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It is up to each of us to maintain our vocal health and be able to sing to our very best ability and with our full passion.

I am very experienced at teaching lessons over Skype. There are some modifications that I make in order to make your lesson just as clear and efficient and personal as a live in-person lesson. I have perfected these modifications over the past 7 years of teaching over Skype.

Skype is free, even for international lessons. And at the end of the lesson I will send you an MP3 of the lesson so that you can use it for practice between lessons.

Some recent memorable Skype lessons I have taught:

• With a student in Oakland who uses the Skype app on his Iphone and has his lessons in his car on his lunch break. Both audio and video are used.
• With a student in rural California who can’t get internet at her home and drives to the nearest coffee shop, sits outside of the coffee shop in her car using their internet and her laptop, and has her lessons.
• With a group of three students who are investigating the possibilities of becoming certified to teach SLS using Skype’s conference calling.
• With a student from many locations over the world. She tours nine months a year and no matter where she is she is able to have her weekly Skype voice lesson with me.

So give it a try. In this age and time there is no excuse to study with the teacher and technique you most want to study with, no matter where their location.

It is such a joy to see where some of them are. Check these videos out.

Kate Threlfall is a jazz/R and B composer, singer and pianist presently performing throughout the U.K.

And then there is Olivia Leisk, singing here with UK rapper, Devlin:

And finally, Jeanna DeWaal. She is currently performing on Broadway in American Idiot. Prior to that she was in the West End performing in Queen.

This young student came to me with an incredible voice. Her primary problem was pulling up her chest voice so high that she would really strain her voice. She had already had nodules on her vocal cords by the time she was 9 or so before we started working together. Such a big voice is a huge responsibility for the student and for the teacher. But she is learning how to manage this great vocal gift and use it to it’s fullest without letting it get out of control.

Enjoy this one as well.

Yep, Lindsay. We ARE going to hear from you.

I would only trust a very experienced online or internet based teacher to do this. It does require the teacher be able to deal with the very brief sound delays and video delays. I now personally take over 75% of my lessons over the internet. I teach over 50% of my lessons online.

So what do you need to take an online singing lesson?

• either a computer, pad or smart phone
• Skype software, which is free
• headphones (not absolutely necessary, but can cut down on the time delay)
• an internet connection

You are set! So no matter if you are on the road, live where there is not a singing teacher you want to work with, or don’t want to deal with traffic–you can have a high quality and convenient singing lesson.

• I will ask you about your singing and musical history, goals, and what you would like to improve in your singing.
• We will start the diagnostic part of the lesson where we determine what vocal tendencies you have.
• I will teach you specific tools to counter-balance the tendencies you have that are causing you vocal problems.
• We will apply those tools and resulting technique to songs.

Each student has very specific needs and vocal tendencies. I tailor each lesson to that specific student’s needs.

Here are some video snippets from an actual voice lesson to give you an idea of what the core of the singing lesson is like.

You could hear that the student had some trouble getting across the first bridge of his voice smoothly. That is the area where the voice has to transition from chest voice to mix. Mix is the middle register of the voice where the primary resonance changes from being below the soft palate to being below and above the soft palate. We call this a split resonance. Most students have difficulty with this transition at first.

Now listen to this:

What you heard the student do is called a lip bubble or lip trill. The lip bubble was a great tool to help this particular student smooth out the bridge between his chest voice and mix and then between his mix and head voice. At the end of this video I had the student experience the difference between doing a lip bubble with the vowel of “uh” shaped in the mouth behind it and the vowel of “ee” shaped behind it. I wanted him to be aware of how those felt differently and know that it was the feeling of the “uh” vowel behind the lip bubble that he needed so that his larynx would be stable.

Here I used some vowel and consonant combinations with the student to get him closer to actually singing a song. All singers have one or two vowel and consonant combos that work best for them-that help them keep their larynx stable, their vocal cords sufficiently compressed, and an appropriate amount of air flowing. The “noo” sound in the above video was this student’s “best” vowel and consonant combination. It helped him become familiar with the feeling of a relaxed and stable larynx.

In this last video we began the work of application of technique to a song. I used a couple of the vowel and consonant combinations that worked well for him earlier in the lesson to start getting this song into his sensory memory with a stable larynx. And I had him keep his vowels “narrow”.  His tendency was to widen his vowels in the approach to and in the bridge. We also began to work on vibrato. The change was quite significant, even in this short amount of time.

I hope this helps you know what a lesson can be like, that it will spark some questions about your own voice, about what your tendencies are, and about how you can improve.

About five years ago I had my first singing lessons over the internet. I had moved to the United Kingdom, far away from my singing teachers who were all based in the western United States. One of them came to the U.K. to teach only a couple of times a year and I wanted more lessons than that. All of my teachers are masters of teaching and had been teaching regularly over the internet using either Skype or I Chat for years. So I knew that they knew what they were doing, but I was still a little skeptical.

Would they be able to hear the nuances of singing that they needed to hear over Skype? How would they deal with the sound delay that sometimes occurs with internet lessons?  Would I miss some of the nuances of their teaching without being face to face with them?  What if the internet crashed?

Since that time I have had many internet voice lessons. And I have taught many internet lessons. At least half of my students take their lessons over Skype. The questions I asked are all legitimate questions and require solutions unique to internet teaching. But they do not get in the way of getting  great singing lessons over the internet.

Voice over internet protocols these days are of  high quality. The sound truly is excellent and much better that what we get over land line phones and mobiles. There have been  one or two lessons where my student’s internet connection was weak, which affected the sound and speed of the connection. But they were able to remedy that problem by either modifying their connection or taking their lesson at a different location where the connection was stronger.  I actually had one student who took her lessons in her car with her lap top outside of a Starbucks for a while! It worked great.

