My buddy Aaron Anastasi has been teaching people how to sing with his course “The Singing Guide” for a while now.  Well, it turns out that Aaron decided to do a major overhaul of the course, add a ton of new material, singing exercises and resources for singers, and make it into a bigger, better course called Superior Singing Method.
 


I sent an email to Matt Smith, the co-founder of Superior Singing Method and asked for temporary access to the new course so I could share my thoughts about it with you, and he was extremely friendly and receptive (thanks Matt!) and gave me access to the course right away. To me, that says a lot about the way Aaron and Matt choose to treat people who reach out to them online, and you’ll see in the “community” section, that these guys are all about building great relationships.
 


 

The first thing I noticed about this course is that it’s completely ONLINE.  You register, get a login and password, and then login to the Superior Singing Method website, which leads you to the member’s area.  All of the course materials (videos, downloads, singing exercises, etc.) are accessible from one main “home base”, which is convenient.

One of the first things I check when I review a singing course is if the creator of the course can actually SING!  I know…sounds weird, but there are a few people out there putting out singing courses when they can’t carry a tune and that’s not acceptable to me, and you should be aware of it as well.

But Aaron Anastasi CAN sing, and has some serious vocal chops.  Great tone, solid pitch, excellent range and a beautiful, artistic phrasing.  Check it out:

Once you’re in the member’s area, Aaron makes a really big deal in the intro video about going through the entire course, in order, and before we dive into the good stuff, I want to emphasize how important that point really is.  Singing is a very technical subject.  There’s a slow, inefficient way to learn it, which involves cherry picking stuff you THINK is good for your voice, and then there’s a smart way to learn it, which involves following a SYSTEM put together by a professional, that’s designed to grow your voice in a specific progression.  If you don’t start out by learning the fundamentals, you can forget about making real progress, so follow the steps in sequence!

Alright…so let’s see what Superior Singing Method has to offer!

I had to shrink the image a bit to get it to fit here, but as you can see for the most part, the course has 8 training modules, plus 2 bonus modules:

Module 1: Warm Up Exercises

Module 2: Breath Management

Module 3: Vocal Tone

Module 4: Pitch

Module 5: Power and Resonance

Module 6: Singing Higher Notes & Mix

Module 7: Vocal Agility

Module 8: Advanced Strengthening & Vocal Techniques

Bonus Module 9: Performing

Bonus Module 10: Music Marketing

Each module features a video of Aaron explaining the singing exercises for the day and builds on what you learned the day before.  That’s why Module 2 – Breath Management – comes BEFORE Module 4 – Pitch – because it’s virtually impossible to sing on pitch if you don’t know how to control the airflow to your vocal chords.

 

There are a few other general things about the course that you should know:

“5 Minutes A Day”

Aaron has structured the course so that you can literally spend just 5 minutes a day for a total of 60 days’ worth of training, although I wouldn’t really recommend that.  Realistically, you’d get more out of the course if you spent 30-60 minutes of uninterrupted, totally focused practice daily.  Be careful not to OVER-practice, either.  60 minutes a day is more than enough IF those 60 minutes are utterly “in the zone”, with no distractions.

What Voice Type Are You??

Aaron removed the part of the course where you categorize your voice type, and I think he did the right thing.  It’s not necessarily useful to know if you’re a “bass” or a “baritone”, a “soprano” or an “alto”.  What’s useful is gradually expanding your range and improving your vocal technique.  You already intuitively know when something is too high or too low for you to sing, and as you progress in your singing training, you’ll be able to challenge yourself to expand your vocal range.  Just be careful not to push it or you can harm your voice.
 

Superior Singing Method Community

Every single lesson in the course has a comments box underneath it where you can ask Aaron questions and interact with other members of the Superior Singing Method community.
Check it out, 58 Comments just on the introductory video alone!
 


 

Why is this valuable?  The reason this is so valuable is because it speeds up your learning, makes you remember the lessons better, and makes the entire process more fun.  One quirk of human psychology is that we learn things MUCH better when there’s an emotional connection with the material.  By bonding with Aaron and other singers, you’re participating in an exclusive group of like-minded individuals who love the same thing you do, and are as dedicated as you are to getting better at singing.  They’ll also be there to hold you accountable for your progress in a gentle, non-judgmental way.  In business, this kind of group is called a “mastermind” group, and I’ve found that successful people in just about every field actively look to join these kinds of communities, so consider this to be a HUGE benefit.

While Aaron does an amazing job at explaining the nuances of each exercise and what it accomplishes, I would love to see him eventually add more live demonstrations of him actually singing through exercises and even full songs.  My singing teacher always used to say “do what I say, not what I do”, and it frustrated the crap out of me because we all know intuitively that we human beings are amazingly good at mimicking others, and that’s how we learn most effectively.  No parent says to us when we’re 12 months old, “here are the rules of grammar…now speak!” Of course not…we just imitate the sounds that grown ups make and that’s how we learn to speak!  However, Aaron does demonstrate each singing exercise in audio form, which is extremely helpful.

