Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hey there. Welcome to
my Skillshare course. My name is Alicia and I am
your rising star vocal coach. In this course, are going
to take you through a basic but very comprehensive singing
lesson and teach you five basic exercises to help you improve your
singing technique. So let's start with a
little bit more about me. Well, I have many years of experience as a
private vocal coach. I'm also very active onstage
and behind the microphone. I can bring make mistakes. Secondly, from it, I have worked with artists
from the voice as well as the
Eurovision Song Contest. I have written and
recorded vocals for various producers in the
dense house and horsetails. But enough about me, it's time
for you to start singing. Let's get started.
2. Exercise 1 - Breathing with the Diaphragm: Alright, we're going to start
with the first exercise. The first exercise is
all about breadth. So I'm going to explain a little bit about how to
breath works inside of your body and how it should
work when you're singing. So when you breathe, you
can breathe in two ways. You can either breathe
into your chest or you can breathe
into your stomach. And oftentimes, you
can hear people say your breathing is too high or
you need to breathe lower. You need your breaths
to go into your belly. This can seem confusing
because obviously your lungs are up here and there's no actual air
inside of your belly. So to understand this
properly, consider your lungs. At the top of your body. Underneath your lungs, you have a muscle called the diaphragm. So the muscle is kind of like a parachute underneath
your lungs. And the parachutes can tighten, tense, like stretch out, or it can relax. Right? And the lungs are
sitting on top of this. The lungs, they can either
expand forward with the chest breathing or they can expand downward and then we
get the belly breathing. So what's actually
happening is that your lungs are
expanding downward. Your diaphragm is
pressing down and the organs inside of your
belly are coming forward. So let me just show
you what happens when we breathe into the chest. So this is the breathing
we want to avoid. We breathe into the chest. We breathe up. Your shoulders tense up, your throat is constricting, your belly is tensed up. So this is a very tense kind of breathing. When you breathe out. It feels like you're relaxed. Most people, when I say breathe
in, this is what they do. They breathe into their chest, creating a lot of tension. When you breathe out the
Relax, it's singing. We want to turn the whole
breathing or brown. We want to start
breathing into our belly. To breathe into your
belly, you need to twist. You need to turn it around
what's happening down here? So when you breathe out, you want to squeeze this inside, you want to empty
out all of you. Let me just show you.
We go like this. As you can see, my belly
is in yellow there. Now when I breathe in,
I relaxed my belly. I love air to come down
because my belly is relaxed. My diaphragm can
move downwards and my lungs can feel
downwards, right? So the easiest way to find
this kind of breathing is not to start
with breathing it, but to start with breathing out. So we begin this exercise. You place one hand
on your chest, one hand on your belly. And
what do you want to do? What you want to
start by breathing out all of the air inside of your body as though you're blowing out candles on the cake. Here we go. Now, before you breathe in, make sure to relax your belly. Let it come forward. And you take a deep breath
in through your mouth. This can be difficult
at first because maybe you're tensing up your stomach and then this is
going to happen. You're gonna go right up.
Alright, so this is all about relaxing when
you're breathing in. So that's why we do it a few
times you breathe out again. Read them, relax and let this whole area and
move forward again. And alright, so you want
to do this exercise every time before you start
seeing to make sure that your breathing is going
down into your belly. Alright, so the first reason I've already explained to you, the first reason we want
to bring into our belly is because we want to avoid all of the tension of the
constriction that you have up here when you breathe
into your chest. Now the second reason we
want to be breathing into our Billy is because when
we breathe into our belly, our diaphragm is activated. Now when we activate
the diaphragm, that basically
means we can use it just like every other
muscle inside of your body. If a muscle is activated,
you can use it. So when your diaphragm is down, it's activated, is tightened. You can actually squeeze it to push the arrow. You can say. And if you look down here, you can see the tensing it. And what I'm actually doing
is I'm pushing out air from my lungs with my diaphragm. So all the power that
you want in singing, if it's either a loud
volume or very high note, all of your power is
going to come from this area inside of your
body, not your throat. That's where things
often go wrong. When you actually start
breathing lower into your belly. It means that you're
using your diaphragm, it's moving and
when it's moving, your training it and you
can actually use it. When you see. That was exercise number one.
