in the key of C are called half steps as they are halfway between two whole steps.

On a piano keyboard and in western music theory the half-step above a note would be called “sharp”. A half-step below a note would be called “flat”. Think sharp pointing up and flat being down. Another definition in music for sharp and flat is being slightly out of pitch above a note (sharp) and slightly out of pitch below a note (flat). More on that later.

The black key above C on the keyboard is C Sharp. The symbol in music theory that represents sharp is the pound sign, or number sign, or nowadays known as the hashtag. All of you Tweeters and Instagram people out there know about these. Looks like this, #. So C sharp would be C#. The black key below a note, such as D, would be flat. The symbol for flat looks like the lowercase letter ‘b’. So D flat would be Db.

As you can see black keys are shared between white keys, like C# is the same as Db. We don’t really care about this right now. It is simply a thing of interest to be discarded at the moment as it is not useful to our purpose. For our purpose we will use only the sharp instance where needed.

What we care about really is the placement of the half steps. With these the scale actually has 12 notes. The half-steps remain in the same relative position no matter what key you are in. If we considered the half-steps to be a .5 of the previous note, the above would look like this. 1, 1.5, 2, 2.5, 3, 4, 4.5, 5, 5.5, 6, 6.5, 7, 8. There are 12 notes with the repeat of 1 as 13. But we don’t play all of those notes when doing the Do Re Mi in C. The black notes are skipped.

When playing the Do Re Mi, aka Major Scale, in C it is played like this: C, skip a note, D, skip a note, E, F, skip a note, G, skip a note, A, skip a note, B, C. If you were going to really get into music theory, that is the way you would have to see things; 7 notes with sharps and flats.

But that gets way too confusing. So for our purpose let’s simplify things, and name them 1 through 12. That would look like this.

So if we use the twelve note system, or twelve-tone technique as it is otherwise known, we can see that in a Do Re Mi or major scale, only 1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, and 12 are played. To give credit, it was first devised by Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg.

That sequence does not change no matter what note you start with on the keyboard. If you are in the key of D where D would be 1, you would be playing D, E, F#, G, A, B, C#, then D again. The pattern of 1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, and 12 remains the same regardless that you moved the 1 up two notes from C to D. Therefore it would not matter where on the keyboard you started, if you wanted to play a major Do Re Mi scale, you would use that skip pattern.

For the next 3 drills use the following 1-8 ladder image:

Listening Drill 7 – Pitch – Notes

On the piano, play the scale C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C as shown on the above image. Listen to the notes and look at the 1-8 ladder images. Start at the bottom and play to the top. Reverse the direction and play from the top to the bottom. Follow the letter on each rung as you play them on the piano. Repeat until you can easily follow and play the notes while looking at the image.

Listening Drill 8 – Pitch – Notes

On the piano, play the C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C scale. Listen to the notes and visualize the notes 1-8 ladder image without looking at the image. Start at the bottom and play to the top. Reverse the direction and play from the top to the bottom. Repeat until you can easily visualize the notes while playing them.

For the next singing drill we don’t care about pitch. Don’t worry about being in tune at the moment. I don’t care if it is completely off. All we are going for is that you rise in pitch going from bottom to top and down in pitch from top to bottom.

Singing Drill 8 – Pitch - Notes

On the piano, play the C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C scale. Sing the numbers 1-8 with the notes as they are played. 1 for C, 2 for D, and so on. Start at the bottom and go up. Reverse order and go down. Repeat until you can comfortably play the notes and generally sing them at the same time.

Singing Drill 9 – Pitch - Notes

Repeat Singing Drill 8 while visualizing the 1-8 ladder. Repeat until confident that you can visualize each number on the ladder as it is being sung.

Pitch

Now that we’ve covered the necessary basic piano theory, and we’ve put our voice to piano, let’s go back to the subject of your average pitch or natural note. As said before, in order to find that average we need to be able to track and measure notes as they are codified by basic music theory. Now we can do this with the piano.

First thing we need to do is get familiar with matching our voice pitch with the piano pitch.

In the next few drills we are going to use a vocal technique called ‘sliding’. To easily explain and demonstrate sliding, remember a time you were really surprised at something someone said and you said “huh?” or “what?” Now say the word “huh?” or “what?” like you did at that time. Now say it again, but this time extend and exaggerate the time it takes you to say the word.

Notice how your voice went from low in pitch to high in pitch. That is sliding. Sliding up to be more specific. To demonstrate sliding down, simply say the word “Ohhhh” as you would when someone answers the question you were saying “what?” to in the first place. As in, “Ohhh, I get it.” That would be sliding down.

I can’t resist adding a note here. From my observation most everyone likes things known. Most everyone dislikes an unsolved mystery. Most everyone dislikes things being unsettled and would prefer to have everything in its proper place and time. When a question is left unanswered, it is said to be “up in the air”. When dealing with hard known facts, not questions, it’s known as “down to reality”. When someone is unrealistic or unpredictable they are considered to have “their head in the clouds” and we don’t give them much credibility. Conversely, we want to be associated with people that are “down to earth”.

When we get anxious, scared, or angry our voice goes up in pitch! When we are comfortable our pitch goes down. Our voices literally calm down. Most people like questions answered and until they are, there is a degree of anxiousness. When those answers are presented, we chill out. So when our voices go up in pitch it is a direct representation of tension, as well as an indication to the person listening that an answer is needed. The answers are usually provided to us with a fall in pitch, the other half of our rise. Gives a different perspective of the phrase ‘what goes up must come down’ doesn’t it? It goes to the very core of the security we place in gravity. Otherwise we’d fling off right into space like drops of water from a spinning wheel.

On the other hand though, when something dreadful, whether actual or not, is spoken about we sometimes tend to sink our pitch from normal. As in “Oh no you’re kidding me?” with the pitch going through the floor, while our anxiety level goes through the roof. Another example would be “Oh no this can’t be” or “It can’t be true”. Dread is indicated by a fall in pitch below average. We even have phrases to represent this like “down in the dumps” or “Feeling low” or “sinking feeling”.

In the end, all life is looking for a ‘happy medium’ or normal. And music is a representation of life itself.

Then again, maybe it’s just coincidence. Either way music is interpreted as such when it comes to pitch. Sort of like a rubber band drawn between your fingers. Either way you pull it, up or down, there is tension until you release it back to center. When the pitch of a song rises, so does the emotional tension of the song. When the pitch comes back down to normal the tension releases. When the pitch of a song goes low, tension builds. When it returns to normal, so does the tension. There are a few exceptions, but very few.

I know I was on my soapbox a bit there, but it was relevant to the next drills. We will be sliding up to and down to a note played on the piano, whereas that note is the “normal”. When doing these drills, remember that if a note is too high to work with and you can’t perform the drill comfortably, choose a lower note on the piano. Conversely, if it is too low, choose a higher note. Also remember to visualize the frequencies of the notes you are singing and the notes of the piano. We are shooting for match in frequency to be in tune.

In addition, I am using the word ‘sliding’ in the next few drills. What I mean by that is a continuous note that on a gradient changes in pitch either up or down. An up slide would sound like a drawn out “huh?”. Anyone familiar with Scooby Doo and his “huh” knows what I am talking about. A down slide would sound like a drawn out “Oh” as sometimes expressed when someone answers a big question.

Basically there is no break in the note with consonants that would delineate individual notes. Simply sing the word “La” or some other variation and slide. Now, on with the drills.

Singing Drill 10 - Pitch

Play and hold a random note on the piano generally in the middle of the keyboard. Sing a note decidedly higher in pitch than the note played and slide down until you hear your voice matching the piano voice in pitch/note. Then play and hold the same note on the keyboard. Sing a note decidedly lower in pitch than the note played and slide up until you hear your voice matching the piano voice in pitch/note. Repeat with the same note until comfortable that you can slide into pitch with the piano note.

Singing Drill 11 - Pitch

Repeat Singing Drill 10 using the next note up on the piano from the one used in Singing Drill 10. Do this with each note for 4 notes up from the starting note. Then do Drill 10 with the 4 notes below the starting note. With each note, complete at least one up and one down slide. Repeat any notes you do not feel confident sliding into until you do. Then move on to the next note until all notes both up and down from starting note have been drilled to confidence.

Singing Drill 12 - Pitch

Repeat Singing Drill 10 using various notes at random on the piano. With each note complete at least one up and one down slide. Repeat any notes you do not feel confident sliding into until you do. Repeat the entire process with various notes until confident in your ability to slide into notes.

Now the next goal here is to reduce the amount of sliding. In the next drill you want to come in as close to the note as possible, not start high or low. If you hit it great!!! That means that the drills are starting to bite and you are developing your ear for pitch. Otherwise, hold the note you chose to sing for a second or two, then slide into the played note.  It is important that you hold the chosen wrong note for a second or two and concentrate on recognizing the difference in pitch from the note being played on the piano. Remember when I covered the importance of having something to compare something too? If you want to better understand anything you need something similar to measure it up against. What we are going for is you getting the concept of the difference between the note you chose to sing and the note you are supposed to slide into.

Singing Drill 13 - Pitch

Play various notes at random on the piano. Try to start singing as close to the same pitch as the piano. Hold the primary note you chose for a second then slide up or down respectively into the piano voice pitch played. Repeat until confident that you can start singing close (within a few notes or so) to the same pitch as the piano voice pitch.

Car Drill 3 – Pitch – Notes

Choose a note in the chorus of a familiar song and sing only that note whenever it is sung in the chorus. Try and choose a slower song and a note that is held for a considerable amount of time in the chorus. Example: The 1st, 3rd and 6th “Oh” in ‘The Longest Time’ by Billy Joel.

Natural Note

All of this has been leading up to finding your natural note. Oddly enough, in order to do that we need to reverse things. Instead of playing a note on the piano and adjusting your voice pitch to match, we are going to make the piano come to you. So, get to your piano and let’s get started.

The word key has many definitions. The one we have been using thus far is the one that relates to pitch and pitch families. On the piano the physical definition of a key is the actual black and white thingies. A typical piano has 88 keys. Collectively they are called the keyboard. It would look like this.

Find the very middle C key on the keyboard. That is called Middle C. When the piano was first invented, middle C was considered the pitch that was most common to the average natural note of humans. It still is true today. Obviously there are people with higher and lower voices with natural notes that wouldn’t necessarily fall directly on or match in pitch to middle C, but all voices considered, middle C is…well… the middle.

Notice that from the left it is the 4th C on the keyboard out of 8. Therefore it is called C4. From it and to the right in succession, the other notes are designated with the same number until C is reached again. i.e. D4, E4, F4, etc. They are considered the 4th group of notes on an 88 key piano. If we started with the middle C and went the left it would go down in the 3rd group, i.e. B3, A3, G3 etc. down to C3 and beyond. Looks like this.

Many keyboards however do not have 88 keys. Many are shorter. However, they are all based on the middle C or C4 and shortened equally on either end by cutting off 1 and 8, or 1 and 2 and 7 and 8. And all middle C’s on all keyboard are the same frequency, 261.6Hz. Remember frequency and pitch from before? Hz = Hertz. A hertz is the measurement of one wave cycle per second. 261.6hz is 261.6 wave cycles per second. That is the frequency of wave cycles per second. All C4 on all pianos are the same and the frequencies rise or fall from there depending on which way you go on the keyboard.

The important thing to remember is that any keyboard you are using has a C4. It is the C that is in the center of your keyboard. And it is from that middle C that we will find your note by moving one by one up or down the keyboard until we find your natural note.

Remember what I said earlier about when you went to the doctor and said ahhhh, and that was your natural note. Using that same concept we are going to do a drill to find your natural note. And as said before, clear your head and don’t think about any songs. Don’t think about high notes or low notes. In fact, don’t think about notes at all. You are simply going to open your mouth and sing the word ‘aaahhhh’ or ‘la’ if you like. This drill is in three parts and is relatively more extensive than the previous drills. So read through it to make sure you understand the process before beginning.

Singing Drill 14 – Pitch - Natural Note

DO NOT PLAY THE PIANO BEFORE SINGING. (a) Without concentrating on pitch, simply sing and hold a note. While holding the note, play the C4 or middle C on the piano. If the piano note is lower in pitch, move up the keys one by one, including the black keys until you play the same note you are singing. If you land on a black key as the same note you are singing, go the next white key down from there and write down the key designation of that white key, i.e. B3, A3, etc. (b) Wait a few minutes to clear the found note out of your head and repeat step a. (c) Repeat 3 or 4 times to determine the average note sung, i.e. B3 sung two out of 3 times = B3. The average note sung is your natural note.

Congratulations! You found your natural note. Now let’s put it to use.

Chapter 7 - Mastering Pitch

Depends On Your Point Of View

A bit ago I talked about recognizing the difference between the note you are singing and the note you are wanting to sing by holding the incorrect note with your voice and concentrating on the difference in pitch between it and the note being played on the piano that you are trying to match.

The only way to determine the quality of something is to have something else to compare it to.

When I was a boy, unbeknownst to me, we were rural and relatively poor…monetarily that it is. I say unbeknownst to me because we lived in the country and I didn’t know what I was “missing”. You could generally find me in the summer months either swimming in the lake or exploring the countryside with my dog.

I remember packing simple lunches and heading out after breakfast with my dog and not coming back until supper time. Carrying nothing more than my lunch and my imagination, I would spend the whole day as a bear hunter, or frontiersman, or Army Ranger, or superhero or all in the same day.

Whenever I needed, I would find the ground littered with expensive advanced military weaponry that could instantly transform into primitive hand to hand combat gear like spears, hatchets, and bows and arrows. Then just as easily, they would turn into a surveyor’s sextant and other necessary equipment used in the establishment of my new colony in dangerous Indian territory, only to be discarded at the end of the day back to the dead wooden form from whence they came.

