by mojobone » Thu Mar 08, 2018 9:35 am
Here's an exercise that will totally transform your singing. Buy a pennywhistle; they go for about ten bucks, nowadays, LOL. [AKA Celtic flute or Irish Whistle] A plastic alto recorder is similarly cheap and will work fine, but it's a bit fiddly to cover the holes, which is where we're going next. Cover all those holes, and produce the lowest note you can, for as long as you can. Repeat. That's all. But do it for three to five minutes at a time, two or three times a day. The point of the exercise is in controlling the diaphragm to get a nice steady note; if you overblow, it jumps an octave, so you'll know if you're doing it right. Once you have a nice steady column of air, just engage your voicebox and discover that you now have excellent breath support and singing on pitch is easier! This is guaranteed to bore you to bleeding tears, so after you're good and warmed up from the breathing exercise, you can learn some fiddle tunes and jigs to relieve the boredom.
Fiddle tunes and jigs do have merit as does breath control. It's a good point and I might just give it a go, I like the simplicity of it.
I have taken singing lessons in the distant past. The teacher was great and she had taught a very notable young opera singer in Australia. She said she taught the "Eduardo" technique [not sure if I have the spelling right]. She said air is power and the first two weeks we concentrated on taking large lung fulls of air lifting the epiglottis whilst doing so.
My singing did improve back then. I haven't practised much in the last 2 or 3 years.
A lot of "my" trouble is hearing the correct note. I'm not sure if it is the head architecture or just a "lazy" ear. I realise during tracking that I quite often don't identify the melody, a sort of fluid approach.
The plugin is useful, you can see in real time if you are singing flat or sharp and you have parameters to apply subtle pitch correction by set and forget. Just bounce it down and then pop the vocals into a pitch correction editor for final adjustments. I have had no experience with auto tune but I suppose it works much the same way.
For me it was the best 30 bucks Ive spent on plugins so far.