If gospel songs can be so powerful, why do they fall flat when the average church choir attempts them? To sing gospel music, you need a different mindset and different techniques than traditional, classical church music.

History suggests that people first learned to sing gospel from the Negro spirituals of the American South in the mid-to-late 19th century. African slaves were mostly illiterate (and in some areas forbidden by law or by their owners to become literate), so they were taught the Christian faith through repetitive call-and-response songs.

In a call-and-response song, a leader sings a line or phrase and the group repeats it back. There is usually a refrain or chorus that is sung by everyone. The structure is simple, the lyrics repetitive, and the emotion heartfelt.

Compare that to the classic hymns by such writers as Charles Wesley or Isaac Watts. Though beautiful, the lyric isn’t repetitive and there are multiple verses. A person, who can’t read, can’t sing them! Far too many choirs and congregations deliver them with little to no emotion. In some churches, there is a general belief that too much emotion is inappropriate or unseemly.

The mindset required to sing gospel is, “Make a joyful noise unto the Lord!” Relax, let loose, and have fun! That doesn’t mean you should ignore vocal technique, however. Some believe that, after opera, gospel is the most difficult and demanding type of music to sing.

Singing gospel well requires a powerful voice and very strong breath support. The phrasing is long, dramatic, and emotional. You are telling a story, and to convey it effectively you need to feel it and believe it yourself. Your listeners will be able to tell if you’re not authentic.

Sing Gospel Exercises – Fontanelli Exercise

If you want to sing gospel, the first step is to work on supporting and controlling your breath. A good way to achieve that is the Fontanelli exercise (named for the person who developed it). Stand with good posture and slowly breathe in through your mouth while mentally counting to four, then exhale slowly to another count of four, trying to expel all of the air you took in. Watch yourself in a full-length mirror to make sure you fully expand your midsection, and try to maintain that expansion while exhaling.

When you can easily do the exercise to a count of four, increase the count to five, then six, and so on. When you work up to seven or eight, add a hold phase. Breathe in for a count of four, hold for a count of four, and exhale to a count of four. Watch to make sure you achieve and maintain good expansion. Gradually increase the count.

Sing Gospel Exercises – Messa Di Voce

The next thing to work on this sing gospel exercises is dynamics. A good exercise for dynamics is called messa di voce (Italian for “placement of the voice”). Take in a good, well-supported breath and sing a comfortable pitch in the middle of your range. While sustaining the pitch, start very softly and gradually get louder, then gradually get softer again.

Sing Gospel Exercises – Expression

This may sound odd but in order to sing gospel really well you need to work on expression, study the text of your song. Try reading it aloud as if it were a poem or story, then try to sing it with the same expression you used in speaking it. Watch videos of great gospel singers, such as Mahalia Jackson (there are several on YouTube).

The words are paramount when you sing gospel. Remember, it originated as a way to teach people who couldn’t read, so they had to be able to understand the text. Enunciate your words as clearly as you can. Again, watching videos will be helpful.

Above all, have fun! More than anything else, singing gospel music is JOYFUL. Sing it like you really mean it.

Singing Tips –Take a Lesson

You may think this singing tip is only for beginners but even if you’ve had extensive training in the past, it’s always helpful to get fresh, objective advice. Maybe you’ve slacked off on your breathing exercises, or fallen into bad vocal habits. Call your former teacher and schedule a “tune-up” lesson. Most professional singers and even singing teachers still get occasional lessons.

Singing Tips — Mix it Up

If you have been focusing exclusively on one technique or type of song, try something different, try this singing tip and mix your songs. Pull out one of your favorite recordings from high school and sing along with it. Choose a new song to learn, perhaps one in a style you haven’t done for awhile. When you return to your usual routine, it won’t seem so stale.

Singing Tips — Do a Self-check

Doing a self-check is our singing tip number 3. You can do this by reviewing the fundamentals and make sure you’re still using good posture, breath support, and tone placement. Check for any unwanted tension, especially in your face and neck, as this can detract from your sound and make singing less fun.

Singing Tips — Relax

Here is another one you may think belongs to singing tips for beginners, but professional singers are more successful with their careers when they are relaxed when singing. Start each practice session and performance warm-up with simple stretching and relaxation exercises. One easy relaxation exercise is the “rag doll”. Standing with your feet about hip-width apart, bend forward from the hips and allow your arms, head, and upper body to hang loosely. Shake your arms and head a bit, then let them dangle again. Relieving tension can make a huge difference.

Singing Tips — Get Some Exercise

This singing tip is mostly useful for those who have a hectic performance schedule, you may have gotten out of your regular fitness routine. If you are touring, most hotels have workout facilities; if not, simply take a walk. If the weather is inclement or you’re in an unfamiliar city, you can walk in the hotel hallways. Unless you’re toting equipment, use stairs instead of elevators.

