Workout thrice weekly. Forty-five minutes is enough.
Vocal rehearsals, lessons, and concerts count as workouts.
Warm-ups only remind you how you sing best. They will keep your voice in shape on quiet days and prepare your voice for busy days. By themselves, daily warmups won't make your voice strong, fast, flexible, enduring, or accurate. More on how to do these later.
Workouts will improve the voice, but only if you keep doing them. Doing just one workout a week is enough to tire you and get you some improvement, but several in a week will definitely improve your singing.
Please do not sing far too much. Singing when your voice and body are tired open the door to get bad technique and vocal injury. For beginners, three workouts a week is almost too much. As your voice gains strength and stamina, it will thrive on three to four or even more workouts weekly. Just don't push yourself too hard too fast. The above is going to get you where you want to go.
You'd think five vowels.. A E I O U, and sometimes Y (and even W) ... would be enough, but they are not. Dictionaries have pronunciation keys on most pages. They ALL have 12 or more distinct English vowel sounds. Wikipedia gives 30 different sounds in English:
ă pat, bad, cat, ran
ăr parry, carry
ā pate, bait, play, same
ä pa, father
är part, arm, bard, aria
âr pare, hair, pear, there, scary
ĕ pet, bed, bet, end
ĕr perry, merry
ē pete, ease, see
ĭ pit, sit, bit
i pee, midi, very, ready
ĭr pert, syrup, Sirius
ī pie, my, rise
îr peer, here, near, serious
ŏ pot, not
ō oat, go, hope, know
ōr port,hoarse, glory
ô paw, law, caught, saw
ôr horse, more, laureate
oi poi, boy, noise
o͝o, put, foot
o͝or, poor, tour,
o͞o, poo, lose, soon, through
ou pout, house, now
ŭ putt, run, enough, up
ûr purr, fur, bird
ə uh, about
ər per, enter
Critically, 30 vowels is too many. When I sing them out loud, long and slow, some of those those vowels sound the same to my West Coast USA ear: ä pa = ô paw, i pee = ē pete. (Say these out loud. Do you hear a difference? if yes, then it's two different vowels to your dialect of English. If not, it's all one.)
Further, some of those vowels are made by smooshing two other vowels, gliding one into the other (called diphthongs). oi poi = ō oat + ē ease. ou pout = ô paw + o͞o lose. Diphthongs are sung as one simple vowel (almost always the first one) followed briefly by another. Practice it by prolonging the first vowel, then second vowel is a quick glide away from the main vowel just before you make the next sound.
Then there is R which could get its own article... and will. Classical singers (and almost all other languages singers) treat R as a diphthong following the main vowel.
I go with a simpler list for practical purposes.
(this from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phonology)
Lexical sets representing
General American full vowels
FLEECE GOOSE
KIT FOOT
FACE NURSE GOAT
DRESS STRUT THOUGHT
TRAP PALM
This list omits long i, while thought and palm are very similar in many English dialects.
Simple to think this way:
a e i o u, long and short, gets to ten (Face, fleece, Pie, goat, goose, palm, dress, kit, thought, foot) then add these three: Nurse, trap, strut
Since R in spoke English can change the vowel, so that's another 13 vowels you CAN learn, but they're rarely sung, even by American singers.
Exercises:
Do long tones on 13 different vowels.
Take any vocalize. Run in on 13 vowels.
For a live vocal teacher, I have really low rates, but even those can be too much for regular lessons for young singers and struggling artists.
This little offer is a good-looking prospect:
I have a few occasional students who pay them a one-time fee to buy and use this, then contact me for a short lesson when they get stuck and are not improving. I put them back on track with my online voice lesson (seven minutes is usually enough) and away they go.
While most subjects must be taught face to face, music performance is successfully taught online. Is anyone else doing this? I tutor a score of folks each week this way now from my website, some of them local (even through Wyzant), but many more of them are from all over the world from places I could never physically visit.
Instead of connecting to a student in a physical space, we connect in a virtual space. My student and I are both at home on our own computers, with an audio headset, a common chat channel and sometimes a mini-camera active. We can tutor over Google-Talk, Second Life, There, MS Chat, or Yahoo Messenger, but my favorite music-teaching platform is Skype. Skype service is free for all, the sound and video stream is fantastic and I can inhibit new callers so the student and I are not distracted by incoming calls during our session.
I always spend the first few moments of the tutoring session making a good connection so we can hear and see each other clearly. If static, break-up or background noises interfere at all, we spend a few moments taking care of those, checking connections and setting levels. After that, the online tutoring session is very like a live face-to-face tutoring session.
There are some differences, of course. We can see and hear each other clearly, but I cannot point to a symbol on a physical paper page to direct attention to a detail. I cannot touch the student to correct a posture or hand position. However, I can instantly send a link to a website video, picture, or article that we can look at together and talk about right then. I can chat notes about an exercise while the student is singing or playing without distracting her and send it immediately on completing without distracting her from focusing on her performance technique. Using a recording program, I can make and upload short clips of our session so the student can review them after our session. In trade off, I think the online session offers the student more resources than the face-to-face.
I do not think this practice is widespread yet, but it’s effective and economical for teaching vocal and instrumental practice and technique.
I am interested in experimenting with my singing ability. I am 23 years old and getting a late start with my desire to sing. I have no other prior experience with voice lessons of any kind or music lessons. With you have some time in your schedule I would like to possibly sign up for lessons with you. Looking forward to hearing back from you.
Thank you, [Name withheld]
Hi!
Gary Shanon, Oregon Portland/Gresham voice-mentor here.
This is a great time to get started. 23 is hardly too late! Chances are that you've been singing your whole life. You've already started if you've sung in a choir or karaoke with a good host. We'll take that experience and build on it.
In your first lesson, I'd like to find out what your dreams are, hear you sing a song and find out what you need and want to learn. Then we start practicing and really mastering what you need and want. Toward the end of the lesson, you'll get a homework assignment. Then we'll schedule your next lesson.
This 2008 summer, I normally teach during the day, since evenings and weekends are reserved for my gigs and my family. We'll also need to pick a place to meet: we can use your home, we can meet online or by phone, or there are places we can use near my home near I-205 and Powell Avenue.
As soon as you complete your contact/billing information, we can start!
Gary Shannon Portland, OR 45 minute rate: $37.00*
