How to Improve Power In Your Singing Voice

Many people have great control over their voice, but cannot project their voice to be heard in the back of a room. A mousy voice with great control is still a mousy voice. Read on for an exercise that will help you to build your stamina, control breathing and project your voice louder.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Quiet area to practice
• Water with lemon slice
• Flat area to lie down

1. Lie down on a flat surface and begin to breathe deep from the abdomen. This will help to enlarge the lungs for the time you will be practicing. Do the deep breathing for about two minutes.

2. Begin to sing the scales you are comfortable within your range. Slowly begin to push from the abdomen, exhaling the air in a harsher motion than normal. Breathing deeply on your back forces you to push harder from the abdomen, where the air should naturally come from when singing. If you find that this is not easy, it is not supposed to be. Continue to do this for 5 minutes.

3. Take a short break and drink a small amount of water that has lemon mixed in. This will keep your throat from becoming raw or irritated during this exercise.

4. Repeat the initial step of lying down and singing the scales for your range. Begin to push harder from the abdomen. If you are unable to do this, lie on your stomach and try to start from there. This will be harder, but it will again force you to exhale harder from the abdomen.

5. Do this exercise every day for a week. This will slowly build up your stamina because you are holding each breath longer, and will also build your volume up. The harder you push the air out of your abdomen, the louder your voice will get.

Tips & Warnings

• Vocal lessons are always a good idea for anyone without proper vocal training. To avoid damaging your vocal chords, drink plenty of water at room temperature. Cool liquids tend to cool the voice box and shorten the vocal chords, leading to damage when singing out of range.

[akasha1web]

on 12/17/2009 "Push from the diaphragm" as a tricky directive because "pushing" without proper training will cause the vocal chords to tighten. It's a hard-wired connection. Just try picking up any heavy object and you'll find that your abs and something in your throat tightens. Those would be your vocal chords.

Cudos for walking people through how to access their diaphragmatic breathing. Perfect technique there. as Good educational stuff about the water, with a word of advice. Water does no immediate good, and depending on your level of hydration may not do any good for your vocal chords. Take in your water (half of whatever your weight is in ounces is a good estimate) about 30-40 minutes before running your breathing/singing exercises. The water takes about that long to metabolize and even then everything else in your body gets hydrated before your vocal chords do. Sad but true.

A vocal coac...

[scottmitzi]

on 1/29/2009 Thanks for the suggestion. Projecting my voice was always a challenge ... until I had children. :}