This module is all about developing your flexibility and the release of the air. Work on this consistently, and other vocal skill areas will be easier to develop. If you don’t have enough release of air, it’s very hard to build up muscle memory and coordination. Without those, it’s harder to be consistent, and when you’re not consistent, you won’t feel so confident.
What you’re aiming to achieve over the next few weeks is to see an improvement in these areas. You’ll be able to evaluate that by listening back to yourself singing along to warm-ups and specifically listening for the volume and for the breath being fully used.
It’s natural for beginning singers or those new to vocal coaching to think of ‘good singing’ as being ‘singing in tune’. Ultimately singing on pitch is going to be part of the skill set, and it’s normal that we want to sound in tune and it stands out when something is out of tune, but it’s one aspect of developing your singing among various different characteristics of your sound, including tone, colour, resonance, rhythmic accuracy and feel.
As the overall strength, coordination and flexibility of your vocal cords develops, it’s going to get easier to move between pitches accurately. To have a more informed way of charting our development, we need some slightly more detailed indicators of our progress. At different times, we’ll look for different specific attributes in how we sound and how it feels to produce the sound. For now, when you’re singing, you want to cultivate the habit of checking your body for tension and releasing all the air when doing the slides and other warm ups. You don’t want to push or strain, but you do want to allow all the air to turn into sound and vibration.