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I have taught voice lessons for a decade and the first question I get from new students is really simple, "Can I Sing?"
The question is simple but it deserves a long answer. My simple answer is this; yes, almost everyone can sing, and sing with a pleasing tone that people will enjoy listening to. Singing is a skill that can be taught, just like people can learn to play an instrument, cook, or draw a picture. The skill might not come easy and may take time, but singing well is feasible for everyone. Even those who come to me with REALLY raw sounds...as in, they may not be able to match pitch consistently, or have an unpleasant high voice etc...I've trained them and in just a few months they are singing well. Truthfully, the more the student is a beginner, the more I enjoy the process of teaching because it is amazing to hear the difference over a few months. However, "Can I Sing?" goes a bit further than that. The reality is that what we hear internally versus the actual produced sound are VERY different. This is why when you hear a recording of yourself, our first reaction is "That's Not Me!!!" Due to a funny trick of acoustics, this is in fact correct. The person singing hears a very different sound than what actually emerges. And this causes a real conundrum... how can you learn to love your own voice if the actual product is NOTHING like what you conceived? How would you like it if someone told you were a beautiful blonde all your life, and then found out it was a lie and you were a brunette? The value system you constructed around being a blonde would not disappear overnight. It would take time to adjust to being a brunette and accepting that as beautiful too. To draw on my own experiences, I sang for years and had this singular thought: "I like to sing, and people really seem to enjoy it and I do well in competitions, but I can't stand hearing myself!" It took YEARS for me get accustomed to how I actually sounded as opposed to what I heard in my head. I don't know if that length of time is normal (maybe I had a lower self-esteem than others) but I do know most people need time to like their own instrument. At its core, I think "Can I Sing," is about accepting who we are. DWS The source of greatest difficulty in voice lessons is that I cannot actually 'see' your instrument as you play; unlike a tuba or trumpet coach, I cannot physically manipulate your voice and tell you which 'buttons' to push to create a better tone or correct pitch. As a result, I rely on a lot of vocal 'cues' to hear vocal tension, which is the killer of a good tone!
Vibrato is one of those 'cues.' First, let's talk about the basics of vibrato. When you sing, everyone, and I do mean everyone, has vibrato. It is simply a natural variation in the pitch level you produce when you sing a specific tone. For beginners and young singers, that vibrato may be slow and hard to detect but I promise you, it IS there! Even when a singer is asked to produce a straight-tone, which is a pitch with no noticeable vibrato to our ears, you can still see the vibrato on a spectrogram (a visual representation of a person's singing). What am I listening for when I hear a person's vibrato? Essentially, a good vibrato is like oxygen in the atmosphere: you only notice it when it is absent or there is too much of it. A good vibrato enhances the vocal sound and creates a warmer tone quality that is more pleasing to listen to. If a singer's vibrato is very wide in pitch range or too slow or fast, it distracts from a pretty tone quality and likely means that there is a source of tension to resolve. Poor vibrato comes in two forms. The first, and far more common type, is a slow vibrato that produces a very wide range that distracts from the desired pitch level. The classic archetype is the 'old church lady' vibrato: a vibrato that is so wide that it sounds 'wobbly.' While there are different causes for this vibrato, most boil down to a lack of adequate breath support. By sending more air, the vibrato tends to speed up and reduce its wide pitch range. The second is a fast, almost 'machine-gun' vibrato that you notice because it seems to almost 'shake' the pitch. This sort of vibrato tends to occur most often in younger female singers. It occurs primarily because a singer is putting too much pressure on their diaphragm while they sing. Finding a way to relax this pressure will slow down the vibrato rate. The ultimate irony of 'fixing' your vibrato is that people stop noticing it when you sing. Again, this is because vibrato should be an aid to a beautiful vocal tone. If a casual listener 'hears' your vibrato, then something is going wrong because it is distracting from a naturally beautiful voice. DWS P.S. I have not posted in almost three months because the end of the school year was INCREDIBLY hectic. IN addition to my normal teaching and parenting duties, my wife is a choir teacher who took on a new position last year as head of Blocker Intermediate Choir. She is doing an amazing job but we found out how busy March through May will be! And my wife also has a side-business that took off, so I found myself at home putting the kids to sleep by myself. Do you know how exhausting it is to get a three year old to stay in bed! So I apologize for my lack of posting and will try to get back in the habit this summer. |
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