A Mini Course on Pitch - Hearing Your Voice Properly

{Published in Business Times Newspaper Friday June 5 - 11, 2015} If you’re having trouble hearing yourself, the likelihood is you could quite easily run into pitching problems. Hearing your voice properly when you sing is critically important to your singing in pitch. If you’re in an empty room, for example, you’ll hear your voice reverberated against the walls, which doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to be hearing yourself properly. A padded room, or room filled with furniture and drapes on the other hand will absorb your voice and doesn’t really help you hear yourself properly either; and if you sing in an open space like the beach, even more so. So how then do you get to hear your voice properly when you sense something isn’t right with what you’re hearing? This article will share an age old singers’ tip you’ll want to keep closest to your chest.

A good way to intonate your ear… or to get your ear tuned to what your voice is doing is a very simple trick that is used in opera circles. What you can do when you’re doing your vocal exercises is to cup your ear. Try cupping your palm around one ear and try to sing Nay Nay Nay. And then try doing the same without cupping your ear and you’ll notice you don’t really hear yourself as well. Mind you, this doesn’t have to be done the whole time you’re exercising. You need only do it for a while to help tweak or correct your pitch when hearing yourself properly becomes a problem. It’s a very old singers’ trick that works, and I hope it’ll work for you.

When you’re recording your vocals in a recording studio, it is important that you hear yourself on your headset. If you cannot hear yourself at all (or what you hear isn’t good), then make sure the producer does something about it. Being unable to hear your voice when you’re recording will affect the way you deliver your vocals. It really is as simple as that. You may have noticed how many a time producers resort to auto tune to fix pitching problems, when all they needed to do was to make sure you heard yourself properly. If you’ve had vocal training, you don’t need auto tune. You need to hear yourself. Plain and simple!

Thank you for dropping by,

JOETT
Vocal Coach
Need Private Singing Lessons? Click Here!