singing405

Today, children, I will be teaching you the art of singing. No. I’m just kidding. But I will be telling you some essentials of producing good singing habits. If you get good singing habits and build a strong base you can work up from there and experiment with your voice to make all different kinds of singing. You would not classify opera and pop in the same category, now would you?

The first tip to know is to sing from your diaphragm not your chest. Your diaphragm in a muscle underneath your lungs it expands downward when you take a good breath in. to explain it to little kids terms; your tummy should go out when you breathe in. your shoulders should not move because that means you are breathing with your chest, instead of taking a “good low breath” ad my teacher would say. Sometimes laying flat on the floor helps with breathing with your diaphragm. That brings me to my point, sitting up straight. If you slouch while singing that gives your diaphragm less area to expand resulting in a shorter breath, which could make holding out a long note, or adding crescendo to a note difficult.

Every time you sing a vowel it adds a slightly different shape to your mouth but in general it should all generally look like an O.  This shape lets the sound come out and makes it sound tall. A lot of the time directors will change the vowel sound of a word to awh. Like in the word amazing, it wouldn’t be uh-mazing, it would be awh-mazing.

During warm ups is a good time to practice vowel shape. Warming up before you sing is very helpful. If you warm up it will help you hit notes well just like a basketball player warms up before a game or practice. If you push yourself during warm ups it can help increase your vocal range, the range of notes you can hit well. But if you push yourself too much you might end up with a sore throat.

If you do get a sore throat or a cold some of the best remedies to get your throat back into tip top shape would be to drink tea with honey, have cough drops with you all the time, and drink soup. All of these things are warm and soothing to your throat.


That’s all for today children, class dismissed.