Vocal knowledge

[j4]

Okay, this is a bit of a left-field question, but you lot are a fairly eclectic bunch, so some of you may be able to help...

If you wanted to teach someone to sing, how would you go about it?

No, I'm not entirely sure what I mean by "teach someone to sing", which is part of the problem... IME most people can sing (and when they say "I can't sing" what they usually mean is "someone told me when I was a child that I couldn't sing"); what they can't necessarily do is stay in tune (with others, or even with themselves). So let's say you want to get somebody to the point where they're able to do that well enough that they can join in confidently with 'community singing' (weddings, carol services, etc.), and eventually do simple part-singing. Where do you start? Am I asking the wrong questions?

Reading music is sort of orthogonal (and the sort of people I'm thinking of could probably teach themselves that fairly easily anyway, because they're bookish kind of people).

Comments

Another non-singer, here via friendsfriends

[white_hart]

When I try to sing I can hear that what's coming out of my mouth is a tuneless drone, and that it's not the same as the music I'm singing along to or hearing in my head. However, although I can tell that two notes are different I have great difficulty in distinguishing whether the second is flat or sharp and by how much (I used to play the viola when I was at school, and could never manage to tune it), and I cannot work out how to change what I'm doing with my vocal chords to produce a note that's in tune.

I would love to be able to sing, but even my husband looks pained and asks me to stop :-(