A karaoke place in Wuhan, in Luoyu E. St. (Across the street from the HUST campus) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Are you looking for a fun way to add some life to your parties? Karaoke is an activity that people of all ages really enjoy doing. Your guests will look forward to your next party once you tell them they can sing their favorite songs while they are there. There are plenty of different karaoke machines you can purchase and many of them are very affordable.
The words of the songs will be scrolling on the karaoke machine or across your TV set depending on the type of set up you have in place. A microphone allows the voice of those singing to be amplified and that is very exciting. Most karaoke machines come with several tracks from which you can choose to sing. You can also buy additional ones to give your guests more of a selection of songs.
There are some excellent software programs you can purchase to burn karaoke songs offer of the internet. This is one of the easiest and most affordable ways to increase the number of songs you have to offer to your guests. If they find something they really like they will be more likely to join in the fun.
You can have a karaoke contest at your party as well. If the party is for children you will want to have a prize ready for each child to take home just for participating. For adults and teenagers, you can offer great prizes for different categories including best voice and the most original performance.
Don’t think that your karaoke machine is going to remain stored away in between parties either. Chances are your family will have so much fun with it that members will use it regularly. They may just want to have some fun or they may want to improve their sound for the next karaoke party.
Take your time to compare the various types of karaoke machines available and the music for them. You want your party to be a huge success so give guests something they will really enjoy being a part of. It is a good idea to set up the karaoke machine in advance and practice using it before your party. This way you won’t be fumbling around with the equipment and holding up the entertainment.
It helps if you have a sign-up sheet where guests can write down their name and the selection of the sound they want to sing. You can print out sheets of the song titles and artists for them to review as well. You can make a spreadsheet on your computer so you can continually update it as you add new material.
Regardless of the type of party, you are hosting, you can bring a smile to the face of everyone there with karaoke. Make sure you offer a wide variety of songs since everyone has their own taste in music. If karaoke night at your house becomes a regular routine you can even ask your guests if there are particular songs they would like to hear. This is a great way to have fun without spending very much money for your event.
The ability to sing high notes and increasing the vocal range is an aspiration of most singers. However, most singers find it very difficult to increase their vocal range so that they can hit and sustain those high notes effortlessly and effectively.
So how can you own a powerful singing voice and hit those high notes without straining your vocal cords or even damaging them?
Although expanding your vocal range is an elusive issue, the good news is that it is not all that difficult. Once you understand it, you will be surprised that it can be so simple after all.
Now, for the bad news, it is somewhat like learning how to swim. You cannot possibly learn to swim by reading an article or even a zillion articles without getting into the pool and start practicing your swimming strokes. The problem is that many singers are doing just that when learning how to sing.
It is the same when you want to increase your vocal range to hit those high notes. You can possibly learn the theory from an article such as this one but would be most unlikely that you can master the skill because it involves the coordination of muscles moving and correct breathing techniques when you are singing.
The precise coordination of these singing muscles and breathing techniques can only be learned by listening and repeating vocal exercises and then in actual singing.
People will think that you are crazy if you go around asking, "Can you provide me with some helpful tips on becoming a proficient surgeon in time for an open heart operation next week?", but no one will give you a second look when you ask "Give me some singing tips on how to sing high notes."
Having said that the correct vocal exercises are crucial for you to expand your vocal range, here are some singing tips for you to sing the high notes.
In order to increase your singing vocal range, you must learn to get the wrong muscles out of the way, so try this experiment.
Begin by gently placing your hand over your throat so that your chin is cradled between your thumb and your forefinger. Pretend that you are trying to hide your throat from view but just barely touching it so that you can feel its movement.
Once your hands are in place, just swallow. Can you feel things moving inside your throat? Of course, you do. What just happened is that more than 30 muscle groups working just to ensure that you swallow properly!
These muscle movements are to make sure food goes down your gullet and not into your windpipe. They are also designed to work for about as long as a swallow lasts, then they go back to their original position.
Unfortunately, these muscles are also activated when you are singing and especially so when you are singing the higher notes.
I said "unfortunately" because the muscles actually do nothing to help you to sing higher notes but are using up energy and increasing the tension around the muscles that are needed for you to sing higher.
Do remember that the swallowing muscles are designed to work for just a second or two when you swallow and they then go back to their original position, but when you begin to sing, you are more likely to feel them engaged and stay engaged until they wear the singer out. Therefore the singer must educate the actual singing muscles not to over-exert themselves when singing higher and higher notes.
Your most natural sounding voice is the voice you use when you are speaking. When you sing in a "normal" tone, you will start in this voice. It very likely is your "chest" voice. It is called "chest voice" because most of the resonating or vibrating to create sound is happening in your chest.
In your most natural sounding voice, you have learned to make a nice, strong sound by letting the tone vibrate mostly in your chest. You didn't even need to think about it and that is why it is natural. It is a very open, rich and full sound. It sounds "firm" and not "mushy" at all.
Your little tiny noise-making muscles which are your vocal cords are generally vibrating along their entire length when you are singing in your chest voice. Your vocal cords are amazing muscles. They perform tricks and some of those tricks are used to easily take your voice over three or even more octaves.
Your vocal cords change the notes along the bottom of your range by contracting. The tighter they contract, the higher the rate of vibration as air passes between them from your lungs.
Just like any muscles, they will reach a limit as to how tight they can contract without injuring themselves. At that critical point, they will do one of these two things:-
a) They protect themselves while maintaining their ability to sing higher than that critical point by suddenly dumping tension by swinging apart slightly, and producing an airy false voice usually referred to as the falsetto voice. I called the falsetto "false" because it sounds so unlike that rich chest tone you were producing just a few notes lower. Get the picture?
When your singing voice goes into a falsetto, you will experience a physical relief since you went from a high tension state to almost no tension at all. Your singing will go from struggling for the next note to easily reach the next higher note.
However, you will probably not be comfortable with the fact that your voice tone changed so drastically and losing the power in your singing. It is really an emotional a let-down. It makes you feel like writing emails to people asking "How can I sing higher notes?".
If you are properly trained, your vocal cords will do the next two tricks and can easily shift into the next gear rather than flip into a falsetto voice when singing higher notes.
Your vocal cords will begin to thin out as you go higher and changing their mass so that they vibrate at a higher rate of vibration and therefore they do not tighten more. It is just like changing to a thinner guitar string but keeping the tension exactly the same.
So your voice is unlike going into a falsetto as they don't pull apart so that the tone produced will still have that firm sound rather than that airy false sound.
You will eventually enter into what is called the "head voice" because the resonance moves from your chest cavity to the cavities in your head and face.
If you are practicing with the correct vocal exercises, your body will learn to fade more resonance into the head cavities and out of the chest cavity producing what is called a "mixed voice". When you listen to a singer who has a wide, powerful voice range, this is exactly what that singer is doing.
Once your vocal cords have taken you as high as they can go by thinning out, they will actually close off a portion of their length which is not unlike fretting a guitar string. This will result in even higher notes like the whistle tones of Mariah Carey because the length of the vibrating surface has been shortened.
So do you want to be able to sing high notes effectively? Don't let anyone tell that you can't.
There many things you can do to be a good singer and one of the most important things to do is to engage a good singing teacher. However, finding a good singing teacher can be a confusing affair.
Most singing teachers actually invent their own singing system and methodology to teach their students. Each method and singing technique will usually include vocal exercises, singing techniques, skills and concepts.
To add clutter to the confusion, there are many books and information and sometimes misinformation you can find in the libraries, music shops and on the internet. The most frustrating thing is that many of these products and books come with contradictory information.
With this abundance of information, you could be learning singing techniques that conflict with each other and this could be very detrimental to your singing support system and sometimes the damage done may be irreversible. Many exciting singing careers were destroyed because of learning wrong singing techniques.
