Did you know that singing is not all about your vocal cords? You can’t forget about your ears! They work together to help you sing beautifully… and even tackle harmonies!
Lisa and Julia are back at it again with a new lesson to help you recognize intervals, sing harmonies better, and improve your pitch accuracy.
First, let’s get warmed up.
You’ll start by counting up the steps of a scale:
I know. Pretty easy. But it gets a little trickier than that. You’ll have to count the scales in reverse once you add a new number. Like this:
This is an exercise of concentration as much as it is for your voice and ear training. Julia finds it easier to keep track of it using her fingers. So maybe give that a try as you sing along with them.
Now that you have that, we’ll try to make our way back in the scale. Starting with 8, we can do the same thing until we make it up to 1.
Singing along with Lisa and Julia will help you stay focused on the numbers.
There. We’re all warmed up! Now, not only does this help you warm up, but it also helps you learn what each number along the scale sounds like. Which will come in handy in just a minute.
If you know the notes to sing, you can sing most anything.
The Sound of Music is such a great movie. And we’ll use a little bit from the song to… well, know the notes to sing.
Interestingly, that verse allows you to sing every note on the scale in relation to the one:
This is a great exercise for interval training. Speaking of which…
Who’s Joanna, and how will she help?
This exercise will help you learn the most useful intervals. Because they happen all the time in harmonies. You can use the third, the fifth, or the octave to have an immediate match.
So if a melody starts at a 1, singing 3, 5 would allow you to harmonize cohesively. This gets your vocals and ear working together to find those intervals super fast.
You’re basically signing an arpeggio, but it always brings you back to the one. Lisa makes a great point. Attaching the numbers to the note is helpful.
The perfect warm-up for this is singing the name ‘Joanna’ Like this:
Did you notice how ‘Joanna’ only uses 1, 3, 5, and 8? Use this as a tool to find the note you’re looking for.
With these tools, you’ll be able to train your hearing to drastically improve your singing. It’ll also help you feel confident when singing harmonies.
If you liked this lesson with Lisa and Julia, you’re in luck! As a Singeo Member you have access to practice guides in different keys, the ability to transpose or repeat certain sections, get personalized reviews of your progress and so much more.
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