Transcript

Hi I’m Cari Cole. I’m a celebrity vocal coach and artist development expert. And I help artist find their voice, craft their music, and create successful music careers. I’ve worked with Donald Fagen from Steely Dan, Courtney Love from Hole, I’ve worked with the band Journey. I’m going to teach you how to be a better singer and performer. So I’m going to give you a few tips on how to sing with a cold. I will start off by saying that singing with a cold is not fun. But as a professional singer it’s something that happens and you have to learn to deal with. The first thing to not do is don’t take antihistamines. Try your best not to take antihistamines because they dry out your throat so much that it makes singing harder. It’s actually easier to sing with all that wet sloppy stuff than to have dry vocal cords. So, there are some natural remedies that work much better than regular pharmaceutical antihistamines. I recomment D-Hist, D dash H I S T. This is what a lot of professional singers use to deal with their allergies. Allergies in general mean that something is off in your health so you want to take a look at maybe you’re not taking enough vitamins. vitimin C is a very powerful vitamin that raises the immune system but singers have to take non-ascorbic vitimin c. They don’t want to take regular vitamin c because it causes laryngeal reflux that then dries the vocal cords and that’s a little problem with that. So make sure you get non-ascorbic vitimin c. Singing with a cold, I mean in general what I recommend to my singers is to try to ignore it, to try to just sing through it. And the more that you do this you stop worrying “Oh my gosh I have a cold, I don’t sound right.” Which then makes you sing worse because you’re fearful. So you always want to sing confidently. So you say to yourself, “I have a cold but I can do this anyway.” Maybe I’m not going to hit that high note tonight so you want to have a plan ‘B’. There’s a plan A for each song and a plan ‘B’. I recently saw a famous singer sing and she instead of going for that high note, went for her plan ‘B’ note. Did anyone really notice? Maybe those who are musicians noticed, maybe a few other people noticed. But she didn’t squawk on that note she actually sang the plan B note correctly, so have your ‘A’ and ‘B’ notes planned for the times when you have a cold. And just that super, super hydrated. One of the ways is drinking water, one of the ways is steaming and that’s why sometimes people sing a lot in the shower because the steam actually is very moisterizing to the voice. You can jump in the shower, take a nice hot steam Or you can steam over the stove with a pot of water and just put a towel over your head and breathe in that steam. That’s going to bring moisture to your vocal folds right away and it’s going to clear out some of that junk. I also recommend gargling. Gargling with warm salt water is awesome, and when I have a cold I go to the gig with Throat Coat Tea which you can get at a health foods store and it brings down the inflammation and sooths the vocal folds. So I’ll give you one other little insider tip that I learned from Beyonce’s team which is loquat syrup, and this you can get at a Chinese pharmacy, drug store it works wonders for the vioce. Some people put like a little teaspoon in some warm water. I just take like a teaspoon or half a teaspoon and just eat it like honey, let it sit in the back of the throat, works wonders. So these are some awesome tips for how to sing with a cold.

Transcript

Hi I’m Cari Cole. I’m a celebrity vocal coach and artist development expert. And I help artist find their voice, craft their music, and create successful music careers. I’ve worked with Donald Fagen from Steely Dan, Courtney Love from Hole, I’ve worked with the band Journey. I’m going to teach you how to be a better singer and performer. So I want to teach you today a little bit about how to avoid strain. It’s probably the number one reason why most singers come to me to train their voices. Is they’re having problems with singing on stage and straining, or just in general having problems with their voice straining, feeling like it’s stuck in their throat. The thing about singing without strain is the first thing to understand is that the vocal muscles should have very little pressure on them. The pressure on the voice should be really taken in the muscles in the pectorals and in the rib cage and to have a nice free back of the neck. Most signers tend when they strain they tend to jut their chins forward and AHHHH, AHHHH. What you want to do is the opposite AAAH AAAH so you want to tip your chin down slightly, chest lifts at the same time and bring the sound back and around. You actually want to have the sound go this way.

So the first thing that you want to do is not sing with the throat so much, imagine the sound resonating up in the mouth, point your chin slightly down, chest slightly up, feel a lot of space in the back of your head, like the sound is coming in through the mouth and out the top of the head, and don’t sing with so much pressure, keep it light. AAAH, AAH A AHH A AAA. Try that, keep your chin pointed down, chest up. AAH A AHH A AAAA. Some people just feel a lot of pressure here at the vocal muscles. Sometimes that can be from physical things like if you have a lot a lot of tension in the back of the neck that tends to squeeze those muscles back there and there are nerve endings in the back of the neck that actually have to do with the laryngeal muscles. So some of it can be physical and the best thing to do in that regard is to go get a massage, see an acupuncturist, you know get this part of your body healthy. I mean, singing in general has a lot to do with physical health. The healthier your body is the healthier your voice is.

Transcript

Hi I’m Cari Cole. I’m a celebrity vocal coach and artist development expert. And I help artist find their voice, craft their music, and create successful music careers. I’ve worked with Donald Fagen from Steely Dan, Courtney Love from Hole, I’ve worked with the band Journey. I’m going to teach you how to be a better singer and performer

So humming is another way to warm up quickly. It isn’t something that we use a lot. We tend to use it with people that have a lot of strain or stress in their voice because it’s a lighter mechanism. But it’s an easy quick way to warm up and here’s a little insider tip, if you’re at a club and you forgot to warm up the best thing to do is to hum along with the music that’s playing and that is a great way to actually warm up your voice. But here’s a quick little humming warm-up that I use in my studio. So we sing [hums]. And I’m kind of adding a little [hums] to it. There’s a little “h” there, so there’s a little breath release. [hums a scale] Nice and light [hums] Keep it light [hums].

So that’s a great little exercise to warm up quickly. And you can do it without a piano if you learn that little scale, just learn it A capella, you can do it any time, anywhere.

Transcript

Hi, I’m Cari Cole. I’m a celebrity vocal coach and artist development expert, and I help artists find their voice, craft their music, and create successful music careers. I’ve worked with Donal Fagen from Steely Dan, Courtney Love from Hole. I’ve worked with the band Journey. I’m going to teach you how to be a better singer and performer.

Okay, so I’m going to give you a tip or two about how to correct nasality in the voice. We’ve all heard those singers who have that nasal sound. There are singers that are known for that: Edith Piaf, from way back in the day, very famous French singer. There are singers that have more nasal voices. Some people want to correct this and some people don’t. In my training I always correct it because I’m not a big fan of honky sounds, but here’s a couple ways you can do that. First is to understand that if you’re nasal, you usually have a very tight nasal passage and you’re squeezing the muscles behind the nose. I’ll get into that more in just a second, but it’s a breath imbalance and it’s a high tongue. So the tongue in back is high on a nasal voice which then compromises the overtones and the sound passage of the mouth which creates a more nasal sound. There’s less space, so it’s tighter and smaller and constricted. So a couple of things you want to do for that is to really study breathing. Most people that are nasal are holding their breath so I’m just going to imitate that sound for a minute. And so if you’re nasal, you’re not using the breath. You really want to train your breath and get better control of your breath.

