How To Sing - Your First Singing Lesson

Andrew Southworth
May 24, 2018
5 min read

Have you always wanted to learn how to sing? It can be very hard and awkward to start without someone to help you along the way. In-person vocal lessons can also be expensive, and the vocalists available to you may not be in your vocal style or have the same goals as you. In this blog post and video I aim to give you a solid understanding of what topics you need to research, and some general guidance on how to start learning to sing.

My Background

First let me give you some background on my vocal path because I think its important if you have the same goals as me. I started singing because I wanted to write music. I already played guitar, but it wasn't enough for me to just be a guitarist. I did take about 1 year of in-person vocal lessons at a local music shop, and while those lessons were great at teaching me the fundamentals of singing they didn't necessarily align with my goals (the voice lessons were based around classical style singing).

I spent a couple years teaching myself and writing music with little improvement until I stumbled upon a book called 'Raise Your Voice' by Jaime Vendera. This book gave me more vocal improvements in a couple months than I had gained over the past few years. I forget exactly how, but Jaime became somewhat of a mentor and I took a few Skype vocal lessons with him. In addition to this I took a couple online vocal lessons with Tony Harnell, which was also very helpful. These vocal teachers were very focused on musical applications and helping me achieve the goals I wanted, even though my goals were relatively unclear since I was a teenager at the time.

Overall I think this approach of mixing lessons with the right vocal teacher focused on your applications, and lots of personal experimentation is the best path. Now... onto your first vocal lesson.

Just Sing

The best way for you to start singing is just to get some easy songs you enjoy, and try singing along to them in the shower or in the car. Some people already do this, but if you don't (I didn't), I highly recommend it. This will help you find the joy in singing, and it will build up a level of comfort.

Singing in Key

Most people will find that they have trouble singing in key at first, and there is a simple approach to getting over this first roadblock. You need to have a means to provide a reference note, so grab an instrument or download a piano app on your phone (or find one for free on a website). Play a note that sounds like it would be comfortable for you to sing, and then just try to match it. You may have to slide around with your voice to hear the point where you're hitting the right note, but you'll eventually land on the right spot and it will sound correct. If you have major troubles telling the difference, a guitar tuner or guitar tuner app may help as a visual aid.

Once you are comfortable hitting a note, try hitting different notes and matching them with your voice. At first you'll spend a long time trying to match each note, but this helps train your voice how much it takes to go between notes. Practice going back and forth between two notes at a slow pace, then if you can try going up and down a scale at a slow pace. If you don't understand how to play a scale on your instrument of choice or piano app, then you can find many free or paid resources of audio files to sing along to. I actually offer some Vocal Practice Scales either as a free stream, or $5 to download if you're interested. YouTube has thousands of videos offering free vocal scales, so be sure to take advantage of that resource too.

Breathing Exercises

Believe it or not, many vocal lessons will start off with having you do breathing exercises. These are incredibly important because often many people are breathing incorrectly, however for a first vocal lesson it can be kind of a bore and scare people off. I would recommend watching my video below (at 2:31) for this because its hard to explain in words, but i'll try anyways.

You want to make sure that you're not pulling up your chest to breathe. Your stomache should move outwards, which uses your diaphragm to pull air into your lungs. This is a much more controllable method of breathing than raising your chest. The first exercise to practice breathing is to breath in for a count of 2 seconds, hold for 2 seconds, then exhale for 2 seconds. Then you increase the number of seconds to 3, 4, 5, 6 etc. The goal isn't to hit the longest amount of time, its to train you to develop smooth control over your breathing so you can manage your breath over the duration of a note later when you sing.

Learning To Sing Songs

Once you are comfortable with these basics, you can apply them to real songs. Find a song that is comfortably in your vocal range and sing along to it a few times. I would highly, highly recommend that you record yourself singing along on your phone - you want to find out exactly what you're singing badly, and what you're singing great.

For any problem areas of the song that sound bad you should loop through the part and practice it. It can help if you have a means of slowing down the part and looping it, and there are apps to do this or you can use a free DAW like Garageband. You want to focus on hitting the correct notes and managing your breathe control correctly. Don't worry too much about vocal tone and 'feel' at this time, its important to learn how to just sing along to songs on pitch with proper breathing technique.

Next Steps

This material should be enough to keep you busy for several weeks, but the skills covered here will keep being developed over a lifetime. There are many more topics in singing to learn that I haven't covered yet, but I will write a list of some topics you can research (Google) until I cover them myself. I will provide links for content I have covered.