New book Coming SooN! “F-ing Sing Joyfully & Easily”
Scroll down for a sneak peek: Excerpt #2!
I am currently writing a book about modern vocal technique! It is lovingly titled “F-ing Sing Joyfully & Easily”. This book is an in-depth, compassionate overview of the skills modern singers use to belt out the high notes (all of the notes in fact!) and find their most confident voices! It covers everything from posture to breath control, registration, vowels, keyboarding skills, chord theory, and authentic, musical vocalizing.
If you’d like to PRE-pre-reserve your copy, fill in the form below. By doing so, you are guaranteed either a digital or physical copy (maybe both?) at an early-bird price! Scroll down to read an exerpt!
Excerpt #2 from “F-ing Sing Joyfully & Easily”
RELEASE DATE TBD
What does it mean to have ‘a good ear’? The expression refers to people who have musical listening skills. There are those who think you have to be born with a good “ear”. I wholeheartedly believe that you can develop an ear and train your listening skills through listening exercises and other ear training work.
You can practice ear training in many ways. First of all, you can listen to your favorite songs and sing along. Yes, it can be as simple as that. You’re doing hundreds of amazing things when you sing along to your favorite songs.
When you sing along to a song, you’re actively listening! You are training all of the skills you need to listen attentively and musically. When you hear a familiar melody, your brain does amazing things! Consider that you have never had to consciously memorize the rhythm, melody, or even the lyrics of your favorite songs. There just seems to come a time when it becomes an earworm and you’ve, seemingly all of a sudden, got it memorized! Music and memory have a curious relationship that we’re just starting to understand. Music is processed in many parts of the brain. According to Dr. Daniel Levitin, author of This is Your Brain on Music, (Levitin D. J., 2006) musical processing occurs throughout the brain from the cochlear nuclei, to the brain stem through the auditory cortices on both sides of the brain, to the hippocampus and the frontal lobe. Basically, your brain lights up when music is being played and you’re listening to it. According to a study done at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, which studied the increasing the size and capacities of the auditory and motor cortex, listening to and studying music helps the brain’s neuroplasticity – which is our brain’s capacity for change and our ability to learn well into the winter of our days. (Andre Aleman, 2000)
The long-term impact of music on the brain is also too magnificent not to mention. Music therapies are being used to engage people suffering from Alzheimer's Disease. The music we’ve listened to and loved has an intimate connection with memory that lives on in our brains, even in the darkest of times. To witness this miracle of auditory processing, watch Alive Inside: A Story of Music & Memory, a featurette played at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival. In this documentary short, you’ll see previously slumped, immobile and silent patients come to life with the help of an iPod mini and a headset.
When you sing along to a song, you are using the listening skills developed by the auditory process to coordinate your ear and your voice. Producing or reproducing – i.e. the ‘singing’ part of ‘singing along’ – melodies cement our listening skills to the mechanisms of the voice. I guarantee that if you take the time to develop your listening skills through ear training, even just listening to and singing along to your favorite songs, that you will become a better singer. Notice though, that the first step is listening, not singing.
So, to all of those who say that a person must be born with a ‘good ear’, I say, consider your brain’s relationship with music and listening! Consider how active your brain becomes when you listen to music and how amenable our brains are to growth and change through its influence. Consider that music, if you take the time to listen – really listen – will be one of the last things you have with you on this earth before you go.