The other thing I just mentioned was having a high tongue. So having a high tongue means that when you’re singing the back of the tongue is going high. So this is a harder thing to control, but the first thing I have people do is I have them hold their jaw down, tip of the tongue touching the lower lip, and then I want you to say, ‘gah.’ So you’re going to say, ‘gah.’ ‘Gah.’ And notice how on the G the back of the tongue goes really high and on the Ah it drops. Now on those of you who have more nasal voices, the Ah won’t drop very much; it will stay in that high position and you know you have a high tongue, because on the Ah vowel, the tongue is the furthest down of any vowel in the vowel spectrum.

So that’s a first starter, is to hold the jaw down, keep the tip of the tongue touching the lower lip, and say, ‘gah.’ ‘Gah.’ And to see if you can get the back of the tongue to go down. And then you try it with your singing voice, ‘gah.’ ‘Gah.’ And just keep practicing that, keep practicing that tongue dropping. You can also do it without vocalizing; you can just do it with your breath; that’s another way. Same position, take a breath in. Do you see the back of the tongue going down as you take that breath in? And you can add a bit of a yawn to help that tongue drop, but I call it that soft pallet flex and a tongue drop, because when the tongue drops band the pallet lifts and that creates that openness in the back of the mouth that ultimately you will prevent nasality when you have that.

In general, instead of singing Ah, for nasal voices, instead of singing Ah, sing Uh. So every time you sing like, ‘Ahh ahh,’ make it more, ‘Uh’ instead of ‘Ah.’ ‘Ah, uh.’ So it’s an Ah with an Uh, and that will help you contract nasality.

The good news is that nasality is total fixable, so if you practice your breath and practice those exercises that I just showed you, you’re going to see a significant improvement.

Transcript

Hi I’m Cari Cole. I’m a celebrity vocal coach and artist development expert. And I help artist find their voice, craft their music, and create successful music careers. I’ve worked with Donald Fagen from Steely Dan, Courtney Love from Hole, I’ve worked with the band Journey. I’m going to teach you how to be a better singer and performer

Hey, guys, I’m going to give you an exercise right now to master your breath in just ten minutes a day. Singing really has so much to do with the power of the breath. It’s about controlling the breath. It’s not about pushing the air out; it’s about letting the air ring inside the mouth, and inside the resonating cavities. So getting control of the breath makes a huge difference. How you’re going to do that, I’m going to teach you this breathing exercise, and you can do it in the morning for five minutes, and in the evening for five minutes before you go to bed.
So this exercise has to do with slowing the breath down in order to get control of it. I want you to sit in a comfortable chair. You can also lie down and do this exercise. If you’re lying down, put your knees up and your feet flat on the floor. If you are sitting, just sit comfortably, put one hand on your belly and you can also put one hand on your ribcage. I’m going to have you blow the air out, and then you are going to inhale for ten counts. You’re going to inhale slowly like this: One-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten. And as you do that, if you notice, the middle of my body.my stomach and my ribcage are slowly expanding, slowly expanding. So you don’t want to fill too quickly. You want to slowly expand like you’re blowing up a balloon inside your body. And then you’re going to exhale with a hiss Ssssss — for 15 counts.

So your goal is to be able to do do ten of these back-to-back comfortably. And when you can do that, you’re on your way to mastering your breath. So let’s give it a try.

So, hand on your ribcage, hand on your belly; you can be sitting or lying on the floor, blowing the air out gently. Inhaling slowly: one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten, and exhaling: Ssssssssssssssss six-seven-eight-nine-ten. Keep going 11-12-13-14-15 and relax.

Okay, let’s try that again, and what I want you to do this time, is when you wrap that breath around and you come to that next inhale, I don’t want you to gasp the air in. Because some of you will really feel like you’re out of breath at 15 counts, but the goal of this exercise is to smooth it all out. So if you are pushing that air out too quickly on that exhale, you’re going to feel like you want to gasp the air in, but that’s not how to work the exercise. How to work the exercise is to actually don’t push out so much air. Be comfortably exhaled so that you can inhale more easily. So when you come around to that inhale, I want you to take that inhale in very slow. That’s how you start to control the breath.

So the way to do this exercise is to do it ten repetitions in a row. And I recommend doing it in the morning, when you first wake up. It energizes your body and gets you kind of focused. And at the same time, your are mastering your breath and controlling your breath. And I also recommend it at the end of the day, before you go to bed, a nice way to drift off to sleep.

Transcript

Hi. I’m Cari Cole. I’m a celebrity vocal coach and artist development expert. And I help artists find their voice, craft their music and create successful music careers. I’ve worked with Donald Fagen from Steely Dan, Courtney Love from Hole. I’ve worked with the band Journey. I’m gonna teach you how to be a better singer and performer.

So, I’m gonna teach you an exercise for how to sing with your diaphragm. Now, I can’t go into all the details here, and it’s a bit more complicated than I’m gonna show you. But for a quick peek into how to use the diaphragm, and what the diaphragm is, this is gonna help you understand the subject.

So, the diaphragm is a muscle that’s inside the rib cage, okay? So, here’s one side of your rib; if I had another hand it would be over here, right? The diaphragm is inside that rib cage. The diaphragm doesn’t have any nerve endings, so we can’t feel it. So, it causes a lot of confusion for singers, or wanna be singers, when we start talking about singing with the diaphragm, because it’s not a muscle we can feel. But, we can control its movement by the surrounding muscles.

So, when the ribs open, the diaphragm has room to go down. When the ribs are too tight and locked, so it has a lot to do with your breathing, of course; when the ribs are too tight and locked, that diaphragm isn’t gonna go down. So, of course, breathing and learning how to open up the middle of the body, not breathe up into the chest, but breathe down into this area, right here. And it really is 360 degrees around the body that you want to move, when you breathe. This is how you start to control that diaphragm movement, and get it to move down.

Now, when the diaphragm moves down, it pulls air into the lungs. That’s why so many people, when they take a deep breath, they do this, and they breathe into the upper chest. Singers have to keep the chest lifted, elevated slightly, more than normal and then reach down below the chest, for the breath. And this is how we get that diaphragm movement going, like so.

So, for those of you that are very tight in this area, particularly dancers have a hard time with this, because they’re always tucking their stomach, or for those of you that have very tight abdomens or work your abdomens out a lot, this is going to be a little bit tougher for you. So, with this hand that’s being place on your upper stomach, I want you to apply more pressure in the areas that don’t move. If your ribcage doesn’t move or your upper stomach doesn’t move or your back muscles where my thumb is wrapping around to, if any of those areas feel tighter than normal, apply more pressure. So, if your stomach feels tighter, apply more pressure as you breathe.

So, I just want you to keep that chest elevated, hand here on the upper stomach with your fingers pointing in, hand on the ribcage; exhale your air, but don’t drop the chest. So, you don’t want to go like that, right? Chest stays up. Try that again. Take a breath in, blow your air out, keep the chest elevated. This is the first step to using the diaphragm correctly.

