3 Singing Tips – Pt. 3

Understanding Tone as a Singer

Welcome to the final part of my 3 Singing Tips blogs! In my last blog, I talked about the importance of having good breath as a singer. Today we’ll be talking about tone. We will talk about the importance of singing in tune, differentiating what tone and pitch mean, in the context of music and why it’s an important aspect of singing well.

Photo by Ebuen Clemente Jr on Unsplash

What is Tone?

In music, tone is an instrumental or vocal sound that is produced by that instrument or voice. Tone or sound, is what you hear with speaking voices, animals and inanimate objects on a daily basis. Tone is produced and then channels into your ear canal into your ear drum and the vibrations are processed into your brain.

Check out this helpful article on how we hear as humans. Tone is important in music because it allows performers to get a sense of the musical direction or pattern, if something is loud or soft or higher or lower. It is a crucial factor with staying in pitch or within a good relative pitch center.

What is Pitch?

Pitch, according to Sloan School of Music is how hear the frequency of a sound, whereas tone is the color of the sound or another word timbre (tam-br). Timbre determines how bright or dark a sound is made by an instrument or voice. Pitch will indicate what note that you are trying to sing or produce. In singing, the inhale of air goes into the lungs, the exhalation of airflow vibrates against the vocal cords (vocal folds) and creates a pitch. A note in “C” for instance, vibrates with the vocal folds at a 440Hz frequency. The notes in music are C, D, E, F, G, A, B and C again in an octave.

How to Sing in Tune?

In music, the notes written in a musical score has a series of patterns that are in rhythm and in time. (We’ll talk about time signatures, tempo and key signatures in another blog). In elementary school, hopefully your music teacher taught you a whole variety songs that have a melody (the main part) and perhaps they taught you how to sing in a choir! Some examples of songs might be nursery rhymes, folk songs, Christmas Carols and popular music that is trending.

There are a lot of ways in which a singer can sing in tune. The piano is one really helpful resource to sing in tune to your voice and your ears. Another method of how music can be taught by rote, where the lead singer sings a line and then singer(s) repeats what they hear back. Pitch accuracy is important when playing an instrument or singing.

Here is one video on how to sing in tune: There are many, many videos on how to sing in tune, but this is one example that you can check out below.

Dr. Dan’s video on how to improve pitch or intonation (in tune or tone)

Why It Is Important to Sing In Tune?

It’s important for a singer to sing in tune for 3 reasons:

1. It’s pleasant for the listener
2. It’s accurate to the original composition, or how it was written
3. Singing in tune allows the singer to express the music freely and in the context of their performance.

Remember that when you’re singing, your whole body is your instrument! Your breathing, body alignment, along with your ears, vocal folds are essential in singing! These are just the basics in singing.

Note, there is a lot of subjectivity in music and in teaching people how to sing. There is no one uniform way of how to sing for every singer, but there are a lot of helpful exercises on how to sing.

Check out one more video below on how to sing on pitch!

Sing on Pitch: 3 Exercises to Make It Happen

You’ve made it! That is the 3 basic singing tips! Alignment, breath and tone. I hope you enjoyed reading these blogs! I’ll be posting way more on singing tips in future blogs and I will create my own videos as well. Stay tuned! (no pun intended)

Feel free to share these blogs to your friends and family. Comment below any questions or comments that you might have!

Photo by BRUNO on Unsplash