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Over the last 53 years, karaoke has become a globally beloved pastime. Every night, singers take the stage in karaoke bars from Tokyo to Turku to Toronto. How did this hobby with a decidedly Japanese name become a worldwide hit? The answer is more complicated than you might guess.
Read MoreWhen you imagine childhood music lessons or think back on your own experience, you might conjure visions of tedious scales and exercises. So many adults have a complicated relationship with our early experiences with music and learning. A bad teacher can kill a budding interest before it has a chance to bloom. However, lessons with the right instructor can be a chance for students to discover a lifelong passion, learn a new skill, or build lasting friendships. Unfortunately, finding the right voice teacher for your child is rarely as easy as calling the top-rated coach on Yelp. In this article, we go into what to look for in a great vocal instructor to support your child’s musical journey.
Read MoreFrom the moment I took my first breath as a newborn, I used my voice. Like any typical baby coming out of the cozy, comfort zone into the strange new world that would become my new home, I would no doubt have cried.
Was it a polite, petite cry?
Not likely. The first cry of the newborn has been described as “vociferous, shrill, and piercing.” Not at all a pleasant sound, but it sure is a powerful form of communication
Read MoreNothing induces involuntary cringing quite like hearing your voice played back at you. Despite this, recording yourself (and listening back) is one of the best tools a vocalist can use to improve their singing and an essential skill for professionals. So how do you get past the reflexive cringe when you hear yourself recorded? And why is it so dang uncomfortable in the first place?
Read MoreLearning a second or third language is a massive accomplishment. Not only do you have to learn to comprehend a totally new language, you need to learn to use over 100 muscles in your mouth, face, and throat to make completely new sounds. Training those muscles is one of the most important steps in reducing your accent to make your speech clearer and smoother. In this article, we look at fifteen tongue exercises to help make your English sound more natural.
Read MoreSinging harmony is an amazing way to expand your vocal and musical horizons, but singers are often expected to just know how to harmonize. The ability to harmonize is often talked about as though it’s so inborn talent that you’re either lucky enough to have or can never learn, but this simply isn’t the case. Harmonizing is a skill and, with a little bit of time and effort, almost anyone can learn to sing harmony.
Read MoreIf you speak for a living - whether you’re a teacher, therapist, motivational speaker, or podcaster - you’ve likely spent hundreds of hours studying and then editing your content, to ensure what you say is as engaging and informative as possible. Great content is only half the battle, however. Your delivery can be a greater barrier to your audience retaining and engaging with what you say than the quality of the content itself. Below, we’ll look at the common complaints people have about their own voices and others’, and how to address them.
Read More“How do you get to Carnegie Hall? - Practice, practice, practice!” The punchline to this famous joke, which has been in print since 1955 and was probably told long before that, isn’t wrong. One of the best things you can do to improve your singing is practice as regularly as you can. But regularity alone doesn’t make a good practice routine. It has to be good practice! As we talked about in our article, The Myth of the Impossible Daily Practice Routine, practicing daily (or as close to daily as you can get) isn’t as hard as it may seem. Creating a great practice routine doesn’t have to be hard either.
Read MoreA crowd-pleasing karaoke performance is more about being fun and entertaining than performing wild feats of vocal acrobatics, and there are plenty of hit songs that don’t require great (or any) vocal chops to turn up the energy in a room. In this article, we look at twenty songs that both you and your audience will have a blast singing along to, regardless of whether you’ve got diva vocals.
Read MoreIf you ask us, karaoke is a wildly underrated hobby. It’s fun, confidence-building, and can be a gateway into a lifelong passion for music. Picking up a new hobby can teach you all kinds of things about yourself and lead you down unexpected paths, from promotions at work to meeting a new romantic partner. Below we’ll look at why you should absolutely pick up that karaoke mic and how investing in your new hobby can build confidence both on and off the stage
Read MoreIf you’ve taken music lessons in the United States or another English speaking country, there’s a good chance that the only palette of colors you’ve ever gotten to paint with are the major and minor scales of European art music. Don’t get us wrong, you can make incredible music with those scales, but it can also feel like only ever eating vanilla ice cream or only ever having the basic box of 8 crayons. Luckily, the major and minor scales we’re most familiar with are just one of many answers to the problem of dividing up the octave. Cultures around the world have come up with different solutions to the octave problem ranging from five-note pentatonic scales that have been found from Asia to the Americas for the past 50,000 years to twenty-two-note microtonal scales in Indian classical music. There are thousands of musical color palettes to draw from; no need to limit yourself to the basic crayon box.
