Sing Better Instantly!

1. HELLO B-E-A-U-TIFUL PEOPLE: Hello b-e-a-u-tiful people, and welcome to my Skillshare course. My name is Maggie Reneé, and I am a Juilliard-trained opera singer, as well as a YouTuber, vocal coach, and entertainer. I'm so excited to bring you this course on how to sing better instantly. I've had over 10 years of experience in this field singing professionally on stages all over the world, which I've been so grateful for. Now I am thrilled to share with you what my best discoveries have been of the best ways to sing better instantly. Not only am I creating this course so that you can enhance your knowledge of performance and vocal technique, but also, this is for you to find confidence so that you can perform the music that you love so much with more strength, more knowledge, and a better foundation. I want you to go up on that stage and rock it. You know what I mean? If you know these tips, I feel like you'll come up to the challenge much better because you're going to walk around and be like, "Oh my God, I know how to do this. I know Maggie's tips, which means I'm already good." Just kidding. But hopefully, having these tips in your back pocket as things that you know will definitely give you more confidence on how to come out on that stage and really give your best performance knowing that you have something to back yourself up and be like, "I know this is a thing." In this class, I'm hoping to cover warm-ups, posture and breathing, matching pitch in case you didn't get that, vocal registers such as chest, head, mix, and even whistle tone. Also vibrato, and performance confidence. I've gotten a lot of comments on my videos when my viewers have watched my reactions to artists like Dimash, Pentatonix, Sohyang, Morrisette, Marcelito Pomoy, Home Free, and many others asking, how the heck do they do that? The answer is, a lot of hard work and training. But in addition to a lot of hard work, they also have a really great sense of the foundational things that allow you to sing much better, and so I'm hoping that these things that I teach you today will help you to sing better instantly so that you can hear a difference and really get on with your practicing to make sure that you're singing your very best on stage. I really hope you enjoy this course, and let's get into it so that you can sing better instantly. 2. Breath Control: The first thing that I want to talk to you about before we get started with our warm-ups is breathing. Breathing is the most essential part to singing, because without breathing you wouldn't be able to sing. When you're breathing for singing, you want to make sure that you have a very relaxed position so that you can take in the most amount of air and maintain the airflow as it's coming out so that you can last longer and more consistently. For example, when I breathe, I don't breathe like. Because it seems like a big breath. But honestly what I just did is, I raised my entire larynx here. I feel very uncomfortable, my shoulders and my chest is raised. My neck is tensed in the back, and if you start singing. The air didn't actually help at all from my lungs. Also, if I breathe in too low, generally I have good support. But if I was to do a long phrase with that, this is not going to be enough air down here to fill up entirely. So what you want to focus on is this midsection right here. This is where all of your breathing should be happening so that you don't raise up too high, and so that you don't lack in the amount of air that you take in. If you look, these are muscles that you can build up and it's all the way around. Even in your back muscles you can fill up air and try to work to keep this going so that you have better support. What I'd like to do, is I'd like to take my hands and place them on this area of my back so that way want to take a deep breath in. I can feel that expansion right throughout this back area. Then also from the front, I can feel it all around in my rib cage. The more that I keep this expanded and have my muscles working to keep it out, the less breath I have to let out in the long-run and the longer I can last in general. Additionally, this helps with singing posture because you're sitting in a much more supported way, as long as you're keeping your shoulders very loose and your chest down but not collapsed. You don't want to collapse your chest either because that also loses a lot of the breath support that you might have. You keep this very even but not tense, in a very relaxed manner. Pretend you're being a very proper person and you're just, like a ballerina. A ballerina has her arms open and she has them sitting, but she also has this area relaxed. That's basically what we're looking for. A great exercise to try with all of this in mind is called the hissing S exercise. Basically how you do this, is that you would fill up your body with air and then you would release on an S for as long as you can. My challenge to you is to time yourself for as long as you can go. Every single day practice this for a week and watch as you see yourself improve, see the time get longer. Ready? I could keep going, but I think you get the point. Basically, you take a timer and you keep timing yourself until you get to the end of your breath, and once you do you restart the timer for the next day and you try again and see how much further you can get. Always keeping in mind that you should be releasing the tension, you should be keeping yourself in an elevated position with this area expanding in a very strong way. These are the muscles you should be developing. If you need to do a couple of sit-ups to be able to fill these muscles in here make sure that you're really getting them. That's a really great way to