Singing tips

How to improve my singing                                                         

now-a-days singing is a god profession if you are like singing and your voice is not clear then you follow some steps and make a good singer

Whether you’ve been singing all your life, or are just starting out learning the basics from an online course, it’s important to approach singing with as much respect as you would approach any musical training. As my own vocal coach is fond of reminding me, there is no difference between musicians and singers. We are all musicians. Singers simply carry our instruments inside our throats and vocal cords. We also may not have to oil and maintain our instrument the same way that musicians with physical instruments do, but there are many good practices we can incorporate into our lives to maintain the flexibility and agility of our internal vocal instrument.
Singers have the advantage of being able to sing anywhere they are, and not having to carry anything with them. However, we must care for and maintain our vocal cords just like any instrument. There are ways we can do damage to our voices simply by using them incorrectly. And just like proper positioning for playing an instrument, there are ways that we can improve our posture and refine our movements to get the best performance out of our voices.
Some of these tips may seem obvious, but some of them might come as a surprise to you, especially if you’re just starting out as a singer. You may find your body naturally inclined to sing in ways that could be damaging or dangerous to your long-term singing abilities, and not even know it. Recognizing what to watch out for, and taking a few simple steps to keep your voice in top shape, can be invaluable as you begin your singing career.

Taking Care of Your Throat

Drink Plenty of Water

Hydration is put forward as an answer for everything healthy these days, and for good reason. In the case of singing, there’s a direct correlation between how much water you drink, at how well your vocal instrument is maintained. Singing is a product of the mucous membranes of the body, and these function best when they’re adequately hydrated. Making sure to get eight glasses of water a day into your system, and spreading them across the course of the day, can help keep your throat lubricated, and your voice functioning clearly.

Do Your Exercises

Practicing warm-ups on a regular basis is important for a singer. There are classes in how to warm up your voice effectively. Although we use our voice constantly, singing is a special way of coordinating it, and it takes practice. One of the benefits of regular practice for all musicians is the muscle memory that comes from putting your vocal cords through the same patterns and movements repetitively. The vocal cords can absorb and respond to muscle memory just as well as your fingers do when playing any instrument. Find time every day to practice your vocal exercises, even if you think you have them down perfectly. It’s not about getting an exercise right, it’s about keeping the muscles trained.

Be Quiet

Silence can be a welcome rest for the voice. I think we’ve all had the experience of feeling our voice start to get rough and scratchy after we’ve been speaking or singing for too long. Making sure that you find time in your life to be silent and let your voice rest can be very helpful as you’re developing your singing stamina. Some performers even try to take one day a week when they won’t say a single word, just to give their voices a rest.

Get Your Sleep

Sleep is something we all need enough of. It’s not just about your alertness and stamina, but also about healing. During sleep, the body heals the damage that we’ve done to it during the day. If we don’t give the body enough time to sleep, that healing process is interrupted. The practice of training your singing voice will force new muscle fibers to grow and adapt. It’s during sleep that these changes become integrated into the body.

Don’t Smoke

Stop smoking. It’s not about whether you’re going to get cancer or whether the people on the train next to you will find the smoke irritating. The critical thing is that your throat and your lungs will be irritated by repeated exposure to the irritants and particles in smoke. If you want to develop a raspy voice, learn to produce that sound naturally. Don’t limit yourself by causing damage to your instrument.

Speak Like a Singer

Use your speaking voice is an opportunity to practice your singing. With attention, you can develop a speaking voice that not only supports but enhances your singing voice. Speaking is very much like singing, in that we are still taking in air and letting it out through our vocal cords in a controlled manner over an extended period of time. Speaking is an opportunity to learn how we perform out loud, and experiment with the ways that our vocal cords produce sound.

Hitting the Notes

Get a Vocal Coach

Don’t try to do it all by yourself. Get into a vocal training program and follow it. Having a vocal coach is one of the most important things a singer can do to improve and grow. We can’t always hear what we sound like as were singing. Even if we record ourselves and listen to it afterwards, we can’t make the instant corrections that a vocal coach can recommend. A vocal coach will also keep you aware of your posture, your breathing, and your technique. Shop around for this. There are good vocal coaches and bad vocal coaches, and it’s important that you find one you resonate with–literally!

