1) PERSONAL MESSAGE from Your Personal Singing Coach

2) FACEBOOK GROUP for all supporters and fans of Your Personal Singing Guide

Join our facebook group now and keep in touch with the latest news from Your Personal Singing Guide.com!

3) RESOURCE Webpage: Vocal Cords

Knowing more about our vocal cords helps us understand our voice better!

4) RESOURCE Website Section: Ear Training

Never neglect your ears when you sing. They are your best judge!

5) COMMUNICATE with Your Personal Singing Coach

Send in your questions about singing, and also compliments or feedback about this website!

1) Vocal Tip #25 – Carolling Indoors and Outdoors

2) Pitching Tip #21 – Keeping Your Pitch Steady when Singing

Homepage URL:
http://www.your-personal-singing-guide.com

Message from Your Personal Singing Coach:

“Welcome all fellow singers, vocal coaches and singing students!

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2011!!!

It is with a great happiness and love that I wish everyone a Happy New Year, and of course a belated Merry Christmas!!

The past year of 2010 has been such a roller coaster ride and also been so surreal, watching my website grow from strength to strength, gathering more and more readers and singers.

Many of you have sent in lovely comments about the website, and I believe that many of you have benefited from the tips that I have put up so far, and I am very very glad!

I will be upgrading my knowledge about singing during this coming year, and I will certainly let everyone know what I have learnt, for the benefit of singers all around the world.

It is my hope to leave behind a singing legacy, and I trust that you will be a part of this as well! ;-p

Perhaps the one thing that I might ask you to help me out with is that you join Your Personal Singing Guide’s Facebook Group
(http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=161546608524&ref=ts

, and get your friends to join too. Help me to spread the word to everyone in the world, so that my website can begin to touch lives that I can’t even begin to imagine right now!

Do enjoy the tips that I am providing for you in this 23rd issue of this Ezine, and feel free to share Your Personal Singing Ezine with your friends and loved ones, or better still, get them to come and subscribe to their very own Personal Singing Ezine! I will be glad to share my singing tips and pointers with them too!

If you wish to share with your friends the back-issues of our Ezine, feel free to do so too:

http://www.your-personal-singing-guide.com/Your_Personal_Singing_EZine-backissues.html

Also, if you feel that our website is really beneficial to you, please do let us know by dropping us an email through our Contact Us section on the website! Your comments will be greatly appreciated!”

Yours Sincerely,

Aaron Matthew Lim

Your Personal Singing Coach

FACEBOOK GROUP for all supporters and fans of Your Personal Singing Guide

For those of you who subscribe to our Personal Singing Ezine, do make it a point to join our Facebook Group for readers of Your Personal Singing Guide.

This facebook group allows us to keep in contact with each other online, and also to discuss various topics about singing and music.

Basically, we can build an online music community, but I do need your help for this. Hopefully you can join this facebook group, and also get your friends and family to join too!

I am sure it will be fun to interact with people from all around the world, and exchange pointers and contacts with musicians and singers from every part of the globe!

So, do check out the URL below and join our facebook group now!

Your Personal Singing Guide Facebook Group URL:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=161546608524&ref=ts

Thank you for your help, and I hope that our music community keeps growing by the minute!

RESOURCE Webpage: Vocal Cords

Our vocal cords are the most fragile things on earth, but the sad truth is that we abuse them most of the time, without even knowing that we do so!

Every cough that we do, every scratchy sound, every shout and scream causes harm and fatigue to our vocal cords.

A more efficient way would of course be to find a good balance between your breath and your voice, and allow those tiny vocal cords to do their stuff.

Of course, then you would have to make sure that the sound produced by your vocal cords manages to reach your listeners, by allowing the sound to reach the resonators in your head and body.

If any part of the passageway is blocked, for eg by a tight throat, stiff tongue, unrelaxed jaw, then your vocal cords would have to work harder, and you might end up with a tired voice too quickly.