But as time marched on and during the school year, I came to realize what I didn’t have.

Some of my friends at school had big screen TV’s with cable, which at the time was a luxury. We had the three channels and unless it was Saturday morning or after supper, I wasn’t interested. And if the President was on that night, he took over all three channels. When video games came out, some of my friends had all the latest games. I found the graphics to pale in comparison to my own imagination. Still do actually, regardless of the advances in technology. When my friends rode over to my house on their brand new bicycle, they always left it lying on the ground by the fence because they couldn’t ride them where I would take them.

Sometimes I would envy those things. And I can’t say that I didn’t play the video games or watch the cool cable channels or ride the new expensive bikes. But I always bored quickly with the games. I found the shows to be tiresome and visually limited in short order. And when I rode the bike I found myself glancing off in to the woods realizing the limitations of the two wheels underneath me.

So being ‘poor’ at a young age gave me the opportunity to compare being ‘poor’ to being ‘well off’. It gave me the opportunity to see the difference between having the latest and greatest to using my imagination. It showed me what I was lacking and what I wasn’t. It provided me with the ability to easily create mental concepts and communicate them, which has helped me greatly as a performer.

Essentially my life as a youth provided me the opportunity to compare ‘poor’ too ‘rich’. And in the end I found that ‘poor’ is a relative term.

So, as you can see, being able to compare things is very important in understanding the quality of something. For a note to be in tune, there must be another note to compare it to. Otherwise, it’s just a note. And listening to oneself sing a note while comparing it to another note being sung or played is very effective.

However, there is even another more effective way of comparison.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to recognize the value of what I had and was developing as a child, when I was a child. Sure I was able to see the difference in how I felt and how much fun I had or didn’t have between exploring the universe with my imagination vs. watching TV and playing video games. I can see now that the former was much more formatively important than the latter. But back then I simply would rather go outside and play for some reason.

Back then the perspective, point of view or viewpoint (to shorten the term) was me looking at the other thing I could be doing. If I was watching TV, I could look outside and decide that I would rather be playing.

Back then the viewpoints were only two-me doing what I was doing and what I wanted to do. I didn’t realize then how much healthier it was to want to play and exercise my imagination than watching TV. I didn’t have that third viewpoint of me looking at me looking at something else. Even my Grandmother telling me that watching too much TV would “rot my brain” didn’t register back then. You usually can’t be given the third viewpoint. You will have to use your imagination to arrive there on your own.

It wasn’t until later in life, becoming a parent myself, when I looked back and understood the importance of the differences. Only then was I able to see the differences in the choices I made. It’s only now that I realize and wish I didn’t waste as much time on the video games and watching TV. I’m not saying they weren’t fun. And obviously I needed to do those things or similar things to them in order to appreciate the quality of the other. I’m just saying that I now realize how much more productive using my imagination was and how it contributes to my ability as a singer/performer.

If I knew then what I know I know now, I could have really taken advantage of the opportunity to fully understand and test the differences. I could explore the value of each while I was in the moment. It more than likely would have produced greater results in cultivating conceptual creative ability. If I could go back in time, I could have had all three viewpoints at once. Now THAT would have been something.

In the previous drills you have been developing your ability to conceptually create and then produce the correct pitch of a note and sing it in tune by comparing your perspective of the note you were singing with the note being played. They were crucial in developing your understanding of pitch and singing in tune. The two viewpoints assumed in those drills were very effective and crucial. But a third would be even better.

In my example above I had to wait years to get the third viewpoint. If I could have reduced the time from years to minutes I would have had then the knowledge I have now. That is what we are going to do with the next drill. We are going to combine everything that we have gained thus far from all of the previous “two viewpoint” drills, add a third viewpoint, and take your ability to understand pitch and create notes conceptually to a whole new level.

Here is a simple example of how we are going to accomplish this. Imagine you wearing a sweater while looking at another sweater hanging in the closet. That is two viewpoints. That is you comparing what you are wearing (one) to the other sweater that you could be wearing (two).

Now imagine if you videoed yourself wearing the sweater looking at a mannequin that looks like you wearing the other sweater. Then, if you watched the video, you would have the three viewpoints. You (now one) watching you with the sweater on (now two) looking at the mannequin that looks like you wearing the other sweater (now three). Then, you could REALLY get the concept of the differences between the sweaters and how they would look on you.

If it weren’t for smartphone technology, at this point a good portion of my female readers would be contemplating what type of video camera to buy before shopping again. And possibly there are many of my male readers doing the same, or hoping their wives wouldn’t read this part of the book in fear of having to buy a new video camera. Either way, next time you go to the mall, find a mannequin of similar features and try it out. Let me know what you think.

All joking aside, the next drill is The Pitch Drill. It is the drill that takes what you have achieved from the previous drills, reduces the time to obtain the third viewpoint, and combines all three viewpoints, thereby increasing your understanding of pitch, and strengthening your ability to create notes conceptually. This hones your pitch recognition and duplication to near perfection.

The correlative piece of equipment to the above example for audio would be some sort of voice or sound recorder. And again smartphones come in handy for this as well. Usually there is an app on them that will allow you to do voice recordings. That will suffice. If you don’t have that, then you will need to get some sort of audio recording device. Or you could use your home video camera if you have one. Or you could use a microphone and your computer. Basically you will need anything that will record your voice and enable you to play it back soon after. Obviously the higher the quality of recording the better, and that usually comes down to the quality of the microphone.

In addition to a recording device, you will need access to a piano or keyboard. If you have been doing the previous drills you should already have that covered. Those two pieces of gear, your voice and the knowledge you have gained from the previous drills and info, are all you need.

Before we get started though let’s review the 12 note system from chapter 6.

Remember that with the 12 note system we can see that in a Do Re Mi or major scale, only 1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, and 12 are played and that sequence does not change no matter what note you start with on the keyboard. If you are in the key of D where D would be 1, you would be playing D, E, F#, G, A, B, C#, then D again. The pattern of 1, 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, and 12 remains the same regardless. Therefore it would not matter where on the keyboard you started, if you wanted to play a major Do Re Mi scale, you would use that skip pattern. An easy way to remember the pattern is you always skip a number except between 5 & 6 and 12 & 13/1

In the next drill you will be playing the major Do Re Mi scale up and down from you natural note. And you will be playing it two octaves above and two octaves below, or as far as you can get in either direction. Remember, the word octave means the eight, or of eight. C D E F G A B C = 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8/1 again. Those 8 notes are the skips on the keyboard as shown above, and you would start with your natural note.

If your natural note is C4, in order to play two octaves up, you would play the notes C4, D4, E4, F4, G4, A4, B4, C5, D5, E5, F5, G5, A5, B5, C6. If you were to play two octaves down it would look the same only backwards starting from C4 and going through the 3 group and 2 group down to C2. This is easier to see with this image.

But since C is the only natural key, meaning it only uses the white keys, this might be a little hard to follow. So remember what we said about the black keys being half steps and being called sharp or flat depending on the direction you are looking. And that the symbol for sharp is #, and the symbol for flat is a little b. So the black key to the right of C would be either C# or Db. For the purpose of keeping things simple we are only going to use the sharp# designations.

Let’s say your natural note is D4. Using the 12 note system, for one octave we would play D4, E4, F4#, G4, A4, B4, C4#, D5. To go two octaves up you would repeat the pattern and go to D6. To go two octaves down you would go to D2.

You may or may not be able to sing the notes at the extreme ends of this drill. No problem. Your ‘range’ is the extreme height or depth of the notes you are physically able to sing. One can only sing so low or so high without further vocal exercise. We aren’t looking to increase your range just yet. This drill is for pitch. But, as a side benefit, the more you practice it, the better your range will get naturally.

So, without further ado, here is the primary pitch drill. Get to the piano and take your voice recorder with you.

Singing Drill 15 – Pitch - The Pitch Drill -Recorded

Part 1

Start the voice recorder in order to record both the piano and your voice. Play your natural note on the piano. (a) While holding the note on the piano, sing and hold the note for at least 2 seconds. (b) Play the next note up in the major scale and repeat step a. Repeat steps a and b with every note of the major scale in succession for two octaves up or until the top of you range. (c) Once again play your natural note on the piano. (d) While holding the note on the piano, sing and hold the note for at least 2 seconds. (e) Play the next note down in the major scale and repeat step d. Repeat steps d and e with every note of the major scale in succession for two octaves down or until the bottom of you range. Stop the recorder.

Part 2

Play back the recording and listen to yourself singing the notes. Observe where you were out of tune with the piano. Count how many notes you were out of tune with. Play back the recording again. On the notes where you were out of tune, decide whether you were sharp (above pitch) or flat (below pitch) for that note. Repeat Part 1 and 2 until improvement is noticed by the reduction of the amount of notes you are out of tune with.

The amount of notes you are out of tune with is not relative to what notes they are. In other words, you can sing 10 notes wrong the first time and sing each of those notes correctly the second time through the drill while singing 10 different notes wrong and the net result is the same between both drills – 10 wrong notes sung. We are looking for a reduction in the amount of notes sung incorrectly. That is showing progress. So if you sing 10 wrong the first time, 11 wrong the second time and 7 wrong the third time, that is showing improvement.

Keep doing the drill until you feel happy with your results. After that, stop and go do something else. Ride a bike, bake a cake, run an errand, doesn’t matter. Stop when you have a feeling of accomplishment and don’t go past that.

Then once the novelty of the accomplishment has worn off, and you are itching for more, then go back and do it again. If you find that you are getting worse, leave a bigger gap in time between drills. Leave it for 5 or 6 hours or a day or two. Then go back and see if you can improve. And keep in mind that everyone has a cap on the reduction of mistakes and it is NOT perfection. Sure, you may do it without 1 mistake a time or two, but don’t expect to nail it every time from there on out. Perfection is not obtainable in the land of mortals. Period. But once you have reached a good happy average limit. Move on to the next drill.

Singing Drill 16 – Pitch - The Pitch Drill 2 - Recorded

Repeat the steps of Singing Drill 16 changing only the time of the note held. Hold it for 1 second instead of 2. All other steps of both parts are executed the same in the same sequence.

Well that’s pretty much it for pitch and how to sing in tune. For both of the previous drills I hope to have on the website soon (if they aren’t there already) prerecorded piano scales for all of the notes from D3 to B4, essentially eliminating the need to play the piano parts yourself. Only thing is, they won’t stop at the top or bottom of your range and will go the full two octaves both ways. So if you top or bottom out, you will have to wait for the piano parts to play themselves out.

Either way, you have in your hands the knowledge and tools to develop your conceptual ability to sing in tune. And when it comes to singing that is more than half the battle. If you aren’t singing in tune, you are just yelling in an interesting manner.

Part 4 Resonance

Chapter 8 – Your Instrument

There are TONS of places to get information on the physical attributes of the voice. You wanna know what vocal cords are made of? You can find out. You wanna know exactly how sound resonates through sinuses and nasal passages? You can find out. You wanna know the technical term for all of the muscles in your chest, neck, throat, mouth, etc. and how they function? You can find out. You wanna get the details from all the different “guru’s”, with their intricate interpretations of vocalization and the physiology of it all? Go ahead. Look around. There is plenty of info out there to get lost in. But not much of it is useful or needed for our purposes.

So why don’t we just stick to what we need to get the job done?

Here is a simple definition of resonance.

Resonance is the product of sound that has reverberated off different surfaces thereby creating a distinct quality.

Musical instruments create sound. And essentially your voice is an instrument, not much different than a guitar, piano, violin, saxophone, trumpet, etc.

Let’s take the guitar for an example of comparison. A guitar has a many different parts to it, but let’s takes up the ones that correlate to the human voice. We are going to use the acoustic guitar as an example as opposed to an electric guitar. Here is an image for reference.

First off you have the strings. The strings are stretched over the hole in the middle that, sure enough, is called the sound hole. The strings are strung over what is called the fret boards. When you strum the strings, the vibration of them resonates into the body of the guitar through the sound hole. That resonating sound then comes back out through the sound hole.

Now, as I’m sure you have experienced, if you take a length of string or chord and stretch it tight and pluck it, it will vibrate with a sound. That sound has a frequency or pitch that doesn’t change unless you shorten or lengthen the string. If you lengthen the string the sound will go down in pitch. If you shorten the string it will go up in pitch.

When you press the string to the frets it instantly shortens the string, thereby changing the pitch or note. When you release or go down towards the head of the guitar, the string is effectively loosened and the pitch goes down. That is how the note is changed with the frets.

But changing the length isn’t the only way to change the pitch of a string.

When you tighten the string it will go up in pitch. When you loosen the string it will go down in pitch. You do that at the head of a guitar by turning the little knobs, which are called tuning keys.

As you know from before, being in tune is being at a certain predetermined frequency. And the guitar strings are set at a certain frequency each by tightening or loosening the strings with the tuning keys.

So, when you strum the strings without touching the frets, you get a sound at a certain pitch. When you press the string to the fret, you get a change in pitch. All the while the sound is going through the sound hole, resonating in the body which gives it volume, and that volume comes out through the sound hole again.

But the quality of the resonation from the body of the guitar does not change. It is either rich and thick or light and thin, or somewhere in between depending on the dimensions and construction of the body of the guitar. And the resonation doesn’t change because the body doesn’t change.

If the body of the guitar is large and deep from front to back, the tone from it will be large, warm, and full. If the body is thin, so will be the tone. The interior volume of the guitar is directly proportionate to the tone quality of the sound it will produce. The bigger the interior, the bigger the sound, and vice versa.

Now, why did we go over the parts of a guitar and what the heck does it have to do with your voice.

Well, the human voice and the guitar are actually pretty similar. Whereas a guitar has strings, you have vocal cords. Whereas the guitar has a sound hole, you have a sound hole, usually referred to as a mouth. Whereas the guitar has a body…well…that’s where things diverge a bit.