Sing Quietly

Unless you’re studying a particular singing style that involves belting, don’t try to shout out your songs. Singing in a quiet voice is excellent practice for maintaining control. It’s remarkable what intensity you can deliver when you subdue the volume, and focus on the technique. Often new singers will try to sing loud in order to cover-up confusion over notes. That technique does not work. By singing quietly, you force the voice to control itself, and can gain mastery over your vocal technique.

Ground Yourself

Surprisingly, when you are trying to reach high notes, it’s helpful to think about grounding yourself downward. Your body may be inclined to reach upward when you are trying to hit the high notes, but if you put your attention on your weight, and feel yourself sinking downward from the chest, you will have better luck hitting those high notes effectively. You will also be stabilizing yourself, which should result in more control over your breathing and your posture.

Use Enough Air

Breathing deep from the diaphragm is very important for a singer. Unless you can get enough breath behind your notes, they won’t resonate as clearly, and you won’t have as much control over the sound you produce. You can learn to breathe from the diaphragm with this course to add force to your singing. Practicing your breathing as a regular exercise can help you develop more capacity and stamina, and let you sustain longer notes for a greater period of time. You will also notice your energy improve if you spend time thinking about how your breath travels into your lungs, and adjusting your posture to optimize that.

Listen to the Intervals

Unlike musicians who master an external instrument by learning finger positions that translate directly to specific notes, singers have to use our minds and our muscle memories to make sure we hit the notes as they’re written. Singing is done on a continuous tone scale, like string instruments without frets, and some wind instruments. So singers need to be able to operate and adjust our voices in a natural scale, although we usually coordinate with instruments tuned to a Western 12-tone tempered scale. Keep that in mind when you’re singing, so you can listen for the small adjustments you need to make.

Useful Tools

Get a Microphone

Sometimes when you’re singing you will need to project your voice out to the back of the room, but frequently you will be using a microphone. Get used to holding a microphone, and singing with it. Buy yourself a good handheld microphone, preferably one with the wind guard, and plug it into a recording device so you can hear how you sound with it. There are some excellent inexpensive USB microphones that you can use to record yourself with your computer, and it’s not difficult to learn basic vocal recording techniques.

Monitor Yourself

A good set of speakers can help you learn to listen to your voice and pay attention to how it really sounds while you’re singing. Sometimes the best feedback that we get is the live feedback of hearing our voice is projected back into our ears while were singing. Listening live, we can adapt quickly. But poor quality monitors can be just as misleading as not listening to yourself at all.

Stick a Finger In Your Ear

Similarly, headphones can be a very convenient tool for a good singer to practice with. One trick is to put your headphone in one ear, and leave the other ear open. This can allow you to hear the ambient sounds, as well as your own voice, and distinguish between the two. Some singers just put a finger in one ear to help them monitor the sound of their own voice while they’re singing. The point is to pay attention, and learn how you sound.

Advanced Tips

Keep Your Chin Down

Keep your head straight and your chin down when you’re producing notes. This may go against what you naturally inclined to do, but keeping your chin down gives you more range of control of your vocal cords and your jaw. When you jut out your chin, you limit your range of motion, and close off the sound. You may also be surprised to notice how much better you sound with your head straight and your chin pulled back.

Open Up Your Jaw

Practice reciting the vowels of the alphabet with your jaw open, and notice when you have a natural tendency to close your jaw. Try to keep your mouth open wide enough to stick two fingers sideways between your front teeth. All of the vowel sounds should be produced with the jaw wide-open and the chin down, to enhance the resonance of the sound. Learning to sing with full round vowel sounds can be the difference between sounding like an amateur and sounding like a professional.

Control Your Vibrato

In western singing, most singers use some degree of vibrato in their voice. Vibrato is the rhythmic increase and decrease in volume that you hear when a singer sustains a note. Strong singers can control their vibrato so that it gets faster or slower depending on the rhythm and the style of music. If you’ve been exposed to popular modern singing all your life, you probably have a natural vibrato in your voice, but it may not be something you have conscious control over. Good vibrato is used subtly as an accent, often just as a note is trailing off, rather than consistently throughout the entire song.To learn to control your vibrato, practice by opening your jaw and singing single vowel sounds for an extended period of time. Keep your chin down, and imagine the swirling patterns of air in your mouth. Put one hand on your chest, and feel the vibration change as the volume naturally resonates, and see if you can control the patterns. By paying attention to how it feels, you can learn to control the rhythm of your vibrato.
Singing is a performance art, so don’t sing only for yourself. The appreciation and feedback of an audience is both gratifying and instructive. Singing can even help you develop a solid stage presence for public speaking. Approach your voice the same way a musician approaches his instrument, and give it to respect deserves. With a lot of practice, and a lot of attention, you can develop a singing voice that you’ll be proud of.

