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20-Day Song Challenge: Days 15-17

Bit of a set-back: had a particularly awesome karaoke session with coworkers but this left my throat in pretty bad shape. Googling “throat tired’ and “singing” resulted in this universal piece of advice: don’t sing and get voice rest. Day 15 was already my rest day but to have an additional day (or two as the case may be) of not singing was a major set-back.

Nonetheless, I also googled voice exercises to do with an injured throat and was provided with a list of things to do to improve singing while at the same time giving the throat rest:

-learn to open the mouth and jaw -properly shape the mouth with each vowel, keeping the mouth relaxed and avoiding “stretching” the mouth - apparently, the vowel sounds of “ee” and “oo” are particularly bad for this -keeping the throat box open. While my warm-ups did a lot of work on vocal fry and ya-ya exercises to work on this, I found it quite easy to practice doing these exercises without actually singing

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This is my second week’s performance: I Wish I Could Go Back to College from Avenue Q. This is my first attempt to harmonize and so am doing all three parts - when required, I had to lower the note by an octave or invert the chordal structure - this is especially true for Nicky’s part which irritatingly goes into my falsetto range.

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20-Day Song Challenge: Days 13-14

It’s time for the next song and I’ve decided to do yet another song from Avenue Q: I Wish I Could Go Back to College.

On the practicing front, I’ve hit the dreaded PRACTICE makes PERFECT spot of learning a musical instrument. Say, in I Wish I Could Go Back to College (IWICGBTC) the melody lines of Nicky, Kate, and Princeton occasionally harmonize with each other. When recording, I would (obviously) record each line separately but I’m finding it very difficult to sing the counterpoint lines - especially when they are (for example) the minor 3rd of a major chord structure. Say the piece is in C Major and I have to sing the E of a I chord - because that particular interval is minor in that key, to my untrained ear it sounds wrong and so I will try to over-correct myself when it’s not even needed. Essentially, I end up making the chord sound more wrong than my already out-of-tune voice provides.

Nevertheless, I’ve had to go back and manually sing the line while playing the respective part on the piano simultaneously. Over and over again. I’d do that practice technique where you have 5 coins on one side of the music stand and you’d move a coin over to the other side when you’ve practiced a particular section relatively well (and subsequently move a coin back if you failed). It’s a stark reminder of how I hit a similar wall when learning to practice piano and no matter the technique I did, I would simply have to practice something over and over until I felt comfortable to do it right.

I guess the difference is that the music I’m singing is enjoyable versus the relatively boring sounds of introductory piano music.

Length of held note: 15 seconds

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20-Day Song Challenge: Days 10-12

I tried practicing harmonizing and have noticed an interesting issue: I find it very difficult to harmonize to myself but very east to harmonize to someone else. If I were to hear a piano note or someone else hum a note, I can probably sing close to the note on the first attempt; however, if I listen to myself singing back, I find it difficult to tune. A Reddit post suggests this might be related to your brain processing your own voice differently from other voices - although, it doesn’t explain why it would process my voice differently from a recording.

Basically it means that there won’t be any one-person a capella band of me anytime soon.

I’ve learned the added benefit of warming up throughout the day with hums and throat box hums. In learning to harmonize, I’m also attempting to harmonize to music on the radio but it’s difficult to do that without merging into the melody part.

Length of held note: 14-15 seconds

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20-Day Song Challenge: Days 7-9

Was watching Dr. Dan’s Voice Essentials on YouTube and he made a good point that part of the repetitive and technical singing exercises, because they are easy to do, is to examine how the body is performing while singing these easy phrases. Case in point:

- as the pitch gets higher, my tongue moves to the back of the mouth - opening my mouth wider makes for a better sound; this seems like a no-brainer but clearly it wasn’t happening before - my jaw doesn’t tense when singing, but I’m guessing that skill came from the days of playing the trumpet and learning to have proper embouchure without tensing the mouth

Also a general rule: don’t drink milk before singing. I felt like the mucous in my throat was super thick!Length of held note: 14.5-15 seconds

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I neglected to mention in the post below that these two songs are from the musical Avenue Q - the very first song sung about what to do with a BA in English. Much more fitting (for me anyway) is what to do with a BSc General degree - which is really a Bachelor’s of Science in Science no matter how you look at it. Anyway, so this is my actual voice at Day 7 of the 20-day song challenge which I think went relatively well. I think. I hope~

Things to work on: -Yikes, my voice did something in the beginning of the first verse -I’m more flat than anything; will work on that this week

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No that’s not my normal voice. Or I really hope not!

