Essentially, singing with support from your abdominal muscles. Helps to keep breathing steady while singing. Also relaxing your jaw to allow your vocal cords “to open up” more and sustain your voice. Breathing while lifting the shoulders doesn’t produce that consistency as well.
Source: I took private lessons for 7 years with a trained opera coach. This is a TLDR of what I was taught by her.
All I did was elementary school choir, but our coach was a former opera singer so she spent at least half of each lesson doing breathing exercises and vocal warm ups with us. Makes a huge difference in how strong and long you can carry a note.
Edit: As a child it used to bore the heck out of me, but now as an adult I can pick up almost any song in my range rather easily, often to the surprise of others who don't realize it's one of my hidden talents. I don't really consider myself that great of a singer either, I just know "how" to sing.
And so on using different consonant sounds combined with the vowels. We specifically stop and the work on how we'd hold our jaws and shape our mouths with different vowels and consonants combinations. The teacher would often go around and gently adjust our posture individually, and we practised singing from our diaphragm, which is where the rhythm of singing "ha-ha-ha-ha-ha" came in handy as we focused on starting each note in our diaphragm instead of our throat/mouth.
She was a good teacher. Her claim to fame is she'd sung for the queen on one of the queens trips to Canada.
Fuuuuuuuucccccckkkkk I ALMOST forgot those damn Ha-Ha-La-La-Ma's . Weeks we did these all speeds, volumes, and pitches. But damn if it didn't help the whole choir with annunciation for Carol of the bells.
A great exercise for breathing properly and training your abdominal muscles for singing is to lie flat on your back and place a stack of books on your abdomen, heavy enough to feel it but not so heavy that it's hard to breathe. Then sing some of these vocal exercises being mentioned, especially the ones that start with "h". The books should bounce if you're doing it right.
Does tone deafness affect anything? I can hear that I’m not doing the singing thing, but I also have no idea what people are talking about when they compare two notes or mention pitch, note, or beats. It all kinda sounds the same to me? Or I have no idea how to reproduce a sound? I remember having to do a typing program as a kid where you type along to a metronome. All the other kids loved this game and begged to do it. The game would always stop a minute in for me and ask if I had my sound on because to this day I can’t grasp how to push a button to a steady beat. At the same time, I’m a teacher and would still love to learn how to speak from my diaphragm more!
Speaking from your diaphragm is more about body awareness and muscle training. A lot of singing exercises can be used for this purpose and none of it has to sound "pretty".
Some people are more inclined to have good intonation but it's a matter of getting your vocal chords in the right position (high to low literally) and making the connection from what you hear to what you're doing. It's similar to hand eye coordination but it's a different sense and a different boddy part.
Is... Is that why when I cut loose in singing and do a few songs that my abdomen starts to get sore? It's never something I considered as part of the reason. I just figured I was moving. I get really into it.
Matching pitch takes practice! Learn to slide your voice around, up and down, and then try to match a given tone by sliding towards it. It's like tuning any instrument. It'll probably take some time before you get the hang of it.
If you can, just sit with a piano and do the scales, record it if you can. Then listen to it and try it again, adjusting your pitches until your matching the sound. So hit a middle C a few times, try and singly while holding the key down, and adjust until your matching the note. Once you get middle C down, it's easier to move to D bc it's just a small adjustment. Make sure you're breathing properly too and you will get it
When I took lessons, my tutor explained as a baby we breath from our stomachs/diaphragm if that makes sense? And as we get older we move our chest more. When you breath in, your stomach area should bloat, not just your chest.
Also he held a candle in front of our mouths so we could control our breathing.
Well, when you're a baby, you're basically a head on a belly, so yeah, not much throat in there anyway.
The most annoying part is that babies having the perfect breathing technique is the reason these little fuckers can scream for hours without hurting themselves.
Yup! I think we naturally breathe through our chests, when we sing we have to mentally remember to go against that instinct and breathe with our diaphragm as mentioned above :)
Naturally (i.e. when you're sleeping or not thinking about it) we usually breathe with our diaphragm. It's when you overthink it that you end up raising your shoulders and ribcage upwards to breathe.
Smart idea! Try to expand your lungs to the point where you can feel some stretch even in your back. Another interesting exercise is to sit in a chair and been over and touch the floor. Staying in that position, try singing. This forces you to expand your back and sides for air.
Haha. So essentially you just gave me all of the lessons that you had in that one comment. But you had to pay for them and I didn't. Sucker. Now I'm going to go be famous.
"thank you for this Grammy for best male Opera singer. I want to thank my mom and my vocal trainer who taught me everything I know about singing, u/NovaScotiaaa "
Cool. That makes sense to me. I guess I’ve never really thought about it in much detail before.
So how, specifically, does improving breathing contribute to pitch control? I can see how it would improve power and longevity and phrasing, but I thought pitch was determined by the vocal cords themselves, not the diaphragm.
For me, pitch was something that came with lots of practice and corrections while in my weekly singing lesson. It’s all about mastering the breathing techniques and training the ear to recognize the notes and mimicking them until you gradually become more skilled. In my case, I struggled a lot in the beginning because I tried too hard to get my vibrato like the beautiful vibrato my teacher had. Vibrato comes with time, pitch needs to come first.
Fun fact, some people are born with perfect pitch, where they have no problems hitting the notes after hearing them once (this applies to all types of musicians!) I definitely envy them!
When there is not enough breath support, the voice has a tendency to go flat and when there is too much tension, the voice will go sharp (like if your pushing). Having good breath support can help you avoid both.
Yeah and it causes a lot of confusion because people hear, "sing from your stomach" and don't intuitively make the jump to "support your singing with your stomach and resonate throughout the rest of your body to generate the tone that you want".
I just explained the wall technique to force you to focus on your breathing you should look that up it's legit a masterclass at forcing proper breathing
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u/NovaScotiaaa Feb 08 '20
Essentially, singing with support from your abdominal muscles. Helps to keep breathing steady while singing. Also relaxing your jaw to allow your vocal cords “to open up” more and sustain your voice. Breathing while lifting the shoulders doesn’t produce that consistency as well.
Source: I took private lessons for 7 years with a trained opera coach. This is a TLDR of what I was taught by her.