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Thank you all. Gonna hold off on this .




Kirsten, The singlemost important thing you can do right now to improve your singing abilities is to work on your ear.

Learning to NAIL the Major Scale intervals, correctly and IN TUNE.

Use of the old, "Do-Re-Mi" is a plus IMO, but not entirely necessary.

Being able to keep the tuning of the tempered scale, by being given a starting note, the Tonic, and then being able to sing through a simple tune without deviating from the tuning of the scale is the first thing any singer should aspire to "own" and that is done by practicing doing same daily.

All the rest, breathing, learning to sing with power, vibrato or no vibrato, etc. will be to no avail until that Major Scale is firmly locked into the brain and thus the vocal chords.

The Major Scale is the basis for all Western Musics. From there we branch out to minor (the natural minor scale is actually inside the Major Scale, from the 6th to the 13th, which is where we get that "Relative minor" jazz from) and the all-important Major and minor Pentatonic scales.

Until we can nail them, staying in tune, by ourselves, by practicing singing them along with a well-tuned instrument and then gradually removing the well-tuned instrument from the sessions until only the voice is able to carry the tune, all else is a wash.

I listened to your recordings and am just trying to help out here.

Inside Band in a Box are Ear Trainer, plus a few other music games designed to help with all of this, it is well worth ten to twenty minutes a day of your time and the ears can and will start to lock onto these issues if you spend the time with it. The time involved is not all that long, either, for most people.

*Practice singing those simple "childhood" songs by yourself, trying to keep all the notes right where they belong after getting a note from the instrument for the Tonic. This can be *any* western simple song that you happen to remember, but you can also find many webpages that list these kind of songs for the purpose of ear training, improvisation, etc. Most will be centered around playing a musical instrument, but always remember that your voice IS a musical instrument, matter of fact, the human voice is the FIRST musical instrument.

Sing these softly, just enough power to be able to control the pitch and always try to sing them "musically" -- as if each one was a performance. If you make a mistake, don't keep going, stop and start over again from the beginning. That way we practice much more efficiently by not "practicing the mistake" with the thing.

The EAR is the thing that controls what comes out of the mouth...

Training that ear, then, is the most important factor.

All the rest is icing on the cake.

One more important thing about all of this to incubate: "Deep Desire"


--Mac