If I Had to Start Singing Again, I’d Ask This One Question

I get asked a lot of times from people who are just starting off.

Where should I start?

Now personally for me if I was to start again, I would simply focus on this one question.

In a scale,

How do I change pitch only?

Because I’ve found personally, the better I can chip away at this, the better my technique gets.

Now today I want to explain why this is an incredibly important question for any beginner singer.

And that if you can understand this, any scale or exercise will help you develop the voice.

Real quick! For those of you who don’t know me. My name is Ivan, I love making music and also teaching singing to students all around the world. On this newsletter my goal is to make learning to sing simple. If that’s up your lane, consider subscribing. If you want to improve your voice faster, check out the links down below for ways to work with me

If you want to inspire our next episode! Drop in the comments below what you want me to talk about next.

So why should someone starting off focus on this question?

Why don’t you just give me a specific exercise or technique Ivan?

The reason why is I think for many singers their challenge as least from a technique lens goes deeper.

And I’ve talked about this many times.

Whilst there there are a lot of muscles involves in singing from the breathing muscles, to the ones that shape the vowel.

There are these really specific ones called the CT muscles.

These are the ones that when engaged, stretch and thin out our vocal folds like a rubber band. This allows them to vibrate faster.

Now whilst it’s simple, the challenge I found with myself and with most people I’ve taught thus far is it can be really challenging to just engage these muscles.

Often we end up pushing more air, getting louder or softer, straining/flipping.

Because we haven’t learn to isolate them.

And so this is where the initial questions come in.

If I can chip away as just changing pitch as I go up and down a scale.

I start to engage these muscles correct

So in a sense, any scale can teach you this.

Whether you’re doing the NO’s, NAYS, MUMs, even just simple slides on vowels.

Whilst they all have more specific reasons for why they work.

Notice how they’re generally just asking you to change pitch without anything else changing.

You don’t have to get louder at any point. You don’t need to change the way you articulate the words compared to speech.

In other words, all of them have the potential to teach what you need to learn. If you know what you’re looking for.

Now what I’ve found is some sounds and contexts are actually easier and some are harder. And it depends on the singer.

For example, I find the octave scales easier than these long scales.

And so the idea with practising each day is, you want to feel correct technique where it’s easy and then use it to translate to some of the harder contexts.

I talk about this more in depth in episode 222. So if you’re interested, check that one out after this.

Now as you’re chipping away at this, you might be wondering.

But Ivan, how does this even apply to a song? In a song, you need to get soft and loud.

Now you’re right in a song things will change.

You’re not always going to sing at the same volume. You don’t want to stay entire still when you’re singing.

In fact, that might come across as boring.

But the reason we work on this fundamental skill of can we change pitch only.

Is such that when we do change the VOLUME, VOWEL, THE TEXTURE.

These are all done as choices. Not crutches.

Anyway! I hope this answers your question.

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