Aaron also hooks you up with 3 bonuses, depending on which upsells you go for, if any, when you get the course.

Bonus 1: How to overcome stage fright and perform your best.

This short eBook contains some very solid advice about performing, and a lot of it overlaps with what I teach in my ebook “Easy Singing Basics”.  As a singer and a submission grappling competitor, I’ll be the first to admit that performing can be utterly nerve racking.  But there’s nothing like it, and after you do it a few times, you actually begin to enjoy the adrenaline rush, the high heart rate and the feeling like you’re 10 times more alive than you are in your regular, daily life.  It’s kind of sick, really, haha, but hey – we’re musicians and it’s in our blood!  In this bonus Aaron shares some of the secrets that high-level performers use to give their best shows.

Bonus 2: Superior Vocal Health

Have you ever had a terrible day of singing because your voice just wouldn’t do what you asked it to?  A lot of those situations have to do with what we eat, drink, how much sleep we get, and our emotional and physical condition.  This report goes into some of the things to avoid and embrace when it comes to optimizing your vocal health over both the short and long term.
 
 

Bonus 3: Superior High Notes

Singing high notes is something that we as singers always struggle with.  This bonus features 7 video lessons with exercises, dedicated specifically to improving the ease and quality of your higher notes and comes with a PDF manual.
 
 

Bonus 4: Superior Vibrato

Most singers do vibrato totally wrong.  Instead of allowing the voice to naturally “beat”, they try to force the vibrato, which creates a wobbly, unnatural and pitchy sound.  With this bonus, Aaron absolutely NAILS what vibrato is, what it is NOT, and how to do it properly.  As a classical singer, I spent a LOT of time developing vibrato, and I’m in full agreement with everything Aaron teaches in this module.  Good stuff, Aaron!
 
 
 
 

A brand new feature of Superior Singing Method is the Vocal Coaching Club.  For 20 bucks a month, you get to send in a video or audio of you singing and receive a critique from Aaron, personally.  You also get new singing exercises and vocal tips monthly.  I charge $100/hr for vocal coaching and several of the professional opera singers and teachers that I’ve worked with charge double that, so if you thrive on individualized attention in your singing training, this is a great opportunity to get some one-on-one instruction directly from Aaron for a very reasonable price.

If you read some of my other reviews, you’ll see that I have no problem telling you that a given course is a waste of money if I think it is. Sing With Freedom, aka The Bristow Voice Method is definitely NOT one of those courses. Even though Per holds the unorthodox belief that singing exercises are actually HARMFUL to the process of learning to sing, this is still one of the small handful of courses that I reviewed among many products, in which the instructor actually knows what the hell he’s talking about AND can sing like a canary, himself, to back it up (which he does inside the course quite a bit…he really gets into it too!) What also struck me about Per’s approach to teaching singing is how different it is from just about every other singing method out there. Why do I say that and what do I mean by “different”?

When I say “different”, I mean that Per doesn’t give you a bag of tricks and tell you, “go sing well”. Instead, he goes on to explain and demonstrate why we humans are BORN with full control over our vocal instruments and how we unlearn this coordinated act as a result of social and psychological pressures and expectations from all corners – culture, friends, family, etc.

Here’s how Per might explain it:

Imagine you’re trying to sing a high note but instead of gracefully singing the note, you tense up your shoulders (or jaw, or abdomen…) and try to “squeeze” the note out. The result is a strained sound that not only sounds like crap but FEELS uncomfortable to produce, which makes singing physically draining rather than invigorating as it should be.

As babies we scream at the top of our lungs for hours on end with NO vocal strain whatsoever and no sign of fatigue in our voices. But because of the process of conditioning through the expectations we face in our cultures, from parents, school, etc., many of us learn to fear looking or sounding foolish. But great singing begins with allowing ourselves to sound however and in whatever way we want. It’s the freedom to sing out of tune without your whole body tensing up, which is what happens to most of us – we try to force a sound and ironically, choke it so much that it refuses to come out or comes out sounding all wrong!

Untangling these mind-body knots is at the core of Per’s approach.

The basic idea behind the Bristow Voice Method comes from Per Bristow’s experience as both an athlete and professional singer.  Athletes spend virtually ALL of their time learning incredibly intricate patterns of muscular coordination and draw heavily upon cutting-edge developments in sports science and learning psychology.  So you could easily make the argument that athletes are uniquely qualified to figure out the nuts and bolts of complex, coordinated activities such as singing, dancing, wrestling, etc., and convey them to another individual effectively.  As a lifelong athlete, I can absolutely confirm this fact and the reason this is so important is because many talented, competent individuals are unable to TEACH what they know very well because they possess what’s called implicit knowledge, whereas what you need to be a great teacher of something is explicit knowledge (the HOW and WHY).