While it is true that you have a body, it doesn’t come into play as much as it does with the guitar other than to run the air supply. And while that is obviously important, there is no resonation taking place in the lungs. You can change the volume of your voice with the lungs by using more or less air, but you can’t change the tone. That is all done past the vocal cords.

So, the guitar body would be better compared to everything past the vocal cords as that is where the resonation changes take place.

The vocal cords are part of what is called Larynx. The inside of your mouth is called the Oral Cavity. Behind your nose is the Nasal Cavity. Here is an image to help.

Using the guitar example, when you move air across your vocal cords in the larynx that would be the same as strumming the strings on the guitar. The vocal cords themselves are basically two flaps of tissue in your larynx or throat that you can tighten or loosen with throat muscles, like you tighten or loosen the muscle in your arm when you move it.

When the air moves across the tightened vocal cords, it essentially ‘strums’ the chords making them vibrate, not unlike the strings on a guitar, thereby, creating sound.

Now, depending on how tight or how loose your vocal cords are will determine how high or how low the pitch is of the note you are singing. When you tighten your vocal cords you are stretching them just like the guitar strings that are stretched by the tuning keys, thereby increasing the frequency of the pitch making the note go up. Conversely, loosening them makes the note go down. Just like the guitar.

Another quick example is to put your lips together and blow. Yes, I know it makes a sound of flatulence, and yes I know it makes the 5 year old in you laugh as it does me, but putting that aside, think of your lips as vocal cords. The tighter you tighten your lips, the higher in pitch the sound is. The looser your lips, the lower in pitch. If you are not around any children or your boss, you should go ahead and try this now.

I said before that you have a sound hole just like a guitar, your mouth, and that is partially true. The difference is, you actually have your nasal cavities as well as the top of your throat to add into the mix, making a much more complex ‘body’ to resonate sound in after it passes the vocal cords.

That is why I said the things diverge with the ‘body’ comparison in regards to the guitar and your voice.  

Remember where I said the guitar tone has no change in resonance because the body doesn’t change? That is mostly true. However, if you punched a hole in the back of the guitar, it would have an entirely different resonance and tone. If you stuffed a shirt through the sound hole and into the body, it would have a different resonance and tone. Basically any physical or dimensional change you make to the guitar body will change its resonance and tone.

What if you could, at a moment’s notice, double the size of the body of the guitar or just as easily cut it in half? Or what if you could close off the small part at the top of the body and increase the bottom part of the body, or a combination of all of the above? That would be a REALLY cool guitar! That would be a really cool instrument in general! Talk about versatility!

Well that is what your voice is. It is an extremely versatile instrument. It is made up of the lungs, the vocal cords, the throat, the oral cavity (mouth), the nasal cavity (nose), the lips, the jaw, and the master of all, the tongue. I call the tongue the master of them all because of its versatility in shape shifting and its ultimate roll in the creation of sound. You will see what I mean soon. But, the above are the basic parts of your instrument, The Voice.

I’m sure that there are vocal purists out there who will read this and insist on naming and listing a multitude of other parts and bits. But since this is about singing and not medical school, I think I’ll leave out the book report on Gray’s Anatomy. And I’m not referring to the TV show with the similar name. Check the spelling and Google it if you’d like.

Otherwise, what I have listed is what you need to be familiar with for the next part, how to use them.

Chapter 9 - The Three Voices

A pivotal point for me in my vocal development was when I was 22 years old and at a friend’s home studio in Los Angeles, CA. I had basically just arrived there “fresh off the boat” from Texas and he was helping me get started in the biz by doing some recording.

I was in the sound booth singing a fairly high note but having a hard time keeping from cracking into falsetto to reach it. My buddy, Wes was his name, asked me if I was using “all four voices”. At first I thought I misheard him through the headphones as he was in the control room and had to speak into a mic to talk to me. When asked what he meant, he repeated “all four voices”.

He said “You need to combine all four voices and put some power behind it if you really want to hit that note”. I had no idea what he was talking about. As far as I was concerned, the only voices I knew of was my regular voice and my falsetto voice.

If you aren’t aware of what a falsetto voice is, simply Google Tiny Tim’s “Tiptoe through the tulips’. Perfect example, and pretty funny actually. But a brief description of it would be very high pitched and soft in volume. It is also called the head voice.

I must have demonstrated a perfect look of confusion, because he patiently went on to explain the 4 voice resonance theory as I call it. I’m not sure where he got it from as it has been kicking around for some time and has been modified by many over the years. And although still not completely correct, it definitely put me on the road to really expanding my range and vocal ability as well as narrowing down what the real deal is behind the scenes.

His version was that we actually have 4 voices we can use. First was the Chest Voice, which was singing from down in your chest and producing a large, rich, and usually deep tone. The second was the Mouth Voice, which is basically your regular singing voice and speaking voice where you are simply singing from your mouth. The third was the Nose Voice singing from your nose or nasally and the fourth was the Head Voice which is the falsetto voice as mentioned.

He told me to combine the power of my chest voice with the top range of my head voice and stabilize it with my mouth and nose voice. It took some practice to (1), get the idea of what the heck he was talking about by trying all four voices and visualizing the voices coming from those areas, and (2), keep from cracking into falsetto.

Eventually I figured it out by realizing that I had to put more power and air into it and create more room for the sound come out of my mouth. Once I got it, I was suddenly singing Boston tunes…in the same key as Brad Delp …with full voice.

Full voice, by the way, is simply not going into falsetto. You may have heard this term thrown about, and that is what it means. Full voice does not necessarily mean loud, it simply means not using falsetto.

Once I fully grasped the concept of the 4 voices, combining them and recombining them and trying different things became an obsession and immensely fun.

But being the way I am, I couldn’t come to complete terms with pretending. I need things to be real and measurable sometimes. Mysteries need to be solved most of the time, and the truth should come out. Otherwise, in my opinion, we leave ourselves open to falsehoods and wrong road dead ends, or minimally wasted time.

So, although it helped to expand my boundaries, ideas and concepts of singing, pretending sound was coming from my chest eventually couldn’t be overlooked and I had to understand what was really happening. That way I could possibly develop it even further.

This book, to a degree, outlines the milestones of my own vocal development in the order they occurred in my life. The difference is, I am leaving out the weak or unworkable theories that briefly took up residence on the metaphorical examination table of my vocal laboratory, and delivering the brass tacks I found demonstrably workable and superior.

That is the reason that I felt it necessary to at least mention and briefly go over the 4 voices theory and show how I used it to develop my ability to conceptualize singing. And because it was important, but in the end penultimate, I do want to go into it a bit more, if only to provide a foundation for you to truly get what comes next.

Throat Voice

To get the idea behind the “chest voice”, visualize a large deep rich voice for men. A friend of mine, James Barbour, is an extremely good example of this. A well-known Broadway star, singer and actor, James has tremendous resonance and a large rich voice. You can find several examples on youtube.com. Look up a few to see what I mean. A quick way to get the idea though, is to think of an opera singer.

The “chest voice” for women is essentially the same thing but in a higher pitch. An extremely good example is Barbra Streisand. In the vocal range of women, her chest voice is extremely rich and large.

Both singers have an extremely expansive range and can sing very high and very low notes well above and below their natural note. But both are good examples of a well-developed “chest voice.”

Now, as you may have noticed I keep putting quotation marks around the words “chest voice.” Keep in mind that “chest voice” is a pretend concept only to help conceptualize singing large and rich. You don’t actually physically produce sound in your chest. Sure you get the air from there but sound doesn’t actually come from there or resonate there to any productive degree.

What happens when we pretend to sing from our chest? Well let’s see. For this drill I really want you to channel your 10 year old self and really play the part. Get your whole body into it and really pretend. I want you to BE an opera singer, if only for one long note.

Singing Drill 17 - Resonance – Throat Voice

Choose a random note decidedly lower than your natural note. Stand, sing and hold the note while singing the word “La.” Visualize a large rich sound coming from your chest and sing the note in your best deep operatic voice. Repeat until you feel you have sung your most operatic-like note.

You may have noticed some interesting physical manifestations occurred with your body when doing this. Some of which could be the following. You most likely pushed your chest forward. Probably your arms came away from your body creating space for your chest. Your shoulders may have spread out and down slightly. You may have elongated your neck, lifting your head. You probably opened your mouth wider than normal. You may have dipped your chin or raised it, one of which is helpful and one is not.

As a matter of fact, only three of the above manifestations are conducive to a proper “chest voice”. And there is one that I didn’t mention that is the most important of all, where the tongue is.

A large rich resonance of any kind is directly proportional to the size of the space the sound is allowed to resonate in. If you are in a large room that is wide and tall and deep and you shouted you would notice the sound reverberating or echoing off the walls and back to you. The sound, having room to travel and echo, combines with echoes of itself, seemingly growing in volume only to continue to travel until it finally dies out. That is resonation. The larger the room, the larger the resonance. Conversely, the smaller the room the smaller the resonance. Small resonance can be considered as thin or tiny when heard at all.

In order to produce the largest and richest “chest voice” possible, the ‘room’ needs to be as big as we can get it. We know from simple anatomy, if not from the observation of our own bodies, that vocal noise does not originate from the chest. So in the literal sense, a chest voice is impossible. Not only that, but other than the temporary space created in the lungs when air is drawn in, there is no room for sound to really resonate, being filled with other things like a heart, bones, muscle, etc., etc. None of which make good sound chambers.

Yes, there is a slight resonation in the chest simply due to vibration through the various tissues and organs in the thoracic cavity aka chest cavity. If you rap your knuckles on a desk, and then put your ear to the desk and do it again, you will find you get MUCH more volume directly through the wood to you ear than through the air. But to hear it, you have to have your ear directly on the desk.

That is the type of resonation that happens in the chest cavity. It is a cavity, but it’s pretty full. There is no room for chamber resonance. There is definitely vibration resonance that does contribute to the overall sound, but it is of little consequence as it cannot be heard beyond much of a distance. And any professional singer or teacher out there thinking that I’m wrong simply needs to answer these two questions.

(1) How much of the sound coming from the chest is picked up by the microphone on stage?

Little to none.

(2) If there is any at all being picked up by the microphone, how much can be heard through the speakers?

Again, little to none.

I’m sure you’ve seen singers move the microphone away from their mouths to reduce the volume on certain notes. And a fair amount of times they move the mic down toward their chest. If there was any significant resonance coming from the chest the mic would pick it up and the volume wouldn’t decrease.

As a matter of fact, next time you are around a microphone, try this little experiment. Point the microphone at your chest and sing. Then press the microphone to your breastbone in the center of your chest and sing. When you do that, you will find that the only way to truly get any volume from the chest is to physically be in contact with it.

So where is all the volume coming from? If a large rich tone is only made possible by large chamber resonance, what are we hearing? Where is the room made for the sound to come from the vocal cords and then resonate? The answer is the throat and mouth. More specifically, the top of the throat and the back of the mouth.

And the only way to make more room back there is to lift the head slightly, drop the jaw and get the tongue out of the way.

As you know, since the tongue actually goes down the throat there is no way to completely move it out of the way. But the tongue is the most versatile and agile muscle in the body. It can be manipulated into all kinds of shapes and seemingly sizes. It can be positioned all around and outside the mouth and throat. But to increase the amount of space in the mouth and throat, simply move your tongue out of the way by moving it as far back and down as possible, thereby creating more chamber for the sound to resonate.

So, of all the physical manifestations that could be portrayed when pretending to be an opera singer in the previous drill, only three things fully contribute to creating the large throat resonance chamber to produce the “chest voice”.

1.        Tilt the chin slightly up

2.       Open the mouth wide

3.       Drop the tongue down and back out of the way

James Barbour pointed out a good way to achieve this. Pretend you are yawning.

If you’re thinking it’s looking like it’s time for another drill you’re right. But this time you don’t have to pretend to sing from your chest. You are going to use your Throat Voice

Singing Drill 18 - Resonance – Throat Voice

Choose a random note decidedly lower than your natural note.

1.       Tilt the chin slightly up

2.       Open the mouth wide

3.       Drop the tongue down and back out of the way

4.       Sing and hold a note with the word “Oh.”

5.       Repeat until you feel you have created the largest and richest note possible and visualize the position of jaw and tongue.

As you can see it actually isn’t a chest voice at all as the resonation is happening at the back of the mouth and throat. Therefore, it is more correctly called the Throat Voice.

Listening Drill 9 – Resonance – Throat Voice

Listen to various songs and note the times when the singer is using his or her Throat Voice for approximately half of the song, then note when they are NOT using their Throat Voice. Repeat until you can easily tell the difference

Car Drill 4 – Resonance - Throat Voice

Sing along with various songs on the radio while using your Throat Voice

Now that you have the Throat Voice down, let’s move along.

Mouth Voice

The next voice on the 4 voice list is the mouth. The Mouth Voice being your normal speaking voice.

As stated before, part of the Throat Voice is obviously using the back of the mouth, and it’s the opening of the throat that creates that large resonance. Well, if you let the tongue relax and move back into normal position you get the Mouth Voice.

You would think there would be no reason to cover this voice as you have been using it your whole life. Nothing to learn there, right? Wrong.

There is a slight almost imperceptible shift in tongue and jaw position when using the Mouth Voice that determines whether a singer sounds like a professional or an amateur. Other than obvious pitch problems, this one thing is the turning point between sounding like a shower star or a rock star when using the Mouth Voice. And frankly, it’s the Mouth Voice that professional singers use mostly.

It is the go-to voice. And why not? It is the one we are most familiar with. So, if we are so familiar with it, why is this one thing hidden? Because we don’t walk around talking like Forest Gump. Yes, I said Forest Gump.

