Sing!
Sample Studio Lesson
- Exercise 1S: Spoken Separated /yoo/ Vocal Fitness Studio™ 0:24
- Exercise 2: Spoken Connected /oo-ee/ Vocal Fitness Training™ 0:20
- Exercise 3S: Spoken Connected /yoo/ Vocal Fitness Training™ 0:18
- Exercise 5D: Separated /yoo/ Vocal Fitness Studio™ 2:07
- Exercise 6D: Connected /oo-ee/ Vocal Fitness Training™ 2:01
- Exercise 21A: Cries in Fifths on /yoo/ 1:15
Regardless of your level of experience, the overall design of the Sing! curriculum will teach vocal technique efficiently. You will not find fancy or complicated exercises. Rather, the scales and tunes of the exercises are simple so that you can focus on learning how to do them properly for the best outcome.
Remember, by deliberately focusing on progressive muscle training, the Vocal Fitness Training materials in Sing! go beyond the traditional approach to teaching singing. When you look at it this way, it creates an entirely new paradigm of the process employed to improve your voice.
By shifting the idea of vocal training to something tangible and attainable, it changes your understanding of what is possible. Confidence emerges as you gain an understanding of what steps you will take to improve your vocal production.
Spoken Exercises
Vocal Fitness Training’s exercises included in Sing! contain many spoken lessons because they are an effective way to prepare muscle pattern and habit. You should keep in mind that essentially the same physical mechanism produces both your speaking and singing voices. For that reason, as you continue with your vocal study and improve in your ability to use this technique, you should consider spending some time focusing on the improvement of your overall speaking voice.
This is particularly important for those of you who sing contemporary commercial music (i.e., musical theater, pop, rock, folk, country, jazz, and blues), as those genres have firm roots in speech patterns. Also, if you have a habit of relaxing your articulation for speech regularly, it may be more challenging to access the greater muscle energy required for transforming those spoken sounds into strong and free singing tones.
Spoken exercises introduce you to the concept of exaggerated articulation using the vowel /oo/. You might want to practice the exercises in Studio Lesson One for a few days to integrate them into your muscle memory before moving onto Studio Lesson Two. It is extremely important to take the time to learn these spoken foundation exercises properly.
The Vocal Exercise
The patterns for the vocal exercise tracks are intentionally simple in order to give you the opportunity to practice efficiently with a prepared sequence. Most exercises present a chord played on a piano followed by a sung vocal model. Each exercise moves in a half-step fashion through the vocal range, but that does not mean that you sing the exercise example just once and then continue to the next example. When beginning any new exercise, follow these instructions:
1. Once you hear the example, press Pause. (To help you to remember to pause, there is a slight gap of silence between each vocal example.)
2. Take a moment to think about how you will incorporate all of the necessary movements and positions needed to create the best result, before singing the exercise.
3. Sing the exercise while looking in a mirror. Repeat the pattern on those pitches a minimum of three times while focusing on the correct execution of the forms and positions taught in the lesson. Repeating the exercises in this way encourages the development of reflexive muscle memory. Think of this as the same as the reps you would do if you were lifting weights.
3. When finished, press Play to continue the exercise, provided you are sure that you have done the previous step accurately.