be able to identify where you're supposed to be keeping yourself strong. Another great exercise for breathing is the panting exercise which is basically exactly what it sounds like, panting like a dog. Now, you want to be able to do this very consistently and without too many fluctuations. If you're breathing too heavily or too lightly, you might get lightheaded. You might have inconsistency with your breath, you might go. That kind of stuff. You want to make sure that you're using this area right here so that the muscles are prompting the breath rather than through the chest. You want them to be coming from. If you're having trouble with this, maybe think of a /h/. So the H is coming through clearly and not /ha/, if that makes sense. Another great exercise to try is a finger in front of your mouth like this and then blowing lightly for as long as you can, and keeping that going in a very consistent way. This way, you're building up a very nice knowledge of how much breath you're letting out at one time. If you feel your finger being blown on too hard, you're not controlling your breath enough and you're letting too much escape, which means that you might have too much space. You might not be keeping your muscles engaged enough, and they're just letting you fall out. You're getting breathless and airy, or if you're not filling enough air then you might be constricting in some way. You could have some tension, you could be blowing with your lips just a little bit too close. Be sure to try this exercise out to see if your breathing is consistent, and if you're wavering at all or if you've got a very steady breath flow. 3. Vocal Health: Warm-ups. Yes. I know it's a pain in the butt. Some of us think of warm-ups as the chores before the fun. But I'm telling you now, warm-ups are the key to almost every single problem that you might be experiencing. Is your jaw tight? Warm-ups. Are you having trouble hitting the high notes? Warm-ups. Are you having issues where you run out of breath at the end of a phrase? Warm-ups. Do you have moments where you feel really tense in your throat or in your shoulders or anywhere else on your body? Warm ups. Finally, after you've been singing for long periods of time, do you feel tired? Do you have any vocal fatigue? Do you want to collapse after the end of it? If you said yes to any of these or all of these, then warm-ups are your key to starting to improve. The reason why I think warm-ups are so important is because when you start doing your warm-ups, you don't feel a sense of, oh, I have to perform in this moment. You don't have any words usually behind it or any emotion that you really need to give. You don't have the urge to lift your shoulders, for example, or to over sing, to sing out, to give too much because you're just singing on regular vowels. Sometimes you have hissing exercises, breathing exercises. These are things that we know are building the foundation and the structure of our voices and our breathing mechanisms. Warm-ups are basically like a little massage for the inner muscles of your larynx and your vocal chords so that you don't end up hurting them after singing for too long. You end up stretching your vocal cords, reducing the risk of hurting yourself, and allowing all of these muscles to release and all of the muscles of your body as well. You end up engaging a lot more of your body to be able to efficiently sing in a really great way. All of the struggles that I mentioned above can be helped with many different kinds of warm-ups. The more you practice, the better you get. Trust me guys, I've been doing warm-ups for forever. You got to do them. The more you practice, the more you warm up, the better you get. Even just working on the way that you breathe and the length of time that you can breathe, fixes a performance immensely. Why don't we get into a couple of examples of exercises that you can use to improve? 4. Warmups: The first exercise that I think is super important and a great one to start off with, especially if you're just warming up is a lip trill. A lip trill is basically when you take your lips and make it sounds like a horse ready. Silly, I know, but very effective. If you have trouble making this sound with your mouth, then please feel free to take your hand and put your fingers on the outer corners of your mouth so that you can have an easier time. This helps because you push in the corners of your mouth to make your lips push forward a little and then you can go. If you're having trouble with even this, then it might be something with your breath and you would want to sit up just a little bit straighter, make sure you're getting a great breath within your diaphragm, which we'll talk about shortly and make sure that you're getting everything all settled in for this sound to come out. Once you've got that taken care of, then feel free to add in some sound. So pick a note. I like to start on doe usually, that's a C4. Now, if for that note you are fluctuating a ton or falling on and off like or that kind of stuff, the struggle is real, I feel you. Then feel free to try and adjust the way that you're doing it. Make sure you're releasing all the various tension that could be going on. Try to tense up your shoulders and release, and tense up again and release. That should help you relieve a little bit of the pressure that you're putting on there. This should not be hard at all. You shouldn't be going. I probably looked very silly doing this. But it's a very, very easy process that should be very light. You should only be releasing a little bit of breath so that you are able to control it for longer. This exercise really allows you to build up that breath stamina, allowing you to breath for longer in a much more