Day 7 is a rest day (just like any muscle, it’s important to give the throat muscles some rest). This is something I played around with as an experiment in doing voicework and seeing how my singing skills have gone. I’m definitely more flat than I’d like to be at times but all in all not too bad.

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20 Day Song Challenge - Days 4-6

So: yes to breathing exercises!

I’d say subjectively my tone has improved a lot with diaphragmatic breathing - you actually have to do something like that when playing the piano since raising your shoulders and chest makes it difficult to be nimble on the piano. But definitely when I hear myself, it’s definitely on-tune around 50% of the time (versus “lady luck be on my side”). Doing those “ya-ya” and “ng-ng” exercises have also helped me from sounding ultra nasally!

Objectively: Time to hold note: 15 seconds

OK, so 12 to 15 seconds is not that long nor is it considered a statistically valid measure but that’s still something.

Again the biggest problem right now are the “attacks” of the notes and “holding” the notes. I was watching Evynne Hollens say to imagine hitting the notes on a stairwell - as I took it, to “reach” for the notes rather than landing on them. That’s worked OK but I think I need to do more ear training since sometimes I’m not quite sure what the note is supposed to be.

Holding the notes hopefully well be helped with breathing exercises. There’s actually a few videos about this but one by #SuperiorSingingMethod uses buzzes to accomplish this so we’ll see how the next few days hold out!

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20 Day Song Challenge - Day 2 & 3

A lot of the 2 days is getting diaphragmatic breathing down-pat. Which I think I have. But not it’s led to a different problem:

How do you control your breath?

I mean, you can breathe deeply but how does that actually translate to your actually singing voice? Noticeably, I feel like my normal range does resonate better and has better control but when you get to the higher ranges, it feels like the diaphragm has less effect on that.

Anyway, sustained note = around 11 seconds. Wasn’t expecting a difference this time.

After hearing myself sing along with the Dear Evan Hansen soundtrack, I’ve noticed two things that I need to look into for Day 4 and 5:

-hitting the right note from the beginning -sustaining a note

At this point, I think it’s time to find another opinion!

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20 day song challenge isn’t much without a song so I’ve decided to piggy-back on the vocalist I accompany what’s hip and trendy. And of course it’s musicals right now and so was enlisted with the following challenge: to do the Hamilton part of “It’s Quiet Uptown”. Haha, we’ll see how that actually turns out.

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20 Day Song Challenge - Day 1

With 400,000+ subscribers, @EricArcenaux YouTube channel has been stickied!

You don’t go through music school without learning breathing techniques to some degree - especially diaphragmatic breathing. So step 1: get on to perfecting diaphragmatic breathing (or as Eric puts it, the 360 degree breathing method). I found it easy to do when thinking about it but I’m guessing it’s going to be muscle memory when trying to sing it out.

Warm-up: -diaphragmatic breathing exercises (x3 reps) -melodic notes (C-D-E-D-C) with buzzes, ya-ya, and uh-uhs -vocal fry registers with the above

Metrics: -length of held note: 11 seconds

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The 20 Day Song Challenge - March 2017

So here’s the scoop: I was watching #Boyinaband on YouTube do his “I learn how to sing for 30 days” video to see if singing was an innate talent or a skill (spoiler alert: it’s most likely skill but some people are born with the skill).

Now, I’ve grown up playing piano to the Associate level and doing orchestral percussion for university-level ensembles; so it pains me to admit that I can’t really sing. Well, I sing like the average person, but when you have any form of musical skill people come to expect that you probably also have good singing ability (probably a la Billy Joel or Alicia Keys). This opinion quickly changes as soon as I try to belt out Piano Man.

So here’s the plan: a challenge of-sorts to improve my singing ability in 20 days. Note that this is strictly to improve my ability, not to get to some objective standard (which hopefully I’ll do one day). Using #Boyinaband’s “methodology”, there are three parts that I will hopefully strive for:

1. Exhale length 2. Subjective pitch match 3. Subjective musicality

Unlike his videos, I’m not going to be using an app to track my absolute pitch (but I might use them while training). I also figured out my vocal range - roughly between F2-F4 (which is strange since this puts me in the baritone range and my normal talking voice is in the tenor range). I talked to a musician friend who thinks this is probably due to me mixing my chest voice, head voice, and mixed voice. Which hopefully I’ll learn more about in the upcoming 20 days.

Last thing to note: why 20 days? Well, there’s a vacation and although I rarely let trips like this ruin any challenge, I’d rather not get kicked out of hostels trying to do vocal practices. At any rate, perhaps there will be another challenge as soon as I get back.

Day 1 will start tomorrow. I also forsee me recording some samples of my voice and posting them here just to track how I’m doing. Wish me luck!