The joy of singing

Last night I had my 3rd singing lesson. I'm still buzzing!

I have no illusions about being the next winner of X-factor or Britain's got talent - in fact I doubt that my voice will ever be good enough for solo performance. But that is not the point for me.

When I was around 10 I joined the church choir in my home village. I don't remember how long I stuck with it, but I guess 2 or 3 years. Mostly I just remember enjoying singing, to the point of even attending a regional choir camp one summer (no, it wasn't anything like band camp...).

When I was 13 I moved to a different stage of schooling which meant a bigger school with more students. The music teacher made every single student audition for a spot in the school choir. I got handed a sheet of music for a song I'd never heard and was told to sing it. As I didn't know how to sightsing I did not do well and so didn't join the choir.

At university the student theatre always did one play each year that included singing, I only acted in one of those. It was a harrowing experience. It wasn't one of the easiest pieces out there (the lyrics were set to Mein Herr from Cabaret) and I realised I knew nothing of the craft of singing.

I read somewhere Stephen Fry describing his problem with singing was that he was tone mute, rather than tone deaf. He said that he could hear music perfectly in his head, but he didn't know how to reproduce it. That is my problem. I have no musical training, nor am I a natural at it. I can look at notes and see up and down, but that's about as far as it goes.

A few years ago I attempted one of those "Find your voice courses". The blurb said it was for complete beginners and it started very basic. Breathing exercises and stuff like that - but within a couple of weeks we were onto singing different songs. For someone that was a complete beginner it was a largely pointless exercise. How am I supposed to find my voice while singing in a group and doing a different song each week? You spend your time learning a song, not how to sing.

Since then I have been yearning to be able to sing. Just knowing that if I open my mouth to join in with communal singing of any sort what comes out is not hideous. Or maybe even one day being able to actually join a choir (an amateur one obviously).

So I finally took the step of having proper 1-1 singing lessons. I was incredibly nervous before my first lesson. I had no idea what to expect and most of all I was nervous that it would turn out that I couldn't be taught.

3 lessons later and I'm hitting the right notes based on the piano pretty much every time. This was one of the things I was most nervous about. I wasn't sure how one goes about hitting certain notes with one's voice just based on the piano - and it is quite an essential skill if one wants to aspire to joining a choir. But I can do it!! And with practice I will hopefully learn to trust myself instead of glancing at my teacher at the start of each scale to check that she is smiling and nodding to indicate I got it right.

My homework this week is to work on the blade (I think that was what she called it) - how you get your voice to carry through projecting via your sinuses. Last week I worked on learning "Early One Morning" and now I have learn to sing it while making it all nasal to project it. It sounds pretty hideous, but I'm told is a phase you have to through as you are learning. Once you are able to project the voice properly you learn how to round it and make it sound good. One step at a time, I guess. :-)