3. Exercise 2 - Activating the Diaphragm: Moving on to
exercise number two. I already gave you
a little preview in my first exercise about
what we're going to do it. This one, we're
going to do yells. We're going to activate
our diaphragm. So you've just done
the belly breathing, bringing it down
low into your core. And now we're going to actually start using the diaphragm. So this exercise is very simple, but you may want
to be sure to find a quiet place where
you can perform this exercise so that you're not actually bothering
anyone else with your sound or that you're
not too worried inside of your head that you're going to be bothering anyone else. So what we're gonna do
is we're going to place our hand on the diaphragm. So for the ladies, it's kind of like placing
your hand underneath your Brock where that was sick. Gentlemen. You can try and
find the same spot. It can actually
help. You can feel a little dent where your
ribs come together. There's a little hole. You can try and find
that with your thumb. So below that pole is where
you place your hands, where your diaphragm your
diaphragm sits all the way around behind your ribs on the inside. You've
got to feel it. You're going to feel
it moving in front. You're going to feel
it moving in the back. Some people don't feel it
at all in the beginning. So just kinda try and get a connection with your body and what's happening in there. You place your
handled it so that you can be sure to
feel what's happening. Now what we wanna do
is we want to just do a number of yells. It doesn't really matter
what they sound like. This is also a very good
exercise in letting go and not being too
concerned with how you sound. So it's very good
mental exercise. Just letting the sound come up. And what we wanna do is
we want our body to work. So you want your diaphragm
to work very hard. You want your throat
to not work at all. What often happens when we use exercise as many
people started going? That you can already hear that
my throat is constricting. I'm trying to keep the
sound in over here, but I'm trying to get
the sound out over here. And that's just going to
cause a lot of trouble. So you wanna do is you want
to just relax your shoulders, relax your body, and then
breathe it, the belly. And then go and just
have it opens for it. Alright? And when you find yourself thinking about all,
maybe someone says, Hear me, maybe someone's going to think what the
****'s going on. Just try and let that go and visualize that someone
is running off with your backpack and you have to stop them no matter what,
you have to go ahead. And then there are instinctive
sound can come up. So you can play
around with this one. You can also go
whoa, whoa, whoa. He did he have or yeah. Right. So you can do
many sounds like this. So just trying to find
their way around it. If you're having trouble
getting it loud, just do pay. A bit softer. The most important thing
is that your throat is relaxed and that your
diaphragm is working hard. So for here we can
feel the muscles. A little bit of muscle
ache is no problem. Over here. You want to feel relaxed. If you feel pain in your throat, it means that you're not
really relaxing up there. The next exercise is a very good exercise to
help you relax your throat. So let's move on to
exercise number three.
4. Exercise 3 - Vocal Range & Sirens: Hey there and welcome to
exercise number three. So this exercise is all
about the focal courts. Exercise number 1.2 were very focused on the
body down here. That's where our engineers, and now we're going to focus
on the vocal cords up here, which is kind of
where the gears are. So I like to compare
C to driving a car. Look at it this way
from down here. This is where the
engine is, this is where the gas pedal is. So this is where
you want to give all the power for the
volume, for the high notes. Up here is where
we have the gears. So it's important to
be in the right gear. Otherwise you get this kind
of sense of driving too fast or too much in a
gear that is too low. So it kinda gives
us the impression of you can already hear that
I'm pushing them, straining. It's because my vocal cords
are in a wrong position, or we could say in
the wrong year. The next exercise is
going to help you with the position of
your vocal cords. So before we get into that, I'm going to explain
a little bit about chest voice and head
voice and mixed voice. The vocal cords are
inside of our throat, attached to the Adam's
apple is still a lump that you can see with
some men when they talk, you can actually see the vocal
chords moving up and down. So the vocal cords
are two little muscles they are attached onto there and moving
towards the back. And the vocal chords
can be opened. This is when we're breathing
in, breathing out. But every time we're
making a sound, whether it's humming
or whispering or screaming or
sitting or speaking, or vocal cords are
vibrating together. They're touching. The air from our lungs
is coming through the vocal cords, out
through our mouth. And the speed at which the vocal cords vibrate
actually determines the pitch. So when the vocal
cords vibrate slowly, we have a low pitch. When the vocal
cords vibrate fast, we have a high pitch. So if I'm doing this, What's happening is
my vocal cords are speeding up and slowing down. Alright, so the
speed at which they vibrate correlates to the pitch. Now, when we have our vocal cords vibrating