In this article, we’ll share some scales you can start exploring that use the same half step intervals found in European art music as well as briefly discuss some microtonal scales if you want to dive in deeper.
Read MoreWhen it first premiered in 2002, American Idol became an unexpected breakout hit, launching unknown singers to international stardom and inspiring millions of aspiring performers to sing their hearts out at auditions across the country. Twenty years after that first season, there are more than half a dozen variations on the reality tv singing competition currently on the air and vocalists continue to line up around the block for their chance at a big break. From the comfort of the couch, these shows look like a way for undiscovered talents to bypass industry gatekeepers and jumpstart their careers based solely on their merits. Unfortunately, like most TV competitions, the reality of reality singing shows doesn’t match what you see on the screen
We spoke to our friends Joelle, Tyler, and TJ to hear about their experiences with TV singing competitions. Below we’ll look at the good, the bad, and the ugly parts of reality shows.
Read MoreIf you take lessons for voice or any other instrument, you’re going to find yourself singing or playing scales. Even if you play a non-pitched instrument like the drum set, your teacher will give you a list of exercises to practice between lessons. The oddly specific, repetitive drills can feel a bit like your high school math homework: theory with little-to-no real world application. However, we promise you that, unlike your 10th grade trigonometry class, you’ll actually use what you learn running drills every time you sing.
Read MoreThe human voice is amazing; as unique as a finger print and capable of moving an audience to tears or bringing a crowd to their feet. As we build our skills as singers, one of the biggest challenges is making the leap from doing an impression of your favorite artists to singing with our own voice. Finding your voice sounds like some big, existential quest, but it doesn’t have to be nearly that daunting and doesn’t require any mountaintop pilgrimages or the slaying of mythological monsters. Your unique voice is already inside of you; it’s just a matter of learning to hear it. Below, we’ll explain why your voice is uniquely yours and how to explore it, but first let’s bust a myth.
Read MoreIt seems like Christmas music is as unavoidable as the winter weather this time of year. Love it or hate it, you’ll probably be asked to perform a holiday song at some point in your singing career, maybe even an entire seasonal set. If you’ve never put together your own setlist before, it can feel a little daunting. Even if you’re a seasoned pro, the polarizing nature of holiday music can make it challenging to build a great repertoire. So how do you create a holiday setlist that both you and your audience will enjoy?
Read MoreAuditions are stressful. Even if you follow every step in the process we laid out during out last article, you’ll still likely experience some level of performance anxiety. It’s completely reasonable to feel nervous around an audition: they’re a potential turning point in our careers or lives, they tap into our fear of the unknown, and the process of standing in front of judging strangers could have been lifted directly from an anxiety dream. The whole process can be an emotional rollercoaster of anxiety, desire, and - frequently - disappointment.
We spoke to our friends Tyler, Joelle, and TJ; all professional vocalists who have gone to their fair share of auditions. Below we share our best advice alongside their real-world anecdotes to help you navigate the emotional minefield of auditioning.
Read MoreWhether you’re a student, a professional musician, or a passionate hobbyist looking to join a local choir or theatre production, you’ll probably have to audition at some point. Unfortunately, the process of auditioning can feel like something lifted directly from an anxiety dream: standing alone in front of a group of strangers who’s whole job is to judge you based off one performance. With this in mind, it’s not surprising that auditions are a major source of stress for musicians and a common reason many singers seek out a vocal coach. While we can’t make auditioning 100% stress free, we are firm believers that knowledge is power here at Love Your Voice and that breaking big tasks into smaller steps can make them that much more manageable. With that in mind, we’ve broken the audition process into steps, from research to self-care after the fact.
Read MoreMany of our articles touch on the different aspects of self-care that a professional voice user might want to incorporate into their daily routine. Spread out across ten or so articles, it might feel overwhelming to incorporate them all into one, streamlined practice. In this article, I wanted to share the success story of one of my students who took this holistic approach to vocal health and ran with it.
Read MoreWe’ve all heard horror stories about singers losing their voices; Adele famously required surgery to treat nodes on her vocal cords. Because of this, vocal health and safety is one of the primary focuses of singing lessons, but singers aren’t the only professional voice users who need to protect and care for their instruments. Talking can cause just as much vocal strain, wear, and tear as singing - sometimes more so, because we often take our speaking voices for granted.
Read MoreWe spend a lot of time writing about singing, but loving your voice is so much more than making music; it’s caring for you body and speaking with confidence. For some of us, speaking with confidence means learning how to talk to a crowd, but for many of us it means reducing our accent. We sat down with Zelda to learn the basics of accent reduction from a pro.
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