Singing Tips — Pamper Yourself

Spend some time in a hot tub, get a professional massage, treat yourself to a favorite dessert, or re-read a favorite book. Indulge in any small luxury; it doesn’t have to be expensive.

Singing Tips — Have a Jam Session

Get a group of musician friends together for an informal jam session and play some old favorites. Avoid performance material and just have fun! You may want to include a casual dinner, and ask everyone to bring part of the meal so nobody has to do all of the work.

“Wait a minute,” you may be thinking. “So far, only half of these so-called ‘singing tips’ involve actual singing!”

That’s right, but think of it this way: when a guitar gets hard to tune, you replace the strings. When a piano gets out of tune, you call in a tuner. As a singer, your instrument is your body. When your voice gets out of tune, you need to perform the proper maintenance.

When your body is in good shape, you can return to your singing routine with new energy and enthusiasm. Choose some fun new material to work on and jump back in. Review your fundamentals and take the advice you received in your “tune-up” lesson, and you should be back on track.

In order to improve your singing skills you’ll need to master the technique. To produce full, rich, high-quality sounds, you must learn the right physical techniques and vocal techniques.

Physical Techniques that should improve your singing skills

When practicing to improve your singing voice you need to understand how posture can impact your ability to produce clear tones. A slumped, curved back prevents your abdomen muscles from fully contracting and expanding. When used properly, these muscles help with upward air flow.

Another thing to improve your singing skills is to remember that singing makes demands on the body as well as the voice. For example, you will need to regulate your breathing to control notes. One breathing technique, called appoggiare, involves inhaling deeply and using the abdomen muscles to force the diaphragm to rise up. This moves air up into the lungs and then up to the vocal chords.

In appoggiare, you keep the sternum lifted while exhaling to maintain control of the air. This technique, once mastered, will prevent uncontrolled air pressure on the vocal cords. Appoggiare will train you to hold notes.

There are many other physical techniques that can benefit all singers, including forming the lips, controlling the palate, and mastering proper tongue placement. Mastering these techniques can drastically improve your singing skills.

Improve your singing skills with Vocal Techniques

If you take singing lessons, you will also learn a number of vocal techniques to improve your singing. In addition to consistent practice, singing requires an understanding of how sound is produced, giving you the knowledge you need to control the results. Once you understand how to breathe and how to hold your body, you can begin to learn how to:

• Create solid, full sound
• Sustain and end a tone
• Identify and sing a pitch
• Keep the throat open to create resonance
• Pronounce vowels and consonants while singing
• Increase range
• Increase amplitude
• Add emotion to your singing

There are a number of vocal techniques that will help improve your singing skills when you have mastered them. But there is even more to learn if you want to sing professionally. You will need to master elements of stage presentation, such as walking onto the stage and holding the microphone, to connect with the audience.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about learning how to improve your singing voice is that just about everything you do will affect your ability to perform well. Even your lifestyle has an impact. For example, smoking and drinking too much caffeine can damage your vocal cords.

The Whole Picture on how to improve your singing skills

To learn how to improve your singing, you need to look at the whole picture. There is much more involved than just learning to hit certain notes or sing on key.

In order to improve your singing voice you need time and effort. You have to “find” your voice and then master the physical and vocal techniques that will bring out its best qualities. It’s a process that lets you explore your individuality so you can sing at your best, for yourself and for others.

Whether you dream of having a professional career in music or are a purely recreational singer, you want your voice to sound as good as it can and to last your lifetime. The best way to preserve your voice is to keep yourself physically fit and in good overall health. To do this, maintain a healthy diet, adequate sleep, and moderate exercise. Avoid smoking, illegal drugs, and excessive use of alcohol. These are just some of the expert tips on how to sing well.

The stereotype of the hard-partying rock star isn’t a reality in most cases. Most of the recording artists who have had the longest careers have taken good care of themselves and avoided the excesses that prematurely ended the careers of such talents as Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Elvis Presley.

If you want to be a serious singer, whether professional or recreational, you need to learn how to sing well. It’s essential for aspiring professionals, just as nurses and accountants have to go to school for
their chosen occupations. You can either find a local teacher and take lessons, or use an online singing course. such as Singing Is Easy by Yvonne DeBandi or Singorama by Emily Mander.

Whichever method you choose, you need to learn how your vocal apparatus works and how to use it, and also how to deal with (or avoid altogether) any voice problems. With the right teacher or program, learning how to sing well can be fun and exciting.

The first thing any good teacher or online course should address is your posture and breath support, which allow production of the best vocal tone. The best singing posture is to stand erect but relaxed, with your feet about hip-width apart and one slightly forward. Keep your shoulders back and your chest high, though not as rigidly as a soldier standing at attention.

