Pitching Tips To Help Us Sing In Tune!
Pitch is certainly one of the Basics of Singing, and these pitching tips will help you to correct your pitching through the use of a variety of techniques involving some aural training as well as actual singing! When we sing in pitch, we are usually employing 3 kinds of techniques: Let us look at each of these pitching tips in detail:
1. Knowing Your Pitch Well
Singers who are able to sing in the correct key or pitch often have a great sense of notes and musical scales, knowing exactly how to produce the pitches that are necessary for the respective songs that they sing. This will involve knowing what vocal register or vocal position to sing the respective notes from, as well as how to support the notes well with your breath.
This familiarity with your ‘singing pitch’ also comes with regular practice of the basic musical scales,for example the Major Scale as well as the Major Arpeggio, and also other more advanced musical scales like the Minor Scale, Minor Arpeggio, Major 7th Arpeggio and so on!
We can also practise certain Basic Major Intervals like a Major 3rd (Doh – Mi) or a Perfect 5th (Doh – Sol), so as to familiarize ourselves with how to do some basic pitch jumps when singing.
2. Listening Out For Your Pitch And The Music
Great singers not only know how to sing well, but they are even better listeners than you would think! This is because when we sing, we need to also listen closely to and monitor our singing pitch, making sure that our vocals are in tune with the key of the music or song accompaniment.
Basic aural awareness or listening training would involve listening to certain notes and reproducing them with our voice, for example we may play a C note, and after listening, we would sing back a C note and check that it is the same as what we played. We may also do the same with longer melody lines, and singing them out exactly the way we play them, making sure that we are in the correct key.
We can also train our aural awareness by getting someone to play the basic intervals in various starting keys to see if we are able to tell what interval is being played. This tests our listening ability as well as our recognition of pitch jumps between notes, and this will certainly strengthen our aural awareness!
3. Correcting Your Pitch As You Sing
Once we are able to listen closely to our singing as well as the music or song accompaniment, we would be able to tell if we are in the correct key or not, or whether we veer off course during certain difficult phrases. If it does happen that we sing off-key for certain words or phrases, we would have to be able to correct our pitch instantly as we sing, so that our listeners would not be able to tell that we are not in control of our pitching!
This would mean that we should be able to tell if we were singing too LOW or too HIGH from the respective pitch needed, and correct our singing accordingly. We would need to be familiar with how we pitch when we sing, as well as to be able to listen out for our pitch and the music, before we would be able to correct our pitch as we sing. (Pitching Tips 1 and 2 have to be covered before we can master Tip number 3!)
We would also do well to practise the various musical scales and intervals, as well as the various beat durations and rhythms to strengthen our ability to sing in tune as well as on beat too! When we have finally mastered the above 3 Pitching Tips well, we would then certainly be on our way to better pitching when we sing!