Whatever your style of singing is, if you want to strengthen and improve your voice, singing exercises are the way to it. Singing songs is not the same as singing exercises and it will not help you improve the quality of your tone. Singing along with the radio or your iPod will not help you develop your fundamental singing voice.

It will help develop your personal style but most people use the other singers voice as a crutch instead of developing confidence in their own voice. When you sing along to songs you will be repeating any bad habits you currently have. When you sing along to other singers voices you emulate them and if they are improperly trained as most singers are, you begin to reproduce their bad habits.

Even if you have solid technique, and all of the singers you try to emulate have good technique this is still not how to go about strengthening your voice. This is because songs tend to stay within certain given pitches and repeated pitches over and over. While this is good for developing muscle memory for a particular song if you intend to sing it with a group. It does nothing to expand your range. Singing scales is the most effective way to warmup, loosen, strengthen, and expand your singing voice.

Don’t Worry About Pitch In The Beginning

Some people worry themselves to death about being on pitch when they start off. If you’re just starting singing exercises you’ll likely will miss some notes. Once you have more control over the of your voice you can start paying attention to pitch. As you go through the scales everyday singing on pitch or at least realizing that you are off pitch will come easily.

Just pay attention to when the scale goes up and down, and take note when you are off. But don’t stress out over it. Songs will not cover the range of notes that scales will. Scales will take you out of your comfort zone, strengthen your voice and enable you to develop confidence in singing songs. The key is to translate singing scales properly to singing words and phrases of a song properly. Singing exercises are intended to develop and strengthen your voice allowing you to then add your own unique style and coloring.

Some of the Most Effective Singing Exercises:

• Lip Rolls
• Mum
• Nay
• No
• Na

Vocal coach Ian Castle covers the lip roll and its’ benefits in this singing exercises video.

Vibrato is an oscillation of pitch on a sustained note. It adds color and feeling to a phrase. A lot of people aspire to sing with vibrato because the heard their favorite singer and were very moved by. Whatever your reason is for want to learn how to sing with vibrato, but there is a right and wrong way to make it happen.

The Wrong Way Sing with Vibrato

The type of singing vibrato you’re after should not involve shaking your head, jaw, or stomach. So stop doing it this way if you’ve already started as these methods are like to produce tension and eventually unnecessary soreness.

The Right Way to Sing with Vibrato

You’ll need to produce short bursts of air to produce the oscillations in the pitch of your voice. One way to get a feeling for vibrato is to sing in bursts like a car that won’t quite turnover in the dead of winter. Sing err – err – err – err. Notice the change in pitch? Remember to do it without shaking anything. You should feel quick bursts air in the back of your throat and the vibration pulses in the back of your front teeth.

Concentrate on the roof of your mouth in the back and where the top of your mouth comes together with the back of your tongue. This is where you should be feeling bursts of air. Repeat the exercise and see if you can feel the air pulsating there. Concentrate on making the pitch of your voice change.

Remember to provide consistent diaphragmatic breath support and change the speed of the vibrato as you get a feel for it. It take a lot of short bursts of air to create the vibrato effect. Once your body coordinates its’ efforts to create vibrato, something strange takes place. You won’t be thinking about making vibrato, the voice begins to feel as though it’s making vibrato on its own.

The typical reason vibrato feels natural is related to speed of oscillation. Early on, your vibrato it likely to be too fast or too slow, but once you get used to playing with it, the air and cords start coordinating their timing, and the cords find the perfect tension. At that point, vibrato just happens and you’ll feel as though you were born with it. And just like singing in and of itself, you want to feel natural, just an extension of who you are and what you’re communicating.

For more on vibrato … Check out vocal coach Ian Castle giving a sneak peak into his video lesson on how to sing with vibrato.