Monday, July 19, 2010

Extend Your Vocal Range, Sing Higher With 7 Singing Tips

In order to extend and improve your vocal range, there are a few points to remember. Follow these 7 easy tips and you will be well on your way to a better singing voice with a larger vocal range.

For the purpose of this article, we will assume you have a good grasp on basic singing techniques and a solid foundation. To extend your vocal abilities it is necessary to understand the basics, as this is an area of advanced study. If you do not understand how the voice works, you can easily harm your voice if you try to push it too far. Have you ever screamed all day at a sporting event and you can hardly talk the next day? You just hurt your voice by overuse and you can do the same thing with advanced singing.

1. Identify your range. The first thing you must know if you want to broaden your vocal range is what exactly is your range now? Your range is what you are comfortable singing most of the time without straining. You can more easily define it by starting at middle C on the piano and going down by half steps until you can no longer easily produce a clear tone. The ranges are defined as soprano, alto, tenor and bass. The same is true for your high range; go slowly up the scale or a half step at a time until you reach where you feel a little uncomfortable and stop there, this is the range you will begin to improve upon.

2. Set reasonable and attainable goals. If you know where you are in your voice, you can better know where it is you want to be in the future. It would be reasonable to say that you would like to be able to sing one to one and a half steps higher with ease over the next few months consistently and this would be possible. To say that you want to be able to increase your range by one octave in the next few months may be possible, but unlikely and possible risky to your vocal chords if you injure them.

3. Slowly condition your voice. Keep in mind that being able to sing higher is not something that will come overnight, but with continued practice and effort. The conditioning of your voice is much like athletes muscles; it will build over time and increase in flexibility and power. Can you imagine a high performance runner for example just running full tilt without warming up his muscles or without training for many months to get where he is today? It does not happen in any athletic endeavor and singing at this level is more athletic than many people know. Singers are not exceptions to the rule.

4. Warm up. This is the best advice anyone can get with regard to not injuring yourself in singing. You will not see any professional singer not warming up before a lesson or a performance because they realize the benefits and the drawbacks if they do not warm up. Only if you warm up can you begin to slowly work up to the higher notes you are trying to reach. This of course also applies to the lower register if you are working on lower notes, although it is much less strenuous to work on lower notes, it is more a matter of breathing and relaxing.

5. Work with a teacher or program. A teacher will be able to help you find the best way to strengthen and improve your voice as well as protecting it from over use. There are Also many online programs which are equivalent to a good college course with excellent audio files that are perfectly acceptable.

6. Stand in front of a mirror. As you begin to work on expanding your vocal range, it becomes even more important to observe yourself as you sing. You need to watch your posture, the position of your jaw and chest. The only thing that should move as you go for that high note is the little vocal chord within your body, not your neck and shoulders. If you reach up with your neck and jaw, you are actually constraining your vocal chord and making it more difficult to reach the note.

7. Record yourself. Nothing is more brutally honest than a recording of your voice. This is where you really see if what you think you heard is what you sang. If you take a lesson from a teacher it is a wonderful way to not only evaluate your performance afterward, but to listen to again and again and pick up small things the teacher said that you missed or forgot. Get your moneys worth from the lesson, they are expensive.

Extending your vocal range is a skill that every singer aspires to and there is a way to achieve this ability. Practice and effort, time and experience will help you to achieve your goals of becoming an accomplished singer.

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