Rejecting Singing Exercises…Say Whaaa?

An interesting aspect of the Bristow Voice Method is that Per rejects the use of singing exercises as a primary tool for developing the voice. Per believes that when we sing scales, we’re relying chiefly on our ear to guide the kind of sound we make.  That’s because we each have our own standards of how we think we should sound, whether it’s because we want to emulate our favorite singer or sound “classical” or “pop” or whatever.  The problem is that we should be using our kinesthetic (kinesthetic means touch and refers to our feeling of our own body), not auditory, sense to guide our singing rather than trying to force a sound that trains us into bad singing habits.

To use one of Per’s examples, if you’re singing a scale and your voice cracks, you probably feel embarrassment about it on an emotional and psychological level, especially if anybody else is listening.  Why?  Because we’re taught to believe that the mark of a bad singer is when the voice breaks and you can’t sing the high part of the melody because it’s out of your vocal range.  This leads us to engaging “compensatory muscles” that really shouldn’t be engaged during singing, to try and force the sound we want or to hit the high note we’ve been struggling with.  Things like tensing your abs or engaging your neck and shoulder muscles are examples of using compensatory muscles during singing.

In other words, we create muscular tensions to try and avoid sounding “bad”, when really what we need to do is embrace feeling good. Yes, it sounds self-helpy and feel good but any pro singer with a long career will testify to the fact that singing should be relatively effortless on a muscular level and rather than being an exercise in the avoidance of fear of embarrassment, it should be a celebration of empowerment and self-expression!  This is why Per urges you to be OK with making absolutely any kind of sound and not judging it as good, bad, ugly, pretty, etc., because it’s just a sound!

On a goofy side note, one of the first things we were taught to do during a warmup back when I studied opera singing was to make a bunch of sighing noises, or sirens. The non-music art students were in the same building as us and got a kick out of our seemingly strange behavior!

But why is any of this important? I mean, why NOT engage compensatory muscles if it gets you the sound you want?  Simple: you’ll blow your voice to smithereens.  You’ll also sound strained and stifled in your expressiveness.  And most of all, it feels unpleasant and confined, not free and easy.

My Problem With Sing With Freedom…

I have to differ slightly with Per regarding vocal exercises, because a handful of well-picked singing exercises help develop an awareness of the breaks in the voice and the muscles that a singer tends to engage as he or she is singing.  Also, vocal exercises are critical to developing an accurate sense of the distance between notes (intervals) and a feel for tension and resolution and major/minor tonality. In other words, singing exercises sort of connect your voice to your ear.

. . . HOWEVER . . .

I do agree that a singer SHOULD, first and foremost, be free from strain and tension and any belief that they need to conform to some sort of “sound”.  I should add that I’ve often seen colleagues practice endless exercises and carry around ENTIRE BOOKS full of vocal exercises, which is self-indulgent, counterproductive and boring. Most high-caliber singers have just a handful of comprehensive singing exercises they go through that cover every basic aspect of vocalization. The rest of the time they spend on learning actual music, not more exercises!

Now, here’s something interesting:

In the free video on Per’s site, Per also demonstrates a prominent break in the voice as he sings higher and then sings the same thing again with absolutely NO break so that his voice sounds completely unified from top to bottom.  It’s interesting because there is no visible difference in what he does and the reason for that is because Per has learned to strengthen and control the tiny muscles in the larynx that most singers never develop.  And why do most singers never develop them?  Because they engage compensatory muscles which prevents the smaller muscles from strengthening!  Yet Per can sing freakishly high notes without ever flipping into falsetto and without resorting to yelling.  Hmm…

So that’s the scoop.

Now what exactly comes with the Sing With Freedom program? There’s a physical version (a DVD set) and a digital version that you can download immediately after you purchase the course.

1.  The first DVD consists of experiments that help you develop your kinesthetic sense and discover muscles that you probably weren’t aware existed, much less that they had any role in your singing.  It helps you discover the sensation of free vibration and releasing restrictions.

2.   In this DVD Per shows you how to get a deeper, richer sound out of your voice and begins showing you the process of isolating fine muscles in order to cultivate an impressive vocal range, sing on pitch, heal hoarseness and recover from vocal fatigue.

3.  The third DVD goes into the details of dramatically increasing your vocal range.  Per discusses why the voice breaks, how to conquer that break and make an effortless, smooth transition from the low part of your voice to the high part and clears up the misconceptions behind vocal range terminology like “head voice”, “chest voice”, etc.