Southern accent aside, the way Tom Hanks positioned his tongue and jaw when talking is basically the thing you need to do to truly achieve a professional resonance with your Mouth Voice.

When you are talking, your tongue and jaw are in the ‘Speaking Position’. The natural mouth position you have developed naturally since birth. It is the position that sounds “normal”, unlike Forest. But when you sing with your mouth in the speaking position, it sounds closed, muted, and thin because you are not giving the sound anywhere to go but through what’s left of the room in your mouth and into your nasal cavities, which we will go into in a moment. If done correctly it is valid. But if done incorrectly it is bad.

To get the correct singing resonation from your Mouth Voice, you have to sing like Forest Gump…sort of. In order to do that, simply move the tongue back and down slightly, but not as far back and down as the Throat Voice. And then drop your jaw just a little more than it is in the speaking position. This is the ‘Singing Position’. I keep using Forest Gump as an example simply because Tom Hanks used his Singing Position as his speaking position, threw in the child’s southern accent, and slowed his speech down. As a matter of fact, Tom Hanks copied the actor who played little Forest, Michael Conner Humphreys natural accent, as Michael is from Independence, Mississippi and at the time had a heavy southern accent.

The slowing of the speech, or deliberate enunciation, was important. If you listen to any clips of Tom’s Forest Gump, you will notice that his voice was slow and deliberate, almost as if it had a cadence or rhythm, like singing. He put deliberate space between each word, giving each word its own identity and had his mouth in the Singing Position.  

Essentially he was singing while speaking. The effect would be no different if you were to speak Mary Had A Little Lamb with the same mouth position you use to sing using the Singing Position and with the same rhythm you would if singing it. Tom using his Singing Position to speak is no different.

So, the Mouth Voice has two positions – the Speaking Position and the Singing Position. I bet you can guess which one makes you sound like a pro instead of an amateur. So, let’s use the lamb song and do a drill to lock in the Mouth Voice.

Singing Drill 19 - Resonance – Mouth Voice - Speaking in Speaking Position

1.       Start with your mouth in natural Speaking Position

2.       SPEAK the words to Mary Had A Little Lamb

3.       Repeat a few times and note the resonance produced and visualize the position of jaw and tongue.

Singing Drill 20 - Resonance – Mouth Voice - Speaking in Singing Position

1.       Drop your jaw slightly

2.       Move your tongue SLIGHTLY back and down

3.       SPEAK the words to Mary Had A Little Lamb

4.       Repeat a few times and note the resonance produced and visualize the position of jaw and tongue.

Singing Drill 21 - Resonance – Mouth Voice - Singing in Speaking Position

1.       Start with your mouth back in natural Speaking Position

2.       Sing the song Mary Had A Little Lamb

3.       Repeat a few times and note the resonance produced and visualize the position of jaw and tongue.

Singing Drill 22 - Resonance – Mouth Voice - Singing in Singing Position

1.       Drop your jaw slightly

2.       Move your tongue SLIGHTLY back and down

3.       Sing the song Mary Had A Little Lamb

4.       Repeat a few times and note the resonance produced and visualize the position of jaw and tongue.

Listening Drill 10 – Resonance – Mouth Voice

Listen to various songs and note the times when the singer is using his or her Mouth Voice for approximately half of the song, then note when they are NOT using their Mouth Voice. Repeat until you can easily tell the difference

Car Drill 5 – Resonance - Mouth Voice

Sing along with various songs on the radio using your Mouth Voice. Note the resonance.

You will probably notice after doing these drills that you will be singing and sounding more and more like a professional and will naturally use the Singing Position when using your Mouth Voice.

Nose Voice

Much earlier I wrote about the two remaining voices, the nose voice and the head voice. The head voice being falsetto, like the Bee Gee’s used, among others. The problem is, the head voice doesn’t really exist. Like the chest voice, it too is actually imaginary.

See, the resonation only occurs in the nasal cavities in and behind the nose and eyes. If you have a brain, there is no cavity for resonation in your head.  Falsetto was falsely named the ‘head voice’ long ago and it stuck simply because when you use falsetto, it can feel like there is nothing substantial coming from your throat. When in reality that’s where it is all originating from, the vocal cords. And the reason it feels like it is in your head is because of most of the resonation is occurring in the nasal cavities. But even if you eliminated that resonation you could still do it.

Here is an experiment. I’m not making this a drill because it is real simple to do and you only have to do it once to get the point. In your most light airy falsetto voice sing some random tune. Then hold your nose and sing the same tune.

Notice that you can still sing the note. But also notice that it feels forced as if the note is pushing back on itself in the back and top of your mouth. That is because you have just blocked a sound pathway and essentially removed nasal resonation from the picture.

Two things we can get from this. One, there is no such thing as a ‘head voice’. Falsetto is done with the vocal cords. Two, the third and final voice is the Nose Voice and it is all about the resonation.

Unlike the Mouth Voice, the Nose Voice doesn’t have the advantage of having the tongue to manipulate the resonance chamber. The sound either resonates in the nasal cavities or it doesn’t. There is no manipulation other than how much sound is allowed to resonate there. And that is controlled by the tongue and soft palate.

If you take the tip of your tongue and touch it to the roof of your mouth right behind your teeth, you will notice that it is hard there. That is the hard palate. And if you move your tongue back you will feel it go soft. That is the soft palate. And right back there at the back is that thing that dangles down. That is called the uvula. And right behind that is the top of your wind pipe that feeds into the nasal cavity.

The soft palate is the gate. It is the muscle that controls the air flow, and sound flow, to the nasal cavities, of which you have two. One off each nostril. So, actually the Nose Voice is resonating in TWO different chambers.

And as far as being a resonance chamber, between the two nasal cavities, the Noise Voice has almost as much square footage as the mouth voice. Therefore, it is easy to understand why the Nose Voice has so much influence on our overall voice.

We have all had a cold at one time or another, and know just how strange we sound when our nose is stopped up. That is because all of the nasal resonance is being stopped cold (pun intended). Well we can do that intentionally as well with the soft Palate.

It’s easy to do. You’ve been doing it all your life and may not even know you were. But let’s do it while actually thinking about it so as to better understand the Nose Voice, and actually the Mouth Voice.

Simply breathe through your mouth and only your mouth. Feel something close off in the back of your throat up towards the top? That was the soft palate closing the gate and denying any air to pass through the nasal cavities, neither in nor out.

Now let’s see the opposite side of the coin. Open your mouth and only breathe through your nose. You will feel the back of your tongue rise up and close off the back of the mouth, AKA oral cavity. But, we’ll stick with mouth.

So, if we really take a look at the airway from the throat up, it splits at the back of the mouth, one pathway going up to the two nasal cavities, and one going out the mouth. But which one has the sound resonating in it when you sing.

Actually, both.

If you were to pronounce the letter “E” in its long form, for example, the way it is pronounced in the word “eat”, you would find the front of your tongue up almost touching the hard palate or roof of your mouth, and the back of your tongue raised and back almost closing off the mouth. I say almost. There is still some sound coming out. But since there is no room for the sound to resonate, it sounds thin and tinny and well…like the letter “E”. And another thing to notice is the jaw being closed up more with teeth almost touching.

If you were to close the gap between your hard palate and the front of your tongue, you would effectually be forcing all the sound to resonate in the nasal cavities. To demonstrate this say the “ing” sound, like in the word “sing” and hold that note. That is technically all nasal resonance. But it isn’t really what we are going for when talking about singing and creating the Nose Voice. But it is if we wanted to describe humming. This by the way is impossible if you close off your nose. Go ahead. Try it. Hum with your nose closed. I dare yah.

The Nose Voice is really sharing resonance with the Mouth Voice, if only a little and only at the back of the mouth, but sharing all the same. It is singing with as minimal jaw expansion as possible with as much front tongue closer as possible and as much back tongue lift as possible. That is the Nose Voice

A perfect example of this style of singing voice is Bob Dylan, and specifically the song Jokerman. His unmistakable nasally voice, is a pure example of singing with the Nose Voice. He is singing the whole time with his tongue up and back in his mouth. So, anyone wanting to sing like Bob Dylan, this is how you do it.

Singing Drill 23 – Resonance – Nose Voice

1.       Drop the jaw slightly from closed, i.e. the position when saying “Eeee”

2.       Move the tongue up in the front and back towards both hard and soft palate

3.       Hold the jaw and tongue in this general position and sing Mary Had A Little Lamb

4.       Repeat a few times and note the resonance and visualize the position of jaw and tongue.

Listening Drill 11 – Resonance – Nose Voice

Listen to various songs and note the times when the singer is using his or her Nose Voice for approximately half of the song, then note when they are NOT using their Nose Voice. Repeat until you can easily tell the difference.

Car Drill 6 – Resonance - Nose Voice

Sing along with various songs on the radio while using your Nose Voice

All in all it is a pretty simple resonance to create. Other than Bob Dylan there are several other examples, but for singing, he is the best one that comes to mind. Now, I’m going to date myself a bit here but when I was a kid, I used to watch reruns of a cartoon character that was the perfect example of the speaking version of the Nose Voice – Droopy Dog.

At this point we have covered the three different voices, Throat Voice, Mouth Voice and Nose Voice. We have eliminated the need for imagining there is a chest or head voice, so at this point you should have a thorough mental and physical understanding of the three voices. And you should also be able to produce sound with each of them, at will, and with ease. If not, repeat Singing Drills 17 – 23 until you do and before moving on, because having a firm grasp of these three voice concepts is key.

Part 5 Shaping

Before you get worried that I’m about to launch into some sermon about the importance of diet and exercise and how it affects singing, let me say – don’t worry. When I say “shape”, I don’t mean body shape. I’m not talking about going to the gym and logging miles on the treadmill. Actually if I were, that’s not the best way to get into shape anyway. But that is a different subject.

Don’t get me wrong, it is always better to be in good physical shape. But it doesn’t necessarily affect your ability to sing. Sure, if you easily lose your breath climbing a flight of stairs, you won’t be able to sing as well while moving around on stage, at length, as someone who is in shape.

But I’m talking about Voice Shaping.

I’m talking about how to use your tongue, jaw, soft palate, lips, in concert as part of the three voices along with other components to sound like a professional singer. That is Voice Shaping.

It is agile Voice Shaping that adds the color and texture to your singing, therefore really refining your ability to sound more and more like a professional singer. And now that you have control of your pitch, and a basic concept of resonation with the Throat Voice, Mouth Voice, and Nose Voice, it is time to refine your abilities and add some important weapons to your arsenal that will set you on the road to proficiency in Voice Shaping.

Chapter 10 - Basic Resonance Modulation

Throat, Mouth, and Nose Combination

As you know each of the three voices has its own unique resonance and each one is a basic ingredient in Basic Resonance Modulation. Modulation comes from the word modulate. There are several definitions for the word ‘modulate’. And actually several of them have to do with music as the etymology of the word comes from the Latin word modulari , which means to play or sing. But there is one definition in particular that actually doesn’t have to do with music that we use.

Modulate \ Verb\ : to regulate or adjust the degree of

That is the definition we are interested in because that is what we want to do with resonance. We want to regulate or adjust it. And we do that with different combinations of the Throat, Mouth, and Nose Voices. Oddly enough we’ve been doing it our entire lives, or at least since we could speak.

Have you ever said the word “coin?” I’m sure you have at one time or another, but just in case, go ahead and say it now.

When you say ‘coin’ you actually start with a combination of your Throat Voice and Mouth voice right after you say the ‘k’, and then through the word you adjust or modulate the resonance from Throat and Mouth Voice to just Mouth Voice and then a Nose Voice, to finally a full 100% nasal resonance with ‘the hum’ in the final consonant ‘n’. Let’s look at it this way.

As you can see there is a lot going on if you think about it. Luckily we don’t or we would probably never be able to carry on a conversation with someone. The thing is though, as we have discussed before, your mouth being in the Speaking Position is not necessarily the best way to sound good when singing.

We need to train ourselves to be able to sing in the Singing Position with Mouth Voice and be able to combine it with the Throat Voice and Nose Voice when needed to accomplish a professional overall singing voice.

Singing Drill 24 – Shaping – Basic Resonance Modulation

Sing the following part of Mary Had A Little Lamb using the voice indicated to sing the words indicated, whereas TV=Throat Voice, MV=Mouth Voice, NV=Nose Voice. I.e. ‘Mary – TV’ means to sing the word ‘Mary’ with the Throat Voice

Mary – TV

had a – MV

little lamb – NV

little lamb – MV

little lamb – TV

Repeat until you can easily modulate between voices.

Singing Drill 25 – Shaping – Basic Resonance Modulation

Sing the whole song Mary Had A Little Lamb while randomly changing between voices, and not necessarily in order from throat to mouth to nose and back. Repeat until you can easily change from one voice to another at random.

To this point I really haven’t put much emphasis on the Listening Drills. Even though they are all important, this one deserves mentioning as it is instrumental in the conceptual development of Voice Shaping and your basic resonance modulation ability. In other words, it will help you learn how to easily get the concept of which voice or combination of voices to use when singing, thereby effortlessly singing like a pro. So spend some time on this one.

Listening Drill 12 – Shaping – Basic Resonance Modulation

Make a list of three songs you would like to sing. Save this list as it will be used in the next Singing Drill.

1.       Listen to the first song and note what voices the singer is using for which word, phrase, or line.

2.       Listen to the song again and visualize the voice being used for which word, phrase, or line.

3.       Repeat steps 1 & 2 with the same song until you can easily determine and visualize what voice the singer is using for each word, phrase, or line and how they modulate from one to the other.

4.       Repeat steps 1 – 3 for songs 1 & 2 on your list.

Singing Drill 26 – Shaping – Basic Resonance Modulation

Using the 3 songs from Listening Drill 11, do the following.