faster and faster and faster, there comes a point where
they can't actually fibrate much faster in
this current position. What happens then is
that our vocal cords start to tilt upwards, stretching out, actually
tightening the vocal cords, which means that they can
then vibrate even faster. This is what happens
when we move from our chest voice
into a mixed voice, into our head voice. When we are in head voice, our vocal cords are actually
tilted all the way up, stretch it as far
as they can go, vibrating much faster
than their chest voice. We are in a chest voice. Our vocal cords are down here. So when we're
moving up in pitch, what we want is for a vocal chords to move
along with the pitch. So in my chest voice, my vocal cords are going to
remain in this position. And then when I move
into my head voice, my vocal cords are going
to start tilting, right? So I'm just going
to illustrate how that goes while I'm
doing the pitch, we go. Alright, and I'm just doing this just to kinda give a
visual for moving down. But they're actually staying
in the same position. Then what I'm going
to head voice, they're tilting and then
they're coming back there. So what often happens
when people don't have much singing experience
is at the vocal cords. Don't really want to move into this head for its position. They kinda just want
to stay stuck there. Or when we're really
going into head voice, just gonna kinda go, go
all the way straight up. When that happens, you get
a kind of jump in your, in your voice, your voice. Mrs, a few notes you get. You get that kind of thing. You can also get
the feeling that you're pushing and pushing until your vocal cords
finally flip up. You can get that
kind of feeling. So basically what's
happening and I really explaining
this in a very, very simple terms because I could also use
low difficult words and name all the
different body parts that are used when we do this. But I just want
you to understand the movement is happening
inside of her throat, how it feels, and how it
needs to feel, right? So that's what I'm explaining
this in very simple terms. You want to do is
when you're moving up into this head voice, you want your vocal
chords to move freely. The exercise that
we're going to do is going to help you
with that because you're going to
practice it a lot of times when you feel that your vocal cords are
kind of feeling a bit rusty, like they
don't want to move, they don't want to move
up or they want to jump, then that is the
point where you want to practice extra hard and just do more and more repetitions until your muscles are
starting to learn, hey, this is the movement
that we need to be doing. Alright, moving on
to the exercise. So for this one I tend to place one hand on your
diaphragm or your belly, one hand on your throat. Alright, so oftentimes you can even feel what's
happening over here. You can feel the
vocal chords moving. So don't squeeze your throat. Obviously, just place your hand on top of it to
feel the vibration. Be sure to also have something touching the front over here because that's where
the vocal cords are most easily felt. Alright, so what we're going
to do is we're going to do the siren and we're going
to do various sounds. And each side we're
going to do three times. We're going to begin
with a more quiet sound and move on to a louder sound. So we're going to start
with the easy one. Move on to the more
difficult one. Now what's very good As
before you start singing a song at home is to just repeat these sirens to stretch her vocal cords into your
head voice and back down. And you'll actually
notice that after this goes a bit more fluid, and when you start
to sing a song, it should go easier. So what we want is we want
to breathe into our belly. And we're going to
start on the sun. And we've got to move
all the way up to the top of your range and
all the way back down. Now obviously the range is
different for every person. So if you're a male singer, then you're going
to probably start a lot lower than the
female singer. So just start on
your lowest note, move into your highest note, and then go back
down to your lowest. And the other thing
to focus on is that your diaphragm is going to be doing the work just with
the previous exercises. And your vocal chords should
be feeling relaxed and free. There should be
absolutely no pushing, going on inside of your throat. You should focus on
lifting, lifting up. So it feels like you're
lifting up your vocal chords. It should never feel like you're pushing through them
because then you're going to get that whole
thing which we don't want. Alright, so once again,
we start with the moon, breathe into the diaphragm. And here we go. Second time. Third time. All right. The next time we're going
to do is to then the E, Then the next cell. And I'm going to do each
of these just once. For your own vocal practice. You're going to do each
of them three times. And even if you notice that a specific file actually has
your voice flipping a lot, then that's a file you
should practice more often, but sometimes it can be good. Say if you keep skipping
over a note on the R. But who is going really well to kind of go
back to the zoo, do the siren feel when it's smooth field
where it's working. And then two, transfer
that feeling to the arm so that if
you're skipping on to go back to the UI, that smooth, That's
how it feels. And try and take that and
transfer it to the NFL. The exercises that are difficult
