A Mini Course on Pitch: Vocal Cord Grip

{Published in Business Times Newspaper Friday May 29 - June 4, 2015} Another common cause of pitch problems is the lack of grip on the vocal cords. The idea when you sing is to convert air into sound as quickly as possible. So when a little bit of air escapes and you have this breathy tone instead of a hard click sound like you would when you did something like say a GOO GOO, your voice becomes more air than it is grip. A breathy voice from a stylistic standpoint is okay, but a breathy tone because you can’t get a grip is most definitely faux pas. This article will aim to discuss a common pitch problem and the different ways to get a firmer a grip on your vocal cords to correct that.

I always say that there are those that have a natural gift of voice, and those that have to work really hard just to sound average. And believe it or not, in my line of work, I’ve seen them ALL. I suppose working as a vocal coach has exposed me to all sorts. So brace yourself to get a better understanding of what this thing ‘vocal grip’ is all about and what you can do to fix the problem.

If you’ve worked in local recording studios you may have heard the producer demand ‘punch’ in your vocal. Well, what exactly are they asking for? How do you even begin to define punch? From a listener’s standpoint, if when you sing you don’t project that accelerated fuller voice that resonates and has your hairs stand on end, then you’re not quite capturing the attention of your audience. Suffice to say, the conclusion would be that your voice lacks power and that much-needed takeoff to make it work. So let’s go right ahead and fix it, shall we?

Try singing “Mama Mia,” and record yourself when you do. Play the recording back, and if your vocal doesn’t have the desired projection (or punch), then go back and do this in a different way. This time hold your ‘m’ a little longer and extend your ‘I’. Here’s how. Begin by pretty much humming before you sing mama, like this: Mmmama. You should sense your power has increased tremendously just by making this slight adjustment to your takeoff. Now let’s take a look at the word ‘Mia’. With this word I want you to extend the vowel ‘I’ like this: Miiia. Now you ought to have a much clearer and more powerful pitch like when you hummed your way into mama earlier. So let’s round this all up by singing both words using the extended examples. Sing “Mmmama Miiia!” Now that that is all sorted out, let’s take a look at doing something similar using the vowel ‘A’. And here’s what I want you to do next. Sing an extended “Aaaaa” but try dragging out your Aaaa with a more brassy tone from start to finish. You’ll notice that if you had a breathy tone, it’s now all gone.

A great way to get your vocals sorted is to do the Warm-Up Alternative vocal workout from my Learn to Sing with Joett vocal training CD, with a “Niii Niii” all the way up the scale. If you have the reissued CD, the piano track is on track 5. Alternatively, you can download it for FREE from my HulkShare page here!

Thank you for dropping by,

JOETT
Vocal Coach
Need Private Singing Lessons? Click Here!

Joett Vocal Training Product Review for Home Learning

   As I  move more and more towards online tutoring using WhatsApp, Skype, Viber and email, I now see the need to recommend and to avail vocal training programs to my students that can help you train from home.

I don't do this a lot (recommend), but on occasion I would pass on specific exercises to my students providing I'm absolutely certain that you are able to perform the exercises correctly.

Nothing defeats the object more than performing vocal exercises incorrectly. It is the fastest way to hell for your voice. This is why I'm very particular about ensuring that my pupils really know what they're doing.

Once you have the tools... the training program, USE it! It is the only way you're going to keep on developing your voice. When in doubt, please do feel free to contact me. We could easily go over things on Skype or WhatsApp; or if you live in Dar es salaam, you may book private one-on-one lessons with me in my studio.

If you keep up with my regular blog posts AND my weekly Letters from A Vocal Coach column in Business Times newspaper (published in Tanzania), you'll find helpful tips on how to stay on track with your training wherever you are. It's quite simple when you put your mind to it and when you follow some basic rules and principles.

That said, the purpose of this article is to recommend vocal training programs that cover the entire spectrum in voice training to include: Pitch, Tone, Vocal Agility, Head Voice, High Notes, the Mix, Vibrato and MORE. To BUY these AMAZING programs online click here!

This is what I personally recommend, and use myself, so it's worth its weight in GOLD. With this you will get results if you follow instructions and when you put in some work. I GUARANTEE it!