1.       Sing along with the first song using the same voice the singer uses for each word, phrase, or line.

2.       Listen to the song without singing and visualize how you can sing each voice the singer uses for each word, phrase, or line and modulate from one voice to the other.

3.       Repeat steps 1 & 2 until you feel you can easily replicate the voicing used by the singer and their modulation. NOTE: The goal is not to sound like the singer, but to simply modulate your version of TV, MV, or NV along with them.

4.       Repeat steps 1 – 3 with the other remaining songs in your list.

Car Drill 7 – Shaping – Basic Resonance Modulation

Listen to various songs on the radio and note what voice the singer is using for each word, phrase, or line and how they modulate from one to the other.

Obviously there is more going on behind the scenes with Voice Shaping and resonance modulation than just the three voices, and we will get to some of those components in a moment as promised. But the three voices and the way they are combined and shifted in and out of, is the general overall basics of resonance modulation.

Before we move on though, I would like you to take a moment and go over briefly in your mind what we went over with parts on pitch and sound. Think about what we went over regarding frequency, and pitch, and notes and most importantly, the ability to conceptualize your own singing.

Now think about the last few runs of the last song you sang in Singing Drill 26. Remember how you sounded? And I don’t just mean resonance. Remember how in tune you were? Did you find that you were conceptualizing the notes?

Now imagine how you would have sung that song before you started this book. I’m sure you can picture it. You should be able to see a pretty big difference between then and now.

Chapter 11 - Advanced Resonance Modulation

Vowels and Voices

Remember before when I said “other components”? Well, let’s go ahead and go into those. Let’s take a look at the remaining ingredients of Voice Shaping.

With all of the words in the English dictionary, and with all of the variations of those words, and with all of the slang words, and with all of the accents in the world of the people that could say those words, and with all of the songs in all the genres and all of the renditions of those songs, it all comes down to 5 vowels and 3 voices.

That’s it. 5 vowels, 3 voices.

Sure there are consonants and consonant blends, but those are simply the different ways you can start or stop resonation. All but one consonant have nothing to do with modulation beyond being the gate for resonance. And that one lone consonant doesn’t have that much flexibility. In fact, it’s just a mutation of the vowel ‘e’.

But every word or possible variation of a word either spoken or sung consists of a variation and combination of 5 vowels and 3 voices.

To put this to the test, say “Mom” without the ‘o’. Or say the word “Top” without the ‘o’. Better yet, let’s use a word we used earlier, “coin”. Say that without any vowel sound. As you can see it is impossible.

The only consonant that could be considered a cousin to a vowel would be “r”. The actual voicing of “r” is really “e” in Nose Voice with the middle of the tongue moved up towards the hard palate or roof of your mouth. See? Even “r” is an imposter and really has no significant power over resonance modulation.

It’s the combining of the three voices, and those combinations combined with vowel shapes, that truly make the overall instrument we call the ‘singing voice’ such an amazing tool for resonance modulation.

As we have learned in grade school the three vowels are A, E, I, O, and U. Some people try to throw Y in there but it doesn’t belong as it is an imposter of the original, E. In grade school we are also taught that each vowel has a long form and a short form.

To review our dear old school days, the long form for A is the sound made in the word ‘hay’. The short form would be as it is in ‘hat’. Long E would be as it is in ‘heat’. Short E would be as it is in ‘jet’. Long I would be as in ‘kite’. Short I would be as it is in ‘it’. O long would be as it is in ‘boat’. Short O would be as it is in ‘lot’. And last but not least long U would be as it is in ‘tube’ and the short would be as it is in ‘tuck’. All that info in one short paragraph. If only grade school class was that simple, we would have had more time to play.

So, essentially we actually have 10 vowel sounds to choose from if we go by the book. And taking a lesson from grade school again, we know that the long form and short form were represented by their letter in either upper or lower case - upper case for long form and lower case for short form. I. e’ A’ for long, and ‘a’ for short.

I’m sure you already know how to make the sound for each and every one. If not you most likely didn’t pass 1st grade. But we need to take a look at them in another light and concentrate on visualizing what is really going on so that we can give conceptual life to each one. In other words, we need to give each vowel sound its own individual identity in our minds so that we can draw on them at will, combine them with other vowels and voices to replicate a certain singing style or accent.

I know this may seem like we are starting back at the beginning and it may seem elementary (pardon the pun), but you will come to see why we are doing it momentarily.  Remember, the long form is represented by the upper case letter and the short form is represented by the lower case letter. And don’t worry about which voice to use. Your Mouth Voice in Speaking Position is the most natural, so go with that.

Singing Drill 27 – Shaping – Advanced Resonance Modulation

Say the following vowels in the exact sequence given for at least 2 seconds. Pause between vowels. Pay particular attention to the position of the jaw and tongue and visualize the position of the jaw and tongue.

1.       E then i

2.       e then A

3.       a then I

4.       u then o

5.       O then U

Repeat until you have a firm mental concept of the jaw and tongue position for each vowel

If you said them in the correct sequence, you might have noticed that there was very little difference between each vowel in regards to jaw and tongue position. In other words, you didn’t have to change much of anything in your mouth to say the next vowel correctly. Some of them were probably even hard to tell the difference between. Let’s string them together and see how you do.

Singing Drill 28 – Shaping – Advanced Resonance Modulation

Say the following string of vowels as one, giving each vowel 1 second before modulation to the next vowel. Pay particular attention to what you are doing with your jaw and tongue during modulation between vowels and visualize the positional changes of your jaw and tongue.

E – i – e – A – a – I – u – o – O – u

Repeat until you have a firm mental concept of the jaw and tongue positional change during modulation.

Now, you may have noticed that I just had you say a drawn out version of the word “Yeow.” Yep. Funny how that one word uses all 10 vowels in modulation. That’s why I colloquially refer to it as “The Yeow Drill”. Seems silly, but think of it this way. Now you know every single vowel modulation that makes up that word.

Now, you can take that word apart. And since you now know how to take that word apart, or reverse engineer it if you will, you can reverse engineer any word. Better yet, you can now reverse engineer any word in any accent, and with proper Voice Shaping, recreate it or reenact it.

Ever wanted to master an English accent? Now you can. Pick any word. You can now understand what is going on inside the mouth, in detail. You can know exactly what combination of vowels make up the way that word is said in that accent just by listening to it and getting the concept of it. Therefore, since you can get the concept, you can say it. Go ahead. Listen to a word in a foreign accent. Then duplicate it. You can do that now. Pretty cool huh?

That’s all well and good, but how does this relate to singing?

That’s where the three voices come in. It’s one thing to have a concept of what each vowel sounds like while saying it with the Mouth Voice in Speaking Position, but since we hardly use the Speaking Position while singing, we need to expand our concept.

Neutral Singing Position

Before, I mentioned the Singing Position. I described it as simply moving the tongue back and down slightly, but not as far back as the Throat Voice. And then drop your jaw just a little more than it is in the Speaking Position.  But as we can now see, any position where you are singing properly is a singing position and that position can be in any of the three voices while you are singing.

But there is a neutral resting Singing Position and it is the one described above. When you are not actually singing but are in the middle of a song, this would be the neutral resting position between phrases or lines. It is a ready position not unlike a boxer.

A boxer has a stance when boxing. When he is not actually throwing punches or defending himself he is in a ready boxing stance. He is at the ready, waiting to attack or defend. It is a neutral position. It is not a relaxed position like standing in line at a ticket counter, nor is it advancing toward the opponent. It is neutral, but ready.

And like the boxer’s neutral boxing stance, the Singing Position described above is actually the Neutral Singing Position. You are not actually singing, but you are ready to.

Again, to obtain this, simply move the tongue back and down slightly, but not as far back as the Throat Voice. And then drop your jaw just a little more than it is in the Speaking Position.  You need to drill this in as a natural ‘stance’. It needs to be as naturally subconscious as the trained boxer’s stance. Therefore you need to practice doing it until it becomes natural, just like the boxer did with his stance. Eventually you won’t have to think about it. Eventually it will be as natural as standing.

So, before any singing drill from here on out, either after this section or any that you redo from before, make sure you start by putting your mouth in the now defined Neutral Singing Position. And then you need to try and remember to do it anytime you sing outside of the drills in this book. Before you start singing in the shower, get into Neutral Singing Position. Before you start singing in the car, get into Neutral Singing Position. Before you start your next karaoke song, get into singing position. We are going to do another drill now, so what do you do? You got it. Positions everyone! We need to lock in how it feels to sing the vowels. And to do that we are going to pack in some drills.

Singing Drill 29 Shaping – Advanced Resonance Modulation

Sing the following vowels in the exact sequence given for at least 2 seconds using your Throat Voice. Pay particular attention to the resonance produced and visualize the jaw, tongue and throat positions.

1.       E then i

2.       e then A

3.       a then I

4.       u then o

5.       O then U

Repeat until you have a firm mental concept of the sound and the jaw, tongue, and throat position for each vowel

Singing Drill 30 Shaping – Advanced Resonance Modulation

Sing the following vowels in the exact sequence given for at least 2 seconds using your Mouth Voice. Pay particular attention to the resonance produced and visualize the jaw and tongue positions.

1.       E then i

2.       e then A

3.       a then I

4.       u then o

5.       O then U

Repeat until you have a firm mental concept of the sound and the jaw and tongue position for each vowel

Singing Drill 31 Shaping – Advanced Resonance Modulation

Sing the following vowels in the exact sequence given for at least 2 seconds using your Nose Voice. Pay particular attention to the resonance produced and visualize the jaw and tongue positions.

1.       E then i

2.       e then A

3.       a then I

4.       u then o

5.       O then U

Repeat until you have a firm mental concept of the sound and the jaw and tongue position for each vowel

Singing Drill 32 Shaping – Advanced Resonance Modulation

Sing the following vowels in the exact sequence given for at least 2 seconds alternating between the three voices, using a different voice for two vowels at a time, in the order indicated. Pay particular attention to the resonance produced and visualize the jaw and tongue positions.

1.       E then i - Throat

2.       e then A - Mouth

3.       a then I - Nose

4.       u then o - Mouth

5.       O then U -Throat

6.       E then i - Mouth

7.       e then A - Nose

8.       a then I - Mouth

9.       u then o - Throat

10.   O then U - Mouth

Repeat until you can easily switch from one voice to another and with each vowel.

Singing Drill 33 – Shaping – Advanced Resonance Modulation

Sing the following string of vowels as one giving each vowel 1 second before modulation to the next vowel. Sing the string three times using a different voice each time starting with the Throat Voice.

E – i – e – A – a – I – u – o – O – u

Repeat until you can easily sing each string in each voice.

Now I’m going to get out of the cockpit of the vowel plane and see how you do flying solo.

Singing Drill 34 Shaping – Advanced Resonance Modulation

Sing the following vowels in any sequence you want for any duration you want with any voice you want using different voices changed at will.

Repeat until you can easily choose and modulate from one vowel and voice combination to another.

You have now sung and drilled 30 different resonances. That’s right. 10 vowels X 3 voices is 30. By now you should have a firm concept of what it feels like to sing each one and how it feels to modulate between them. And because you have that concept, you can recognize the sounds when they are made by others when they sing. In fact you will most likely find yourself emulating the positions with your own mouth when listening and deciphering there voicing.

You are well on your way to mastering resonance now and with these drills you can do just that. You almost have all the tools you need to be a great singer. But just so you know, the big parts have been covered. The rest is frills and color. In fact, before we move on to the final pieces of the puzzle, I would like to touch on something that I might cover in a later work or in my video course, since it is relevant to what we just went over.

Chapter 12 - Accents

I had said before that you could reverse engineer any accent, like an English accent. And as this is true, let’s take a look at how profound of an impact it can have on singing.

I used Forest Gump as an example of the Throat Voice, and said that using strictly the Throat Voice with distinction given to each word, with a southern accent is how Tom Hanks did the voice of Gump. However, if you took any slow song you sing, used the Throat Voice, and spoke the song in the same tempo and rhythm as if you were singing it, it would come out sounding a lot like Forest. You wouldn’t necessarily need to do a southern accent. That was simply fine tuning on Tom’s part. But it brings us to a point. The fine tuning is where accents fit in with singing.

It is actually fine tuning of resonance. There are still only 3 voices and 10 vowels, but accents are achieved by the slight variations of modulations and subtle additions of vowels and combinations thereof. Our native accents are taught to us simply by those around us. We learn as we grow up how to speak. And we get our examples from our parents, family, friends, and neighbors.

So, if you were raised in the south, you are going to grow up with a southern accent. If you grow up in the upper Midwest, you are going to sound like Marv from Fargo. If you grow up in the Northeast you are going to sound like Rocky Balboa or Janice from the show Friends. If you are from New England, most likely you are going to sound like any of several characters in a Stephen King movie.

The point is we take on the accent of our peers as we grow up because that is the only example that we have. Then, if we move somewhere, we adapt and adjust our accent to fit those around us in the new environment. It is a subtle way to connect to those we are now surround by in the new location.

For example, if you move to England eventually, to a greater or lesser degree, you will lose your home accent and take on the British accent. It may be subtle or profound. It varies with different people. But if you ever call home, there is a chance that you will slip right back into the old accent, if only for the phone call to Mom.

I myself am a prime example. I have lived in many states and have traveled to many countries, but originally I’m from Texas. And although, I’m told I still have a slight Texas accent (variation of southern), I don’t really notice, and it is slight. However, when I am on the phone or travel to Texas, the change is so profound that even I notice it. And sometimes it’s intentional. Sometimes accents can bridge cultural gaps and instill a degree of comfort and familiarity in someone you are talking to that might otherwise be standoffish or aloof. And the more complete and regionally accurate the accent, the more it is considered “real” and therefore safe.