to kind of try to take. What's easy on the other one, how it works, the sense of, hey, this is how it works
and you try to bring that into the one
that's more difficult. This is what I always
do, my singing lessons. Okay, We have some trouble here. Go back to the one
that's working, feel the technique filled, feel how it should work, and then try and transfer
that onto the next part. Alright, so 2 s though, is that breathe
into the diaphragm. Who then the E and the app. If you have trouble
finding your high note, if you're getting
stuck and you're not really able to go
into that head voice, maybe your vocal cords are stuck down here and they're
not really tilting. What can help is actually
doing a few loose, just making a few of those
noises and it's been okay. That's where my head voices. Sometimes when you go
from all the way down up, you can kinda get stuck. Throw it up there, and then go. And then hopefully you'll find that the siren
is working for you. So this is a really
fun one to do. Also a good exercise to throw all the shame out of the window. Don't really bother what
you're sounding like. Do this one frequently. If you notice your
voice skipping, do it every time
before you start really full and singing
a song or practicing. And you should notice it goes easier Onto the next exercise.
5. Exercise 4 - Vocal Support: Welcome back to
exercise number for this exercise is going to
be the first one where we actually do a bit
of solid scene. We're going to try to
combine a few things from previous exercises
into this one. So this exercise is
about breadth support. This is different to just barely breathing,
diaphragm breathing. Now we're actually going
to do something actively to try and have support
and to hold the air in. Exercise number one, I already explained why we need to be
breathing into our belly, moving our diaphragm,
relaxing, our upper body. Now we're going to
talk about how we can treat the air once
we have briefly. Alright, so we've got
our diaphragm lowers. We've got lungs full of air. And then we're going to see, now what happens
lot of times is we go on and on and on the left. And then the aerosol
at because the body, until we start training it
is actually quite lazy. So once you have
the air inside of your body and you start
seeing it at, at, at, at another that the
body just wants to relax as soon as possible so the air wants to come
out as soon as possible. Now when we actually
start doing, when we start singing, want to control the speed
at which the air comes up. We want to control the breadth. So one thing we want to
start doing is we want to hold the breath in
while we're seeing. So we're using air, air is coming out with
by holding it in, we're actually stopping the flow from going too fast.
We're going okay. I want, I want to
give a little bit, they're a little bit here, a little bit more there,
a little bit there. And then at the end I want
to squeeze it all up. We want to actually start being in control of the airflow. This exercise is all about
holding the breath in as long as possible while we're
singing and making a sound. So we're going to be
working with two movements. We're breathing
into our diaphragm. We're going to be working
with the movement of keeping it expanded, right? So when we breathe in, we go and our diaphragm is expanded
outward while we're singing. We want to hold it there
as long as we can. Then when that no longer works, because eventually your air
is coming out here as well. Eventually it's going
to have to move inward. When we can no longer
hold it there. We're actually going
to be squeezing, squeezing, squeezing,
squeezing in. So we've got to movement, movement of keeping it outward. And then we've got movement
of pulling it, it. Alright, so I'm going to
explain for this exercise, it's good to place your hands on your ribs where your diaphragm
is situated over here. So that's been quite difficult to have their hands
up that high, just see how you
go, give it a shot. If it's difficult, you
can also place them like this just over here. But if you can put yourselves in the back and your
hands in front, we're going to be breathing
to ours our hands. Yes. So you want to look at
my fingertips by nails. You want to see
expanding, right? And then when we're
done with all the air, it looks like this moving in. So once I've expanded to be seeing a note and I want to
keep my hands over here. So you're going to
have a kind of tug of war happening because
your body wants to go in, but you want to be
pushing it out. So it's going to happen
is perhaps your belly is going to come in over here, but you want to keep your
diaphragm and your ribs expand. The longer you can do that, the lover you can hold
your area and the longer the sentence you can see. So many times in my
singing lessons, people have difficulty with very long sentence or
maybe they have to save two or three
sentences in one breath. Then what happens
when they actually start focusing on the air? Taking a good breadth at
the start of the sentence, holding the breath
until a certain point. And then we agree,
okay, from there on, you can actually start
squeezing it up. And then suddenly the whole, the whole phrase becomes
so easy and so simple. And they even have air
leftover at the end of it only because they're focusing on controlling
the breath. Right? Back here. We've got our hands on our hips. We're going to breathe out.
