What is the most important thing to learn first?

This may seem like a simple question with an obvious answer, but I certainly can’t say that I have found it to be! Of course some people will tell you to learn breath support first, and that might be right for you, but is it right for everyone (and is the technique being taught good for everyone?)? I suggest trying to learn the several fundamental things that are required if you want to sing well in any kind of traditional way, and see if at least one of them comes to you quickly/easily. Why not? I don’t see any risk, and the reward is that not only do you have something “down pat,” but it might help you learn one of the other fundamentals!

Opera voice coach Jack LiVigni, for example, believes cord closure is most important and should be learned first:

Most singers fail at the very source – the cords, and this is across the board the biggest reason why people fail – their inability to maintain a grasp on their cord closure throughout the musical line with varying vowels and pitch, and to fine tune it with varying dynamics.

…Your language is a huge disadvantage because your AH OH and OO vowels in speaking are produced by loosening the cords so as to darken. AH OH and OO should be bright bright bright. What is this dark thing? This is a false sound that never is theatrical. These swallowed dark sounds are not right. They unavoidably lead to pushing, particularly when your rep calls for volume.

Exercises for cord closure on the EE vowel are truly important, as well as the EH, especially for English speaking natives.

The link to this used to be (it appears he deleted it):

http://gioacchinolivigni.com/2017/01/cord-closure-for-all-voice-types-post-1/

This is excellent advice, but how many aspiring singers (especially beginners) will understand it? Here is another voice coach’s suggestion on this subject:

As to breath support, the technique I’ve suggested to my students is to take a deep breath mostly in the stomach (not chest) that is perhaps 3/4 of what they could do, but not to tense up the muscles in the neck or head. Then you place one or both hands on your stomach and press lightly. Now you have no choice but to keep air in reserve for singing! This will likely feel at least a bit weird at first, so give yourself time to get used to it. From the chest up there should be no tightness; if there is you’ve got to relax those muscles.

However, other teachers/voice coaches seem to think it’s essential to teach high volume opera singing breath support for acoustic singing to people who want to sing at much lower volume using a microphone (and technological enhancement, such as reverb, which is nearly always used in pop genres), so this is another factor that might cause major prolems. If you can’t afford lessons and are having great difficulty with breath support and cord closure, you can sing simple songs, whatever you sing well. Post on sites like the Reddit singing forum for feedback. If you don’t sing anything well, work on common words that contain the crucial vowels, like you, me, go, in, way, etc. Then make up a song that contains these words, like, “you, you and me, me and you, we can go, in the way, what it was, not to be, so much luck.”

Try to sustain the vowels in these words, not all in one go, but rather work out different phrasings so that, for example, the “uh” vowel in luck is sustained in one phrasing but quickly passed over in another. Some will find this very difficult without learning breath support first, so again, it’s all quite variable, from one person to another. This is even true for professional opera singers – here’s some evidence to that point:

Professional opera singers activated the TR, INT, RC and OBL muscles to higher levels than the student singers did. Another finding was large inter-subject variation in muscle usage, showing an idiosyncratic composition of the muscle contribution to subglottal pressure.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15260181/

And listen to as much singing as you can! You will learn all kinds of useful things, such as how articulated the words are. The more muddled or slurred, the easier it is to do just about anything with singing, and of course “scooping” and “sliding” are common in pop and can help you not just sing well, but add interest to your phrasing. If you can, work on changing your volume levels within a song; so long as you are going to sing with a mic, technology exists to keep the volume consistent (expecially compression). Some aspiring singers actually think their favorite “stars” sound like superhuman singers, but in fact it’s mostly due to things like reverb, EQ, and compression (often at a 5 to 1 or even 10 to 1 ratio!). And if you can, obtain a copy of Henry Pleasants’ “The Great American Popular Singers” and read it more than once.