controlled way so that you're not having no fluctuations while you're singing, so that you're not falling off of pitches and so that you have a lot more stamina for those high notes as well. Let's try that again. Did you get that? Great, now let's go higher. This is a D or a ray in Seoul fish. That's an E, or a me, far or F, G, A, B, and C5, which is the octave up. You've officially sang all those nodes of that octave with a lip trill, that should allow you to get rid of a lot of the tension. If you're still having trouble try to release again, try to let yourself just loosen up. Think as loose as you can, loosey-goosey, loosey-goosey and not too much breath pressure, that's the whole point of this. A lot of people will like to sing and they'll just let all their breath flow, and they push and they try to get all their sound out. But that's not necessary for this. In this exercise, we're trying to manage how much air flows out of us so that we can keep control over it and manage it for longer, and also in a more consistent way so that it's not just falling all over the place. It's really important for a lot of songs. For example, in one of my songs I have a phrase that goes, if I lose my breath control there, then I could go. If I'm releasing too much. If I'm wavering I could go, and it causes pitch problems. Of course I'm being overly dramatic with it, but breathing is really important in keeping that sense of support and consistency throughout the phrase, especially when you're singing longer phrases. It's really important, even on something as simple as an O on a note for long period of time. Watch, right? Can you do that? If you can do that with a lot of consistency and the steady vibrato, then you're doing great, you're on the right track. But if you feel like your vibrato is going over the place, if you don't have a vibrato yet, we'll talk about that soon too. Or if you're having trouble maintaining the pitch or you see yourself going sharp or flat, those are all indications of improper use of breath. Those are some ways that you can fix it. Let's look at a longer warm-up. These are just three notes. Not too hard, right? Let's try that. If you can't do the lip trills yet, feel free to just do it on a vowel, one that you find comfortable. That's a great initial exercise. In addition, you can use that same exercise to work on your legato. For this one, I was being a little bit steppy, going up and down on each note. But you can also work on this by using each note to glide through like this versus. Do you hear the difference? That's two exercises in one. Another great exercise for legato is the I E A O U exercise. You start off with an I and go through the vowels very carefully, and in a very straight and connected way. Let's say we start on an A, keeping all those values in the same place without letting the tongue fall back and going, E, A, I, O, U. You don't want any of that, and you also don't want them to be too small or too nasal, because that's also not the sound we're looking for. You want it somewhere in the middle where your tongue is resting gently with the tip of your tongue behind the front bottom teeth right here, see that? Like that. Then your back sides of your tongue touching the top molars. Picture a little slide, where at the top of it you can set a little thing, and it'll slide down. Then if you're singing that again, watch your tongue, this doesn't mean that your tongue can't move, it just means that you want to be keeping it in a similar position so that it's not going or changing too much. The goal of singing is to keep things as flowy and connected as possible, so that your voice sounds like one beautiful voice throughout and will allow you to play with all of the various colors that your voice has after the technique has been settled in the base of your voice. I once heard it described as a Christmas tree where you have the tree and you grow it, and it has all the beautiful leaves and everything and then you add the ornaments on top. But without beautiful tree branches and without a stable base, the tree is just going to fall apart. That's why it's really important to build up the technique so that you can add all the fancy things that you want to add on to it later. A couple other exercises you can try are scales, and up, and up, and up, and continue that on, all the way up. On whatever vowels you choose or on whatever notes that you choose, and you just go up as high as you can in your range and as low as you can in your range without hurting yourself. Don't go too high, don't go too low until you know that the notes that you have steadily are very stable and are very comfortable without any tension, without feeling any fatigue. Once you feel like you're screaming or once you feel like you're falling into the bottom of your throat, that's the time where you say, "Okay, this is where I'm at now," and you'll make it further next time. You really don't want to hurt your voice. Your voice is the most important part to all of this. Without your voice, there is no singing. If you feel like you've mastered these exercises, then feel free to move on to more complicated exercises such as, and then up, and continuing on over the scale. 