Breathe into the hips. And everyone about. You can see my hands
are still here. Now. I'm going in squeezing it. So it's very difficult when you're actually
talking in-between. I'm going to do it again.
I want you to focus on what's happening down here. I'm breathing is my hands. My belly is going
to start coming in, and then eventually my hand
to go to seek it as well. But you can see
that I'm keeping it extended as long as possible. All right? Alright, so you can probably
see what's happening there. This exercise is
quite intense because you are really trading all
the muscles around here. You're training your back, you're training your diaphragm. So you're really going
to feel this one. You can do this with any
that you can think of. If you have a keyboard at home, you can just take a few
notes, try to sing goes. But I'm also going
to throw an exercise in the workbook
that you can use. And it's going to be
seven counts singing, and then one count breathing in. And then going on
to the next bar. And it keeps moving
higher and higher. You can go and have a
look at that exercise. The AI is very good to
practice on that exercise. The breadths support not so much because you really
want to be able to see your art as
long as you can. So for this one I
would, I would suggest just picking a random up. And I'll just choose any
now it doesn't really matter as long as you
stay on that note, keep it steady and feel
what's happening down here. Alright, so for
the higher notes, you're going to notice
that your breaths report is a lot weaker because high notes
require more air. So what I'm trying to say
is you got to go through it much faster when
you breathe in. I was actually quite low one, but you've probably
noticed that the high once you go through
it a lot faster. So the final tip
for this exercise and most important one, is that you don't
really need to be able to have a very long
art to start with. If you're off, is
finished after 5 s, don't feel bad about that. The point is about
extending and extending and extending it every single
time you do this exercise. So maybe when you put your hands on your diaphragm
and you breathe in, you'll notice that
after one or 2 s already your diaphragm is moving inwards
and you're not able to keep it out much
longer than that. That doesn't matter. You need to focus on
is try to keep it out a little longer every
time you do the exercise, just extend it a little more. So if you're feeling
that struggle, breathing in, if you are ****, it wants to move
inwards, keep it up and hits every single
time you do that, you tried to keep it out
a little bit longer. And you're going to
start training it and you're going to
start improving on that. So don't feel bad if you can only do it for a short while. You're actually
training those muscles every time we do the exercise. And if you do the
exercise many times, then you should notice
improvements quite quickly. Alright, good luck. Let's move on to
the last exercise.
6. Exercise 5 - Combine all Techniques: Alright, it's time to get
into exercise number five, the final exercise
for this course. By the way, if you
have any questions or suggestions or perhaps there are things that are not
clear in my videos. Definitely feel free to
leave a comment or send me a message and I will
try to clarify those. I'm also curious as to which exercises help you the most or which exercises
are still unclear. I'm also curious as to which problems you encounter the most. So feel free to let
me know and perhaps I can take them along in
my next course or do in-depth more specific
cores on one of these specific exercises
or specific areas. Obviously for everyone
it's different. Some people have more troubles
with throat constriction, some people have more
trouble breathing. But I'd like to know what
you're struggling with so I can perhaps focus on
that in my next course. Alright, so exercise
number five is going to be combining a number of
things that we did before. We're going to be
singing a basic melody and we're going to be moving up, up, up, up, up, and then
down, down, down, down, down. So I have a few of
these exercises in various forms I'm going
to be giving you as well. And basically the things
that you need to be focusing on in these
exercises are the same. We're going to be
focusing on pitch, which is the, the vocal cords. Obviously, when
you're moving up, your vocal cords are going to be moving up and moving down. So you want to focus on that. When you're breathing in,
you're going to want to breathe in through
your diaphragm? No, no, no. You're going to want
to be squeezing it out and then you want
to read it again. Alright, so when
you're doing this, you're using your breath. You're breathing
into your diaphragm. You're using your
breath support, you're squeezing it out and overhearing you using
your vocal cords going up, going down. So that's already
quite a few things that you're using
in this exercise. I want you to focus
on all of those. The point is we
need to work here, we need to relax here. We want it to sound good. We want to hear the right pitch. And if you notice that perhaps something is going
wrong over here, perhaps you're tensing up
