Learn to Sing with Feedback

Everybody is conceited. If you believe in Darwin’s theory of evolution, it makes sense to be better than others: You get more chances to reproduce. To cover up insecurities is therefore natural. However, overcoming vanity is necessary to make progress: Insist on getting honest feedback.

Learning cannot be accomplished without feedback. If something has to be learned, you have to experience it yourself. For example the famous learning experience of something, which is hot. If you burned your fingers, you probably learned it by experience. You can circumvent the experience by observation and knowledge, however, the direct experience - your personal feedback - is the most effective.

Feedback to our voice is very personal. Our voice belongs to us; most of our direct communications is with our voice. Therefore it is not surprising that we take feedback from other persons about our voice very personnel. Our being or existence is being questioned. However, external and neutral feedback is very helpful to improve ourselves. In this way recording your singing and rehearing yourself is the first step in this direction. The recording is a neutral snapshot of your performance. Of course microphone quality, microphone positioning, background noise and recording quality have a big influence on what we will hear if we play back our recording. But do not overrate the meanings of the equipment; just accept the quality as is. In most cases the quality is good enough to hear our weaknesses. Stepping back and listening honestly to your recordings allows you to give yourself a first self-criticism.

So, the first thing you should do is recording yourself, and then do the second step: Rehear the recording carefully. In some cases we are embarrassed about ourselves. But there is no need to be embarrassed: For other persons we sound this way, even if it differs a lot of our own perception. This is because the sound produced within us, goes over the bones and the blood to our ears. For other persons the sound is transported mainly through the air. Since the speed of sound is different through the bones than through the air, the different perception is real. We have to accept this, in fact we already have accepted this fact, we live with that voice every day. To make progress, we have to accept the different sound phenomena from our recording equipment. Please, do not run away and say: This is horrible, this is not me! Do not be conceited, try to take that feedback as neutral as possible and use it to improve certain aspects in your voice. You don’t make progress by blaming the equipment or having self-pity. The recordings will be good enough to work on some attributes of your singing.

The next step is to sing a simple note and vary the loudness. Sing the note very soft, then soft, then with medium loudness, then loud and finally very loud. Make sure that the recording meter does not go in the red area; otherwise the sound gets clipped and distorted.  If you have got a good recording of yourself, listen carefully and see if you can perceive other attributes than the loudness: e. g. brightness, breathiness, harshness, warmth, vibrato, etc. If some parameters change during your loudness variation and you like a particular one better, then try if you can take that feature to other loudness’. Do the same observations by trying other vowels, or by trying higher or lower pitches. This will give you a first impression of how valuable feedback on singing can be.

Learn to sing with a recording device

If you can isolate some features, you can train those features separately. Pitch is such an attribute. For a coach it is a very tedious task to tell you to go higher or lower, over and over again, sometimes you are just stuck. In such a case you should move on to another pitch or exercise. Fortunately, with the program Listening Singing Teacher you can do pitch exercises, at home and at your convenience. And you do not have to get embarrassed, if you make the same error again and again. If you get to such a point, go back to other pitches or exercises where you were more successful and come back later to this point. Listening Singing Teacher records your voice and will give you visual feedback in real time and the teacher Felix will never get bored. Especially beginners, which do not have a trained ear yet, find it very useful to get a guidance if they are on track, too low or too high.

In addition Listening Singing Teacher allows you to compare your voice to a timbre-free pitch played with the target pitch. The sinus sound helps to focus on the pitch aspect. The sinus sound sounds very dull and boring, it is more like a humming. Therefore you should try to hum the notes too. It is easier to carry a tune to the correct pitch by just humming it. However, you should try changing from humming to other vowels, to see and hear the effects of the different articulations. The visual feedbacks (Amplitude curve, loudness, pitch) give you hints to understand what is going on when you change vowels.

Learn to sing with visual feedback

Another attribute, which can be isolated, is rhythm. Listening Singing Teacher gives you feedback in rhythm exercises: it shows you in the exercise context if you were early or late. Even professional musicians do train pitch and rhythm separately for difficult scores.

Immediate feedback helps you do avoid learning wrong associations. Long-term feedback helps you to identify trends or preferences you have. For example you might sing some pitches always flat and others you tend to sing sharp. Listening Singing Teacher keeps statistics for every note, in this way you can get long-term feedback.

Finally, to get immediate feedback on your singing lets you easier control your voice. And control of the voice is the goal of: How to learn to sing. And to be able to see progress from training session to training session by comparing the score-points of previous sessions is more challenging and fun than to have no feedback. Neutral, embarrassing-free feedback helps to improve your singing.

To have a professional coach is very expensive over a longer time. However, you get feedback on much more features than only pitch, timing and loudness: Posture, breathing, attack, and vibrato, just to name a few. In addition to it, you get psychological tips on how to overcome stage fear, and personal techniques on how to approach individual problems.

Learn to sing with feedback from a professional coach is the fastest way to make progress. However, tedious training tasks can also be done at home. Learn to sing with feedback ensures that you make fast progress. Remember the first thing to do is record yourself and then rehear the recording.


Listening Singing Teacher, Listening Music Teacher, Listening Ear Trainer, The Red Pitch Dot, The Colored Pitch Line, The Counting Hints Line, The Half-Step Brackets, The Precision Listening Method, The Singing Funnel Method, The Octave Anchor Pitches Method,The Interval Overtone Method, The Pitch Keeper Method, Absolute Pitch Point, Same Pitch Please, Pitch Ability Method, Pitch Grid Test and PitchBlitz are trademarks of AlgorithmsAndDataStructures, F. Rudin. Macintosh and OS X are trademarks of Apple Computer Inc., IBM PC is trademark of International Business Machines Inc., Windows XP/Vista/7 is trademark of Microsoft Inc. All other company and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners