Tips for a beginner singer
 

Hello guys,

I've been an instrumentalist for the longest time (playing bass/guitar) for bands, artists, and the like but deep inside of me wants to sing. It's hard to just go to places bringing your guitar and hopefully find someone to sing songs that you know how to play in the guitar. In short, I wanna learn how to sing haha. BUT, I don't know where to start. I tell myself that I can sing but when I actually do by myself, it really sounds horrible.

I've come to know that there are many techniques/ types of singing. Pardon my misuse of proper terminology but I really find Tom Delonge's style of whiney/accent singing in recordings really awesome though a lot even me don't like him singing live; to Portishead's Beth Gibbons' low fi singing that takes me away and etc (too many to mention).

There are just so many styles of singing that I can't seem to find the common denominator. Is it simply talking with a unique accent or something more. I don't really know. Hope you could give me some tips/advice to kickstart my learning on what you guys have already mastered. Would really appreciate it :)

Singing, like most art walks a line of technique and heart. Sometimes one or the other is fine, but the best combination is probably a healthy amount of both.

Go on you tube, there is every singing excercise lesson under the sun, just practice and work on breathing, all else fails.....autotune

Sure, if you want to be a complete ****ing hack...

Autotune is for fixing the occasional mistake in an otherwise good take. As far as I'm concerned, if you can't sing it, and you're not practicing to be ABLE to sing it, you shouldn't be singing it.

Anything further than that (such as deliberate extreme autotune effects) should only ever be undertaken under strict guidance.

IN ANY CASE

Actual advice: Find somewhere you can be loud, go there a lot, and sing along to songs. It doesn't matter if you suck at first, you're GOING to suck at first. I have a reasonable voice myself, and it was developed, not a natural talent. And the way I developed it was just to stick headphones on and sing while I walked home from school or around town. The more you do it the better you'll get.

Another good thing to do is to throw yourself curveballs and be stupid with it. Sing random styles and have fun with them. Hell, MAKE fun of them. I imitate all sorts of singing styles and ham it up all the time. I sing female vocal parts in falsetto all the time. It doesn't sound anything like the recording, and sometimes its great other times awful, but the more you simply screw around with your voice and try and do different ****, the more you'll learn about how your voice works.