The second step is trying to open down here. So, breath down into your abdomen, and your ribs, and your back; all the way around into your back. Blow the air out, chest stays up; it doesn’t drop. And then take a breath in, reach down into your abdomen, ribs, and back. Imagine that diaphragm going all the way down, blowing the air out, keeping the chest elevated. You’re on your way to breathing into your diaphragm.

Transcript

Hi I’m Cari Cole. I’m a celebrity vocal coach and artist development expert. And I help artist find their voice, craft their music, and create successful music careers. I’ve worked with Donald Fagen from Steely Dan, Courtney Love from Hole, I’ve worked with the band Journey. I’m going to teach you how to be a better singer and performer.
So Im gonna teach you a little bit about using microphones. We’re gonna talk about performance microphone- like the microphone I’m using today. This is a line 6 microphone, this is actually a microphone used by American Idol currently. And it is a digital wireless which means it doesn’t operate on a bandwidth and it is a sensational mic, it’s one of my favorites. Most singers a re a little bit afraid of the microphone in the beginning so they tend to pull back too much, and notice what happens when I do that, it gets thinner and it doesn’t have much of a presence. So in the beginning of using a mic, I always teach singers to eat the microphone, almost have their lips on the microphone as I do now, or close by. When you’re singing louder, you can pull away a little bit, but don’t pull away so far, because then it starts sounding thin. Thats more prevalent on a recording microphone than on a performance microphone. So, eating the microphone, not being afraid of it. And the best way to get good at that is to get a microphone, have a microphone and a stand at home. Use a microphone regularly to sing. If you don’t want to bother your neighbors, you can plug that, get an interface and plug that into your computer and wear headphones, and get used to singing on the microphone. A couple of things about it. One, the sweet spot. A couple of things about it. There’s a sweet spot in the center of that microphone that’s very important. If you’re singing like this, you’re not gonna get that sweet spot. You need to be in the center of it. But the best way to learn is to get comfortable on it so to use it all the time. Also microphone placement is important. If you’re gonna use the piano, you’re gonna want that microphone, like when you sit at the piano position your microphone, notice I have it at an angle like this so I can look down at my hands and also at you. Because if you go to the piano and you get it all positioned and everything and then you look down and you’re like “Woops” Or, you position it too low, I see a lot of singers do this on stage and they put both hands and they lean on the microphone and look what happens. A beginner student did that in one of my sessions the other day and I had to go up on stage and help her because she didn’t know what to do. So when you’re sitting at the piano its important to have the microphone positioned correctly so you can straight ahead and look down at your fingers and not be confused and have to move up and down. When I’m playing piano I will keep my mouth on the microphone so I know where I am in space. Now when you’re standing up, heres a typical mic position standing up,one of the things you want to be careful of is, especially when you’re not used to using the microphone is, if you put weight on it, it tends to do this as your singing and then you’re kind of stuck. Either make sure that the mic itself is really tight and don’t put weight on it, just put your hands here, and a lot of singer’s use just one hand. You also want to get comfortable taking the mic off and don’t do it when you’re singing, wait for a break, and then take the mic off. Always put your hand on the stand first instead of just grabbing the mic and then make sure that you move the stand so that it doesn’t upstage you. Then you want to get really comfortable with where your movements are with where that microphone center. So people start moving in the beginning and pulling the microphone away because they’re focused on their movement. For singers that are more seasoned, you’ll see them pull the microphone back when they’re singing louder. This is when you’re more advanced and you know how to control it. But you’re really controlling it by what you hear. On stage you have monitors, they’re either up above you or on the floor. This is what’s feeding your voice back to you so you wanna make sure you have a good monitor level so you can hear yourself or its easy to go off pitch. So these are just a couple of tips for a live microphone but remember you want to get comfortable with it so it doesn’t look like you’re struggling. The last thing you want to think about is your microphone. You want to be thinking about your music, and what you’re singing about, and your audience.

Transcript

Hi I’m Cari Cole. I’m a celebrity vocal coach and artist development expert. And I help artist find their voice, craft their music, and create successful music careers. I’ve worked with Donald Fagen from Steely Dan, Courtney Love from Hole, I’ve worked with the band Journey. I’m going to teach you how to be a better singer and performer

I’m going to give you an exercise and a lesson for singing with good pitch. Those of you who watch American Idol, the word “pitch” has become a household word. We all know what that means when a singer is singing slightly off-pitch. Pitch is something that even good singers work hard to have. You can have a really good musical ear and have a good musical voice, and still go slightly off-pitch. You can have a voice that goes off-pitch just from not being a singer and not using the voice much. The more you sing, the better your center of pitch gets. You want to think of pitch like a circle with a bullseye right in the center. Different singers actually sing and professional singers who have good pitch all have a slightly different center of pitch. So there are some singers that sing slightly sharp, and some singers that sing slightly flat, but not enough to go outside of that circle. So it sounds like its really good pitch, but if you put them together singing in unison, you would even hear that.

Now for your, starting to get a better sense of pitch, I want you start thinking of your notes as circles. You want to aim for the bullseye. The best way to do this and do it well is to record yourself and listen back. The first thing in determining whether you are singing on pitch is understanding whether you are singing sharp, on the sharp side, or the flat side of the note. I like to take it to the max first. Let’s sing at the center of pitch and then go outside of the pitch, so that you can hear that difference.

So, we’re going to go sharp first. I’m going to sing ah (sings ah while varying pitch). Doesn’t sound so good. But that is important to determine that that is a sharp note. Now here’s a flat note. Here’s the center. (sings ah) Sounds flat, okay? So you can’t have good pitch until your ear hears the center of pitch and whether you are singing sharp or singing flat. That’s the first thing. And I recommend going to the piano, playing a note, and trying to hit the pitch. And then go slightly sharp, and then come back to the center, and then go slightly flat. Kind of like tuning a guitar string, how we would bring it in to the pitch.

The next thing with pitch is using the piano or using an instrument as a guide, which is really helpful. And the third thing is to sing a cappella a lot. But here’s the thing with that, if you’re going to sing A cappella, I’d like you to find what key the song is in and use an iPhone app or something, a piano app, to actually hit the note first for you, so that you are in the right key, if you are going to sing A cappella. And that’s a trick for singing a cappella songs in general. If you are going to go for an audition, you want to make sure that you don’t come in on the wrong note or in the wrong key, and then all of a sudden you are singing way higher than you need to. You want to be in the right key.

Okay, back to pitch. We’re going to sing center of pitch. What a lot of you are going to do, you’re going to slide into that note. You’re going to ah-uh-ah (sings at varying pitch). What I want you to imagine is, you’re going to aim right for the center of the bullseye. (Sings ah). And you want to imagine coming to it from above. Why is because the actually soft palette, which is inside the mouth, needs to lift for you to be able to hit center of pitch. That gets a little bit technical, but you can start taking lessons with a vocal coach to experience that more, because it’s really exciting when you start to make those changes and be more accurate with your pitch.