Take a look at babies. They are breathing naturally with their diaphragm and they can throw their powerful voices across the room when they cry to get your notice. How can they project their voice so naturally?
This is because nature has provided us with the natural vocal mechanism to sing well and powerfully. It is when we adopt bad vocal habits as we grew older that the natural ability to be a good singer is lost and needs to be rekindled by good and correct vocal exercises and singing concepts.
One challenge to good singing is to combine a simple yet powerful singing technique with strong emotions. Powerful emotions can break down a voice that is not trained with solid singing skills and techniques as a foundation. The good singing technique is the foundation to build the emotional aspect of singing.
For instance, if you pour out all your emotions in a song, you will know that something does not sound right in the singing sound you produced. Pay attention to your inner feelings and you will know what sounds right or wrong.
Successful singing requires not only the will and ability to express your emotions in a song but also the correct singing technique and skills. Since emotions are channelled through your singing support system, your system must be fully developed for the emotion to come through powerfully and convincingly.
So to be a good singer, you must build your voice and the support system that produce that voice. With a good mastery of your voice mechanism, your own singing style and interpretation of songs will be much more enhanced. You do not have to be concerned about sounding like a copy of other good singers when you perform.
Yes, there are born voices, but there are no born artists. Each and every singer must develop his/her own individual skills to be an outstanding artist. It is not just how good a singing voice you have. It is what you can do with your individual vocal resources that is the crux of a good singer.
So getting introduced to a good singing teacher to help you to hone your singing skills to perfection is necessary if you want to be a good singer.
A common pursuit amongst singers is the quest for a good head and chest voice/tone resonance. Although we have discussed to some extent about head/chest resonance in previous articles, there will still be a lot of confusion on this subject such as balancing tonal brilliance and depth of the resonance.
Blending these two voice qualities or vocal colors is a major source of confusion and frustration for many aspiring singers. However, once you understand how the voice work, blending the vocal colors should become easy and automatic as speaking expressively.
In fact, once you are able to blend the tones, you will begin to sing with more emotion and passion because you will know how to create the tones that will draw out the feelings and the emotions of the songs that you are singing. Some people call it singing with feeling.
It is well established that the head resonance, when properly supported, has a brilliant ringing tone quality as compared to the chest resonance singing tone. This bright voice tone is developed in the bones and cavities above and, behind and around the nose known as the mask.
The result from an unsupported head resonance is very different and is characterized by a false falsetto tone. This oddity occurs when a singer suddenly switches into a choir boy tone.
The resonators have a lot to do with what your voice sounds like. This is why you can listen to many singers with high voices and yet each of them will have a different blend of sound and tonal quality.
Now try this experiment to feel the resonating system of the head. Gently tap your finger on the bone between the upper lip and the nose. Can you hear the gentle thud it made? Now tap the bridge of your nose and then your forehead just below your hairline and again listen to the thugs again.
Did you notice that the thuds were higher in pitch as you ascend from the lip to the forehead? By performing this experiment, you will know that certain bones are predisposed to amplify various pitch levels.
When singers refer to chest resonance, they are actually talking about vocal tone which is characterized by darker vowel qualities or mellowness. However, the term is a misnomer. By dictionary definition, an effective resonating chamber is a hollow place surrounded by hard surfaces. However, the chest is too full of organs to be suitable for amplifying the singing tone.
Throat and chest resonance occurs where there is plenty of empty space for amplification of the lower vibrations created by the vocal cords in the mouth and throat. Contrary to popular thinking, most so-called "chest resonance" actually comes from the throat. However, there is also a distinct sensation of vibration in the chest when singing, especially in the sternum or breastbone area. This feel of tone gathering in the chest area can be used very effectively to stabilize high notes.
So in order to get good singing tone, then you must practice with the right vocal exercises to blend the head and chest tone.