4.  This DVD is devoted to teaching you how to breath correctly for singing and also discusses how to be a charismatic and powerful performer onstage.

As a Sing With Freedom member, you’ll also get access to The Singing Zone where you get several free bonuses.  You’ll receive workbooks that compliment the course.  You also receive an ear training course, music theory course, sight reading course and a rhythm training course, both developed by Per Bristow himself.  Lastly, you get access to Per’s singing article library, forum and interviews.

In addition to the course, Per Bristow applies his method in his Los Angeles voice studio to help singers of every genre increase range, freedom and expressiveness regardless of their individual singing styles.  This makes perfects sense because even though you may prefer rock or opera or heavy metal singing, you’re still essentially using the same vocal equipment as everybody else and instead of trying to convert you to his preferred genre of music, Per simply teaches you how to get the most mileage and joy out of your voice without harming it.

You can Watch Per’s free introductory voice lesson on his site to get a better of feel for his style of teaching:

Singing Success is a 12 audio CD course that contains 17 lessons that cover both technical and stylistic aspects of singing such as developing trills and vocal riffs, fixing the vocal “break” and more.  The program also comes with a DVD where every exercise is demonstrated for you by both a male and female singer.

The creator of the course, Brett Manning, also gives out a lot of his best tips and lessons for free on the Singing Success Website.

At the core of Brett’s teaching approach is a focus on tried and true vocal concepts drawn heavily from Speech Level Singing (SLS).  The main idea in Speech Level Singing is that the larynx must remain in a low and relatively stationary position on every note in the singer’s vocal range.  The reason that this is so important is because the larynx, which houses the vocal cords, interferes with free vocal vibration whenever it rises and activates so called “compensatory” muscles that have more to do with chewing than with singing.  To quote from the Speech Level Singing International website:

“The muscles around the cords act as a sphincter and close so as to prevent swallowing down the windpipe and into the lungs. This is a very important process when you need to swallow, but it is a very poor process when you are trying to sing.”

As you can see, the larynx must remain low because otherwise it causes an anatomical conflict and entrains compensatory tensions in the voice.  Vocal coaches who train opera singers also teach this rule and often the first crucial step in training a voice is simply training the larynx to remain in a low position throughout the vocal range.  Since so many singers grow up imitating straining pop and rock singers, they do whatever it takes to successfully emulate their sound and acquire some pretty persistent habits that it can be difficult to undo.  As a vocal coach myself and someone who went through a pretty rough period of unlearning poor vocal habits and easing my larynx down, I definitely empathize with the amount of work it can take to unlearn bad vocal habits.

The second fundamental concept that you learn in the course is also an SLS tenet: The vocal folds must stay together and vibrate at all times.  If you imagine your vocal cords as two tiny pieces of taut cloth the size of fingernails and you separate those pieces, air will pass through them but they’ll hardly vibrate.  If, on the other hand, you bring them together and then pass air through them, the air will push them apart and initiate vibration.  If you pass air through open vocal folds like in the first example, the sound will be breathy and the pitch will be vague.  On top of that, the edges of the vocal folds will become irritated and inflamed.  But if you keep your vocal folds together when you initiate a vocalization (and as you continue to sing), they will begin to vibrate, creating a “point” to the sound that makes it more resonant, clearer and much easier to tune.

I give Brett Manning and his instructors major points for basing their method on research-backed, functional vocal principles, which is something that the majority of teachers arrogantly ignore at the expense of their students’ vocal health.  Having been through several clueless vocal coaches myself, I’m a little sensitive to the vocal problems and setbacks they can cause for singing students and I just have to wonder how many would-be singers gave up trying to learn how to sing simply because they were unable to make progress with an incompetent vocal coach and thought they lacked ability, when really they just needed somebody who knew the score to show them the right way.

What I DON’T Like About The Course

You don’t really get to hear Brett sing at all and that raises my antenna immediately. A singing teacher should ALWAYS be able to demonstrate the skill they’re trying to impart, and at a very high level to boot. The little that I’ve heard Brett vocalize leaves me with the impression that he his own singing is lacking, although I’d love to hear some actual audio to get a better idea of where he’s at.

The course also uses lot of exercises. While I’m not a big fan of endless vocal exercises, I do believe that they hold a very important place in training the singing voice.  The key is to take a minimalistic approach and only practice the handful of exercises that cover the most musical ground (pitch, rhythm, intervals, breathing, etc.)  The rest of your practices should be devoted to learning and polishing actual music!  Singing Success does utilize a lot of exercises but I was glad to see that they’re fundamental-type exercises that focus on getting the larynx low, eliminating the vocal break, bringing together the vocal folds and learning the nuances of compression and mask.