So we’re just going to do a little scale, singing on ahh. (Sings five notes and then plays the five notes on the piano.) And now, pretty good so far, now we’re going to go to a five-note scale. The challenge here is in the major scale. There is a whole note, whole note, half note, whole note series. The relationship between all those notes is not exactly the same, which is where most people tend to go off-pitch. And this is a little bit more advanced but I wanted to give it to you because I think it would be interesting for you to learn.

So we’re going to hear that scale again and the fourth note is the half-step. Here we go. (Plays and sings ah) Half-step. (sings) Those notes are closer to each other than the first three. Let’s do it again from the beginning of the scale. (Sings) I think of it as a sideways note. Do it again. (Sings)

Mastering your whole steps and half steps have a lot to do with having good pitch.

Transcript

Hi I’m Cari Cole. I’m a celebrity vocal coach and artist development expert. And I help artist find their voice, craft their music, and create successful music careers. I’ve worked with Donald Fagen from Steely Dan, Courtney Love from Hole, I’ve worked with the band Journey. I’m going to teach you how to be a better singer and performer

So I’m going to talk for just a minute about how to sing like Christina Aguilera, take a look at her voice and what the qualities are that make her Christina. She is one of the more popular singers today. I think primarily because of her riffs and her runs. And she’s really based in blues and in R&B. And her phrasing is just sublime. Just, she really, truly is an incredible singer

So one of the things, you know, if you’re wanting to emulate her and have more of her sound is right away you need to sing blues. You need to sing older blues songs. Listen to Aretha Franklin, Mavis Staples. Get into that. And also really listen to Christina and sing with her. She is the queen of riffing today. And she will show you all the riffs and runs. Sometimes she does them so fast, they’re even hard for a professional like myself to hear. I gotta slow them down. I gotta really pull them apart. But there’s so much to learn from her.

So if you want to sing more like her, it really is that soulful element that you are looking for. And so I recommend you listen to her Back To Basics record, which is the record where she really gets more into blues. And that’s a great place to start to really give you that foundation. And again, she is going to show you all the riffs and runs. And just study them. Take one song every week or every two weeks even, and break it down. And really learn what she did.

So for instance, one of my young students was 13 years old. Came to me. And she was singing musical theory at the time, but wanted to be a pop singer. This is the transitional period that a lot of singers come to me in, and they want to sound more pop. And so she had gone to an audition, and one of her friends was at the audition as well said to her you’ll never sound like pop. You don’t know how to riff. You don’t know how to do runs. And she just panicked. And she went home and started really listening to pop singers and studied Christina Aguilera in particular. And within six months she was riffing. And this is the best way to learn riffs.

Christina really is the queen of it. So, you want to sound more like her. Really, really learn her runs. This is probably the most important thing that you can learn with her, besides the amazing emotional expression that she has. But they are not mutually exclusive. Those two qualities go together. You know, having more soul is having more rhythm and more riffs in your voice.

So, I hope this helps you sing a little bit more like the queen, Christina.

Transcript

Hi I’m Cari Cole. I’m a celebrity vocal coach and artist development expert. And I help artist find their voice, craft their music, and create successful music careers. I’ve worked with Donald Fagen from Steely Dan, Courtney Love from Hole, I’ve worked with the band Journey. I’m going to teach you how to be a better singer and performer

So we’ll talk a little bit about Chris Martin’s voice from Cold Play, and how to sing a little bit more like him. He uses a lighter style of singing. He doesn’t force his voice a lot when he sings. He’s also a very expressive singer. He uses a lot of emotion. And sometimes even, live, he’ll lead with his emotion even more than his technique. He’s not so much of a perfect technique singer. I think it’s something he’s working on, and that is more from a voice teacher perspective. I think he has a really good voice. But if you listen to the older stuff, Yellow and some of that, his focus wasn’t so much on being perfect vocally. I think it was more expressive. And so that’s something I really admire and like about his voice. He’s growing over time and now he’s training and he’s into it. His comment was “why wouldn’t I want someone to bring out the best in me,” he he said of his voice teacher. I particularly like the way he uses, in his range, when he goes into falsetto. A lot of other male singers would really try to push that envelope and they try to stay in chest voice. And he really lets it flip into falsetto. And it makes for a very sort of vulnerable style of singing that expresses more emotion.

So if that’s something that you’re looking to do, or if you are looking to improve your connection between your chest and falsetto, or you look to have a little more vulnerability as a singer, he’s someone to listen to. He also uses a lot of textures, a lot of breathy. I think ultimately he’s really a songwriter and his songs are at the core of his message. From what I know about him, what’s important to him is getting that melody and that message across. And so he doesn’t do a ton of ad-libing because he doesn’t want to detract from the songs. So that’s something that he chooses as a singer.

So those are just a few characteristics about Chris Martin’s singing that you could bring into your own practice.

Transcript

Hi I’m Cari Cole. I’m a celebrity vocal coach and artist development expert. And I help artist find their voice, craft their music, and create successful music careers. I’ve worked with Donald Fagen from Steely Dan, Courtney Love from Hole, I’ve worked with the band Journey. I’m going to teach you how to be a better singer and performer

So I’m going to teach you today a few tips about how to learn from other singers. The truth is that every singer out there learned from other singers. We listen to singers and we copy them, we emulate them. We learn their phrasing, their tone, how they use their vibrato. And these are ways that we start to use their techniques with our own voice. So I recommend it in the beginning.

Ultimately, we don’t want to copy another singer. But there are these great songs and these great voices out there that we have so much to learn from. So in the beginning I always have singers sing along with a lot of songs that they love, and their voice will get better because you will learn a lot by copying them.

So what do I mean by learn from other singers? I mean by listening to their phrasing and studying their phrasing, how they’re approaching delivering their lines. What is the emotional interpretation behind what they’re singing? Like don’t just listen on a surface level, listen on a deeper level and tear it apart. What are their vocal textures? What are their dynamics? You know if you just sing along with them and sing on top of them and you don’t really listen, you’re not really going to learn that much. So it’s a combination of singing along with them and listening that’s going to give you those inside secrets to how they’re making their sound happen.

The trick is understanding that your voice is going to be always different than those singers you’re listening to, but you have so much to benefit from listening to them. And then once you’ve got it down, then practice with an instrumental track, find one on Youtube of that song. Sing through it, sing it down a few times like that singer did but then try to ad-lib a little bit and add some of your own voice. Try to let their voice sort of fade into the background in your mind and bring forward what your voice wants to do and how it wants to move and try some things.

One of the things I suggest is play the instrumental track and just ad-lib over it as if you were a horn or a guitar soloing you know. Even just sing on a vowel and try to make up some notes and stretch your ear outside of the notes that are within the song. Then go back to the melody and try to add your own twist to it.

So these are some of the ways that you can learn from listening to other singers.

Transcript

Hi I’m Cari Cole. I’m a celebrity vocal coach and artist development expert. And I help artist find their voice, craft their music, and create successful music careers. I’ve worked with Donald Fagen from Steely Dan, Courtney Love from Hole, I’ve worked with the band Journey. I’m going to teach you how to be a better singer and performer

So I’m going to tell you a few tips for how to create your signature sound and how to find your niche as a singer. For those of you watching American Idol, it’s become very clear when a singer is on their path to finding their niche and whether their singing the right genre, whether they’ve chosen the right songs for them or not, and this is crucial in the music world. There’s a lot of great voices out there, there’s a lot of talented people, but the people who tend to pop through are those that have found their niche, how they sound good singing. So I’m going to just a few tips for that today.

