I am probably in the bottom 99th percentile in singing ability. Okay, in the bottom 99th percentile of those that actually try to sing once in awhile, as I’m sure I have never heard some people’s singing voices.
Which of these methods are most likely to work for me? I am thinking the first method but do not know if this is even possible:
Real-time feedback on my singing pitch.
In other words, I sing into a mic and it tells me the frequency I am singing at so I can adjust it on the fly. This IMO will have the best results since it provides realtime feedback so I can not only go through lots of iterations but also get instantaneous feedback and thus utilize all of my available brainpower instead of having to remember what muscles produced what note.
However, I am not aware of a device that will immediately output the frequency of its input to the 1 Hz level or even close. I tried to build one from scratch, and it worked when I tested it out using a keyboard input but when I tried to sing into it it was wildly inaccurate: I think it was analyzing the overtones since it wildly overreported the frequency.
Karaoke Star or similar gaming software. Is there a good one of these that lets you try to match a song and tells you how you did, pitch-wise? How good is it at providing real-time feedback?
Other voice-oriented software that is specifically oriented toward helping you sing better. Again, I’d prefer real-time feedback.
Voice coach? How expensive are these, and at this stage in my life (34) how hard would it be to find one willing to work with someone who is 8 degrees of horrible? (And my clumsy attempts to correct my pitch post-take in the second verse only make things worse )
People take voice lessons at any age. What I’m wondering is, are you only trying to improve your ability to match/stay on pitch? Singing is much more than just the right notes. There’s the ways to breathe, to focus sound in your head, vowel formation, and so on. Hell, maybe you even want to learn how to read music in the first place, or maybe you already know how to do that? What’s your ultimate goal really?
My goal now is to stay on pitch, both by reading sheet music and by ear. Pitch is my major downfall now: the rest of the stuff I am pretty good at relatively speaking. I can read sheet music, at least the offset from any given note to the next one, but when I try to translate that to singing I have to try at least 10 times before it sounds even vaguely right in my mind (even a simple half or full tone change,) and forget about matching what the singer is singing in any given song, compared to the rest of the people who are just singing along naturally.
Question: if you have a piano or keyboard handy, if you were to pick a random note within your vocal range (feel free to try this out now) and hold that note down on the piano, could you hum or la along with that note reasonably well? You might not hit it perfectly as soon as your voice leaves your lips, but the note will resonate long enough that you can adjust your voice. You can tell when you’ve got it because your voice and the piano will sort of blend. That’s something the choir director did with us to warm up before practice.
I think your ears, a keyboard, and just trying to match random notes will be your best bet for real time feedback. Trying to sing along with a recorded song on the radio, for example, has the added problems of remembering the words, the distractions of instruments in addition to the singer’s voice, and paying attention to the asshole that just cut you off, making it that much harder for you to hit the right notes.
Try the piano/keyboard thing. If your ears don’t work (i.e. you can’t tell if you’re hitting the note you’re playing) then I don’t think there’s much else you can do.
I’m your age and I started taking voice lessons 2 years ago and am still taking them. I can honestly tell where I was and how huge a change it’s been since. I used to be quite horrible. People would politely leave when I sang. Now, I go through a local school (MacPhail), and have been extremely happy with the progress. It wasn’t cheap, but I’m also paying for the highest paid teacher there which is $37 for each half-hour lesson. And people aren’t leaving anymore!
The lesson is broken down as such:
a)About 2 minutes of talking/stretching
b)About 15 minutes of warm-ups. Scales and enunciation tricks. Try singing the tongue twister “Mini many, manny, monie, money” and you’ll see what I mean.
c)The last bit of class I bring in a song with my guitar and we figure out what key best fits my voice and then work on the notes, style, breathing, etc.
Singing is a physical activity. The books, tapes, and videos I tried before this were not enough for me to learn. There are things that those can’t see or hear you doing wrong (moving your lips forward, mouth open, not tilting your hed back, etc) that won’t be noticed by these.
Speaking of which:
Let me summarize this really expensive course as briefly as possible: No.
Seriously, it’s not worth it. First, and this is a personal issue, the guy that created this is the voice throughout all of the CDs. His voice does not belong near recording equipment. It’s shrill and makes me want to sandpaper my ears off. Second, the whole crux of his theory is based on “the color” of the notes.
I’ve been taking lessons for about 2 years (playing guitar for about 14 years)…but it was just recently that I’m starting to hear the colors that he talked about. This was more due to my singing teacher that has been having me notice where my notes that I’m singing are physically. Catching how a C sounds versus and F# and you’ll start to get the hang of it.
Rock, alternative singer-songwriter, and to a certain extent, pop, in order to sing along with others.
I think I will try singing along with a keyboard, (which I hadn’t thought about before this thread, thanks!) put on the sine wave setting. I think it will probably work well enough to teach me to sing in the pitch of the keyboard.
But. [slight hijack but it does go somewhere.] There are several songs that seem to touch on what I call the Universal Hook: Messages by OMD and Somewhere Only We Know by Keane for two. I made up my own and am particularly fond of it – in my head – and tried to play it on the keyboard. But no matter what I couldn’t get it exactly right. Then I realized it might be that the keyboard is in equal temperament.
So I’m wondering for rock and semi-folk music if teaching myself to sing in equal temperament isn’t what I’d want to do, or is this too advanced to worry about now?
There was a guy in my choir, that always sang sharp. He also thought he was really good so he projected. He certainly knew music, but the pitch he heard himself sing just wasn’t the pitch he was singing. You couldn’t tell him this for anything. Unfortunately, it is my experience, that some people just can’t sing.
Yes, I do think that’s true. I didn’t realize that there are people who always sing sharp or flat (was he always just a bit off?), I just thought that some people didn’t have enough control over their voices to make them do what they wanted, or were totally tone deaf and couldn’t hear it at all.
Now it makes me paranoid that I’m not hearing myself sing in the pitch I’m actually singing.
Anything that you can use (microphone and amp, for instance) to let you actually hear your voice as others hear it can help. You normally hear your voice transmitted through your skull (bone conduction), which can interfere with pitch production. A cheap way to do this is to get a couple of pieces of PVC and make yourself a sort of phone-shaped device.
Or get a voice teacher. Most teachers are willing to work with any talent level. I charge $40 an hour, but that’s not gonna help you much.
I’ve said it before: there is almost no one that can’t sing. Most people who are “tone deaf” simply haven’t learned to sing on pitch. Some take longer than others, but absent some pathology (dysfunction of the larynx or hearing), anyone can learn to at least match pitch.
This wasn’t a control or hearing issue, he had clearly been in many choirs before this. He could sight read pretty well. Yet he was always just a hair sharp. Sometimes it was less noticable than others, but sometimes his voice pierced the veil like knife. To be honest though, he is the only case of that I have ever encountered, so fear not RedRosesForMe you are probably doing just fine. So long as you don’t notice the choir forming in cliques around you.
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