Voice

{Drain}

When breathing in air:

• Pretend that your air is like a tornado in a bottle. 
• Here's a great video to show what I mean:
• The air (as the tornado) spirals effortless down. 
• So you are breathing in the air through your mouth and it creates the tornado spiral down. 
• As your fill up your tummy (the soda bottle) the air gradual fills in your stomach going from the bottom up. 

Hope this helps!

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{Proper Breathing}

I stumbled upon this amazing piece of information. Proper breathe has often been a technique that I have found tricky to sustain. My research gave me this little tip:

1. Pretend that air is really heavy as you inhale. Visualize it weighing 50 pounds and let it fall low into your body.

Hallelujah! What a great idea. I had often learned to expand my stomach, focusing more on what was happening with the expansion of my body. Even though this is a huge part of air intake, it can often make the body stressed as well.

This way the air may quickly fill my body, without the added stress.

Information found at: http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/breathing-basics-for-singing.html
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{Vibrato}
It really bugs me when people say, "I don't like vibrato!" If they are really singing to singers, they will notice that most have a slight vibrato. Unless they are screaming into a microphone. However, I can certainly understand why people don't like the vibrato that sounds as though it's a wheel that's about to fall off a moving car.

The vibrato needs to be appealing to the ear. It has to flow with the air and not distract from the overall sound.

I found some great exercises on how to improve this sound. Found at: http://bassonation.wordpress.com/tag/vocal-wobble/

1. Place your hands at the bottom of your chest and feel where your ribs come together in the middle. Now move your hands slightly below this point. (it’s the soft area a few centimeters above your belly button)

2. Now sing a note on one pitch in your easy range. Any note will do.

3. As you’re singing this note, push in gently with your hands. The key is to push in, then pull out, and push in, then pull out and so on. Try doing this at a rate of around 3 to 4 cycles a second.

Listen to how your voice wavers in a singing vibrato like fashion. Now it probably sounds a little exaggerated at this point, but this exercise is just to get things going.

{Diction}
I can't express how important this is! I often sing in French or Italian and therefore have a difficulty realizing that if I were singing it in English, there is a high probably that nobody would understand what I'm saying. I found some great excersies that I have found to have really helped me:

1)

Dick had a dog, the dog dug, the dog dug deep, how deep did Dick's dog dig?
Dick had a duck, the duck dived, the duck dived deep, how deep did Dick's duck dive?
Dick's duck dived as deep as Dick's dog dug!

2)

Betty Botter bought some butter, but the butter Betty Botter bought was bitter. So Betty Botter bought some better butter to make the bitter butter Betty Botter bought better. But instead of the better butter Betty Botter bought making the bitter butter Betty Botter bought better, the bitter butter Betty Botter bought made the better butter Betty Botter bought bitter!

More exercises can be found at: http://vocaltrainingwarrior.blogspot.com