Having trained many celebrity singers who have gone on to tour internationally and win prestigious awards for their performances, Brett Manning definitely knows what he’s doing.  The course is shipped internationally and has users in over 100 countries.  Alternatively, users can simply access Singing Success as a direct download on the website.  Brett offers an incredibly lenient 6 month money back guarantee for Singing Success which, to me, demonstrates a strong confidence in the quality of his product. 

I created Sing Opera Now when I realized that there are thousands of people out there who want to learn how to sing opera but for whatever reason never took action to make it happen.  Contrary to what many people may think, anybody can learn to sing operatically.  Classical singing has an unfair reputation as being an activity that requires some sort of rare gift.  This is more perception than reality and it’s probably seen in this light because the sound of operatic singing stands out SO sharply among the repertoire of sounds we humans make.  But in actuality, singing operatically is no more difficult than any other well-coordinated activity and it doesn’t call for any unique gifts or unusual anatomical characteristics.  It requires sound instruction, an intelligent approach and practice!

Myths such as “you need tons of natural talent to sing like that”, “you have to be born with it”, “you have to be fat”, “you need a naturally booming voice” and so on, are pervasive!  But you know what I’m going tell you, right?  They’re just that…myths!  I’ve personally met tons of opera singers who were told at a young age that they had no musical talent whatsoever (including myself), worked to prove those people wrong, are skinny and speak with a tiny, unappealing voice!

Since I’m the creator of Sing Opera Now, I can’t provide a totally objective review of my own product from the point of view of my online students.  Only they can.  For this reason, I encourage you to visit the Sing Opera Now website yourself and read some of the comments and emails I’ve received to get a better sense of what it’s all about.  If you’re an opera fan and would love to learn sing opera, let me show you how easy and fun it is!

Here’s a video of Sing and See in action:

The Sing And See interface is shown below:

In this interface, you can tell if you’re singing in tune or not by the change in color on the piano keyboard, the stave and also by the graph, which indicates the “history” of your sung note.  As you can see, the graph shows when your pitch fluctuates up or down and gives you an immediate visual cue if you are singing out of tune.

As a voice teacher and performer, I firmly believe that every voice teacher should have one of these in their vocal studio.  The truth is that many individuals are visual learners and “linking” their ear to their eyes can be extremely effective in speeding up learning and allaying frustration at not being able to hear minute details right away.

Sing and See is also extremely useful at helping you negotiate your passaggio, or vocal break.  I personally have experience with this type of software (I don’t know if it was Sing And See in particular).  I visited the Florida State University voice department where they have this kind of technology and discovered that I wasn’t making a proper transition to my head voice which resulted in a wide, uneven vibrato and poor overtone profile.  This sparked a journey to unify my vocal registers which I’m still not at the end of!

Although they don’t really advertise this fact, it seems to me that Sing and See would be extremely helpful for any musician, singer or not, in improving their musicianship.  When you sing an interval on Sing & See, it will show you accurately you make the jump between notes.  Do you tend to overreach and sing sharp or come short and sing flat?  An example is below:

In addition, you can also play the virtual keyboard on this singing software.

From the perspective of a singing student, my teacher creds aside, I believe that this kind of singing software is a force multiplier in terms of learning singing quickly.  Why do I say that?  I’ve done a lot of “modeling” of super successful individuals in various fields be it singing, marketing, sports, etc., and one common characteristic that they all share is that they find ways to monitor themselves objectively.  In the world of learning how to sing this translates to recording your lessons and practice sessions, getting honest feedback from a competent vocal coach and leveraging powerful singing software such as Sing & See.  The person who knows they are making a mistake can fix it while the one who doesn’t may never realize it and wil continue making the error.  Honest feedback is golden.

Sing & See costs $49 for the student version and $99 for the professional version and is available for both Mac and PC.  Thanks for reading this Sing and See Review!

I’ve said before that I’m not a fan of singing exercises for their own sake but rather as part of a comprehensive and immersive musical education.  David Willis’ MP3 Singing Exercises only provide the exercises portion but it states on the website that singers should practice these with a good vocal coach.

There are 3 tiers of singing exercises: beginners, intermediate and advanced.  They each cover increasing your vocal range with progressively more difficult exercises.

I reached out to David Willis and asked him if he’d be willing to provide a copy of his MP3 singing exercises for me to review for my readers. He kindly obliged and I downloaded his full singing exercises package. This includes the beginners, intermediate and advanced singing exercises and a PDF file of the singing exercise descriptions.

In each exercise, David Willis starts in the same key and sings the exercise himself first, then you must follow along as the exercises ascend in pitch. There are 25 singing exercises in total and 2 bonus exercises covering major and minor scales and runs and arpeggios. These singing exercises are also done with various articulations such as staccato, legato, etc.

While these MP3 singing exercises are OK, and I use a few similar ones in my vocal studio, it’s important to understand that vocal exercises by themselves don’t accomplish anything. As singers, we don’t just do random exercises because they’re supposedly good for us, we practice specific vocal exercises in order to fix certain vocal problems or help steer us towards healthier vocalism depending upon our current vocal habits. A good vocal coach will assign vocal exercises on the basis of your individual vocal idiosyncrasies, being careful not to damage the voice or entrain bodily tensions.

For instance, using a hard attack or “glottal” onset helps singers who experience incomplete vocal fold closure and a breathy tone to discover the sensations associated with bringing together the vocal cords. Thus, depending on your particular stage of development as a singer, these vocal exercises may or may not help you and may even be completely counterproductive.

Overall, The Singing Guide is a great course, especially for the price.  It’s an online course with both text and video that consists of 6 modules, warmup exercises, advanced exercises, bonuses and an offer to join Aaron’s vocal coaching club.  It’s all done online, so once you’ve purchased the course on Aaron’s website, you get a username and password and you can access the course anytime you want.  The beauty of this model is that Aaron can always add more material to make the course more valuable for you.  Now let’s take a look at what all comes in the course:

• Module 1 – Getting To Know Your Voice:  In this first section of The Singing Guide, Aaron describes the different voice types and with the help of some downloadable MP3 files, helps you find what your voice type is (i.e. baritone, soprano, etc.), by singing alone with the exercises and seeing which notes are comfortable for you.
• Module 2 – Proper Singing Posture And Releasing Tension:  This module consists of a video and a few articles that talk about aligning your body for a proper singing posture and how to release tension in the most common tension spots.
• Module 3 – Breathing Exercises For Singing:  In the breathing exercises for singing module, Aaron demonstrates how to get a quick breath, how to use your breath in your musical phrasing and several other breathing exercises for singing.
• Module 4 – Singing Warm Up Exercises And How To Improve Singing Voice:  This module actually contains quite a bit of material including how to improve your pitch and vocal tone while doing your singing warmups, relaxing your jaw, sustaining notes, pitch matching, muscle memory and more.
• Module 5 – Singing Techniques:  This is a really fun module because it addresses concerns that are common to most every singer.  Aaron talks about singing with vibrato, vocal clarity, improved resonance and resonance balancing (i.e. not sounding nasal) and more.  I found it impressive that Aaron correctly described the action of the diaphragm in resisting the exhalation of air during singing.  Most singing teachers will tell you to “sing from the diaphragm”, which means absolutely nothing unless you explain how it works and how to do it.
• Module 6 – Advanced Singing improvement:  This is another content-rich module that covers several more advanced singing concepts including negotiating the “break” in the voice otherwise known as the passagio and how to use falsetto effectively.  This module of The Singing Guide also includes the excellent siren exercise and singing tips to increase your vocal range.

In addition to the 6 modules of The Singing Guide, there are also two sections on singing exercises:

1. Warmup Exercises – These are downloadable exercises for each voice type (bass, baritone, tenor – alto, mezzo, soprano).  These are more simple exercises such as singing 1, 2, 3, 3, 2, 1 of the major scale (which happens to be a very powerful exercise when done with a new vocal onset for each note).
2. Advanced Singing Exercises – These singing exercises are a bit more demanding than the warmup exercises and are more focused on increasing range and agility of the singing voice.

On top of the 6 modules and 2 singing exercises sections of The Singing Guide, Aaron includes 3 bonuses:

1. Getting Ready To Perform – Aaron helps you prepare for performance by discussing common concerns that singers have about singing in front of an audience.
2. Maintaining Vocal Health – This is actually a great section because a lot of being an effective singer is just taking care of the voice, knowing when NOT to sing and what foods and actions impact your voice.  Aaron covers all this including my favorite way of getting rid of mucus (gross, but welcome to the life of a singer!)
3. Singing Harmony Interview – This is an interview Aaron does with 2-time Grammy Award Winning producer Nathan Chapman.  Nathan discusses how to pick out harmonies and sings a few with Aaron to demonstrate.

The last part of The Singing Guide is the opportunity to join the Vocal Coaching Club.  As a member of the vocal coaching club, you get a new set of vocal exercises every month.  It costs $1 for the first month and $9.95 a month after that.  Personally, I’m not a huge fan of doing a zillion exercises because the truth is that just a handful of well-crafted, comprehensive exercises will cover all of your singing bases.  The rest of your time you want to spend on real music, which is essentially singing exercises in a more engaging context.

Whenever I review a vocal training program I always check to see if the creator can actually sing well himself/herself. I mean, how can you teach people to sing if you suck at it, yourself? Aaron sings quite well: in tune, with great phrasing and style and a wide vocal range. Check him out:

Aaron doesn’t address a few important topics that would make The Singing Guide better in my opinion:

1. Position of the larynx – Keeping the larynx low is vital to free, unrestricted singing across the whole range.
2. Vocal fold closure – The vocal folds need to come together on all notes.
3. Placement – While Aaron does discuss resonance, I would have liked it if he had spent more time on the concept of the mask and how to “discover” the sensations of the mask.