Here is an easy exercise to help you achieve good singing posture. Stand with your feet hip-width apart and your arms at your sides. Bring your arms in a rapid circular motion across your body and over your head, rising onto your tiptoes at the same time while taking in a good, deep breath.

Slowly start to exhale, bringing your arms down to your sides and coming down from your toes. As you exhale and bring your arms down, try to keep your chest and shoulders in the same position they were in at the top of your stretch.

Breath support enables you to produce a pleasant tone without straining your throat. When you inhale to sing, you should feel expansion all around your midsection. Your diaphragm, abdominal, and spinal muscles should all be working together.

Once you have taken in a good breath, breathe out on a hissing sound while trying to maintain the expansion of your midsection. It will take some time and effort to strengthen those muscles, but ultimately you will learn how to sing well in a healthy manner, with better tone and less vocal fatigue.

Posture and breath support are only the foundation of how to sing well. The next level is tone placement and quality. There are three primary areas where our vocal tone resonates: the chest, the pharynx (mouth and throat), and the head (sinuses). You use your “head voice” for higher

notes, and your “chest voice” for the lowest ones. In most cases, you will want to use what voice teachers call a “mixed tone”, with the sound coming from both the pharynx and the head. The combination is called mask resonance, because you want to feel the sound vibrations in the area that would be covered by a half-face Halloween mask.

You can feel mask resonance with this simple exercise. Take in a good, well-supported breath. Starting on a high note with the syllable “hoo” or “hee”, slide from the top of your range down to the bottom. It should feel a bit like yawning, and you should feel vibration in the soft palate (roof of your mouth) and in the triangle between your eyes and the bridge of your nose.

Mastering these basics is the first step in learning how to sing well. It will take time, effort, and practice, but if you work patiently and consistently, you will see results.

Learn to Sing Harmony by Starting with the Scales

When singing in harmony, one person sings a song using one pitch while another person sings in a different pitch and/or adds notes around the original pitch.

To sing harmony, start by becoming familiar with the major and minor scales. A scale is really only a set of 8 successive notes within one octave, named with the letters A to G.

The major scale has note intervals that run whole-whole-half-whole-whole-whole-half. A minor scale has note intervals that run whole-half-whole-whole-half-whole-whole.

When you sing harmony, the notes are usually from a major scale.

Learn to Sing Harmony by Finding Two Voices

When someone sings harmony, they sing around the original pitch and melody. The first person begins by singing a note from the melody. The chord can also be played on a guitar or another instrument.

The second person will join in singing the same note, taking it to the next higher or lower pitch.

This process is basically repeated multiple notes throughout a song, with the second voice singing above or below the melody the whole time.

Learn to Sing Harmony by Making Harmony Work

When you are first learning to sing harmony, you will need to get really comfortable with the song. Many instructors recommend learning both voice parts.

Normally it takes a lot of practice to sing harmony successfully, but there are those lucky few who seem to be able to join a melody at a different pitch with ease. It’s called on-the-fly harmony, because the harmonizer just jumps right into the song and begins singing.

A person who can do on-the-fly harmony (learns how to sing harmony fast) has a knack for quickly finding center pitch and the melody. After listening to the melody for a small amount of time, they can determine the pitch and melody and then start singing. These are the same steps used in ear training.

In fact, the exercises for ear training can be used to develop harmony skills as well. For example, you can play a particular note on a piano, determine the pitch, and then imagine yourself singing it. Next, you would actually sing it along with the note on the piano. Try it again, but this time sing a note higher than the note played on the piano. The third time, sing a note lower than the piano note. You will learn how to sing harmony in no time.

If you take online singing lessons, some programs have interactive pianos and voice feedback. Using the software, you can practice matching pitch and then going higher and lower. Practice is the best way to develop accurate pitch.

Learning How to Sing Harmony has No Mystery

Harmony is used in many different types of singing, including country music, pop music, and rock music. The Oak Ridge Boys were famous for their ability to blend four very different voices into a melody with two or more harmonizing.

Skillful harmonizers make singing in harmony look easy. The principles behind this type of singing are actually not difficult to comprehend, but it takes practice to learn how to correctly identify pitch and then drop higher or lower.

To learn how to sing harmony, the best approach is to take singing lessons.

In both of these scenarios, your problem isn’t range: it is tessitura. Tessitura is your comfortable range in which you can sing notes, which may include higher notes, consistently, on-pitch, and without strain. The term is also used to describe the average pitch range of a song or choral part.

Many mezzo-sopranos, for example, can occasionally sing higher C at the extreme of their range. But their tessitura is probably an octave to half an octave below that: perhaps from the A above middle C to the second A above middle C. If they’re trying to sing a piece in which the tessitura is from high G to high C, they will experience vocal strain and fatigue.

The key is knowing where your own tessitura is, so you can choose songs within that range. You may be able to sing higher than your natural tessitura, but you run the risk of straining your voice.

