Get That Gunk Off of Those Cords! Allergies? Still getting over that cold? Ate something last night that didn’t quite agree with you? There are many reasons that people get occasional excess mucus on their vocal folds. For most people, the presence of excess muck on the cords often goes unnoticed, but for singers, it […]

Support: The Tripod of Singing Most people when discussing “support” in singing seem to be referring primarily to the breathing mechanism. However, that is just one aspect of what makes up vocal support (or appoggio). If you think of a tripod, it’s very clear that the function of the tripod is to give support to […]

What Do I Do About The Break In My Voice? Regardless of how much experience you have as a singer, chances are that you have at some point experienced a break in your voice when attempting to sing up a scale. You may have noticed that in this area of your voice, you either start […]

Have you ever been to a performance and noticed the singer has two volumes: loud and louder? Have you encountered a singer who tends to whisper rather than sing and can’t ever seem to lean in and get some passion going? These are examples of singers who lack the ability to sing with dynamics. Singing […]

Can ANYONE Learn to Sing? When I tell a person that I teach singing for a living, invariably the question that gets asked most often is, “Can ANYONE be taught to sing even if they don’t have a lot of talent?” In reality. the only thing that can be taught is skill, not talent. If […]

The Joy of Singing From my point of view, there is only one reason a person should sing, and that is purely the joy of singing itself. Singing is its own reward. Making music with our voice is a gift that can’t be compared with anything else. Fame and fortune are by products Some singers […]

When you hear a great singer, from any genre, you know within the first word or so who is singing. Think of Frank Sinatra, Barbara Streisand, Dolly Parton, Cecilia Bartoli, Richard Tucker, etc. Great singers always sing very honestly. This is the case in popular music as well as in classical. Sometimes when I hear […]

Nature gave us our voices for more than one reason. 1) The first and foremost function of the vocal folds is to protect our lungs from foreign materials. If you have ever done what your mother asked you to not do, and talked while eating, you may have gotten a particle of food trapped in […]

Old Wisdom The teachers of the Old Italian School had a tradition that a little practice every day always provides superior results to a lot of practice sporadically.  While this rule applies to all musicians, it is especially true for singers. Singing uses the entire autonomic neuro-musculor system. There are no keys to press. There are […]

Let’s look at a few facts here: Popular music is almost always pitch corrected, tempo corrected and dynamically compressed into a brick wall of sound. Dynamics, phrasing and subtly are impossible under those conditions. Young listeners “learn” what is “good” about music by listening to recordings. These young singers, when they hear an actual live […]