First thing is you want to choose the right material for you and that starts with lyrical content. You should be singing stuff that you believe in, that is akin to you, that is natural to you. So you want to choose lyrics that mean something to you, you don’t want to be singing about stuff that doesn’t mean anything to you.

You also want to find the right genre, and this takes some experimenting. So one of the things I do with my students when they come to me is we go through a bunch of different genres of material, and we record them and listen back and see what they sound best singing. Sometimes a singer might like a style; it might not be what’s exactly perfect for them and they might not have tried other styles. Generally it’s kind of a hybrid of what the singer likes and maybe a direction they might need to be pushed in a little bit to experiment.

You want to find songs that the melody feels easy for you, feels good for you. Songs, different melodies are very different. Everybody focuses on keys, on how important keys are, and yes they are, they’re super important, but it’s not just the key that is right, it’s the actual way that the melody moves, and that has to do with some deeper stuff, like some singers like to hold notes for a longer time, some singers like to move more quickly and riff. All of this depends on how that melody moves in that song, whether it’s right for you. So use your own judgment as you’re singing something. You want to sing it at least 50 times. I know that sounds like a lot, but it’s the truth. You want to sing it for about 50 times to get it in your muscle memory first before you make that determination.

Other ways I work with people in finding their niche is in song writing, is in helping them right songs that come from their own lives, the themes from their lives. And this is one of the things I’m very passionate about. I love working with artists in this capacity. We do a lot of co-writing, and helping them pull out the themes from their life and actually create their branding right there in their song writing. This is something that we do a lot today. So for those of you that want to be artists out there in the world and you’re not yet writing, absolutely start writing. Co-writing is the best way. So these are some tips on finding your signature sound and finding your niche.

Transcript

Hi I’m Cari Cole. I’m a celebrity vocal coach and artist development expert. And I help artist find their voice, craft their music, and create successful music careers. I’ve worked with Donald Fagen from Steely Dan, Courtney Love from Hole, I’ve worked with the band Journey. I’m going to teach you how to be a better singer and performer

I’m going to give you some tips for how to keep your voice healthy. The health of the body has a lot to do with the health of the voice. You can’t mistreat your body. You need to drink a lot of water; you need to eat healthy. You need to eat lots of fresh fruits and vegetables that have a lot of vitality in them and have a lot of moisture in them. Singers need a lot of moisture. So number one is to drink eight to ten glasses of water a day. And this is non-negotiable. Water is non-negotiable for a singer, unless you want a really raspy voice. Raspy voices sometimes sound cool, but they have a lot of vocal problems associated with them. So it’s not recommended. Drinking eight to ten glasses of water a day; eating really healthy; eating lots of fruits and vegetables — a lot of that vitality, you want. I do a lot of juicing, particularly when I sing a lot. And that juicing, all that extra nutrition, brings so much vitality. Singers need a lot of vitality and they need a lot of breath. Juicing helps to oxygenate the blood. So, we need a lot of oxygen in the blood as well.

You want to sleep. You want to sleep at least seven to nine hours. Some people are lighter sleepers than others, so I don’t like to say you have to have nine or ten hours, but sleep makes a huge difference in the voice, as much as water does. Those are the two things that are non-negotiable. I know a lot of people when they are on tour have an issue with that is staying up late and that kind of thing. You have to learn to turn your mind off, maybe practice meditation or breathing exercises right before you go to bed. You can also use chamomile tea or Sleepy-time tea to help you drift off to sleep. I sometimes put lavender oil on my pillow because lavender is very relaxing and it helps you shut off the brain. I also use passion flower, which is an herb that allows you to turn the brain off and relax the nervous system, but it doesn’t sedate you at all. So we use that a lot with touring artists. particularly because they are very pumped after their shows. It’s like, okay, let’s party! It’s time to have some fun! And they end up staying too late and then they have to get up early for a radio show.

Just remember that the instrument of the voice lives inside the body, so the health of the body has a lot to do with the health of the voice. Treat your body well. If you’re going to go out to a party and have some alcohol or whatever, which is not so great for singing but you want to have a little bit of some fun ‚Äì and you want to eat pizza and cheese or things that we don’t recommend so much for singing, just remember you have about three days to recover from that, for the vocal muscles to recover, the vocal instrument to recover. Think of it as a three-day rule. If you’re going to go have some fun, make sure there’s three days between that fun and your singing.

Transcript

Hi I’m Cari Cole. I’m a celebrity vocal coach and artist development expert. And I help artist find their voice, craft their music, and create successful music careers. I’ve worked with Donald Fagen from Steely Dan, Courtney Love from Hole, I’ve worked with the band Journey. I’m going to teach you how to be a better singer and performer

So over the years of training singers, I’ve become an somewhat of an expert, in particular with healing hoarse voices. So for instance I get a lot of referrals from doctors, from ENT voice doctors, to help singers sing more correctly. Often they’ve come to me and they’ve come into some kind of problem. So the first thing that I always do is talk about how the body is the instrument and how the vocal instrument is inside the body. So the state of the body to some degree determines the state of your voice. So if you’re not sleeping, if you’re living a rock star life style and staying up late at night, eating late at night and all these things make a difference in how the voice sounds. So we have to look at all these things when we’re healing a hoarse voice. Number one I would say go and get yourself a vocal coach. It’s important to learn how to sing correctly and you won’t have those problems. Really within a week or two, students I work with don’t have those problems. We can resolve them really quickly. Sometimes there are other systemic problems or medical problems that you may want to see an ENT for so it’s a little bit more than a day or two that hoarseness is sticking around go and see a professional voice doctor, an ENT. You could have reflux, you could have an allergy problem, there are all kinds of issues with what is causing that hoarseness. I would say the number one thing that causes hoarseness in dehydration. So, 99% of the time when a person has a hoarse voice they’re not drinking water. The other 1% of the time is if they’re having reflux and laryngeal reflux which we call if for singers is not something where acid is coming up, but as it is washing up unbeknownst to the person therefore we call it singer’s reflux or laryngeal reflux. So, if you feel dry all the time and you are constantly drinking water, it is a sign of having reflux so go and see your ENT and check that out as well. So the number one cause of hoarseness that comes from singing and not from reflux and not from dehydration is because you’re singing too much and the vocal muscles actually get pushed up in the throat and that causes hoarseness. So if you’re feeling hoarseness at the end of your gig, of if you’re feeling hoarseness in general after you sing, you want to pull the laryngeal muscles down, and you just do that gently. So you put your fingers kind of at the top of the throat and here’s the thyroid cartilage. Go google the thyroid cartilage online so that you can see what it looks like there it really covers about this territory and you want to put your fingers at the top and just begin a yawn and pull it down. So when you pull the larynx down, you pull it down gently, no yanking, but I would say to wrap up this section about having a hoarse voice is number one drink a lot of water, and number two be healthy, eat healthy, get lots of rest, and number three, a little massage in pulling the larynx down will help restore that voice right away.