To understand more about your Vocal Cords, check out the chapter below:

Vocal Cords URL:

http://www.your-personal-singing-guide.com/vocal-cords.html

RESOURCE Website Section: Ear Training

Never neglect your ears when you sing. They are your best judge of whether you are singing well or not. Other than your audience’s reactions of course.. ;-p

Many singers think that singing is all about making good sound, having a good voice, and singing the right pitches.

They forget that being able to hear themselves sing is also very very important!

This is also why whenever we try to sing while listening to music (with earphones in our ears), we tend to go seriously off pitch without even realizing it.

The reason for this is because we cannot hear ourselves sing when we are also listening to music at the same time. We need to be able to hear ourselves, before we know how we sound and we adjust at the same time that we are singing.

Of course, developing good aural or listening skills takes some time and practice, as with all other musical skills.

Start off your ear training right here and now with this website URL:

Ear Training URL:

http://www.your-personal-singing-guide.com/ear-training.html

COMMUNICATE with Your Personal Singing Coach!

Do make use of the Contact Us page on our website, for those of you who wish to ask me questions about singing, or would wish to let us know how great a job we are doing with our website.

We welcome all your comments, and hope to hear from you regularly regarding our website and how we can improve!

I would also like to invite those of you who would wish for me to answer any burning questions about singing, to write in using the online form here and let me know what your questions are.

I will certainly do my very best to answer them, and maybe some of your queries will find their way onto our
website section for Singing FAQ!

Do also let us know what you wish to see on our website, and we will try our best to make the improvements as quickly as we can!

In fact, many of you have already sent in your positive feedback, and I certainly look forward to receiving more from all you readers out there!

Do take note that for the security word challenge, you will need to type the word in CAPITAL LETTERS exactly as it appears, or you will not be able to send us your comments and we would have missed out on valuable feedback from you!

Click on the link below to send us your comments and feedback!

Contact Us URL:

http://www.your-personal-singing-guide.com/contact-us.html

Vocal Tip #25 – Carolling Indoors and Outdoors

With the Christmas season in its 1st week, I’m sure that some of you would be doing some caroling singing of your own, or just singing some christmas carols with friends and family.

Have you ever tried caroling indoors and outdoors? If you have, you would know that these 2 situations are very different in nature, and they cause singers to use different singing techniques and habits.

Before you even go for caroling, be sure to check out the URL below for some useful Vocal Exercises:

Vocal Exercises URL:

http://www.your-personal-singing-guide.com/vocal-exercises.html

Now, back to the topic on caroling!

Carolling indoors allows you to be able to hear yourself better. Acoustics are more encouraging, and your choir group sounds better and louder.

This also means that you do not need to sing that loudly, that as a group you can blend your voices better, and you can afford to do some of the expressiveness that is appreciated in singing christmas carols.

This is the ideal situation, and most carolers would prefer to carol in people’s homes or even in an enclosed area like a cafe or a room with closed doors.

However, when you try to do the same thing outdoors, you will find that the acoustics are so very very different!

Carolling outdoors however forces you to project your voice louder and further, and also makes it harder for your choir group to blend in terms of voice and dynamics.

This is because you are mostly unable to hear yourself sing, and the natural reaction would be to try to sing louder so as to be able to hear yourself.

This is especially the problem if you are caroling without amplification at outdoor or noisy areas like open air cafes, busy streets, crowded shopping centres and so on.

The result, more often than not, sounds more like screaming and shouting rather than singing. ;-p

This also means that the risk of hurting or abusing your voice is much higher, and that you should be careful of this whenever you do caroling outdoors.

I know this because my school did caroling at various Starbucks cafes in Singapore this year, and the indoor performances were so much better than the outdoor ones!

If you have to do caroling outdoors, do try to ask for some form of amplification, for eg microphones and speakers, so that you would not subject yourself to possible vocal abuse.

For more tips on how to take care of your voice, do visit the URL below:

Voice Care URL:

http://www.your-personal-singing-guide.com/voice-care.html

Pitching Tip #21 – Keeping Your Pitch Steady when Singing

Today, my colleague asked me a question about one of her students.