 
But overall, for only 40 bucks, this is a fantastic value. Most vocal training programs (including my own how to sing opera program) cost $100+. This is actually a very comprehensive program that you can tell Aaron put a lof hard work and love into and you’ll learn a lot of excellent, solid singing information with The Singing Guide.

You Can Sing With Impact consists of 11 lessons plus an introductory lesson on singing with the diaphragm (this is actually a common misunderstanding because you don’t actually sing with the diaphragm; it engages involuntarily in response to the proper positioning of your “carriage”…but that’s another story!)  In any case, here’s what the lesson layout looks like once you download it onto your computer:

The lesson format is that you can read the lesson or simply press play to hear it explained to you and then you can play the vocal exercises to here how they sound before attempting to sing them yourself.  The singing lessons are as follows:

1. Preparing The Body – This lesson helps get you in the right singing posture.  Since singing is essentially a full body and soul exercise, it’s important to be in a relaxed, stable bodily position.  Making sure that you’re not unnecessarily tensing up any of your muscles, be it your jaw, shoulders, abdomen, etc., is also paramount to good singing.
2. Breathing Deeply – Breathing for singing involves learning how much breath to draw (you get an intuition for this over time), how to draw air in a relaxed manner, how not to expel too much air as you sing and how to make the most of the air you take in so that you can sustain notes for long periods or time.
3. Awaken The Diaphragm - This is commonly known as “singing with your diaphragm” but it really is about creating what world-renowned singing pedagogue Richard Miller terms “dynamic equilibrium”.  What this means is achieving a muscular coordination and tension, both in the fine muscles of the larynx and in the supportive muscles of the body, to eventually sing with ease, dynamism and emotional power.
4. Sighs And Sirens – Sighs and sirens are my absolute favorite type of singing warmups.  They are easy on the voice, help you extend your vocal range and sound delightfully weird to non-singers.  I start all of my private vocal lessons, both as a teacher and student, with sighs and sirens.
5. Lip Aerobics – The lips are vital to singing.  They are one of the articulators that shape sound quite dramatically.  Learning to use them via lip trills and other vocal exercises has fantastic benefits for your singing.
6. Humming – Humming is one of my favorite vocal exercises because it creates buzz in the mask, which is the front part of the face.  It teaches singers how to utilize their resonators to project their voices, sing in tune and improve tone quality.
7. Singing Thirds – Singing thirds will help you improve your intonation and as we all know, learning how to sing in tune is essential to becoming an effective singer.
8. The Full Scale – The major scale is the bedrock of music and singing training.  Once you become intimately familiar with the major (and later, minor, harmonic minor and melodic minor) scale, you will develop an intuitive feel for the distance between notes.  In other words, by mindfully (i.e. listening intently) practicing the major scale, your tuning will improve.  But unless you practice the major scale with some regularity, you’ll lose this intuition for singing in tune; not completely, you just won’t be on “fire” like when you practice every day.
9. Arpeggios – Singing arpeggios helps dramatically with singing in tune but it also challenges the singer to maintain ease and vocal quality as they make jumps between distant pitches.  Practicing arpeggios helps singers to transition from head voice to chest voice (or falsetto if their head voice is underdeveloped).  They help your musicianship and make fantastic vocal warm ups.
10. Extended Arpeggios - Extended arpeggios continue to train your ear and musicianship and force you to deal with register breaks.  If you’re having trouble with your passaggio, extended arpeggios will reveal it!
11. Full Song – Eventually, we’d like to actually sing music, not just exercises!  This final lesson guides you through a full song to conclude the course.

In addition, this singing course comes with a readable guide and MP3s that you can burn onto a practice CD!  The program costs $19.95 and comes both in a physical format and a digital download.  Thanks for reading my You Can Sing With Impact review!

This isn’t singing software per se, but it’s a digital download and has to do with learning how to sing so I thought I’d include it!

This book is different from most of the ebooks and training programs that circulate out there because it doesn’t really focus on the technical aspects of singing. Instead, it’s a solution to an even more pressing issue for singers, which is how to really connect with the music, the lyrics and most importantly, how to convey that to the audience. Now, make no mistake, technical skill in singing is *crucial*, but great singing technique without interpretive ability is bland and clinical. Young and inexperienced singers also have to learn the difference between feeling the music themselves (which is certainly important) and making sure OTHERS feel it!