Occasionally a Skype video call will drop. I simply call the student right back and resume the lesson. Occasionally the video part of the call will freeze for a few seconds and then return to normal. But this does not affect what I am able to ascertain about the student’s voice. Advanced singing teachers rely heavily upon their ears to understand what is going on in a singer’s voice. In face to face lessons we will often close our eyes for a brief moment so that our ears can take over and we can truly hear what the voice is doing and not be distracted by our eyes. I have also taught lessons using simply Skype audio without video if the student only had access to their mobile phone and had a Skype phone application. The sound was great and the lesson was good.

It did take some experience for me as a teacher to get used to playing arpeggios and hearing the students voice be a fraction of a second later that what I was hearing out of my keyboard in my studio. But it did not take long for me to be able to only really hear the student’s singing and not my playing. Development of that skill is akin to being in a room full of people who are talking and picking out one conversation several feet away. An experienced teacher will have no problem with that.

Internet lessons are a huge boon to singing students. They allow students to study with the teacher they want to study with, anywhere in the world. Internet lessons allow the student to take lessons when they are touring or on vacation or are snowed in. And internet lessons level the playing field amongst students. By that I mean that it no longer matters if you choose to spend most of your time in a small town in the middle of nowhere but want to seriously study singing. It no longer matters if there is not a good singing teacher in your town. You have the choice of studying with the best teachers in the world no matter where you are. Give it a try!

I am taking swimming lessons this winter.  And not because I don’t know how to swim. But I want to swim faster and more efficiently so that I can enter open water competitions this summer.  I want to have the endurance, strength, and technique to do well in the races.

At least half of my swimming practice is spent isolating the different parts of the stroke. I work the arms separately from the legs. I spend time practicing smooth breathing and making sure it is equally easy and efficient for me to breathe on either the right or left side. I know that my overall stroke and resulting speed will suffer if I do not have each of the components of the free style stroke well engrained into my sensory memory. Then I can put the stroke back together and work on endurance and speed. But I have to have a certain baseline of good technique before I can ever hope to have more speed and endurance.

The same holds true for singing. If I am going to sing well I must work out each vowel sound. I must make sure my vibrato is neither too slow nor too fast. No matter whether I am singing high, low, or in between, I make sure I have a stable larynx. Then I can begin the work of putting a song together, with all the varied consonant and vowel combinations, dynamics, phrasing, and artistic interpretation. Those seemingly isolated exercises I did earlier in the day prove their worth. And that is when the real fun begins.

Because I have prepared well, I can eventually sing my song without much thought to technique. The technique becomes “automatic”. The neuromuscular memory of how to correctly sing the phrases of the song is seared into my brain and I can go about the art of singing. Then I know I can perform the song and not fatigue or damage my voice. Then I can tell the story of the song to my audience. Then I am free to be an artist.

Go for it. Dare to practice well and frequently so that you become truly skilled at singing. You may be wonderfully surprised at how much artistry is within you once you have the technique to back it up.

One of the difficult things about being a singer is that we can’t see our instrument. I can see on my guitar how the strings vibrate, what makes them vibrate, which string is larger than others, where the frets are, etc. But I can’t see how to make a certain pitch or even a certain sound with my voice.

So let’s take a look at our vocal instrument. The mechanism of the human voice can be divided into three parts: the lungs and diaphragm, the vocal cords (also called folds) housed within the larynx, and the articulators (palate, tongue, cheeks and lips).

The lungs are the pump for the system. There must be sufficient airflow and air pressure to vibrate the vocal cords.

The larynx is the bump in the middle of the neck, just below the chin. It houses the vocal cords. The vocal cords (also called vocal folds) are a pair of connective tissue and muscular fibers that are joined at the front of the larynx and extend back. When the vocal folds are brought together and there is  balanced air pressure to drive them, they vibrate laterally in opposite directions. The muscles of the larynx adjust the length and tension of the vocal folds to make pitches.

Take a minute to find your larynx. To feel it, gently place your middle and index fingers on your neck about two inches below your chin. Swallow. You’ll feel the larynx rise up when you swallow and then return to a neutral position.

Now watch this video to see the vocal cords in action, but let me warn you first. We singers have a living instrument. It is lots more than wood and strings. Some folks think seeing living tissue in action is gross. I think if you are a singer, you need to know how your fabulous living instrument works:

Good singing demands both skill and art. So many of us artists wish it weren’t that way. Shouldn’t any and every body be able to sing? Can’t we just express ourselves through the natural voice we have? Absolutely. But if we want to most fully express ourselves, we need our voices to have accurate pitch, good tone, and make sounds that others want to hear. Otherwise, we could just as well be singing in the shower.

How many times have you not stopped to listen to a street musician (busker) wailing away and just walked by because she failed to draw you in with her voice? She failed to capture your ear and so she never got to tell you her story. And she may well have had a great story to tell.

The great guitarists of our day didn’t just wake up one morning and play like Mark Knopfler. Mark didn’t even just wake up one day and play like he now plays. He practiced chords, scales and arpeggios. All the while being aware of his style, but knowing that if he couldn’t play the notes and chords accurately, he would not be able to play his style.

Yep. That is the cold hard truth. Skill and art. But development of the skill of singing need not be mind-numbing drudgery. A highly trained SLS coach can lead you to that skill development more quickly than almost any other teacher. And because you will be making obvious progress, you will be inspired to continue to perfect your technique and thus ultimately perfecting your art.