too much or down here, perhaps she knows your
breathing is way too high. Then you can of
course, go back to one of the previous exercises. And then you can focus
on getting it right over there before you
continue with this one. So for this exercise, I really suggest
that you find the MP3 files that I'm
including in this course. And you can do this
exercise along with those, there's going to be a
piano track on there, and it's easiest to just find your favorite one and
practice that one. Also because we have
different ranges happening. We have male singers,
we have female singers. So there's exercises
are best for that. But to explain how this exercise works and what to focus on, I'm just going to go through
a little part of it. Alright, so you want
to place your hand on your belly and your
diaphragm once again, you want to place one
hand on your chest. And we're just going to
start on a low note. What happens? We're going to do a little,
little melody, none. None. Then we're
going to breathe in and we're gonna
go nana, nana. And we're just going
to move all the way up through the range. And then we can move all
the way back down again. So the focus points
I already explained, we are going to be
breathing down here. We're going to be flexible
in a relaxed up here. Alright, let's begin. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, no. No. That was all the way up. You can hear me going
into my head voice, not going to go off to the side. I'm going to go back down and you can see what's
happening over here. No, no. No. No, no, no, no. No. No, no, no. No. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. No. No, no, no, no, no. None. None. None. And that
little stairway all the way up wasn't
perfect because obviously I'm doing it
without any instruments. But hopefully you could
sing along quite well. Like I said with the exercise, you're going to have lovely, lovely, regular step going all the way up and all
the way back down.
7. Conclusion: As mentioned in
the introduction, you're going to be developing a solid focal routine to improve your technique and
to strengthen your ability. For the next five days. I would like you to try to
do a 30-minute vocal workout every day and to see how you're doing after
these five days. So if you have a very busy week, if you don't have that
much time to practice, then definitely don't
pressure yourself. You can Ethan spread
it out over two weeks, but just try and
get a little bit of consistency in there. And then you will
actually notice your body changing
and things becoming easier if you do a vocal workout and then two weeks later you
do another one, we're not going to notice
a lot of improvement. Kind of compare it to
working out at the gym. I always say this to my
singing students as well, especially those that come
once every two weeks, you need to practice
at home to start actually discovering what
works inside of your body, to start feeling which muscles
are working and to start kind of training them and teaching them how they
should be working. So my advice would be to do it a little bit every
day for a week. Or perhaps you can
do three days a week and exercise
routine of 30 min. What I would recommend
that you start with these five exercises. Start with the breathing, then with the yells. Then we've got our sirens, we've got our R, and then
we've gotten melody. And after doing these exercises, I definitely recommend using. So choose a song
that to two, well, that suits your range, that you feel
comfortable singing, that you enjoy
singing and try to feel how you sing the song. So how is your breathing
when you sing the song? How does your throat feel? Are you moving up to the note said you should be moving up to try and translate the
exercises into the store. And then you should also
be able to notice that if you're struggling with
something in the exercise, you're probably going
to be struggling with the same thing in the song. If you're mastering
something in the exercises, if your breathing is going
much better in the exercise, that eventually it should actually go better
in the song as well. Please remember that singing a song is a lot more complex. You've got lyrics,
you've got melody, you've got high
notes, you've got speed, you've got rhythm. So you've got a lot
more to think about. So often when you've mastered
something in the exercise, it can still be difficult
to master and install, but improving your singing
in the exercise and learning the technique is definitely the way to improving
in the singing. But to keep it fun and also to notice how you can translate
the exercise into the song. I definitely
recommend that every time we do the workout routine, you start singing a song. You can choose to save time. You can do it for a
few different days. You can also switch
off the songs. Alright, that's your homework. Please let me know how you go. I hope that these exercises
have been helpful for you. Also let me know if there's anything that you would like to know that I did not
mention in these videos. And then I'll be sure to add
it into the next course. My name is Alexia. You are raising
star vocal coach, and I hope to see
you in the next one. Bye bye.
Ilithya DeBruin