5. Matching Pitch: After you've found your posture which is sitting on the edge of your chair with your feet flat on the floor and your rib cage up and supported with your back straight and not raise tension shoulders but relaxed shoulders, and you've worked on your breathing and warmed up, don't forget to warm up, now is the time to move on to other practice methods like matching pitch, being able to match pitch and stay on pitch while not fluctuating and not going flatter sharp is very important when you're trying to sing. For example, if I sing, Mary Had a Little Lamb. Mary had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb. If I sing it out of tune, Mary had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb. You can automatically see the song is no longer the song. It's really important to maintain pitch and obviously again, I was over exaggerating, but a lot of the times that does happen. When we lose control of our breathing and when we stop listening carefully to the sounds we're producing, oftentimes, we'll end up losing pitch at the ends of phrases. When we run out of breath a little bit more, we will end up changing keys sometimes, especially when we're singing acapella, which is why I recommend singing with the backing track when you can. It's also the reason why songs don't sound the way we want them to. If you're listening to a recording, the chances are is you're voice probably sounds great, even though it might sound bad to you, but it's not because it's your voice that's having the problem, it's because the pitch might be out of tune with what you're trying to do. Therefore, we have practice methods of matching pitch. The first thing I can recommend is getting a free piano app on your electronic device. If you have a phone or if you have an iPad or any kind of tablet, that will work. Even on the computer or whatever device you're watching this on. It's any kind of free app. If you're on a computer, you can look up free piano app and it'll open something up for you. Then all you do is you press any note. Let's say this is an A4, and you match the pitch, or D4, or B-flat 3. You want to make sure you're doing that. Now, if you're struggling with that, you need to listen to which direction you need to go to. Let's say we press an F sharp 4. This sounds like a middle tone. It's nothing too low. It's not here, and it's not here. You don't have to go anywhere there, it's a middle pitch. The way that you think is okay, I need not go too high, not go too low. You'll pick a pitch, whatever you can think of that as close as you can to this pitch. If you listen really carefully, you might be able to adjust in order to find the correct pitch that you're playing. No, that's even further. You might be able to hear that you're further away, so then, you would go in the other direction. Then you've found your pitch and you can try to match it again. So you press it again, stop singing, and then listen for a second. After hitting it three times, you can move on to the next note. This allows you to train your ear to find this pitch, and this also trains your vocal positioning to know what that feels like in that pitch range of how to find it and how it feels when you get to the right pitch. Then let's say you try another note, something lower. Let's say you do a G3. You know it's low. It's not something up here. It's not there, and it's not in the middle either. It's quite low, down there. You start from a little bit higher, and for the most part, you should be able to hear it as long as you're listening carefully, you really have to listen, then you should be able to feel it. Then once you hear that, then what you can do is you can play the note, and sing it back. There you go. Same thing for a high note, and any other note that you're trying to find. That's the first method I would give to training yourself to being able to recognize pitch and feel where it's supposed to lie in your voice. Then another thing I've recently discovered is something called Nail the Pitch. Nail the Pitch is yet another app that will tell you where your pitch lies when you're singing it. When you sing, you can see the keys on the side of the screen right there. You can see, it goes in here from B1 to E4, and I think you can shift it. If I sing higher, you see it scrolls up and it allows you to see it higher. In this case, if you're trying to find a specific note, you can use your device to play a piano note that you want to find. You can test if you're singing the correct notes simply by singing something and seeing if you're matching the pitch. Let's say you want to sing a D4, and it'll show you all of your fluctuations. Do you see that? I was on it and then I went down a little bit, and then I went back up because I noticed I was going down. It shows you all of the really cool things that you do with your voice, which is nice. Then if you'd like to combine this with the piano app, then you can try to figure out how to match pitch this way and see what direction you're going in, in case you don't realize if you're going lower or higher. For example, let's say we want to hit an E4. Let's say I sing a pitch that isn't the E4. This tells me that it's actually not in the right place, it's a G-flat 3. So I know that I'm lower than the E4, so then I go up higher. Here, I'm actually at a D4, which is still not the E4, but it's much closer. I know that I have to go up just a little bit more, and you see, now I'm matching the pitch. I hear it on the piano. I can hear myself matching to it. I knew where to go from it, from those pitch recognitions in the app. Basically, when you combine it together, you can figure it out fairly easily which direction you're going and why you're sinking too low or too high, and then fix it to match exactly what you're hearing. Then after you do that, I want you to go back again and feel it each time. Match that pitch again and make sure you're watching the pitch recognizer so that you're making sure that you're still hitting the same note each time. There you have it. This kind of work will 100 percent help you find your pitch range much better and will definitely help you train your ear to be able to recognize things faster and your position to be able to find it better and feel comfortable in knowing that it's in the right place. 