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

[caramel-betty.livejournal.com]

Can you tell whether you're in tune or not (other than by people saying "you're out of tune", I mean)?

For me, as a "can't carry a tune in a bucket" sort, I very often can't hear what I sound like in any useful sense. What it sounds like in my head and what it sounds like if you play back a piece of tape to me are COMPLETELY different. I'm told that professionals minimize this by doing things like having one ear listening to themselves through headphones, and one ear "open", or something like that.

Most often, it sounds like I'm not in tune and, even going by what I hear, I'm not hitting the notes I want but, since I don't know what I sound like properly anyway, it's very difficult to change it sensibly, or spontaneously. It's also very different when, say, singing along to music in the car, or attempting to sing something to yourself without any guidance at all.


Note that, until the age of 11 (my voice broke, and I went to secondary school, at about the same time), I was in the school choir because I could sing tolerably well.

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

I was an OK singer at primary school, but then my voice broke and I completely lost the ability to get anywhere near the right note. Previously it had just happened magically, without my having to think about it - I'm not even sure I was ever conscious of hearing myself. I still sang to myself afterwards, and it apparently wasn't too hideous, but I couldn't pitch myself to any sort of accompaniment, be it vocal or instrumental.

This changed about a year ago, when I realised, mid-jam session, that if I vocalised into a microphone, I could hear myself properly. The physical separation from the speaker made it sound like my voice was outside my head, and I could evaluate its pitch as though I was listening to a record. Within a few minutes I was happily singing along with everyone else for the first time ever.

I'm still not a great, or even a good singer, but I can at least hold a tune against someone else now, sometimes even minus a mic.