In 21 chapters, Singing Excellence covers these important topics:

1. The True Power Of The Singer – This introductory chapters discusses why being a good singer and performer has a lot to do with being a good actor.
2. The Singer’s Body – The importance of the singer’s body and the body language of a performer can’t be overstated. Even though the singing is the focus, most communication is non-verbal and being able to access and communicate across those non-verbal channels is what separates good performers from great performers.
3. Emotional Limitations – This is an incredibly important chapter because it discusses the intimate relationship between our repressed emotions and our physical tensions, which inhibit freedom of movement, singing and expression. It also talks about the wonderful Alexander Technique which is used by many performers, athletes and musicians to retrain their muscle memory to become better aware and more in control of their tension and relaxation patterns.
4. Using Your Hands – Many singers feel very naked indeed when they have nothing to do with their hands. It really depends upon the situation but learning to be comfortable in any bodily arrangement on stage is crucial to letting go of inhibitions and delivering the performance of a lifetime. Knowing what to do with your hands is one of the first things to address.
5. The Eyes – This chapter talks about trusting yourself as a singer when you’re onstage and also where and how to direct your glance so that you’re not distracted and better able to sing.
6. Movement In Singing – My singing teacher in university used to say that “movement is the best kept secret of singing” and it’s absolutely true. Standing still is an open invitation to tension and dullness in terms of performance. Learning to move both subtly (for recital and very formal, e.g. classical situations) and exaggeratedly (for theatre) is just an undeniable part of the performer’s craft.
7. Breathing For Singing – Learning to breathe properly is extremely important but learning how to breathe as an actual part of the music is a whole different and interesting skill. A breath is a dramatic musical moment than can be taken in and expelled in many different ways.
8. Voice Lessons And Vocal Preparation – I’ve said it a million times, if you want to get great at singing, get a great vocal coach. This chapter of Singing Excellence discusses the qualifications a good voice teacher should have before you allow them to tamper with your voice!
9. Vocal Health – Many singers are very superstitious about what they eat and which exercises they do. This chapters takes a look at what superstitions are justified and what common sense approaches to vocal health have historically and scientifically had the most consistent payoff.
10. Breath Technique And Vocal Power – This chapter deals primarily with learning how to exhale in a controlled manner, which is absolutely crucial to singing in tune and maintaining an even vibrato whenever you decide to use it.
11. Breathing In Song – Learning how to anticipate notes and when it’s appropriate to breathe without interrupting the song is the topic of this chapter.
12. Muscle Memory, Vowels and Consonants – Singing vowels correctly is a years-long pursuit for many high level singers because they constitute the majority of what’s perceived as music. But knowing how to sing consonants correctly is also an art and training proper muscle memory so that this comes second nature is the subject of this chapter of Singing Excellence.
13. Vocal Range And Vocal Resonance – Range and resonance are near and dear to every singer’s heart because a wide singing range, beautiful tone and freedom in all of the vocal registers is essentially what every singer is striving towards because it’s the those technical details that permit you to express yourself freely.
14. Acting And Singing – Singing and acting are intertwined because being on stage isn’t merely making sound, it’s telling a story, conveying emotion and touching others with your interpretation of a piece.
15. Appearing Natural – There’s a popular expression that goes like this: “fake it till you make it.” That’s totally valid but it’s equally important to grow progressively more comfortable with who you are as a person to express not only your personality but the vision of the composer or songwriter whose piece you’re interpreting. It takes practice and a lot of initial discomfort but appearing natural is an earned skill and actually BEING natural is your reward for all that hard work, love and dedication to your craft.
16. Me, You, Here – This chapter discusses singing with a partner.
17. Singing Uncertainty – This chapter deals with the moments before performance and the inner struggle and how to use it positively and proactively to actually enhance your performances.
18. Song Lyrics – Bringing your music to life and really expressing the words that you’re singing powerfully is important to not just singer but speakers, teachers and well, anybody who talks to others!
19. Stage Fright – Everybody gets it and it feels like you’re going to die. But you’ll live and the more that you put yourself out there and perform in front of groups the better you’ll do. You’ll always be varying degrees of nervous but it won’t phase you nearly as much as when you were first starting out!
20. Taking The Stage – There’s an art to entrance and your stage presence. This is a must-read chapter of Singing Excellence.
21. Stage Technique – This chapter focuses on lighting, microphones and all of the technical aspects associated with being on stage.

Singing Excellence also comes with a free ebooklet called Audition Excellence which is a guide that explains how to prepare and perform a successful audition. You also get a second free bonus called Vocal Excellence, which is an eGuide to proper vocal technique.

As this book is focused primarily on the music performance aspect of singing, if you need a more technical guide on how to actually sing, a course like Sing With Freedom would be the place to start.
I really haven’t seen too many ebooks or vocal training courses cover the performance aspects of singing so extensively and for $17 with a 60 day money back return policy, Singing Excellence is worth a read for any current performers and performers in the making.