1) Message from Your Personal Singing Coach

2) COMPLETED Website Section: Singing FAQ

o Hottest NEW section that answers many of the FAQ that you may have about singing!

3) FEATURED Website Section: Breathing Exercises

o Work on the basics of breathing with these simple breath exercises for singing.

4) RESOURCE Website Section: Vocal Exercises

o One of the most popular sections on our website is our ‘Vocal Exercises’ section. Check it out now!

5) COMMUNICATE with Your Personal Singing Coach

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

1) Vocal Tip #12 – Back to the Basics of Breathing

2) Pitching Tip #10 – Pitch Jumping Using a Basic Major Scale

3) Rhythm Tip #8 – On Beat and Off Beat Rhythms

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

Message from Your Personal Singing Coach:

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

Thanks to your support, Your Personal Singing Ezine is into its 10th issue, since we started around a year ago.

This 10th issue of Your Personal Singing Ezine provides you with more of the basic singing tips that you will need for a strong foundation for singing.

We also provide you with some of the most useful pitching and rhythm tips that I have used with my students, and that have proven to be most effective!

I am also glad to announce the completion of a very useful section of my website – ‘Singing FAQ’ – that cuts through all the mysteries of singing and answers many of the most frequently asked questions about singing clearly and concisely.

Since our launch of this website section barely a month ago, it has reached a Google PageRank of 3, and is rising up fast among search engines like Google!

I am certainly proud of this result, and hope that everyone can continue to support my website, and to keep sending in your feedback as to how we can improve on it more.

I am also working on setting up a Facebook Group for this website, and I will certainly inform everyone once it is up, so that we can all keep in contact with each other, and exchange ideas on singing too!

Do 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

COMPLETED Website Section: Singing FAQ

o This newly completed website section answers many of the frequently-asked questions (FAQ) that many singing students and singers would have about singing, vocal training and much more.

The topics covered here include Pitching, Rhythm, Breathing, Voice Training as well as Diction, encompassing most of the basics of singing that I explained in the relevant section of my website.

It is also the hottest website section now, having a Google PageRank of 3, and rising up fast among search engines like Google.

Now, if you have a burning question about singing that you want to be answered, do also send in your query using the
Contact Us Form

that is on this website!

Ok, check out this brand-new Singing FAQ section NOW by clicking on the URL below:

Singing FAQ URL:

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

FEATURED Website Section: Breathing Exercises

o It is time to revisit some of the basics of singing that we need to work on, in order to have a strong foundation for singing and vocal training.

Check out some of the very useful breathing exercises in this section, that aim to improve on your breath stability, capacity, control as well as strength of breath support.

All these points are certainly necessary in order for you to be able to sing a song well, without presenting a shaky voice or a weak sound.

To find out more about these useful basic breathing exercises, check out the URL below:

Basic Breathing Exercises URL:

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

RESOURCE Website Section: Vocal Exercises

o One of the most popular sections on this website is this one on Vocal Exercises, which provides singing exercises for improving various aspects of your singing voice!

These vocal exercises help to improve on our vocal power, sustain, flexibility as well as accuracy and much more.

Practising these exercises for singing will certainly allow us to master a greater level of control over the usage of our voice when we sing, and give us more vocal freedom.

Just remember, we have to do these exercises on a regular basis, and make sure we do them correctly in order to achieve the desired results!

Check out some of these useful vocal exercises now and try them out for yourself:

Vocal Exercises URL:

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

COMMUNICATE with Your Personal Singing Coach!

o 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
newest 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 #12 – Back to the Basics of Breathing

My students have recently been requesting me to revisit the topic of breathing, and stating that they forget how to ‘breathe properly’ when singing, and also how to use their breath to support their voice.

Some of them think too much, and try to control their diaphragm so tightly that they can’t breath properly. Others don’t even use any strength to control their abdominal muscles and their diaphragm when singing, and this causes their voice to be less well supported than other singers.

Well, I would usually remind my students that in order for us to sing well, we have to feel very relaxed. Our body, our diaphragm and abdominal area, our throat, jaw, chin, mouth, tongue, lips all have to be relaxed and flexible enough for us to manipulate freely when we sing.

For students who use too much tension in their abdominal area when singing, tensing up their stomach muscles throughout the entire song, I tell them to keep their bodies relaxed and not to be too stiff or forceful.

We should only tense up our abdominal muscles during certain parts of the song that we sing, especially during the parts that need to be accented or projected. Other than those parts, our bodies should remain flexible and at our command.

Also, with an overly tense abdominal area, we will find that we can’t really breathe deep enough because our diaphragm is not allowed to contract or flatten well, and the air that we draw in will be slightly lesser than it could have been.

The main point about breathing is RELAXATION. Feeling our stomach area relax and ‘expand’ outwards slightly, due to the flattening and lowering of the diaphragm. This should be a NATURAL and RELAXING process, and not a forced or tense one.

Well, for those who are looking to revisit the topic of breathing well for singing, check out the following URL:

Breathing for Singing URL:

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

Once we are relaxed enough to be breathing well, we need to practise some exercises to improve on the flexibility and control of our diaphragm and the surrounding abdominal muscles. These muscles need to be relaxed enough, and yet strong enough to be able to support our voice when we need to project our sound or when we need to sustain our high notes properly.

The best form of control is for us to be relaxed, and this will allow us to truly be in control of our muscles. If we are too tense, the tension itself will become a barrier when we try to control our diaphragm and its surrounding muscles.

