For about a year or so, I’ve been studying singing regularly with Phil Moufarrege. I can now sing with far more ease than ever before. He's taught me how to sing without strain through my vocal bridges in full voice, how to avoid the anxiety and negative thoughts that I have always battled, and how to love my voice so that I can keep improving.
Before meeting Phil, I had been training singing for nearly 1 year with other teachers face-to-face. Although the lessons helped me get started, they could never diagnose the issues in my voice or tell me how to avoid cracking and flipping into falsetto. They'd just tell me “sing LOUD!” and I would end up just yelling and my throat was in pain all the time. I was always just pushing...never singing.I knew that there must be a way to fix this so I searched online and saw Phil on Youtube and contacted him immediately. I saw immediate results from only taking 1-2 lessons with him.
He can hear every little...
If you're struggling with vocal nodules or fatigue through your sets and don't have the vocal range, ease and consistency you used to have then I can help you get it back and better than before.
Vocal nodules are basically the "end result" of consistent irritation to the vocal cords. Prolonged misuse of your voice can lead to swelling of the vocal cord. Constant misuse at this point can eventually lead to a callous/growth on the vocal cord which we call a nodule. Swelling or nodules can interfere with how your vocal cords work, which make hitting notes harder and more risky. Because of this, the instinct will be to try and "force" your voice to behave, the only way to do this being through constriction. It might help you hit the note, but you'll irritate the voice even more.
There are many pro singers who have dealt with this, probably the most famous of them being Freddie Mercury (I talk about how his vocal nodules affected him here).
So if vocal...
In this singing transformation you're going to see how Quentin dramatically improved his voice, through Skype lessons with me.
Before studying with Phil, I felt like just a typical average singer stuck with my vocal range and tone. My voice sounded OK but nothing special.
I was in a rock band at the time and always wanted to sing like Ronnie James Dio or Chris Cornell, but I couldn't sing any of their songs and had to sing all the high parts in falsetto. Singing Dio in falsetto doesn't sound cool.
I took singing lessons with other teachers first, and while they helped me to an extent, my vocal range was still limited. I felt like I had two different voices and was unable to connect them. I lacked confidence with my singing because all my energy was focused on my singing technique - so I'd do weird things live because my technique didn't match my ambitions.
The most frustrating was recieving feedback like "Your...
Is weightlifting bad for singing? Depends how you're doing it. In the video above, I share some tips that you can implement so that your weightlifting doesn't negatively affect your singing voice.
The common belief is that weightlifting will stiffen you up and create tensions in your body that will negatively affect your singing. Can this really happen? Yes. But there is also a way of lifting weights where you can avoid this problem.
There is a lot of dogma and "black and white thinking" in the singing community. Statements like "weightlifting is bad for your voice!" or "milk is bad for your voice!" etc. are way too simplistic to be truthful. We have to go deeper.
Yes weightlifting CAN have a negative affect on your singing. If you are not careful of HOW you lift weights, you can develop tension patterns particularly in the jaw and throat which can encourage you to that same kind of constriction when you go to sing. If you get...
Are you afraid of being judged by others when singing? Does it feel difficult to learn singing when you're surrounded by peers who make fun of your voice instead of encouraging or helping you?
"It feels like being a fat person at the gym who's trying to get in shape and instead of people cheering you on, they simply laugh at you for trying to make yourself a better person."
That's how one singer described his story about being bullied and judged for his singing. You can really feel his pain.
Then he goes on to say:
"I see this happen all the time to people. Makes me feel sad. Happened to me so much before. It impacted my life growing up. Made me discouraged sometimes. It's really stressful when someone bullies you just because you don't know how to sing high. Why don't they try to help instead of put me down?
Feels like a competition on the internet these days. If you can't sing high then you're out of the club. Everyone wants to sing high but I just want...
Welcome to PART 3 of my HOW TO SING PAST YOUR BREAK series. In this video we'll talk about how to mix chest and head voice and how you should go about doing this.
Here are the links to the previous videos in this series:
In Part 2 I mentioned how there IS a time and place for bridging from your chest voice into your falsetto smoothly. I say falsetto because most people when they talk about crossing from chest to head voice are REALLY talking about a non-breathy falsetto. I talk more about this in part 1. Check it out.
Anyway, the main thing I want to say is this:
You don't build mixed voice and high ranged full voice by just crossing from chest voice to falsetto and "smoothing the break". I mentioned there is a place for this, but it's a supplement. It's not a finished...
Welcome to PART 2 on how to get rid of the vocal break. Let's recap what we covered in PART 1:
If you haven't seen PART 1 of how to sing past your break, then check that out first here.
Now that we’ve gotten the terminology out of the way, in today’s video I’m going to show you the actual process on how to get rid of the vocal break. How exactly is it done? What sorts of sounds will you need to do? That’s what we’re going to talk about today.
The biggest thing I want you to know right away is, we don’t actually wanna sing "around" our vocal break by leaving chest and going into falsetto and trying to "trick" the audience into thinking we're still in chest... We want to ELIMINATE...
Stuck on how to sing past your break? Feel like you’ve tried every vocal exercise without any luck? You’re in the right place. I was stuck on this for YEARS not knowing what I was meant to do to overcome it.
This is video is PART 1 of a new free video series I'm creating about how to sing past your break in full voice.
Check out Part 2 and Part 3 here.
In PART 1:
In PART 2 I'll be explaining the actual process of how you go about building your voice so that you can sing past your vocal break without cracking or flipping.
I hope you enjoyed this video lesson. If you want to learn the specific exercises and techniques specific to YOUR voice then I recommend getting Skype lessons with me and I'll teach you how to...
With just a 2 day deadline I transcribed the new release song from BTS - FAKE LOVE by ear, recreated it from scratch in my own style, recording and producing it.
My friend Douglas Skene from PLOUGHMANSTUDIOS wanted to help out with his badass vocals, a guitar solo and mixing tips - and he pulled it off in 1 day LOL. Check out his channel for tips on songwriting, mixing and producing.
I hope you enjoy it! I'm really enjoying the challenge of creating finished music in such a short time frame, it forces me to get my skills to the next level.
This song was quite tough because there's a lot of high notes, lots of A4's and C5's all needing to be belted in full voice!
When I first started singing there would be NO WAY I could sing notes like this...my highest note was F4!! If you'd like to learn how to increase your vocal range and sing with more freedom then schedule a skype lesson with me here and I'll show you how.
Similar to what I did with Drake's song "Nice For What", I created this cover in 2 days. It's part of an exercise I'm doing to grow myself as an artist: Picking new release songs that I usually wouldn't sing and learning them, recording them and producing them in a very tight time frame. I'm learning a lot by doing this!
Let me know what you think.
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