Notice before when talking about the Texas accent, I said “variation of southern.” I also brought up the point of regional accuracy. That is because, accents, like countries, are divided into large areas like Northern, Southern, Eastern, and Western. Then they are further divided into smaller regions like Georgian, and Deep South, Midwest, New England, Texan, etc. Then they are even further divided into small areas, like East Texas vs. Central Texas and West Texas, or Vermont vs. Main, and then even further like the Bronx or Brooklyn or Long Island, which are all slightly different.

When you get down to that level of granulation, the differences are so subtle, that to anyone outside the immediate area, there would seem to be no difference. But believe me. To a Bostonian, the difference between someone from the North End and a Southie is profound. This is most likely due to the cultural history of the different areas. The North End is generally Italian and the South End is generally Irish.

Then of course accents can also be defined by heritage i.e. African American, Hispanic, Oriental, European, Middle Eastern, and North American Caucasian. I know there seems to be a morphing with the above regional examples and that is true. The defining factor here is how those global cultures were absorbed into North American culture and then how each “race” developed and defined their own accents from there.

And as well, each culture has their own culturally defined music i.e. Country, R&B, Blues, Rock, Jazz, Opera, Irish, Mariachi, etc. Each of those genres has their own accent that provides the subtle resonances created by vowel pronunciation that define the details of each individual cultural ‘sound’.

To truly master a genre of music, one needs to master the nuances of the accent of the culture that created the music. You want to sing country music with that authentic twang? Master the southern accent. You want to be able to sing old school blues, master the accent of a southern black man, preferably from New Orleans, LA.

The point is, you have the skills now to modulation resonances with various voices and vowels, and using those properly developed Voice Shaping skills, you can recognize resonances in words and phrases easily. Therefore, you have the ability to reverse engineer any accent by taking apart each word and phrase to get a better understanding of common vowel combinations in that particular accent. You will begin to notice a pattern in those accents. Then all you have to do is practice replicating those words, phrases, and patterns.

This would allow you to put the final touches on Resonance Modulation and Voice Shaping.

I know there seems to be a lot of detail I am leaving out and a much more in depth look into the subject of accents and their correlation to singing. And that is for good reason. The amount of data and information and ideas I have on the subject could, and probably will, be a large part of another book on advanced singing techniques. But for now, the broad strokes and the Resonance Modulation techniques already covered are enough to get you started. And now we need to move on to the final part of this book.

Part 6 Vibrato and Volume

Chapter 13 - Vibrato

Pitch Vibrato

There are two ways to produce vibrato while singing. The first, and most common of the two is actually warbling, by simple definition.

Warble – to produce a continuous sound varying regularly in pitch and frequency.

That is one definition anyway and the definition we are using. However, this definition is also very general, dry, and frankly boring, not to mention in need of at least a wee bit of explanation. As this entire method of learning to sing is based on conceptualization, we need to give examples that you can use visually and then mentally to establish the ability of getting the concept of singing with vibrato.

Interestingly enough we need to take a piece from the top of the book regarding wavelengths to help with this. Take another look at the image of a wave.

The similarities between sound waves and warbling end with the image. With sound, the wave represents the frequency and amplitude of air as it proceeds through time and space. If that locks up you noodle, review the section on sound in Part 2. With warbling vibrato, it represents pitch.

What we need to do to make this a warbling vibrato image, is label the parts differently. From left to right we still have time. So that stays the same. But the line now represents the pitch of the note you are singing. The wave would be the rise and fall of pitch of your voice. The rise being slightly sharp of the note, and the fall would be slightly flat of the note.

As you can see in the image then, not much time is actually spent singing the pitch of the note itself. In fact, your voice only crosses the pitch of the note while rising and falling. So, how is that the note that is being sung?

The secret is speed, average, and sonic illusion. And as a matter of fact it is representative of sound itself. We know that sound comes in waves of air into our ear. But it comes into our ear so fast that we don’t actually perceive the waves themselves. It is simply a constant sound to our ear and mind.

Sort of the same thing is happening with warbling, which is known as Pitch Vibrato. The pitch is varying at such a rapid rate that the ear can only focus on the average pitch, which would be the note you are singing. That is the “illusion”. The trick to Pitch Vibrato is not to vary too much and not to do it too slowly. In other words, don’t stray too far sharp or too far flat from the pitch of the intended note, and don’t spend too much time on one sharp pitch sliding down to the flat pitch.

And essentially that is what you are doing. You are sliding up and down in pitch really fast ‘around’ the pitch. I colloquially call it ‘fudge vibrato’ because it is a way to fudge your way around the pitch if you are having trouble with being in tune. Sometimes you don’t know the song very well, or your pitch drills are out and you need more practice. Whatever the reason, fudge vibrato lets you comfortably sing the song and sound good without actually singing on pitch.

Pitch Vibrato is the vibrato of choice for most opera and Broadway singers. That doesn’t mean that they are fudging. As a matter of fact most opera singers and Broadway singers are quite talented and have no problem with pitch. This is proven out by the way they choose when to use vibrato and when not too. And when they aren’t, they are usually right on pitch.

And as you can see I brought up another point regarding when. Choosing whether or not to use vibrato is a personal choice, entirely up to the singer, when they are choosing what type of emotion and mood they wish to communicate with the song. It is something that is practiced and it is completely subjective, which I will take up in the next chapter.

So for now let’s simply work on developing Pitch Vibrato and moving in and out of it.

Singing Drill 35 – Vibrato and Volume – Pitch Vibrato

Using the wave image, reading left to right, sing and slide slightly up and down in pitch along with the direction of the wave line. Use your Natural Note as your starting pitch. Read left to right, varying pitch slowly at first, speeding up slightly with each run through. Repeat until you are singing a quick steady vibrato and are varying in pitch to fast to follow on the wave image.

Singing Drill 36 – Vibrato and Volume – Pitch Vibrato

Visualize the wave image while singing and slide slightly up and down in pitch along with the visualization of the wave line. Use your Natural Note as your starting pitch. Vary pitch slowly at first, speeding up slightly with each run through. Repeat until you are singing a quick steady vibrato and are varying quickly in pitch.

Now that we have Pitch Vibrato down by itself, let’s incorporate moving into vibrato from a steady note like the pros do. In order to that we need to look at a slightly modified image of the wave.

As you can see the line starts as a steady note and then moves into Pitch Vibrato. Using this image do the following drill.

Singing Drill 37 – Vibrato and Volume – Pitch Vibrato

Using the line and wave image, follow the line on the image from left to right. Start by singing your Natural Note steadily for 2 seconds with the steady line on the image and then switch to Pitch Vibrato with the wave line without a break in singing. Hold the Pitch Vibrato note for 4 seconds. Repeat until you can smoothly and comfortably transition from steady note to Pitch Vibrato.

Singing Drill 38 – Vibrato and Volume – Pitch Vibrato

Visualizing the line and wave image from left to right, sing your Natural Note steadily for 2 seconds with the steady line on the image and then switch to Pitch Vibrato with the wave line without a break in singing. Hold the Pitch Vibrato note for 4 seconds. Repeat until you can smoothly and comfortably transition from steady note to Pitch Vibrato.

Amplitude Vibrato

If you recall, I said there were two types of vibrato. We have covered the first, Pitch Vibrato. The second has to do with volume. Again we have to refer back to our lesson on sound, but not for pitch this time.

This time we are going to deal in volumes. And you may recall, when we are talking about sound and volume we are talking about amplitude. It is the amount of pressure each wave of air has when it hits the ear. The more pressure, the louder the sound and vice versa.  That pressure is the amplitude. It is exactly where the word ‘amplifier’ comes from. And as you probably know, an amplifier electronically increases the sound of an instrument or voice via microphones or electronic pickups, as in the case of a string instrument like a guitar. The amplifier amplifies the amplitude of the instrument.

But, since you can control the amplification with volume controls, you can decrease the amount of sound as well. All you have to do is turn down the knob like you would on the radio in your car. Conversely, to increase the volume you would turn it up.

Essentially that is what we do to create the other type of vibrato know as Amplitude Vibrato.

Amplitude Vibrato is quickly increasing and decreasing the volume of the note you are singing. You do this with your diaphragm which is the set of muscle tissue right below your lungs. When you expand your diaphragm you draw in air. When you contract your diaphragm you expel air, as in when you sing.

When you are singing, your diaphragm is slowly and steadily contracting, expelling air up though you’re your vocal cords. The more you contract, the louder the volume. The less you contract the less the volume.

Amplitude Vibrato is created by starting at a certain volume, then decreasing slightly and then resuming the original volume over and over in a constant patter, using varied intensity in diaphragm contractions but very quickly. Let’s take a look at an image of what this would look like.

If you follow this from left to right, and see the shapes as they decrease and resume in volume, you can see the pattern of Amplitude Vibrato starting and ending at a set volume. Now let’s sing!

Singing Drill 39 – Vibrato and Volume – Amplitude Vibrato

While looking at the amplitude image above and singing your Natural Note, hold the pitch steady and SLIGHTLY decrease and then resume the amplitude of the note. Follow the pattern of shapes on the image from left to right decreasing and increasing amplitude as the shapes contract and expand. Repeat this several times. Start the pattern of decreasing and resuming slowly, and increase the speed with each pass through. Repeat until you can easily and quickly decrease and resume amplitude thereby creating Amplitude Vibrato.

Singing Drill 40 – Vibrato and Volume – Amplitude Vibrato

Visualize the amplitude image above and singing your Natural Note. Hold the pitch steady and SLIGHTLY decrease and then resume the amplitude of the note. Visualize the pattern of shapes on the image while decreasing and increasing amplitude. Repeat this several times. Start the pattern of decreasing and resuming slowly, and increase the speed with each pass through. Repeat until you can easily and quickly decrease and resume amplitude thereby creating Amplitude Vibrato.

As we did with Pitch Vibrato, we need to practice going from a steady note into Amplitude Vibrato. In order to that, let’s use the following image.

Singing Drill 41 – Vibrato and Volume – Amplitude Vibrato

While looking at the amplitude image above and using your Natural Note, start singing a steady note at a set volume for 2 seconds, then, using the pattern in the image, go into Amplitude Vibrato by decreasing and resuming amplitude for 4 seconds with no break in singing between your steady note and the switch to vibrato. Repeat until you can smoothly and comfortably go from singing a steady note into Amplitude Vibrato.

Singing Drill 42 – Vibrato and Volume – Amplitude Vibrato

Visualize the amplitude image above and using your Natural Note, start singing a steady note at a set volume for 2 seconds, then, using the pattern in the image, go into Amplitude Vibrato by decreasing and resuming amplitude for 4 seconds with no break in singing between your steady note and the switch to vibrato. Repeat until you can smoothly and comfortably go from singing a steady note into Amplitude Vibrato.

As a suggestion in choosing which vibrato to use, use both. This is an advanced skill that oddly enough comes about naturally from continued use of Amplitude Vibrato. Amplitude Vibrato as you may have noticed has an inherent physical pitch shift. In fact, you may have noticed how difficult it is to hold a steady pitch while modulating between amplitudes. Well, when you get used to doing it and quickly, one tends to drop in pitch when dropping in amplitude. So the combination occurs rather naturally.

So don’t sweat the drop in pitch in Amplitude Vibrato. You might notice it actually sounds rather nice.

Chapter 14 - Volume

In talking about Amplitude Vibrato, we covered the basics of volume and amplitude again, so there is no need to go into detail. Sound is either louder or softer or stays the same right? That’s volume. And any change in the amplitude of sound is quite literally the change in volume. This ground has been covered well. We know WHAT it is.

What hasn’t been covered is when.

Beyond vibrato, the use of volume to convey emotion and mood in music is called dynamics.  If you are reading a piece of sheet music playing an instrument or singing, there are symbols and words that instruct the musician or singer when and how much to increase or decrease volume. They are placed there by the composer to convey the original intended emotion and mood of the piece. These are called dynamics.

And like the composer, you should use dynamics to convey emotion and mood with the songs that you sing. Just like the use of vibrato, where and when to use dynamics-increases or decreases in volume-is really up to you ultimately. You are the one singing. You are the one delivering the message. You are the one who has the emotion and mood to convey. You are the one with the tools Vibrato and Volume at your disposal to help convey that emotion and mood when you want to. So do you know WHEN to use them?

Unfortunately, or actually fortunately, there is no definitive answer to this question. There is no strict rule. To the degree that freedom of speech exists, so does the freedom to sing what, where, when and how you choose.

Before, I drew correlations between speaking and singing in regards to accents. The same applies here as well. How you would want to say something is almost as important, if not more important, than what you are saying. How you say something conveys emotion and mood.

Think of the different emotional ways you could say “I’m really glad to see you.” If spoken with enthusiasm it obviously conveys the emotion of enthusiasm, joy, and happiness to see the person. If it is spoken with dripping sarcasm, the message is quite different. If spoken while sobbing, it conveys relief.

You can do the same with combinations of emotion and volume. If you say it softly and lovingly to your spouse or significant other, it usually communicates sensuality and love. If it is spoken loudly and excitedly it communicates uplifted joy and excitement.

Then there are ways to combine different lines or phrases of different volumes and emotions to convey a complete message, emotion and mood.

If you combine “I’m going to beat this thing” spoken in quiet determination with “if it’s the last thing I do” spoken in increasingly loud boldness and anger, it would convey the message that one is filled with determination to keep going and increasing one’s efforts until the game is won or else!

Well the same concept applies to dynamics and the use of volume to convey emotion and mood while singing. As you most assuredly don’t speak in one steady and constant volume at all times, you shouldn’t sing that way either.