Check out also the following URL for more information about more advanced breathing exercises:

Advanced Breathing Exercises URL:

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

I certainly hope that by revisiting this topic on breathing, you gain more insight into the art of singing, and learn how to use your diaphragm and your abdominal muscles in a relaxed and yet strong manner!

Pitching Tip #10 – Pitch Jumping Using a Basic Major Scale

One other topic that I have had to revise with my students is something extremely useful towards improving basic pitching and listening when we sing, and it is called ‘Pitch Jumping’.

Pitch Jumping can be done using a great variety of scales, but here, we will only talk about a Basic Major Scale and how we can use it to improve on our pitching ability.

For those who need to revisit the topic of a Basic Major Scale, check out the following URL:

Basic Major Scale URL:

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

For the pitch jumping exercise, what you can do is to write down the basic major scale – Doh (1) Re (2) Mi (3) Fa (4) Sol (5) La (6) Ti (7) High Doh (1) – and start off by setting the reference ‘Doh’ note.

With this ‘Doh’ note, you can sing up and down the scale without playing on the keyboard or piano for guidance, and try to pitch the various notes accurately. You can double-check your pitching by playing the note after you have sung it, and listen to see if you’ve got the pitch correct or not.

Once you are able to move up and down the scale easily, you can try to make ‘U-Turns’ anywhere along the scale, meaning, you could go from Doh to Mi, and then reverse to Re, and proceed to Sol, then moving back towards Fa, before proceeding to high Doh.

If you are able to master this, you can challenge yourself by doing some Pitch Jumping, where you could possibly jump from Doh to Mi, and then from Mi to Sol, or even from Doh to High Doh!

These pitch jumps help you to master the various intervals in the scale, and also improve on your familiarity with the distances between these pitches, making it easier for you to place your voice in the right places for the required notes.

Of course, it would be much easier for us to reduce the possibility of making pitching mistakes by working on our pitching and hearing foundations for singing. Check out the following URL for useful pitching exercises:

Pitching Exercises URL:

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

Also, for those who are looking to know how to sing a basic warmup scale to improve on your pitching, check out the following URL:

Scale Singing URL:

http://www.your-personal-singing-guide.com/musical-scales-warmup.html

Hopefully by revisiting these useful topics on pitching and warming up our voices, you will be able to have a singing voice that is more in tune with the melodies that we sing!

Rhythm Tip #8 – On Beat and Off Beat Rhythms

Of course, after talking about pitching in the previous singing tip, we must certainly visit the important topic of Rhythm.

One of our readers recently emailed us requesting for more information and exercises on strengthening our rhythm sense, and we will certainly be working very hard on this in the coming months, in order to provide more resources in this area!

For now, those who wish to find out more about some basic Rhythm FAQ can check out the relevant section on our website:

Singing FAQ URL:

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

Now, the topic I would like to touch on today will be On Beat and Off Beat Rhythms, and this is very important in guiding singers to develop a good sense of body rhythm for singing.

When we refer to On Beat rhythms, we usually refer to words or notes that fall on the main beats of the song. For example, when we listen to a song, we can usually tap our fingers to the music. 1, 2, 3, 4. Tap, tap, tap, tap.

Whenever we are doing this, we are usually tapping along to the main beats of the song, and this is usually started off by the kick drum in the music, or sometimes by the bass line of the song.

One easy example for you to catch the main beat or On Beat rhythm is to listen to the song ‘Umbrella’ by Rihanna.

When Rihanna sings the chorus for this song, with the words “Umbrella, Ella, Ella, Eh, Eh, Eh….”, you will notice that the beat that these words start on would be the main beats of the song, especially for the words “Ella, Ella, Eh, Eh, Eh…”.

You can easily tap along with the song while singing the chorus for ‘Umbrella’, and see how it coincides with the main beats in the song.

However, for Off Beat rhythms, it is exactly the opposite. The words or notes will come after the main beat of the song, and will feel slightly displaced.

A good example for us to listen to an off beat rhythm is the song “I’m Yours” by Jason Mraz, an extremely popular song right now!

If you listen to the introduction or the music for the entire song, you will find that Jason Mraz strums the guitar in an off beat manner, never coinciding with the main beat of the song.

You can actually imagine a ball bouncing up and down; when the ball bounces down, it is when the main beat of the song goes down. When the ball bounces up, the strum of Jason Mraz’s guitar comes in. It’s that simple!

By listening to these songs and paying attention to the melody or the music, we will be able to strengthen our knowledge about these rhythms, and improve on our body rhythm sense for singing!

Of course, for those who genuinely need help with your rhythm sense, there are good rhythm books that you can consult at this URL:

Rhythm Books URL:

http://www.your-personal-singing-guide.com/singing-books-1.html

We would also need to have a very good listening ear when we sing, so that we would know when to start singing and what to do when we make mistakes. Check out the following URL for great Ear Training Exercises:

Ear Training URL:

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

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

Alright, I certainly hope that these singing tips will be useful to you as a singer, and that you will keep practising your singing with the exercises on my website! Cheers!

1) Singing Rhythm
2) Facebook Group for ‘Your Personal Singing Guide’ Community
3) Increasing Website Traffic

Here ends Issue #10 of Your Personal Singing Ezine!

I hope that you will find the above tips useful in your singing career or adventures, and that you will be able to strengthen your basics using the tips given in this issue!

It is always good for us to revisit our basics from time to time and make sure that we have them right, so that our foundations are strong and we can aim for greater heights.

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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