Hi, James.

As others have already told you - you can sing.

Despite your warning of doom and disaster, I actually enjoyed listening to you sing.

So there. wink

Here are the things that didn't stand out as needing fixing:

1. Pitch. You can hold a pitch! Congratulations, because when someone says "I can't sing", they typically mean they can't hit the pitch, or stay on pitch. This is important.

2. Timing. You've got a nice sense of timing and phrasing. That's usually the other big problem people have, and that doesn't seem to be an issue, either.

All right, on to what I'd suggest most stood out as candidates for correction.

1. You've got a tendency to slip into "speaking" instead of "singing". It's not unpleasant when that happens, and it's a legitimate technique. In fact, it works rather well. But I'd suggest you should "sing" more, and "speak" less.

This probably has more to do with confidence than anything else. Singing tends to be louder, and if you aren't confident that you sound good singing, you tend to back the volume down. Less volume means less breath support, and you're speaking instead of singing.

I suspect that you're probably too close to the microphone. This gives sufficient volume when you're speaking... but also lets you "cheat" by speaking instead of singing.

You might want to move back and put a bit of distance (but not too much) between yourself and the microphone. This will force you to use good breath support and sing. Imagine that there's a line from your lips to the microphone, and project your voice to the microphone.

2. While singing, you'll generally want to connect all your notes together smoothly. There are some spots where instead of doing that, you phrase the notes as separated, stacatto notes. For example, at 0:08, were you sing "amazING", you there's a melisma on "ING", which should be sung legato, but you sing as separated notes.

Aim to sing these notes smoothly, with the same amount of air pressure at the beginning, middle, end, and transition to the next note.

Mostly, keep singing, recording yourself, and listening. laugh

-- David Cuny
My virtual singer development blog

Vocal control, you say. Never heard of it. Is that some kind of ProTools thing?