I trained Airtel Trace Music Star Pan African Winner, Mayunga, to win the competition using this Superior Singing Method program. Mayunga went on to sign a recording deal with Universal Music in South Africa, and then flew off to LA to spend a week being mentored by superstar Akon, with whom he also recorded the hit track Please Don't Go Away.

If you really want to develop your voice, Learn to Sing Like a Pro and ENJOY the experience while your'e at it, download these AMAZING vocal training programs here!

(You may purchase now, but please use a computer to download from a link sent to your email, as the files are too large to be downloaded onto your phone).

And to show you how this works, I have also compiled a series of video diaries, wherein, I train Mayunga using this incredible vocal training program.

To find out more, read my blog posts Diary Of A Vocal Coach: Training Sessions Part 1, 2, 3 & 4 and Training Sessions Part 5, 6, 7, 8 & 9.

To your singing success,

JOETT
Vocal Coach & Author "Letters from a Vocal Coach"
Need Private Singing Lessons? Click Here!

A Mini Course on Pitch – Pitch vs. Tension

{Published in Business Times Newspaper 22-28 May 2015} Strain equals flat notes. If you struggle with your high notes, like your throat begins to strain as if you’re trying to pull up your chest voice into your head voice (like going into shout mode), then chances are you are recruiting your larynx muscles to produce the sound. Your outer larynx muscles need to stay down, and there are specific exercises that can help you develop the technique to keep them from interfering with your singing. This article is the first installment of A Mini Course on Pitch that talks about Pitch vs. Tension. If you should ever get stuck, you should be able to return to this article for guidance. There are only a couple of things you need to do to fix your voice wherever and whenever this problem presents itself. So let’s begin.

Pitch problems as a result of tension on your way up the scales is common, especially when you’ve had no voice training at all AND you’ve been using your voice incorrectly for a long time, it gets harder to lose that tendency. You’ll want to relax, and by this I don’t mean go all slurry and lazy, but be conscious of what you’re doing when you’re doing your exercises. Avoid forcing and pushing, because what you do in practice is what you’re going to end up doing when you sing. One way to eliminate that weighty sound on your way up into the higher notes is to try applying the ‘NG’ sound (Nggg) as it will help you flip into your head voice and get into that mixed voice very smoothly. And it takes away a lot of that weight and strain that makes you go flat. And here’s something else you can do. Stick your tongue out and do any piano based scale using the vowels AA but done with an EEER, to help you hold it in.

I would highly recommend that you start out with a simple arpeggio exercise using the above ideas. Try both these methods, but if you’re still straining on the ‘NG’ workout then chances are you’re not quite there yet. So to eliminate the problem, only do the tongue-out workout on the scale until you’ve learned to keep your larynx muscles from rising. Trust me, with your tongue sticking out like that it will stay put.

Thank you for dropping by,


JOETT
Vocal Coach
Need Private Singing Lessons? Click Here!

How to Stay Motivated when Training Your Voice

{Published in Business Times Newspaper 15-21 May 2015} Procrastination is inevitable, as it were, especially when you’re training on your own—without supervision by a tutor. Nothing is easier than losing interest in your training. Once you begin to skip training a couple of times, before you know it you’ve skipped so many vocal training sessions that the thought of getting back on track in itself sends you right back into procrastination, so much so that if you’re not persistent in your resolve to get back on track you’ll probably never go back at all. In this article, I will offer quick and simple tips on how to self-motivate into pursuing your goals without ever falling off the wagon again.

The secret to staying motivated is to consider what you’re doing as YOUR journey into discovering yourself AND your voice. With every exercise that you do, stay alert and tuned to your senses so that you can actually FEEL the progress you’re making. Believe me, every vocal training session—whether you’re doing it alone or with a teacher—gets you closer and closer to discovering more about your voice than in the previous session. This is how to stay motivated. It may sound a little simplistic, but when you begin to think of your training as a journey into yourself, you’ll never get bored. If anything, you’ll be looking forward to your sessions with every passing moment.