So if there isn’t a specific rule and it’s really up to you on how, when, and where to use dynamics, how am I supposed to be able to show you how do it? I had to think about this one. And when I did, I found that not only did I have an answer on how to learn the ability to use dynamics proficiently, I found that it speaks to the very core of singing. And the way to do it is really simple.

Decide what you want to communicate.

If what you are singing is supposed to be anger, then sing it with the dynamics-increases and decreases in volume that you would normally use in speaking that word, phrase or line, if you were speaking it in anger. If it is love, then love. If it is happiness, etc. The only difference is the pitch of your voice. Instead of the seemingly un-patterned pitch changes of speaking, you are going to be singing structured musical notes.

But, the important thing to remember is, you are not simply singing a song. You are communicating a message. It is your message. Even if you are singing a song someone else wrote or sang, it is you singing it now and it is your message now.

So, decide what you want to communicate and communicate that.

As this is such a subjective area, there really isn’t a formal singing drill that I could give you. However, an informal exercise suggestion would be to sing Mary Had A Little Lamb in different emotions like Anger, Boredom, Excitement, Sadness, etc. Then sing the same song changing the emotion from line to line, then word to word, then combinations of lines and words. You can use that song or any simple song that is short and that you don’t have to think about when you are singing it.

I could have written that out as formal drills, but at this point, you have enough skill under your belt to roll with it and improvise on your own. As a listening exercise, you should listen to various songs and pay attention to how the singer uses different dynamics to convey emotion and mood, and what emotion and mood they are conveying. This could also be car drill.

The same listening exercise applies to determining when and how much vibrato to use. Listen to various songs and pay attention to how the singer uses vibrato to convey the emotion and mood of the song. As a matter of fact, you will probably notice the use of a combination of both vibrato and volume to fully convey the emotion and mood of a word, phrase, or line.

For example, look for the common pattern of starting out in a soft or moderate volume sung at a constant non-vibrato note with a steady increase of volume and incorporation of vibrato with the increase. It is a common one.

Conclusion

There are several tricks and pattern and tools like the vibrato and volume pattern explained above throughout the world of singing. These more advanced techniques are something I will cover in future works, in either books or video courses. As well, I will get into professional performance techniques as mentioned at the beginning of this book. Not to mention harmonies. I will dig into those in depth. They will all be an advanced extension to the Conceptual Singing Method™.

In the meantime you have all the tools in hand and under your belt now to be the best singer you want to be. All of what you need to sound as good as any pro is right there in your hands. Go over the drills as many times as you need for whatever area you wish to improve. You will find that you will never stop getting more out of them. They truly are the gift that keeps on giving.

If someone ever tries to stand in your way and tell you that you can’t sing or can’t get any better, including yourself, you know what that is and you know how to handle it.

If you are having trouble in particular in any area and just can’t seem to get it, make sure to remember that ultimately your ability to sing is only as limited by your concept of singing. The better the concept the better the ability to sing. And that applies to any area. So go back and make sure the previous drills are completely in your grasp. Make sure you understand the foundational parts of sound, notes, and pitch.

By this time you probably don’t even need The Ladder, but if you want to hone your pitch skills, refer back to as needed and do the drills as many times as you can until you reach the level near perfection that you want to achieve. But keep in mind; no one is 100% perfect 100% of the time.

Also keep in mind the concept of your voice as an instrument. Work towards mastering the mechanics of Resonance, Resonance Modulation, the Three Voices, and Accents.

And about those voices, now that we are at the end, I’m going to let you in on a little secret.

There is only one voice. Yours.

Combine everything you have learned from every part of the book, from every chapter, and from every drill, put them all together in big beautiful concept in your mind and sing. Hear that? That song is your song. That sound is your sound. That music is coming from one person. From one voice. Yours.

Congratulations! You are a singer!

But before we end off, just one more drill.

Concluding Singing Drill

Using the same song you recorded yourself singing in the Introductory Singing Drill at the beginning of the book, record yourself singing that song with same accompaniment you used before, either along with the original or a cappella. Afterwards, play the first version from before and then play the new recording. Note the difference in skill.

If I have done my job right in providing you with what you need to learn to sing and improve, and you have done your job right of following the studies and drills properly, there should be a very noticeable difference between the two recordings.

And if you don’t mind, I would love for you to send both your Before and After recordings to me. I cannot tell you how much my heart swells to hear your successes. For that matter, feel free to write me and let me know of any other singing triumphs you experience as a result of this book and your hard work.

When you do send them to me, let me know if you mind me showing others your successes or not. If you want to keep it between you and me, that’s totally fine. Some people don’t mind and some do. I understand.  But I would love to spread the word of your wins!

Send the recordings and successes to me personally at michael@singingfromscratch.com.

I can’t wait to hear you!!!

Michael Graves

Make sure to visit the website www.singingfromscratch.com for instructional videos and audio files as well as additional information and news.

Also, check out the Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/pages/Singing-From-Scratch/762968853799764?ref=hl and like when you get the chance.

If you purchased this book on Amazon.com, please leave a review and let me know what you thought of the book. I’d truly love to hear what you have to say.

You can always contact me at michael@singingfromscratch.com

Drill List

Listening drills

Listening Drill 1 – Conceptual Placement - Sound

Snap your fingers or clap your hands and visualize the pressure waves created by the displacement of air caused by your fingers or hands moving through the space between you hand and ear, finally reaching your eardrum. Repeat until you can completely and easily visualize the sound waves.

Listening Drill 2 – Conceptual Placement - Sound

Listen to the various sounds around you and visualize the source creating the displacement of air and the pressure waves moving through space to your eardrum. Repeat with four or five individual sources, or until you confident in your ability to easily visualize sound from other sources.

Listening Drill 3 – Conceptual Placement - Sound

Listen to various sounds around you and find high pitched and low pitched sounds. Visualize the difference in frequency from its source as to high wave density or low wave density. Repeat until you can confidently and easily visualize wave density based on pitch.

Listening Drill 4 – Conceptual Placement - Sound

Position two music players on either side of you and simultaneously play two different songs, one on each player. Repeat the process using songs from different genres on each player, i.e. rock on one side and country on the other. Repeat the process if possible using to different cultures, i.e. American Rock and Chinese Traditional. Pay particular attention to notes that are playing at the same time and their pitch.

Listening Drill 5 – Conceptual Placement - Ladder

Listen to a song you are very familiar with and visualize generally where the notes that are sung would fall on the ladder. Concentrate on the chorus, then the verses, then the entire song as a whole. Repeat until confident that you can easily visualize the placement of all the notes you hear in the song. Repeat with other songs as desired.

Listening Drill 6 – Conceptual Placement – Frequency as Notes

Listen to a song you are very familiar with and visualize generally where the notes that are sung would fall on the ladder. Repeat until you can easily visualize the frequencies. Repeat with other songs as desired.

Listening Drill 7 – Pitch - Notes

On the piano, play the scale C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C as shown on the above image. Listen to the notes and look at the prior ladder image showing CDEFGABC. Start at the bottom and play to the top. Reverse the direction and play from the top to the bottom. Follow the letter on each rung as you play them on the piano. Repeat until you can easily follow and play the notes while looking at the image.

Listening Drill 8 – Pitch - Notes

On the piano, play the C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C scale. Listen to the notes and visualize the notes CDEFGABC ladder image without looking at the image. Start at the bottom and play to the top. Reverse the direction and play from the top to the bottom. Repeat until you can easily visualize the notes while playing them.

Listening Drill 9 – Resonation – Throat Voice

Listen to various songs and note the times when the singer is using his or her Throat Voice for approximately half of the song, then note when they are NOT using their Throat Voice. Repeat until you can easily tell the difference

Listening Drill 10 – Resonation – Mouth Voice

Listen to various songs and note the times when the singer is using his or her Mouth Voice for approximately half of the song, then note when they are NOT using their Mouth Voice. Repeat until you can easily tell the difference

Listening Drill 11 – Resonation – Nose Voice

Listen to various songs and note the times when the singer is using his or her Nose Voice for approximately half of the song, then note when they are NOT using their Nose Voice. Repeat until you can easily tell the difference.

Listening Drill 12 – Shaping – Basic Resonance Modulation

Make a list of three songs you would like to sing. Save this list as it will be used in the next Singing Drill.

1.       Listen to the first song and note what voices the singer is using which word, phrase, or line.

2.       Listen to the song again and visualize the voice being used for which word, phrase, or line.

3.       Repeat steps 1 & 2 with the same song until you can easily determine and visualize what voice the singer is using for each word, phrase, or line and how they modulate from one to the other.

4.       Repeat steps 1 – 3 for songs 1 & 2 in your list.

Singing Drills

Introductory Singing Drill – Scratch Vocal

Choose a song and record yourself singing that song either along with the original or a cappella (without accompaniment)

Singing Drill 1 – Conceptual Placement - Ladder

Sing the song while reading the words on the graph, then sing the song while visually focusing on the number for the word/note you are singing. Repeat both in order until confident you can easily sing the song while focusing on the numbers.

Singing Drill 2 - Conceptual Placement - Ladder

Recalling the previous drill and while looking at the above ladder image, sing Row, Row, Row Your Boat. Focus on the number for each word/note as you sing it like before. Refer to Singing Drill 1 as needed. Repeat until confident you can easily sing the song while focusing on the numbers smoothly and without referring to the previous drill.

Singing Drill 3 – Conceptual Placement - Ladder

Recalling the previous drill and while looking at the rung only ladder image, sing Row, Row, Row Your Boat. Focus on the rung for each word/note as you sing it, like before. Refer to Singing Drill 2 as needed. Repeat until confident you can easily sing the song while focusing on the numbers on their rungs smoothly and without referring to the previous drill.

Singing Drill 4 – Conceptual Placement - Ladder

Without looking at the image, visualize your own mental ladder and sing the song, focusing on each corresponding number and rung. Repeat this until confident that you can easily sing the song smoothly with your own visualization.

Singing Drill 5 – Conceptual Placement - Frequency

Sing the song Row Row Row Your Boat while visually focusing on the frequency for each note you are singing on the Frequency Ladder image. Repeat until confident you can easily sing the song while focusing on the frequency.

Singing Drill 6 – Conceptual Placement - Frequency

Repeat Singing Drill 5 while noticing that the higher the note you sing, the tighter the frequency, and notice that the higher frequency you sing, the tighter your vocal chords get. Repeat until confident that you understand the correlation between tightness in frequency and tightness of vocal chords.

Singing Drill 7 – Conceptual Placement – Frequency as Notes

Without looking at the image, visualize your own mental frequency ladder and sing the song, focusing on each corresponding note and frequency rung. Repeat this until confident that you can easily sing the song smoothly with your own visualization of the frequencies.

Singing Drill 8 – Pitch - Notes

On the piano, play the C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C scale. Sing the numbers 1-8 with the notes as they are played. 1 for C, 2 for D, and so on. Start at the bottom and go up. Reverse order and go down. Repeat until you can comfortably play the notes and generally sing them at the same time.

Singing Drill 9 – Pitch - Notes

Repeat Singing Drill 8 while visualizing the 1-8 ladder. Repeat until confident that you can visualize each number on the ladder as it is being sung.

Singing Drill 10 – Pitch

Play and hold a random note on the piano generally in the middle of the keyboard. Sing a note decidedly higher in pitch than the note played and slide down until you hear your voice matching the piano voice in pitch/note. Then play and hold the same note on the keyboard. Sing a note decidedly lower in pitch than the note played and slide up until you hear your voice matching the piano voice in pitch/note. Repeat with the same note until comfortable that you can slide into pitch with the piano note.

Singing Drill 11 – Pitch

Repeat Singing Drill 10 using the next note up on the piano from the one used in Singing Drill 10. Do this with each note for 4 notes up from the starting note. Then do Drill 10 with the 4 notes below the starting note. With each note complete at least one up and one down slide. Repeat any notes you do not feel confident sliding into until you do. Then move on to the next note until all notes both up and down from starting note have been drilled to confidence.

Singing Drill 12 – Pitch

Repeat Singing Drill 10 using various notes at random on the piano. With each note complete at least one up and one down slide. Repeat any notes you do not feel confident sliding into until you do. Repeat the entire process with various notes until confident in your ability to slide into notes.

Singing Drill 13 – Pitch

Play various notes at random on the piano. Try to start singing as close to the same pitch as the piano. Hold the primary note you chose for a second then slide up or down respectively into the piano voice pitch played. Repeat until confident that you can start singing close (within a few notes or so) to the same pitch as the piano voice pitch.

Singing Drill 14 – Pitch - Natural Note

DO NOT PLAY THE PIANO BEFORE SINGING. (a) Without concentrating on pitch, simply sing and hold a note. While holding the note, play the C4 or middle C on the piano. If the piano note is lower in pitch, move up the keys one by one, including the black keys until you play the same note you are singing. If you land on a black key as the same note you are singing, go the next white key down from there and write down the key designation of that white key, i.e. B3, A3, etc. (b) Wait a few minutes to clear the found note out of your head and repeat step a. (c) Repeat 3 or 4 times to determine the average note sung, i.e. B3 sung two out of 3 times = B3. The average note sung is your natural note.

Singing Drill 15 – Pitch - The Pitch Drill -Recorded

Part 1

Start the voice recorder in order to record both the piano and your voice. Play your natural note on the piano. (a) While holding the note on the piano, sing and hold the note for at least 2 seconds. (b) Play the next note up in the major scale and repeat step a. Repeat steps a and b with every note of the major scale in succession for two octaves up or until the top of you range. (c) Once again play your natural note on the piano. (d) While holding the note on the piano, sing and hold the note for at least 2 seconds. (e) Play the next note down in the major scale and repeat step d. Repeat steps d and e with every note of the major scale in succession for two octaves down or until the bottom of you range. Stop the recorder.