6. Vocal Registers: The next thing that I want to talk to you about, are vocal registers. We're going to keep it simple and just talk about the chest, head, and mix registers today. There are other vocal techniques that you can use such as vocal fry, growling, and even subharmonics in order to access other ranges in your voice. However, we're going to focus on the main ones that people are usually using. The first vocal register I'd like to talk about is chest voice. Chest voice is the feeling, it's not necessarily that you've got anything happening in your chest, but it's just the strongest voice that you feel, it's where you're in your core, and it's almost like speaking. When I speak, I'm speaking in a chest resonance. If I speak a little bit broader, I am speaking in my chest resonance, do you hear that? Chest. That's my chest resonance, and it's basically very similar to the speaking voice. If I lower my speaking voice here, chest, then that's also in the same range. I would say that that is the best way to find your chest range and be able to practice. If you go from speaking to chesting, chest, or chest, then that's the best way to hear it. Also, feel you're not having to fluctuate between the notes. Because if you think of singing immediately, you might end up flipping into head voice, and having something like, chest, and that's not chesting because you have too much breathiness because you're trying to sing, and so you're opening your soft palate too much and then a lot of air is escaping and you get the point. The next vocal register I'd love to talk about is head voice. My favorite way of accessing this is thinking of an owl. I do something called the owl exercise, which is basically hooting. You don't want to push on this because it's not like, we're not doing any of that. It's a very, light sound. It should be so easy to do. Letting everything relax and my, I had a teacher once called it the Mickey Mouse exercise and she made me do things like, and then for mix, it would just be stronger. We'll talk about mix in a second. The furthest hooting exercise, if you do that, if you do a hooting exercise and then hold out the note for a long period of time, that's your head voice. Then you can practice moving it up and down slowly. That sort of thing. Then when you get comfortable with that and you feel like you've found the correct position, then you can change the vowel. This is a very light head voice here, and it's not pushed, I'm not releasing too much air. I'm using all of my support that I taught in the breathing exercises lesson, and now we're just applying it to this exercise so that you have the maximum ability to keep consistency and even flow throughout the note. Following the head voice, I like to explore the mixed voice. Now, this is a combination of the chest and the mix basically, but in a very smooth way, you bring up a portion of your chest to bring the meat to the sound, and then you bring down the head so that it's not overly screamed, so that's the mix. A lot of people use this in order to blend their ranges and make their voices sound seamless. For example, Dimash even uses this so that he can go between his registers, from his mixed register to his head register and into his chest register much easier. He also uses a technique called a snarl, which allows him to bring it much more far forward. It's not really that dramatic, but you get the idea. It's brought much more forward into the mask so that you're avoiding a lot of what you would normally do if you were to be transitioning from, it would be a vocal crack. But in this case, you're switching over just by using that vocal snarl type of position. In this case, for the mix, I like to think of the hooting sound, but made much smaller and focused a lot more. I bring a lot more of my sound forward this way. It's no longer as much of a, but it's more of a, do you hear the difference? If you want to use the hooting exercise to get into your mixed voice, you could potentially go, and that's already in your mix. You might bring in different colors, you might want to add more of the chest and more of the head, it depends on what you're trying to accomplish, but that's basically the beginning is narrowing that vowel and getting that sound into the correct forward position. Another exercise that you can use in order to switch off between the registers is something that sounds like, which is basically me staying on the same exact note, but while I'm doing that, I'm using chest and then head on the same note. Eventually, when you want to glide between the two, that gives you the opportunity with two different notes. That gives you more control so that you have that little bridge built and trust me, it takes time. But once you build that feeling of switching between chest and head, it gives you that unmatched capability of being able to try to go into that second range. If you crack or have any kinds of issues, don't worry about it. As long as you're not feeling any pain or tension, you should be totally fine. As you're learning, your voice will do weird things, mine still does weird things all the time. Just be comfortable with it and do it at your own pace so that you feel really solid in what you're accomplishing as you go through it. 7. Vibrato: The next topic I'd like to talk about is vibrato. I know that a lot of people have struggles with vibrato. Some people have their Vibrato too fast, some people have their vibrato too slow, and some people have no vibrato at all. I've had knowledge of the vibrato since I was young, so I had to actually go and try to do some research on people who don't know how to do vibrato, in order to