Transcript

Hi I’m Cari Cole. I’m a celebrity vocal coach and artist development expert. And I help artist find their voice, craft their music, and create successful music careers. I’ve worked with Donald Fagen from Steely Dan, Courtney Love from Hole, I’ve worked with the band Journey. I’m going to teach you how to be a better singer and performer

A lot of people come to me asking me how young is too young to start, and when should a person start training. The youngest student that I took, because I really start with technique first, was seven. I don’t take many seven-year olds. The reason I took her was she had not only so much good tone and a good sound, but she was so into it. Her attention span was really focused on this subject. I knew that instantly we struck up this relationship it was going to work. And so there’s a lot of factors that go into my choice in that regard.

But I think one of the reason parents tend to hear this general comment of don’t train your child too young, you could ruin their voice, is if they train with more of a sorry guys, musical theatre teacher who is only teaching them to belt and is not concerned with the health of their voice. This can be damaging. So you want to make sure that you find a coach that has a really good, solid technique under their belt. And then there really is no age too young as long as their attention span is there. I mean, it’s not going to be too interesting for a five-year old to study technique, but they might want to sing songs. If they’re interested in music, I would have them learn piano or learn an instrument. And that’s the place to start. I started at six with guitar. I didn’t get into singing until later.

You want to stimulate their interest in music, and scientists say that there is an area of the brain that grows with musical education. That’s why I make space in my program for eight students under the age of fifteen, every year. Because I really believe in fostering the talent in young singers. But either way, it’s important to have a coach that really understands technique and can lead them correctly, so that they don’t their voices. And it’s invaluable for them because it’s set up in their muscle memory to sing correctly.

For instance, Katy Perry started, I think, when she was nine, with opera lessons. She trained from nine to sixteen. But you can hear it in her voice. She has a lot of overtones and a lot of clarity and a lot of tone. So it’s a cool thing to do, as long as you find the right approach.

Transcript

Hi I’m Cari Cole. I’m a celebrity vocal coach and artist development expert. And I help artist find their voice, craft their music, and create successful music careers. I’ve worked with Donald Fagen from Steely Dan, Courtney Love from Hole, I’ve worked with the band Journey. I’m going to teach you how to be a better singer and performer

So you always want to complete your warm-up with an arpeggio. An arpeggio is a one, three, five, eight of the chord. Why is that important? Because it covers some range. And we want to finish the vocal warm-up with range. So that you can expand your range a little bit.

So we’re going to sing on some different vowels. We’re going to start with ah. So we’re going to sing ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.

And notice how my voice, how my jaw is down? There is more of an oval or egg-shaped position of the mouth. This is really important. If you have trouble doing that, you might want to put two fingers at your chin and kind of gently pull your jaw down. You can also use your hand and hold your jaw down. That’s a little more of an advanced technique. But just propping your jaw with two fingers is a great way to start that. Most people don’t have much length in their jaw when they start singing. So, it’s something you have to work on. OK?

So we’re gonna sing ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.

Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.

Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.

Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.

Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.

We’re gonna move to E now.

E, E, E, E, E, E, E.

E, E, E, E, E, E, E.

E, E, E, E, E, E, E.

Arpeggios are a really important way to again, expand the range and complete your warm-up. I just did the ascending scale. You can also come back down. And that’s an exercise that you should learn how to sing a capella and memorize. Once you get that memorized inside your ear and inside your voice, you’ll have much more flexibility, and your range will expand.

Transcript

Hi I’m Cari Cole. I’m a celebrity vocal coach and artist development expert. And I help artist find their voice, craft their music, and create successful music careers. I’ve worked with Donald Fagen from Steely Dan, Courtney Love from Hole, I’ve worked with the band Journey. I’m going to teach you how to be a better singer and performer. So I’m going to teach you another warm-up. This exercise is really designed to help with the break area so that you don’t sing sky when you go into head voice and bumpy when you go into that transition. We’re gonna use an A vowel and an A vowel keeps the larynx in a little bit of a deeper position, the larynx being the vocal muscles. So right here in the voice box if you put your finger on the top of your adam’s apple or your thyroid cartilage and swallow, you feel it move up. Now take a yawn, you feel it move down. So when the larynx stays in a deeper position we can control the voice better. So we’re gonna sing “Mum mum mum mum mum” The M also helps us bring the resonance to the lips and out of the throat. Very important. Here we go. “Mum mum mum mum mum. Mum mum mum mum mum. Gonna go a little faster Mum mum mum mum mum. Mum mum mum mum. Mum mum mum mum mum. Mum mum mum mum mum mum. Mum mum mum mum mum mum. Mum mum mum mum mum mum. Mum mum mum mum mum mum. Mum mum mum mum mum mum. Mum mum mum mum mum mum. This exercise will help you control the change between the chest and head voice.

Transcript

Hi I’m Cari Cole. I’m a celebrity vocal coach and artist development expert. And I help artist find their voice, craft their music, and create successful music careers. I’ve worked with Donald Fagen from Steely Dan, Courtney Love from Hole, I’ve worked with the band Journey. I’m going to teach you how to be a better singer and performer

Hey, guys, I’m going to give you an exercise right now to master your breath in just ten minutes a day. Singing really has so much to do with the power of the breath. It’s about controlling the breath. It’s not about pushing the air out; it’s about letting the air ring inside the mouth, and inside the resonating cavities. So getting control of the breath makes a huge difference. How you’re going to do that, I’m going to teach you this breathing exercise, and you can do it in the morning for five minutes, and in the evening for five minutes before you go to bed.
So this exercise has to do with slowing the breath down in order to get control of it. I want you to sit in a comfortable chair. You can also lie down and do this exercise. If you’re lying down, put your knees up and your feet flat on the floor. If you are sitting, just sit comfortably, put one hand on your belly and you can also put one hand on your ribcage. I’m going to have you blow the air out, and then you are going to inhale for ten counts. You’re going to inhale slowly like this: One-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten. And as you do that, if you notice, the middle of my body.my stomach and my ribcage are slowly expanding, slowly expanding. So you don’t want to fill too quickly. You want to slowly expand like you’re blowing up a balloon inside your body. And then you’re going to exhale with a hiss Ssssss — for 15 counts.

So your goal is to be able to do do ten of these back-to-back comfortably. And when you can do that, you’re on your way to mastering your breath. So let’s give it a try.

So, hand on your ribcage, hand on your belly; you can be sitting or lying on the floor, blowing the air out gently. Inhaling slowly: one-two-three-four-five-six-seven-eight-nine-ten, and exhaling: Ssssssssssssssss six-seven-eight-nine-ten. Keep going 11-12-13-14-15 and relax.

Okay, let’s try that again, and what I want you to do this time, is when you wrap that breath around and you come to that next inhale, I don’t want you to gasp the air in. Because some of you will really feel like you’re out of breath at 15 counts, but the goal of this exercise is to smooth it all out. So if you are pushing that air out too quickly on that exhale, you’re going to feel like you want to gasp the air in, but that’s not how to work the exercise. How to work the exercise is to actually don’t push out so much air. Be comfortably exhaled so that you can inhale more easily. So when you come around to that inhale, I want you to take that inhale in very slow. That’s how you start to control the breath.