Part 2

Play back the recording and listen to yourself singing the notes. Observe where you were out of tune with the piano. Count how many notes you were out of tune with. Play back the recording again. On the notes where you were out of tune with, decide whether you were sharp (above pitch) or flat (below pitch) for that note. Repeat Part 1 and 2 until improvement is noticed by the reduction of the amount of notes you are out of tune with.

Singing Drill 16 – Pitch - The Pitch Drill 2 - Recorded

Repeat the steps of Singing Drill 16 changing only the time of the note held. Hold it for 1 second instead of 2. All other steps of both parts are executed the same in the same sequence.

Singing Drill 17 - Resonation – Throat Voice

Choose a random note decidedly lower than your natural note. Stand, sing and hold the note while singing the word “La.” Visualize a large rich sound coming from your chest and sing the note in your best deep operatic voice. Repeat until you feel you have sung your most operatic-like note.

Singing Drill 18 - Resonation – Throat Voice

Choose a random note decidedly lower than your natural note.

6.       Tilt the chin slightly up

7.       Open the mouth wide

8.       Drop the tongue down and back out of the way

9.       Sing and hold a note with the word “Oh.”

10.   Repeat until you feel you have created the largest and richest note possible and visualize the position of jaw and tongue.

Singing Drill 19 - Resonation – Mouth Voice - Speaking in Speaking Position

4.       Start with your mouth in natural Speaking Position

5.       SPEAK the words to Mary Had A Little Lamb

6.       Repeat a few times and note the resonance produced and visualize the position of jaw and tongue.

Singing Drill 20 - Resonation – Mouth Voice - Speaking in Singing Position

5.       Drop your jaw slightly

6.       Move your tongue SLIGHTLY back and down

7.       SPEAK the words to Mary Had A Little Lamb

8.       Repeat a few times and note the resonance produced and visualize the position of jaw and tongue.

Singing Drill 21 - Resonation – Mouth Voice - Singing in Speaking Position

4.       Start with your mouth back in natural Speaking Position

5.       Sing the song Mary Had A Little Lamb

6.       Repeat a few times and note the resonance produced and visualize the position of jaw and tongue.

Singing Drill 22 - Resonation – Mouth Voice - Singing in Singing Position

5.       Drop your jaw slightly

6.       Move your tongue SLIGHTLY back and down

7.       Sing the song Mary Had A Little Lamb

8.       Repeat a few times and note the resonance produced and visualize the position of jaw and tongue.

Singing Drill 23 – Resonation – Nose Voice

5.       Drop the jaw slightly from closed i.e. position when saying “Eeee”

6.       Move the tongue up in the front and back towards both hard and soft palate

7.       Hold the jaw and tongue in this general position and sing Mary Had A Little Lamb

8.       Repeat a few times and note the resonance and visualize the position of jaw and tongue.

Singing Drill 24 – Shaping – Basic Resonance Modulation

Sing the following part of Mary Had A Little Lamb using the voice indicated to sing the words indicated, whereas TV=Throat Voice, MV=Mouth Voice, NV=Nose Voice. i.e. ‘Mary – TV’ means to sing the word ‘Mary’ with the Throat Voice

Mary – TV

had a – MV

little lamb – NV

little lamb – MV

little lamb – TV

Repeat until you can easily modulate between voices.

Singing Drill 25 – Shaping – Basic Resonance Modulation

Sing the whole song Mary Had A Little Lamb while randomly changing between voices, and not necessarily in order, from throat to mouth to nose and back. Repeat until you can easily change from one voice to another at random.

Singing Drill 26 – Shaping – Basic Resonance Modulation

Using the 3 songs from Listening Drill 11, do the following.

5.       Sing along with the first song using the same voice the singer uses for each word, phrase, or line.

6.       Listen to the song without singing and visualize how you can sing each voice the singer uses for each word, phrase, or line and modulate from one voice to the other.

7.       Repeat steps 1 & 2 until you feel you can easily replicate the voicing used by the singer and their modulation. NOTE: The goal is not to sound like the singer, but to simply modulate your version of TV, MV, or NV along with them.

Repeat steps 1 – 3 with the other remaining songs in your list

Singing Drill 27 – Shaping – Advanced Resonance Modulation

Say the following vowels in the exact sequence given for at least 2 seconds. Pause between vowels. Pay particular attention to the position of the jaw and tongue and visualize the position of the jaw and tongue.

6.       E then i

7.       e then A

8.       a then I

9.       u then o

10.   O then U

Repeat until you have a firm mental concept of the jaw and tongue position for each vowel

Singing Drill 28 – Shaping – Advanced Resonance Modulation

Say the following string of vowels as one giving each vowel 1 second before modulation to the next vowel. Pay particular attention to what you are doing with your jaw and tongue during modulation between vowels and visualize the positional changes of your jaw and tongue.

E – i – e – A – a – I – u – o – O – u

Repeat until you firm mental concept of the jaw and tongue positional change during modulation

Singing Drill 29 Shaping – Advanced Resonance Modulation

Sing the following vowels in the exact sequence given for at least 2 seconds using your Throat Voice. Pay particular attention to the resonance produced and visualize the jaw, tongue and throat positions.

6.       E then i

7.       e then A

8.       a then I

9.       u then o

10.   O then U

Repeat until you have a firm mental concept of the sound and the jaw, tongue, and throat position for each vowel

Singing Drill 30 Shaping – Advanced Resonance Modulation

Sing the following vowels in the exact sequence given for at least 2 seconds using your Mouth Voice. Pay particular attention to the resonance produced and visualize the jaw and tongue positions.

6.       E then i

7.       e then A

8.       a then I

9.       u then o

10.   O then U

Repeat until you have a firm mental concept of the sound and the jaw and tongue position for each vowel

Singing Drill 31 Shaping – Advanced Resonance Modulation

Sing the following vowels in the exact sequence given for at least 2 seconds using your Nose Voice. Pay particular attention to the resonance produced and visualize the jaw and tongue positions.

6.       E then i

7.       e then A

8.       a then I

9.       u then o

10.   O then U

Repeat until you have a firm mental concept of the sound and the jaw and tongue position for each vowel

Singing Drill 32 Shaping – Advanced Resonance Modulation

Sing the following vowels in the exact sequence given for at least 2 seconds alternating between the three voices, using a different voice for two vowels at a time, in order as indicated. Pay particular attention to the resonance produced and visualize the jaw and tongue positions.

11.   E then i - Throat

12.   e then A - Mouth

13.   a then I - Nose

14.   u then o - Mouth

15.   O then U -Throat

16.   E then i - Mouth

17.   e then A - Nose

18.   a then I - Mouth

19.   u then o - Throat

20.   O then U - Mouth

Repeat until you can easily switch from one voice to another and with each vowel

Singing Drill 33 – Shaping – Advanced Resonance Modulation

Sing the following string of vowels as one giving each vowel 1 second before modulation to the next vowel. Sing the string three times using a different voice each time starting with the Throat Voice.

E – i – e – A – a – I – u – o – O – u

Repeat until you can easily sing each string in each voice.

Singing Drill 34 Shaping – Advanced Resonance Modulation

Sing the following vowels in any sequence you want for any duration you want with any voice you want using different voices changed at will.

Singing Drill 35 – Vibrato and Volume – Pitch Vibrato

Using the wave image, reading left to right, sing and slide slightly up and down in pitch along with the direction of the wave line. Use your Natural Note as your starting pitch. Read left to right, varying pitch slowly at first, speeding up slightly with each run through. Repeat until you are singing a quick steady vibrato and are varying in pitch to fast to follow on the wave image

Singing Drill 36 – Vibrato and Volume – Pitch Vibrato

Visualize the wave image while singing and slide slightly up and down in pitch along with the visualization of the wave line. Use your Natural Note as your starting pitch. Vary pitch slowly at first, speeding up slightly with each run through. Repeat until you are singing a quick steady vibrato and are varying quickly in pitch

Singing Drill 37 – Vibrato and Volume – Pitch Vibrato

Using the line and wave image, follow the line on the image from left to right. Start by singing your Natural Note steadily for 2 seconds with the steady line on the image and then switch to Pitch Vibrato with the wave line without a break in singing. Hold the Pitch Vibrato note for 4 seconds. Repeat until you can smoothly and comfortably transition from steady note to Pitch Vibrato.

Singing Drill 38 – Vibrato and Volume – Pitch Vibrato

Visualizing the line and wave image from left to right, sing your Natural Note steadily for 2 seconds with the steady line on the image and then switch to Pitch Vibrato with the wave line without a break in singing. Hold the Pitch Vibrato note for 4 seconds. Repeat until you can smoothly and comfortably transition from steady note to Pitch Vibrato.

Singing Drill 39 – Vibrato and Volume – Amplitude Vibrato

While looking at the amplitude image above and singing your Natural Note, hold the pitch steady and SLIGHTLY decrease and then resume the amplitude of the note. Follow the pattern of shapes on the image from left to right decreasing and increasing amplitude as the shapes contract and expand. Repeat this several times. Start the pattern of decreasing and resuming slowly, and increase the speed with each pass through. Repeat until you can easily and quickly decrease and resume amplitude thereby creating Amplitude Vibrato.

Singing Drill 40 – Vibrato and Volume – Amplitude Vibrato

Visualize the amplitude image above and singing your Natural Note. Hold the pitch steady and SLIGHTLY decrease and then resume the amplitude of the note. Visualize the pattern of shapes on the image while decreasing and increasing amplitude. Repeat this several times. Start the pattern of decreasing and resuming slowly, and increase the speed with each pass through. Repeat until you can easily and quickly decrease and resume amplitude thereby creating Amplitude Vibrato.

Singing Drill 41 – Vibrato and Volume – Amplitude Vibrato

While looking at the amplitude image above and using your Natural Note, start singing a steady note at a set volume for 2 seconds, then, using the pattern in the image, go into Amplitude Vibrato by decreasing and resuming amplitude for 4 seconds with no break in singing between your steady note and the switch to vibrato. Repeat until you can smoothly and comfortably go from singing a steady note into Amplitude Vibrato.

Singing Drill 42 – Vibrato and Volume – Amplitude Vibrato

Visualize the amplitude image above and using your Natural Note, start singing a steady note at a set volume for 2 seconds, then, using the pattern in the image, go into Amplitude Vibrato by decreasing and resuming amplitude for 4 seconds with no break in singing between your steady note and the switch to vibrato. Repeat until you can smoothly and comfortably go from singing a steady note into Amplitude Vibrato.

Concluding Singing Drill

Using the same song you recorded yourself singing in the Introductory Singing Drill at the beginning of the book, record yourself singing that song with same accompaniment you used before, either along with the original or a cappella. Afterwards, play the first version from before and then play the new recording. Note the difference in skill.

Car Drills

Car Drill 1 – Conceptual Placement - Ladder

Listen to various songs, familiar and unfamiliar, and visualize where the notes would fall on the ladder.

Car Drill 2 – Conceptual Placement – Frequency as Notes

Listen to various songs of varying familiarity and visualize generally where the note frequencies that are sung would fall on the ladder.

Car Drill 3 – Pitch – Notes

Choose a note in the chorus of a familiar song and sing only that note whenever it is sung in the chorus. Try and choose a slower song and a note that is held for a considerable amount of time in the chorus. Example: The 1st, 3rd and 6th “Oh” in ‘The Longest Time’ by Billy Joel.

Car Drill 4 – Resonation - Throat Voice

Sing along with various songs on the radio while using your Throat Voice

Car Drill 5 – Resonation - Mouth Voice

Sing along with various songs on the radio using your Mouth Voice. Note the resonance.

Car Drill 6 – Resonation - Nose Voice

Sing along with various songs on the radio while using your Nose Voice

Car Drill 7 – Shaping – Basic Resonance Modulation

Listen to various songs on the radio and note what voice the singer is using for each word, phrase, or line and how they modulate from one to the other.

Acknowledgments

As you might have noticed, I didn’t do a dedication of this book to anyone. I guess the main reason for that is that there are so many people who have inspired me throughout my life and who have unknowingly contributed to the culmination of information that I use to increase my own singing and performance ability. This information and these abilities are what I used to develop the Conceptual Singing Method™. So to name one would be unfair.

What I think IS fair is that I acknowledge those individuals who were/are key in the development of…well… me, as that is really what this book represents. As far as singing goes anyway.

First off I would like to thank my wife Marlene for her support and encouragement and her never having nothing but a positive word to say about the future success of this book and its ancillary works. Also, for having the patience with the amount of time it took to put it all together. She has been looking forward to the completion of this book more than me it would seem sometimes.  That’s because she was never scared about how it would come out or how well it would be received. Thanks Babe for your bravery and faith. I love you

I would like to thank my mother Susan Junek for singing me my first lullaby “Mamma’s don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys” by Willie Nelson, and from there on out always supporting my decision to pursue a career in music. To this day she gives me the same words of encouragement before a show. “Give ‘em hell son.” Also, I have to attribute to her my first memory of singing. She unknowingly provided me the accompaniment I needed to sing, as my first memory of singing is harmonizing with the vacuum cleaner motor and following the pitch up and down as it moved across the carpet. I was 2 years old. She probably never knew as the vacuum was pretty loud. Love you Mom.

I would like to thank my family in Texas for being the rowdy bunch they are, since I can remember. They were my first audience. And then when I got my first guitar at 10, they became my first backup singers. Every family get together we had (which was all the time) ended with me breaking out the guitar and leading sing-a-longs. Nowadays, I get back as much as I can and when I do there is always a get together, and it always ends the same way, with one exception, now my kids sing and play with me.

This brings me to my kids, Brad, Trevor, Haley, Kiley, Madeline, and Sarah. I would like to thank each of you for making me proud. Each of you is a great performer and I wish to hand down the tradition of support I received from my mother and family. Give ‘em hell kids.

Michael Graves