Another simple trick is to change your exercises and their durations more frequently. For example, you may choose to train for an hour one day and only for forty five or twenty minutes in subsequent sessions. It helps to keep your training more interesting. Variety is the spice of life, as they say. It works every time.  And if you find you don’t have an hour to spare, simply shorten your session—but do SOME training. So stay focused, and be blessed with a beautiful voice.

I offer FREE vocal coaching via WhatsApp. Download FREE MP3 to vocal exercises here!

Thank you for dropping by,


JOETT
Vocal Coach
Need Private Singing Lessons? Click Here!

How Mayunga Beat Contestants from 12 African Countries to Win Airtel Trace Music Star Singing Competition

{Published in Business Times Newspaper 1-7 May 2015} Trace TV aired the Airtel Trace Music Star Grand Finale on Saturday April 18^th and I’ve never seen such drama and tension in singing competitions before. Priceless! But the purpose of this article isn’t to talk about how the competition went, I’m sure you can follow that up on YouTube. In this article I want to spill the beans on HOW Mayunga beat all these other contestants from all over Africa hands down, to walk away with the prize.  It wasn’t pot luck. It wasn’t JUST talent. And it certainly didn’t happen by accident. Do you want to know what went down? Read on!

While training Mayunga for the Kenya Grand Finale, he mentions… “The Ugandan singer is so good; and the Nigerian girl is amazing.” I could see he was a little uneasy. And I said to him, “I’ve watched videos of ALL the winners from the rest of Africa, and you know what? YOU have something they ALL don’t have. You have the training.” And I went on to say, confidently, “YOU are going to win this competition!” Well, he didn’t believe me then, but he does now.

Three songs were required for the Grand Finale. My song selection therefore was More Than Words by BBMak (which he’d sung at the Tanzania finale), and Michael Jackson’s One Day In Your Life… a very big and difficult song. Mayunga asked me if he could sing My Baby You by Marc Anthony. I asked him sing it to me, and I immediately agreed to let him do the number. What had become very apparent to him was that although he’d been singing the song for a while—long before Airtel Trace Music Star came to town—AND knew the lyrics, he admitted he’d never been able to scale the high notes and that it was, back then, all a bit of a struggle. Previously, he said, he would shout his way around the song. Well, evidently, all the vocal training to this point had paid off. But we had a lot of work to do to refine his voice for the song. And so I sought to train him specifically to sing the Michael Jackson song One Day In Your Life—because it was way harder—and assured him that when he’d mastered Michael’s song, Marc Anthony’s would be easy.  What I gave Mayunga in training I have never given ANYBODY else. My reputation was riding on this. We had to win this competition. Period!

I decided to compile a special combination of sixteen vocal exercises that lasted exactly forty two minutes. In the first segment, the voice got a gradual warm-up that then lead on to an intensive vocal agility workout and concluded with a very specific vocal mix exercise. All of which I compiled especially to help him navigate One Day In Your Life with precision, pitch accuracy and control reminiscent of the King of pop Michael Jackson. I will hand this to Mayunga, HE really works hard. On the last day in training he left my studio at 22 minutes past midnight and he was flying out to Nairobi at mid day. I remember him say, “and people think singing is easy?” I simply quipped “well that’s what they think, but now you know what it takes to sing to an international level!” So in essence, and let this be a lesson to all of you, if you want to learn to sing, you have got to put everything you’ve got into honing your craft. I’ve come across way too many people who are so casual about this, it’s annoying. Mayunga is SO refreshing and a joy to work with because he WANTS to do this in earnest. And he brought home the trophy because he put EVERYTHING he had into this AND followed my instructions to the letter. That’s what it took. Watch Mayunga in training Part 1 to 4 here, and Part 5 to 9 here.

Thanks for dropping by my blog, and please share!

JOETT

Vocal Coach/Private Singing Lessons

Online Singing Lessons Course

Mayunga Beats Contestants from 12 African Countries to WIN Airtel Trace Music Star 2015

When I heard the news the night he won this competition, I was THRILLED. I hardly slept at all. I kept going over this in my head, and the more I thought about it, the more I began to reflect upon how this came about in the first place. How I pitched my way into Airtel Trace Music Star was SO déjà-vu. So uncanny. When news of the competition was flying about on TV and radio, I picked up the phone and rang Anethy Muga, the marketing person at Airtel, and I told her quite frankly... "if you want Tanzania to win this competition, you need me. I must come on board. I am your man!" I remember she asked me, "but who are you?" and I replied, "my name is Joett, I'm a vocal coach, and I am the best!"