So the way to do this exercise is to do it ten repetitions in a row. And I recommend doing it in the morning, when you first wake up. It energizes your body and gets you kind of focused. And at the same time, your are mastering your breath and controlling your breath. And I also recommend it at the end of the day, before you go to bed, a nice way to drift off to sleep.

Transcript

Hi I’m Cari Cole. I’m a celebrity vocal coach and artist development expert. And I help artist find their voice, craft their music, and create successful music careers. I’ve worked with Donald Fagen from Steely Dan, Courtney Love from Hole, I’ve worked with the band Journey. I’m going to teach you how to be a better singer and performer. So voice warm up number 2, the best thing to do next is to warm up your vowels. So singing, as singers we sing on the vowels, and we want to make our vowels nice and clear. So we’re going to sing ah, eh, eee, i, and oh. And as I’m singing, notice how my mouth is a little more open, that’s more correct singing and that’s better singing. When a singer is singing with jaw tension their jaw will tend to be closed and their vowels will sound more gutteral. So good singing is a nice open mouth but not over-open, but that its open and also that the jaw is a little bit further lengthened instead of going wider. Ok so instead of ahhh, I’m going ahh, and that creates more shape for the sound to actually resonate inside the mouth, and it makes it easier to sing. Ok, so we’re going to sing oh, ahh, aaaeee to start. So we’re going to sing ohhhhh ahh aaaee, ohhh ahh aaaeee. So I’m going to go up the scale, just follow me. Ohh ahh aaeee, oh ahh aaeee, oh ahh aaeee, ohh ahh aaeeee. Then aaaee ahhh oh. Aaaeee ahh oh, aaeee ahh oh. Continue. Aaeee ahh oh, aaeee ahh oh. EEE ahhh oooo. And on eee, the tendency is to go eeee, but I want eeeeeeeee, eeee ahhh ooooo, and, eeee ahhh ooooo, eeee ahhh ooooo, continue up, eeee ahhh ooooo, eeee ahhh ooooo. Then ooo ahh eeee. Ooo ahh eeee, ooo ahh eeee. Ooo ahh eeee, ooo ahh eeee. Ahh eee ooo. Ahh eee ooo, ahh eee ooo. Eee ooh ahh. Eee ooh ahh, eee ooh ahh. Ooo, eee ahh. Ooo, eee ahh, ooo, eee ahh. Oh aaeee ahh. Oh aaeee ahh, oh aaeee ahh. So I want you to watch how I sang and the positions for the different vowels from my mouth and if you notice that my mouth didn’t change a whole lot, but my lips had a little bit of action. Again this is really good singing. Why? Because we want all of our vowels to really come from the same place. We want whether I’m singing ahhh aaeee eeee ahh aeeee ooo. Notice how when my mouth doesn’t move around a whole lot, the sound stays the same. So what we don’t want is, ahhh aeeee eeeee ahhh eeeee oh ooooo. Right so those extra motions, closing the jaw, really screws around with the sound. So this is a great exercise to warm up your vowels.

Transcript

Hi I’m Cari Cole. I’m a celebrity vocal coach and artist development expert. And I help artist find their voice, craft their music, and create successful music careers. I’ve worked with Donald Fagen from Steely Dan, Courtney Love from Hole, I’ve worked with the band Journey. I’m going to teach you how to be a better singer and performer

So, I’m going to give you a tip or two for how to expand your vocal range. Vocal range is basically expanded and increased by vocalizing more, by studying, by training, but the principal behind is that there is an overtone series in the voice and when the voice is aligned physically more correctly, because singing is a very physical event, it’s a coordination of air and muscle, and you must master the breath and you must master your alignment. I always talk a lot about alignment, your chest has to be up, your chin has to be down, your head has to be back. If you are jutting forward when you are singing, you’re going to be singing from these muscles and you really need to, in order to get that column of air and that flow of breath, your chin needs to be down and your head needs to be back. So alignment is a very important part of this. So the vocal range gets expanded when the overtone series starts to ring. So if I sing and I sing without an open mouth and a position that is going to compromise the sound of my voice, it’s going to sound slightly flat. So if I sing ahh (vocalizing a note, showing how sound changes when her mouth is open and opened wider and then closed). So those, you just heard a little bit of what overtones are.

Overtones is when the voice is more open and aligned correctly, you’re going to get the voice to ring and therefore more overtones are going to ring. And that’s what creates power in the voice and tone in the voice but it also creates range. So, like my voice teacher when I was training, when I was a student, use to tell me is that the overtones in the middle of the voice are what create the higher notes and the lower notes. So a lot of people mistakenly just go to the high notes to try and increase range or go to the low notes to try and push that lower register. That initially works and that’s good, you need to sing and you need to use your voice but ultimately what expands your range is getting really good tone in the middle of your voice, in the meatier part of your voice and that’s also where some of the weaker points are. So you have to really work on managing that break area, going from chest to head for girls or going from chest voice to falsetto for guys. That is a big part of expanding the range, is fixing that break area. A lot of times we talk about that like singing underneath the door, that you want to slip your voice underneath the door because you need compression. Anytime you’re going higher or anytime you’re going through that passage in the voice. So, what a lot of people will do as they’re going higher and I’m talking about the break area because this is a part of range, so what a lot of people will do, ahh (vocalizing from low to high pitch) and they get really breathy on the top because they have no compression and what we want to do is ahh (vocalizing from low to high pitch and low again, showing compression in the diaphragm not in the chest) so we can go flawlessly through those register shifts and that’s a big part of controlling the range.

Transcript

Hi, I’m Cari Cole. I’m a celebrity vocal coach and artist development expert and I help artists find their voice, craft their music and create successful music careers. I’ve worked with Donald Fagen from Steely Dan, Courtney Love from Hole. I’ve worked with the band Journey. I’m going to teach you how to be a better singer and performer.

So I’m going to give you a few tips for performance secrets for American Idol winners. I have worked with American Idol’s and I have worked with finalists and many of the contestants on the show. Its a very intense show and there’s a lot of pressure on and you have to learn a lot of songs very quickly. I think some of the big main topics, some of the main things that these singers know is that over-rehearsing is really important. You can’t just sing through a song once or twice that you’ve to really know it. A cappella and with the accompaniment and that when you know it a cappella then you’re not relying upon what’s happening musically and it just makes it more solid for you. We know that song choice is king. Song choice meaning lyrical you know- choice, finding the song that fits you like a glove is really not an easy thing to do. I can’t tell you how many times in this studio we have poured through material looking for the right songs for a particular artist and it can definitely make or break you. Also in the way that you perform those songs . . . you never want to sing it like the singer ever. You always want to bring your own interpretations. Singing it like the singer is just an [disapproving sound]. It’s not interesting. It sounds like you are trying to sing karaoke and you know. . . you want to change up those notes. So you also want to . . . some of the secrets that Idol contestants use is changing the tempo. Also performance is super important. It’s not just about the voice even though American Idol is a vocal competition, its also a competition about the full person. So it really is about how the person delivers that. it’s not just about the technical voice. It’s about the expression of that voice and I think that more than anything, if I was to say there was one secret to singing I think this is it. I think the secret to being a great singe and getting people to rise to their feet in standing ovation is actually what you give them emotionally. It’s not technically what you sing and that’s kind of an intangible but there’s a little trick to it and this is what it is – whatever you want your audience to feel you feel it. So if you want your audience to feel this is joy you know then you feel that. If you feel that it will translate. If you want your audience to feel the pain of that song then you reach down inside yourself and you feel that and you of-course also have to learn how to bring that to your face, but that will translate. That’s what you are doing as a singer, as a performer is communicating.