figure this exercise out. If you don't know how to do vibrato, the first thing that you want to do, is you want to sing a straight tone note, like a regular note, so pick any note. You hear there's no vibrato in there. Now, here's the kicker. Take your hands like this, almost like you're a cheerleader, and then as you're singing the straight note, do you hear the little fluctuations in my voice that sounds like a vibrato? I know it doesn't sound perfect, but when you don't have a vibrato it's typically because your ear, and your brain, and your body, don't recognize it as a possibility. With this kind of an exercise, you can hear it in your ear, you can feel yourself already doing this. This releases the tension in your neck and in all of your body, so that you can just feel like it's loosening up, and it gives you that opportunity to have resonance flowing through you, and in addition you just finally let yourself go, because you're doing something silly anyway, so you're not worrying about the straight note. Why don't you try that with me? Let's pick any note. Let's pick E4. So we sing the straight note, and then start in a rhythmic slow pattern. That should give you the access to your vibrato, or at least starting it, and that as you get better and better, you can shake, and then stop to let yourself continue without it, because you'll already be in the placement, and you might get scared. It might stop. Don't worry about it. It's okay to get scared. But if you continue practicing, especially if nobody's watching. If nobody's watching, who cares, just do you. You just take your hands, and you do it over and over again until you have that sensation of, "Oh wow, this feels comfortable. This isn't weird. I can feel it," and then just let yourself stop and see if you can continue. The more you practice this, the more easy it will get. This works higher as well. Let's try a D5. Now, it may not be even right away, even I was just fluctuating just a tiny bit because it's interesting to go from there. But we're looking for the sensation. We're looking for the feeling that, "Oh, this is possible," and then the more you do that, the more you realize how to get there by yourself, and then you won't need the shaking anymore, and you'll just automatically be able to go up even from your straight tone, and switch off between the two. Now, of course, this is a little bit more advanced, but eventually, it might help you get there. 8. Performing With Confidence: This last topic that I'd like to talk to you about is very important, and the topic is performance confidence. When you go up on a stage, it's so important to feel like you're going up there because you love what you're doing. If you're going up there because someone's making you go up on the stage, if you're going up there because so-and-so told you you have a great voice, but you don't like it, you're not going to perform well. You have to go up there because you're excited about what you're going to sing, you're excited about who's going to hear you, you're excited about just being up there and seeing people, and you can totally be nervous, this isn't a question of having stage fright. Of course, we all get nervous, I still get nervous a lot, especially when I have a really important performance coming up, oh my gosh. Your girl's backstage like oh mama, oh my god. But you get up there and you do it. I do it because I love it, I go up there, the lights shine, I hear the audience, I see their faces, and if I give a good performance, I bring them joy. That's my favorite thing in the world. A lot of you know this already about me. When I go up on stage I have the sole mission of bringing as many people in the audience joy as possible. I even do this in auditions guys, when I go into an audition room, I don't think of them as a panel. I wrote a blog about this at some point, but when I go and I audition anywhere, I'm not thinking, "Oh my gosh, I hope that they like my voice, oh my gosh, I hope I don't mess this note up." I'm thinking, I hope that I can bring them the joy and let them see what it feels like to just have music lift them up and bring them happiness in their lives. They're sitting there, they want you to succeed. If you're going in for an audition, they're not sitting there like, "Oh my goodness, I hope she fails. Oh, how terrible." That's not what they're doing. They're in there trying to find singers, they want you to do well, they're looking for you. They're like, "Oh my gosh, yes, you can do this. Hit that note. Do that thing, make it happen. Stage act, do all your stuff. Do it and have fun with it." They want you to have fun with it. Of course, it's difficult in an audition room because you're literally being judged. But who cares? Put caution to the wind. I have to remind myself so often that we literally only live once, and because of this, it's so important to know that whatever happens, it doesn't matter. If worse comes to worse, you could forget the word, you leave the room and never see them again. Or you could crack on a note, move to China, change your name, get a new family, get a new identity, and then you're good again. There are so many possibilities, guys, so many possibilities. My point is, is that it's not the end of the world if you mess up or have something happen during an audition. The important thing is that you don't go in there scared to begin with, because if you do, then you're going to sit there stiff like, "Oh my god, okay. [inaudible]." You don't want to do that. You want to come in there, you want to breathe, you want to find your center, and you want to just be like, here it is. [inaudible] Does not make sense? I hope that makes sense because it's so important, so many people go into