Be Patient and Build a Solid Foundation “When I started serious study (age 19) I spent the first six months vocalizing only with the vowel sounds…It was not a very interesting way to spend six months, but my teacher, Arrigo Pola, believed it was essential. Over the years I have become even more convinced of […]

Some people are born with their singing apparatus already aligned, and they go on to careers as fantastic vocalists. When you ask these people for singing tips they sometimes have no idea how they do it – it just comes out! And then there are the rest of us. We have the music within, but […]

When Jane* started voice training she was a senior in high school and very quiet. After some initial progress at two lessons per week, she switched to one lesson per week and her progress….halted. She kept at lessons persistently but after two years had made very little progress.  I was carefully checking her technique and […]

A singer should stand freely and easily and should feel as if the chest were leading, but should not feel constrained or stiff in any part of the ribs or lungs. From the minute the singer starts to emit a tone the supply of breath must be emitted steadily from the chamber of air in […]

I breathe low down in the diaphragm, not, as some do, high up in the upper part of the chest. ..In breathing I find, as in other matters pertaining to singing, that as one goes on and practices, no matter how long one may have been singing, there are constantly new surprises awaiting one. Luisa […]

Allesandro Bonci, from the Forward of “Practical Reflections on the Figurative Art of Singing”, written by Giambattista Mancini in the 1800s, translated to English in 1912: “This work appears at a propitious moment, as not one of the many new methods has proved as good or successful as the old Italian method. If the modern […]

In learning to breathe it is well to think of the lungs as empty sacks, into which the air is dropping like a weight, so that you think first of filling the bottom of your lungs, then the middle part, and so on until no more air can be inhaled…” Luisa Tetrazzini, one of the […]

I want to warn you not to practice any breathing exercise to such an extent that you make your heart beat fast or feel like strangling. Overexercising the lungs is as bad as not exercising them enough and the results are often harmful. Like everything else in singing, you want to learn this gradually. Never […]