Find the right key

Whenever you are choosing a song to rehearse or perform, ensure that the musical key is appropriate to your voice. Know the song, its high and low points, and know your own vocal range. Obviously the singer needs to be able to reach all the notes relatively comfortably, however bear in mind that taking a song too far down in pitch can often have the effect of making it sound dull and uninteresting. The closer that the song is to the top of your range, without going too far, the more exciting it will sound and feel to all.
  
Cool down

Cooling down the voice at the end of your session is just as important as warming up in preparation for singing. By running through a few low-impact cool down exercises, the voice is prepared to return to its normal non-singing state. These exercises are therapeutic for tired vocal folds and have the effect of calming and relubricating them.

Rest before performance

This may seem obvious to some, but it’s easliy overlooked. We perform better if we’re rested so try to minimise the amount of stress and strain on the voice before a show. Have a look at the Vocal Abuse Checklist to see how you can minimise the chances of hurting your voice.

Don’t eat

During singing, whether in performance or rehearsal, try to avoid eating food, especially sugary or creamy foods, or drinking alcohol. Some foods play havoc with mucous levels, and it is very easy to increase mucous around the larynx and add to the overall fatiguing of the voice. Wait to have your meal after you’ve finished the performance.
  
Drink lots of water

Ensure that you always have plenty of water available to rehydrate your instrument.
  
Breathe from the Diaphragm 

Full abdominal breathing actively engages the Thoracic Diaphragm, a trampoline-like muscle stretching across the bottom of the ribcage below the lungs. By developing awareness and control of the process of abdominal breathing  the singer learns to fully support and empower the voice, controlling, developing and sculpting the vocal tone. Abdominal breathing is essential to the development of vocal projection.

Vary your exercises

To fully develop your as a singer you will need to have a wide range of vocal exercises at your disposal. It is important to practice with different vowel and consonant shapes, as well as varying the pitch, volume, rhythm, tempo, duration, range and vocal qualities used.

Record yourself

It is vital for the singer to like their own voice, however many singers will express a dislike for their voice upon hearing it recorded.  By recording lessons, rehearsals, performances, etc., the singer will be able to recognise areas for further development such as intonation (pitching), as well as become more familiar with and warm to their own voice.

Drop the jaw

If you’ve ever heard people sing through a partly closed mouth you will understand that this simple technique - dropping the jaw - will improve vocal tone tremendously. The jaw should drop down, lengthening the face, to allow the sound vibration to move outward, as opposed to widening the mouth which will create a more twangy nasal sound.

Larynx position

The larynx tends to move up and down somewhat during singing, however in speech level singing, ideally the movement will be minimised as the larynx is relaxed. The positioning of the larynx can have quite dramatic effects on the sound. For example, the lowering of the larynx will darken the tone while raising the larynx will brighten the sound considerably. Experiment with different larynx positions to increase the tone colours available to you.

Tongue position

Another factor that will determine vocal tone is the position of the tongue in the mouth. By bringing the tongue forward and touching its tip to the back of the bottom teeth the tone will become brighter and clearer, as this tongue position will create a shallower, reduced space for resonance in the back of the mouth. This forward tongue position allows the sound to freely move forward, and also allows more vibrant resonance in the sinus and resonating cavities in the front of the head. By pulling the tongue back, down into the throat, a deeper resonating chamber occurs, promoting a darker. more classical tone.

Reduce and Release

While it is true that the effort required to sing higher register notes increases with pitch, there is a distinct difference between shouting - pushing the chest voice harder in the hope that it will move up to reach the higher pitched notes - and releasing up to these notes. This will very likely cause strain and some pain to the voice. What needs to happen here is a release upward into the mix voice. The sonic vibration will be felt in the body in an upward movement as pitch ascends, and rather than stopping around the upper chest and throat, as with shouting, the vibration continues to move up and can be felt right up into to top of the head. This release is difficult to describe, however here is an attempt...with rising pitch, the chest voice relinquishes the sound towards the head voice, however rather than just flipping up into falsetto, the voice quality changes, allowing a thinning of the sound to occur. The chest voice continues to add its resonance to the higher resonance of the head voice so that the two are happening at the same time. This thinning and blending of the head and chest voices is commonly called the mix or middle voice.