Start Singing Right

BIG LIE #2:

People start out singing all wrong, so they must be taught (or re-taught) EVERYTHING, in order to sing "properly."

Truth - You MAY be doing SOME things wrong, but if you can speak, you are NOT doing everything wrong. When you speak, you are using the very same tools you need to sing--no more, no less.

Most singers' difficulties come from getting away from their natural speaking technique when they sing.

If you are less than satisfied with your singing, then it is very likely you're doing something less effectively than it can be done. But stop and think a moment. HOW do you get rid of the difficulty?

There are several possibilities:

1) You are just no good at singing (many people suspect this about themselves, but it's totally untrue as you will learn);

2) You are not trying hard enough (many people assume this too, but you will find out that trying "harder" only ADDS to your difficulty);

3) Singing is a special skill that you have no useful knowledge about, so you must be prepared to spend lots of time and money learning this totally foreign skill. All these possibilities are common thoughts, but all wrong. Here's what you must accept to make satisfactory progress improving your singing:

4) You have been using your "singing tools" all your life, but you may have been "holding them wrong" while singing. It will be as easy as speaking, once you have someone show you how to simply hold the "tools" correctly.

You use the same exact body parts and capabilities to sing as you do when you speak! The problem often comes when someone tries to tell us how to sing and they get us twisted up so that we STOP singing like we speak.

Let me illustrate this. Imagine that you've been using a hammer to flatten bottle caps all your life. Then one day you need to drive some nails. You have doubts about trying it. Then someone walks up and sees you trying to drive nails. He tells you, "That's really noisy. Here, hold it like this" and he turns it around so that you're striking the nails with the handle instead of the hammer's head.

It doesn't make so much noise now, so you think he must be right. You keep trying but you make very little progress.

Then a carpenter comes along and says, "hey, buddy, you've got to hold it by the handle if you want to drive the nail." You turn it back around and discover that you can drive nails pretty fast now.

That's what singing should be like. When you learn how the voice was designed to work (and you will learn a lot about it, over these next 9 emails), you should make amazing progress and singing should get much easier at the same time.

For me, Brett Manning was that carpenter. I was singing with a limited range and experiencing lots of strain when I met him the first time. His method, the one in the program, Singing Success, added over an octave to my range and took away all the strain in my high range!

Next time, we will talk about how some of the "helpful souls" have actually helped singers move farther away from their goal of singing with an "honest", "natural" tone.

Keep Singing

SingingSuccess.