Singer

Welcome to part two of our blog series on vocal technique. Today, we’re focusing on the breathing cycle. Controlling your breathing while you sing is absolutely essential, and proper breath support is a huge part of it. Read on and learn more!

Throughout the centuries, various different techniques have developed to help boost the volume and character of the human singing voice. But the technique that best fits your voice depends on the kind of sound you prefer. In the first edition of this blog series about vocal techniques, we dip into the history of singing.

The third edition of our blog series on vocal technique focuses on how to make your vocals flow. By maintaining dynamic breath support, your melodies and lyrics can sound flowing and open. Another important factor of this technique is ‘blending’, which has a lot to do with enunciation. Master blending and harness your breath support, and your vocals will flow like never before.

Proper posture is incredibly important when you’re singing. In fact, aligning your body correctly is a basic requirement for singing well and freely. So what’s the right posture? And what do you do when you want to move around or play an instrument while you sing?

While there’s nothing wrong with singing lines from a piece of paper or a tablet, there’s a lot to be said for singing the lyrics off the top of your head, especially since memorising the words is not as hard as you might think. It’s just a matter of knowing the right tricks and putting in the hours.

Pop music would be unthinkable without vocals coating in at least some effects. In fact, pretty much any recorded music – vocals included – will come packed with effects these days. If you’re a vocalist and want your voice to sound more up-to-date and want to be able to really slice through the sound of the rest of the band, then vocal effects are a must. In this blog, we take a look at the mass of options available to the modern vocalist – from the common compressor, equaliser and reverb to special effects like tremolos, distortions and harmonizers. Try something new and give your live and recorded vocals some proper impact.

Scientists are discovering more and more about how the human brain works, and if you’re a musician that ever-increasing knowledge can be put to good use. Using vocalists for our little case study, in this blog, we’ll focus on ways musicians can use the power of repetition to reach the next level in their development.

Performing out in the open can be challenging when it’s windy. Not only can wind literally carry the sound of the band in the wrong direction and make it harder to hear, but a light gust can easily send your sheet music flying. Luckily, there are a few simple solutions to tackle the latter, no matter what kind of music stand you use.

The shorter the distance between the source and the microphone, the more low frequencies are registered at the cost of high frequencies. This is what’s known as the proximity effect, and it applies to a lot of microphones. In practice, this usually means that the closer you close-mike your voice or instrument, the fuller it’ll sound. Read on and learn how to take advantage of it.

A ‘loop’ is what happens when you take a short (or long) snippet of music and repeat it again and again – on a loop. So, you can take a drum or guitar part and loop it. You can even sing a line and loop it. In fact, using a looper; as long as you can record it in, you can loop it. And, you can not only loop snippets of music, but record and stack endless ‘overdubs’ over the top. In this blog, we’ll take a look at the history of the loop pedal and find out exactly what you can (and can’t) do with these magic boxes.

How different can singing jazz be from singing pop? The answer is: very different. Get your average pop singer to take on a jazz standard and it just won’t be jazz any more. Jazz singing demands an entirely different sense of timing, rhythm, phrasing and an entirely different attitude, and there’s one final essential ingredient: improvisation. In this blog, we tackle the techniques that make jazz singing possible.

While there’s plenty to learn when it comes to singing alone there’s just as much to learn when you start adding more voices to create harmonies. With just one extra voice, you can already sing awesome harmonies, so just imagine what happens when you start adding even more!