audition rooms and on stages, and just even in front of their friends and they feel like, "Oh my gosh, if I mess up, that's the end of me." No, guys. I've messed up so many times on stage, the amount that you get that perfect performance, guys, that's it. That's the amount you get a perfect performance. You can have a great performance, you could have an excellent, amazing, spectacular, the best performance of your entire life but perfection, why do we need it? Nobody's looking for perfection, you're a human. If you were a robot, yeah, okay we're looking for a robot to work properly, but we're humans. We're there to bring them emotion. We're there to show our imperfections and celebrate them. At least that's how I see it. When I see somebody take a risk on stage and mess up just a little bit, or even a lot bit, I'm still proud to say that, "Wow, they really did that and someday they're going to get that, or maybe they already have that it's just today was an off day." That's what I think and I'm a professional singer. I'm never sitting there like, "Did you hear that, that was dreadful. Oh my goodness." That's not me. That's not most people. Some people maybe they'll say that, but then you're not going to be friends with them anyway, you don't need that negativity in your life. My point is, performance confidence is so important. You just have to think of yourself as the person bringing the joy, the person who's going to show the audience, their friends, the judges, anybody in the world, just the things that they love. That's the most important thing. When I sing songs, it's usually repertoire that I love and stuff that I believe in. Therefore, I'm pretty confident in it. A couple of techniques that you can use to practice confidence is something called power stance. That's where you stand with your legs spread apart and you have your hands on your hips, almost like Superman, and stand there. Another way of practicing confidence is thinking as you're walking out on stage, "I have a little secret, and none of them know about it." Then you walk out and you're like, "I guess you'll never know." That's a great way to practice confidence because if you think of something really great that nobody else knows, you have the power in that room. You have the power in that situation because nobody else knows, nobody else has that except you. It could be as simple as thinking of them all naked in the audience or something as simple as, "I'm getting McDonald's after this and you're not so." There are so many ways to practice confidence, you can write great things about yourself in your journal. You can ask your friends to send you things that they love about you. You can ask somebody to come to your performance or listen to you and tell you all the things that they loved about it. Not only that, not only the external validation forms of confidence, you can also find it in yourself by working on things that are achievable, goals that you might have, things that you might want to do, and really go after them. That's all that matters. If you go after the things that you want and accomplish them, who wouldn't be confident after that? The only way we find lack in confidence is when we don't try, because when we don't try, we don't even have a chance to succeed and then we just sit there like, "I wish I could, but I can't and so I'm not going to." That's the lack of confidence because I promise as soon as you try, that in and of itself is already a success, and that immediately boosts your confidence and then you're already in the game. The important thing is to start. I hope that you'll take these exercises and really work them through. I hope that you'll take these tips and really work on becoming a better singer instantly because it will make you a better singer instantly. All of these tips from the warm-ups to the breathing exercises, to the posture, to matching pitch vibrato, and all of these things, all the things that you might think, "This is imperfect. I wish I could fix this. I wonder how I can do this." All of these things will lead you to becoming a better singer and becoming more confident and allowing you to get up, sing, and show your favorite thing in the world to everyone. 9. YOU ARE AMAZING!!: There we have it. You are a B-E-A-utiful person and you made it through. These are such helpful ways for you to become a better singer instantly and I hope you can hear the difference already. I would love to hear from you if you do, because I want to know what I can help you with next. I just want to close out this lesson by telling you how amazing it is that you even came to this course. The fact that you clicked on, that you took the chance to take the time and improve, shows that you have what it takes. That's all you need is to make that effort, take that shot, do the thing, go out there and sing your little tush off, and really show everybody that you have what it takes. You have a beautiful voice, you have an amazing potential, and there's no reason why you shouldn't give it a try. Not only that, but now these singing tips should really help you back up what you have to say. When people ask you how you sing or what you do or why you think you should be singing, you can tell them these things. You can tell them, I have a gift, I have something that I want to give to people so that I can bring them joy. It's a really important skill to have and I was so happy that I can share this knowledge with you. I hope you'll take the opportunity to submit your course projects for this class and show me what you've got and show the rest of the world what you've got. I believe in you, so you should believe in you too. Sending you all so much love and I will see you in the next class. Bye.