Transcript

Hi I’m Cari Cole. I’m a celebrity vocal coach and artist development expert. And I help artist find their voice, craft their music, and create successful music careers. I’ve worked with Donald Fagen from Steely Dan, Courtney Love from Hole, I’ve worked with the band Journey. I’m going to teach you how to be a better singer and performer. So i’m going to give you a few tips for how to sing like Katy Perry. One of the things right away that I as a vocal coach hear in Katy Perrys’ voice is a really good tone, so I know that she’s trained and low and behold when I went to search and find out how she trains- she has trained classically, so I could hear that tone in her voice. She trained from 9 to 16. She trained operatically, so that’s one of the elements. She also stylistically uses some interesting things. She uses the uh-oh-oh, oh-oh. Those little glottals are all throughout her music, like Britney Spears did, she has continued along in that legacy. I think one of the keys to her success has been song choice. She works a lot with Doctor Luke who I just actually had a master session with at the ASCAP Expo Conference, which was awesome. He broke down the E.T song and showed us the whole design of how they created that track and how she came in and she just sang a scatch vocal and the scratch vocal ended up being the final vocal on the record. But that’s because she was very- she’s a very good singer. She has a wide range and she works really hard at that she’s also a really good song writer. So she’s the real deal. She’s done her work. How to sing like her, really pay attention to her diction. You know, she’ll use- Like she doesn’t sing “I” straight up it’s “ah”. There’s almost like a country drawl to it but it sounds cool when it’s put over pop tracks so pay attention to her diction this is something that producers will do with you in the studio they’ll make these corrections. It was something she too had to learn. I think a lot of it comes from diction so pay a lot of attention to how she’s pronouncing it. I think that’s a big key for her.

Transcript

Hi I’m Cari Cole. I’m a celebrity vocal coach and artist development expert. And I help artist find their voice, craft their music, and create successful music careers. I’ve worked with Donald Fagen from Steely Dan, Courtney Love from Hole, I’ve worked with the band Journey. I’m going to teach you how to be a better singer and performer. So I’m going to talk a little bit about how to get the most out of pop vocal singing lessons. The most important thing for singers is structure – I know it was for me when I was training and I know it is for a lot of singers and artists that I work for in my programs. I just recently sent out an email – I have 35 people in my programs every year – and I felt that they could be doing better. I sent out an email saying, “You know, I know you send me every Sunday your practice log, but I want you to know something. I want you to know that I only have 35 people in the whole world to work with, and if you’re not going to be up to snuff, if you’re not going to be vocalising 4-5 times a week on a regular basis, then maybe this isn’t the best program for you to be doing.” It was one of those moments where I was like, “I need to get across the importance of the structure,” – that’s where the results come from. What they’re wanting is in the practical daily application. It’s very simple, really. And all they have to do is do it, and their voices are going to be flying and their songwriting is going to be outstanding and I have this whole list of things they need to do every day that doesn’t take a kajillion hours. It’s doable over a couple of hours, but it’s a structure. I’ve found over the last couple of years that the more structure I give my artists, the better results they get. So my first recommendation to you is follow the structure and establish it. Set a time when you’re going to practice. It doesn’t have to be the same time every day, but make a structure to it so you get the work done. These are how results happen. Most peple talk about, whether it’s in sports training, whether it’s in music training, dance training, golf, what have you – any athletic physical activity that you have to be good at – they talk about those 10,000 hours. And you’ve got to get on your way to those 10,000 hours to really be able to fly at your craft. So structure’s really important, and if your teacher’s telling you to practice four, five, six times a week, do it! This is the way that you get good at it. Being a great singer is really about an inner and an outter type of game. It really takes your full attention on an inside level to be able to apply some of the more tangible techniques, but it’s important to take what you do very seriously, and structure’s a great way to get going on that road. So these are some of the ways that you can get the most out of your vocal lessons.

Transcript

Hi I’m Cari Cole. I’m a celebrity vocal coach and artist development expert. And I help artist find their voice, craft their music, and create successful music careers. I’ve worked with Donald Fagen from Steely Dan, Courtney Love from Hole, I’ve worked with the band Journey. I’m going to teach you how to be a better singer and performer. So I’m going to talk just for a minute about artist development and understanding what it is and why it’s important and how to develop yourself as an artist. The truth is being an artist today is, I talk a lot about voice as a voice coach and the voice is important, it sells the song, it sells everything and not only just sells it but communicates it and expresses it, it is the carrier of the emotion and the expression of that artist. Ultimately there’s a lot of other factors that come into that moment of creating a great artist and its not only your voice, its your songs and your songwriting, its your message, its your artistry, it’s how you deliver that message, how you flavor that message, its your brand, its your image, its your creativity on a visual front today as well. It’s not just what you’re hearing. I develop artists in NYC and I work with them every day helping them to become better at who they are. And that involves all of those things that I just mentioned. I put them on a really intense schedule of vocal training and songwriting and developing their vocal chops and chord progression and instrument ability, playing on piano or guitar. All of those things factor into making somebody really well-rounded so that they can bring their message to their audience and become successful at what they do. And thats a craft and thats something that you work at. I think the key things are recognizing what someone’s strengths are and helping them go more in that direction than even they are convinced of. Pushing them down that road a little further. If you really look at great artists, let’s look at Marvin Gaye as an example, who was doing his thin tie, silk shirt, Motown R&B balladeer kind of thing before he came out with “What’s Going On?” and that record really made him as an artist but that was something that came from inside of him that he went with that was a huge turn from what he was doing. So he was taking a big risk and I think it’s not easy to take that risk. And I have artists right now that are famous in the public eye that are working on their craft and trying to take that turn right now, one in particular. We’ll see if she’s able to do that. A lot of things have to be in place for that to happen. But artist development is about nurturing your vision, your message, and what it is that you want to bring to the forefront as an artist and that includes all of it. It includes your voice, your songwriting, your craft, and your performance craft. You can’t leave one stone unturned, they’re all important. And artist development is important today because it’s not being done by labels anymore, or virtually not. It’s an important process that needs to be nurtured within each artist and you need more than one person to do that. So if that’s something you’re looking to do, you need someone like myself or a manager or somebody who is going to actually help you bring out your best qualities as an artist and I hope that helps you figure it out.