If you do listen to a lot of different kinds of singing, one thing you should notice fairly soon is that words are always sung the way they are usually spoken. And obvious example is the “ee” vowel, such as in the word me. Often it will be sung as “may” instead. I’m not saying this is good or bad, just something you can consider when you practice singing a song and try to get it right, or at least right for you. An interesting example is the original recorded version of Led Zeppelin song, “Black Dog.” Plant vocalizes “hey hey momma said the way you move,” but he does vocalize “the” as “thee” or even “duh?” To me it sounds more like “di” or “dih.” Try it yourself and see what happens. If you try to sing it as most Americans say the word “the” you probably will become “tongue-tied.” By consciously trying to sing it as “di” or “dih,” there’s a smooth transition to the word “way” that you may not get singing “the” in other ways.

Trying to sing rather than just singing is another major issue I’ve encountered often. What this means is that you are trying to do one or more things you think you need to do, such as keep the soft palate raised or the tongue in a certain position (in some pop genres, you might even want to keep the soft palate down!). While such things may be important once you get beyond the fundamentals, I think it’s a huge mistake, at least most of the time, to even think about such things before you have learned them. If you listened to the advice of someone who told you to do this or that before learning the fundamentals and now you find yourself fixated on it, I’m not sure I know what to do to help you in particular. Perhaps if you listen to singing in genres that never interested you in the past, and try to emulate that singing, it might help you get out of a bad habit.

Many beginners are embarrassed to be beginners, but what’s more problematic is to get into bad habits, which no one teacher, no matter how good, may be able to get you out of! And I would also emphasize that you should not be straining in any way as a beginner. I would get far away from anyone who tells you, “no pain, no gain” or anything remotely like that. Many people I’ve taught only wanted to sing on a “basic” level, and that’s fine – it works for many popular songs. Others want to become “virtuoso” pop singers, even if they don’t realize it, and that is something it’s important to avoid until after you master the fundamentals (and probably the vast majority don’t realize they will require “studio magic” to accomplish this, no matter how well they sing!).

If and when you are ready to expland your range in order to be some kind of virtuoso singer, there will be three options:

1. yell/screech (bad idea health-wise, and not singing in any traditional sense, but can be cleaned up by the sound engineers to sort of sound like singing); in terms of biology, you would be over-adducting your vocal cords with this approach (common in Rock and Gospel, for example).
2. soften/lighten up, perhaps become slightly breathy, use plenty of reverb (you’ll likely need to use a mic with this approach), but be careful not to strain your vocal cords because there’s a tendency to push more than is safe to get an extra tone or two.
3. learn Bel Canto type technique, which involves singing the “pure” vowels up and down your range, “pushing” ever so slightly every few weeks to expand that range, then learn to modify the vowels; I suggest doing this under the guidance of a competent teacher.
4. use falsetto (for adults males; female pop singers usually use this if they go beyond a tight range, but it’s generally just considered the higher part of their range).

Some pop vocalists will use a combination of 1 and 2 (and men often add 3 too), as well as add a short, high-pitched vocalization here and there. Most pop vocalists/singers do not use 3. If you want to understand such differences in more detail, I suggest reading the book, “The Great American Popular Singers” (1985), by Henry Pleasants. You can use it in conjunction with listening to the songs he discusses on Youtube. It’s almost like taking a college course on the subject! Be prepared to read it more than once (I suggest waiting at least a few months before you go back and read it again) if you want to get the most out of it. Jerome Hines’ books may be of interest too, especially if you want to sing opera/”Classical Crossover.”

There’s one other key thing to learn, at least if you want to be the best singer you can be, and it is to develop the AES muscle. This allows for less breath support if you want to sing traditional pop songs with a microphone, so it has that additional possible benefit. There are various claims about “quick tricks” to develop it, but in my experience it develops if you sing for a period of time with proper breath control and cord closure. Trying to develop it before the other two may be a big mistake, and I don’t see any reason to rush things, as that seems to be tyhe biggest mistake you can make when you learn to sing! Though I am not endorsing all that is said in this article, I suggest reading through it after you master the fundamentals.

The Teacher’s Secret Weapon: The Method You Never Got Told To End Vocal Strain Forever

Note that I am not currently able to offer singing lessons but when I can get back to it, I’ll create a post announcing it.