She says that her student can’t seem to hold a pitch steady whenever he sings, and it always tends to float or shift in pitch whenever he sustains any note.

The result is that his pitching is very unsteady and also not accurate enough to sound like he knows what he’s singing!

Does anyone of you or your friends suffer from this same problem? If you do, I might have a suggestion that can help you solve this problem.

For those who would like some pitching exercises to improve on your pitch when singing, check out the URL below:

Pitching Exercises URL:

http://www.your-personal-singing-guide.com/pitching-exercises.html

I feel that the problem that my colleague’s student is having, is really a problem of not being able to rest his voice in a steady state and not supporting his singing with a steady breath.

He is probably doing one of the following faults:

1) Singing without much diaphragm or breath support

2) Holding the note with his throat

3) Changing his vocal focus when he sustains his notes

For the first point, the student is probably not resting his voice on his breath, and not using enough diaphragmatic support when singing.

This can be an issue because the voice is unable to find any stable support, and he does not feel any foundation supporting his voice, and this is why his voice is unstable or shaking in pitch.

Holding the note with his throat is also another possible problem, and this is a natural result of not using enough diaphragm or breath support when singing.

The outcome is that he is using more of his throat muscles and also his larynx and vocal cords to sustain the note, and this is not very stable because the slightest movements in those muscles can cause the pitch to shift.

The 3rd point is something that many singers commit, and that is losing focus when sustaining a note.

Usually when we sustain a long note, we try to keep everything at rest and not moving. This is because most singers know that the slightest movement in the throat, jaw, tongue, chin etc will cause the note or sound to change drastically.

The student is probably not paying much attention to this, because he is still a beginner student after all, and is shifting his muscles or mouth position even when he is singing.

I gave this advice to my colleague, in the hope that she would be able to help this student overcome his pitching problems.

Of course, it helps to read up more about singing and understand more about how our voice works, so that we can help more students with more varied singing problems! ;-p

To find out more about singing books that help us to develop our overall singing ability, do check out the URL below:

Singing Books URL:

http://www.your-personal-singing-guide.com/singing-books.html

To find out more about other basic singing FAQ that singers may have, check out this URL:

Singing FAQ URL:

http://www.your-personal-singing-guide.com/singing-tips.html

Should you have any questions, feel free to email me at enquiry@your-personal-singing-guide.com or use the feedback form available on our Contact Us page.

Those of you who wish to check out the previous issues of our Ezine for other tips on singing can also go to the following URL:

Your Personal Singing Ezine Back-Issues URL:

http://www.your-personal-singing-guide.com/Your_Personal_Singing_EZine-backissues.html

Keep up your training as a singer, and do also keep me updated about your progress!

1) Consolidating Information
2) Updating Website Resources

Here ends Issue #23 of Your Personal Singing Ezine!

I hope that this issue is useful to you, and that you are able to gain some knowledge from what I have written in this Ezine. I always try to provide tips that you can use, in a manner that is easy to understand and apply in daily life.

Do remember to join our facebook group so that we can finally meet each other, and share our interests and ideas online!

Feel free to email me at
Your_Personal_Singing_EZine@your-personal-singing-guide.com
or use the Contact Us page provided on our website if you have any feedback, requests or any questions about singing! I will be glad to reply and also to discuss singing tips with you!

Do also subscribe to the RSS feed provided on my website so as to be constantly updated about the new and exciting content that will appear on Your Personal Singing Guide website!

Also, remember to forward this issue of Your Personal Singing Ezine to your friends and loved ones, and encourage them to come visit our website and join you in your singing practices too!

Singing is always more fun in a community with more people!

Your Personal Singing Ezine will be back in another 6 weeks’ time, but be sure to check back at our website frequently and keep practising your singing!

Aaron Matthew Lim
Your Personal Singing Coach
Your Personal Singing Guide

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