She took me very seriously, she contacted Trace in South Africa, and then sent off my profile. When TRACE Managing Director East Africa Steve Agutu came to town, we had a meeting and there you have it... I was on board as judge AND vocal coach to the Top 5 Tanzania contestants! And what's even MORE unbelievable is when I was training Mayunga for the Kenya Grande Finale, I told him on numreous occasions, that he was going to win this competition... and he did!

I really want to thank Steve Agutu, AND Anethy Muga for believing in me enough to entrust me with the job. What a happy ending. We certainly should do this again next year.

ABOUT THE JUDGES

Akon: Akon’s shimmering, soulful voice has propelled countless hits across genres—from pop and R&B to hip-hop and dance. In addition to his own chart-dominating singles «Smack That» and «I Wanna Love You», he’s made a staggering 300 guest appearances for icons including Michael Jackson, Lady Gaga, Gwen Stefani, Lil Wayne, R. Kelly, and Eminem. With over 35 million albums sold worldwide, five Grammy Award nominations, and 45 Billboard Hot 100 songs under his belt, he’s simply unstoppable.

Lynnsha: Lynnsha is a multi-platinium artist from the French Carribbean. She started to sing at 7 years old and debuts her career as a chorist for major Afro-Caribbean artists. In 2004, her first single “Rendez-vous” met great success. She was featured in «Secret Lover» with Wyclef Jean, and with hottest French singers such as Passi and Admiral T. Lynnsha collaborates with Craig David on “Walking Away”. She reached the top of the charts with “Maldon” featuring Fanny J and Louisy Joseph.

Devyne Stephens: Devyne Stephens has amassed a very impressive track record and list of accomplishments. He has created mega-stars and has had an undeniable footprint on the development of some of the biggest entertainers of our time including such notable artist as Akon, R Kelly, Usher, Mary J Blige, Mariah Carey, Lady GaGa, Gwen Stefani, Jay-Z, Alicia Keys, Sean “P. Diddy” Combs, Pink, Sting, Ludacris, Ciara, TLC and many more. Devyne has been referred to at times as the “Berry Gordy” of his generation!!

JOETT
Vocal Coach/Private Singing Lessons
Online Singing Lessons Course

Where to Find Inspiration to Develop a Soulful Voice (Part 1)

In case this hadn’t crossed your mind, a soulful interpretation of a song comes from within. A tone that touches the soul of another person is perhaps the most wonderful gift from God that only you, the singer, endowed with the gift of voice can deliver. The definitive school of soul music that has inspired a multitude of genres and transcended generations in the last half a century—the way I see it, goes back to the 1970s. And if you really want to know, the record label that brought us the greatest soul music of all time in that era was Barry Gordy’s Motown Records. In this article, I’m going to give you some tips on the music you ought to be listening to IF you want to ignite that soulful flare from within. Learning from a stable of legendary singers like 70s Motown pre-computer, pre-auto tune productions will have you experience your growth possibilities as a singer take on a whole new dimension.

In my first installment, looking at my own definitive 70s Motown record collection, I draw inspiration from Stevie Wonder with Signed, Sealed, Delivered; Detroit Spinners with It’s A Shame; Diana Ross – Ain’t No Mountain High Enough; Marvin Gaye – Abraham, Martin And John; Diana Ross & Marvin Gaye – Stop Look And Listen; The Supremes – Stoned Love; The Commodores – Brick House; The Commodores – Flying High; The Commodores – Zoom and last but not least, Thelma Houston – Don’t Leave Me This Way.

I will be listing more Motown material in my next installment, but for now, what I’d like you to do is to run a search for these songs online to get a feel for the way songs were delivered back then—with so much passion, so much soul… and be inspired to develop your own soulful style by learning from the greats! 

I offer FREE vocal coaching via WhatsApp. Download FREE MP3 to vocal exercises here! 

JOETT

Vocal Coach, Dar es salaam.

Private Singing Lessons

Online Singing Lessons Course