So it may be that to sing higher notes, one must raise his/her tessiture? Is it even possible? Yes, but it takes work. The key is breath support, combined with upper resonance. If you try to sing higher notes from your throat without adequate breath support, the result is vocal strain. Over an extended period of time, you could cause lasting damage.

It takes more breath energy to sing higher notes than lower ones. You need to use all of your breath muscles—diaphragm, abdominals, spinals, and intercostals–and fully expand your midsection with each inhalation. As you exhale, keep everything expanded except your abdominals, which will control the rate of breath flow.

Exercises to sing higher – Breathing

In order to sing higher notes properly you must master proper breathing. Once you are breathing properly, focus on your upper resonance, or “head voice”. Think of the tone as being vertical rather than horizontal, and imagine the sound coming from your forehead and the top of your head. Think of it as riding up in an elevator, with your breath as the mechanism that makes the elevator ascend.

You should feel the vibration in your sinuses and the roof of your mouth (soft palate). Keep your mouth horizontally narrow but vertically tall inside. One voice teacher tells her students to imagine trying to swallow something unpleasant, opening the throat enough so that whatever it is won’t touch the sides.

Exercises to sing higher – yawn-slide

Keep your tone light; don’t try to force anything. Start with the yawn-slide or the vocal siren. For the yawn-slide, inhale and open your mouth as if to yawn, then exhale on “hoo” or “hee”, starting at the top of your range and sliding rapidly all the way to the bottom. Try to start each successive one a bit higher.

Exercises to sing higher – vocal siren

The vocal siren is similar, except that it starts at the bottom of your range and goes up. Do it on a hum. As your breath support gets stronger, do the siren up and down several times on the same breath.

Exercises to sing higher – Five-tone Scale

Another good exercise is the rapidly ascending and descending five-tone scale. Start in the middle of your range and use either the buzz (also called lip roll or bubble lips) or a vowel sound, such as “oo” or “ah”. The pattern is do-re-mi-fa-so-fa-mi-re-do. Start the second pattern a half-step above the first and continue in that manner. Be sure to use good breath support.

With time and effort, you can raise your tessitura and sing higher notes more comfortably and easily. Just be patient, persistent, and realistic.

Learn how to sing better by keeping in mind that the larynx plays an important role in the tones you produce while singing. A sound is formed by the following process:

• You decide to sing and the brain prepares the vocal cords
• The vocal folds start to fold shut
• Air rises up from the lungs
• The air forces itself against the vocal folds, causing them to vibrate

If you look at a picture of the larynx, you will see the trachea tube running up to the vocal cords contained in the larynx and above that the epiglottis. The air that rises up and forces the vocal folds to vibrate is called subglottic pressure.

Train how to sing better by controlling the flow of air within your larynx. You can easily feel your larynx by laying a finger gently at the base of your throat. The larynx will move down when you yawn and up when you swallow. The lower position of the larynx indicates the throat is in an open position. This means there is unrestricted air flow, which is good for creating solid, rich sounding tones.

Learn how to sing better by producing the best tones

The subglottic pressure and the position of the larynx can both directly affect your singing. To learn how to sing better, you need to manage the flow of air to the vocal cords and keep your larynx in the lower or central position.

Another tip on how to sing better is by avoiding glottal attack. Glottal attack happens when the larynx becomes tense; the vocal flaps may close completely as subglottic pressure is formed. When that happens, the flaps will burst open when the pressure becomes high enough. This can result in an odd sound, almost like a clicking noise, before a tone is even produced.

When you begin to sing, the onset of tone resulting from the vibrating vocal folds is called the attack. Its name sounds more vicious than it really is; you don’t actually want pressure attacking your vocal cords, but you do want air flowing smoothly.

While training how to sing better, keep the following in mind in order to produce the tones:

• Repeated glottal attacks can damage vocal cords
• Improper posture can lead to vocal cords not closing properly and allowing air to escape
• A larynx that is pushed upward will result in a nasal sounding tone
• Tense muscles around the larynx will cause the vocal cords to function improperly, leading to a poor tone
• Singers who sound breathy have too much air flowing through the vocal cords

While there are advance trainings on how to sing better, don’t forget that the larynx absolutely plays a big role in the quality of tones you produce.

Learn how to sing better by Keeping Control

We don’t usually think of our vocal cords as something we can control, but even something as simple as the positioning of your head can affect their ability to open and close properly. That is just one of the reasons why you should also focus on good posture in learning how to sing better.

To keep your larynx in the down position, hold your head up straight so your neck is in line with your spine. Keep your jaw relaxed and not tense. Tightening the muscles around the larynx can cause a tightening of the vocal cords.

Learning how to sing better involves a lot more than just forming notes. Good singers understand how the body’s components work in unison, and that includes the larynx.