Hi! I'm Dave from Boyinaband. A lot of people say that they can't sing, even though they would really like to. In fact, according to Google, singing is the most desirable skill people want for themselves. But people also wonder: Is singing a talent, or is it a skill? Is it something you're born with, or is it something you can learn? Let's find out! I'm a vocalist, and I really want to perform live. However, I suck at singing. I don't know if this will come as a shock to anybody, because I've been singing in quite a few of the songs I've released but that's just because I use autotune. You really did not want to be in the room when I was recording those parts. *chuckling* It was genuinely bad. I've performed a lot of live shows before, but it was always non-melodic vocals like screaming or rapping. So, if it's possible, I want to teach myself to sing well enough to perform live at my own shows. And I want to record and measure the entire process so other people can see whether one hour a day of practice can actually improve your singing. If I fail, then, whatever. *chuckles* One thing I want to do, to keep things relatively scientific, is to do tests periodically to see whether certain statistics change like my vocal range, for instance. So, the lowest I can go would be *low humming* and the highest: *relatively high-pitched humming* Okay, and then also there's my falsetto voice. So let's find that. *falsetto screech* *chuckle* And then, lowest falsetto, for fun. *dying robot scream* *laughing* That's a dumb sound. The next thing I wanted to do was lung capacity, So, I guess I'm gonna have to try and hold a note quite consistently. *deep breath* *monotone humming*"ahhhhhhhhh" *slightly lower humming* "ahhhhahaha" *laugh* The next thing i wanted to do is to actually document the researching process 'cause that's a huge part of teaching yourself stuff is figuring out how to do things How to sing He looks like he knows what he's talking about That looks pretty good though Eric: Learn to breathe low and utilize the longer stronger muscles of the torso to draw the breath in low into the lungs and help the diaphragm to expand.. Dave: I've heard about this before, like having to sing from the diaphragm I actually talked to my friend Veela about it and she called it her "chest voice" and the "head voice" I have absolutely no clue how to do this but this is perfect Eric: By golly i am using this hand a lot
Dave: (By golly) *laughs* i like you Eric Eric: I want you to try to focus your breath to try to make your hand move forward like this put your fingertips or your knuckles into your side ribs and we're gonna breathe out side to side and relax.. Dave: So I'll do them every day let's find someone else and get a. . another opinion just to make sure SuperiorSinging: One of the problems that most singers have is that when the go to sing high notes *slightly awkward humming* What they're doing is they're raising their larynx up maybe you do this.. Dave: I was doing that wasn't I? *high pitched humming* SuperiorSinging: You wanna keep your larynx steady when you sing and that's what this exercise will help you to do this exercise is the "mum, mum" exercise Dave: but I'm, I'm from the Midlands in England so I would say "mom, mom" SuperiorSinging: ♫ mum mum mum mum mum mum mum~ ♫ and then raise it up ♫ mum~ ♫ Dave: its added to the list. Day two I'm gonna start with the exercises that I researched yesterday hands on the belly, relaxed shoulders thing was here, wasn't it? It's weird trying to make your ribs go sideways *laughs* then the last one was the uhh the "mum" one, Which Emo Danny from Game Grumps was suggesting ♫ mom mom mom mom mom mom mom~ ♫ I'm doing that thing with the larynx too low It's deeper, but it's just before it sounds stupid. ♫ mmmm~ mmmm~ ♫ *laughs* ♫ mm~ ♫ *Kermit the Frog voice* Hey... Hey Kermit ♫ mom mom mom mom mooom *voice cracks,laughs* ~ ♫ Oh God! I gotta go from the belly, let's try that ♫ mom mom mom mom mom mom mom mom mooom~ ♫ Since the whole point of this project is so that i can sing my own songs live I'm gonna do a test now to see how i sound singing one of my own songs so I'm just gonna be singing through my song "Limelight" i did with Cryotic In the lower register first and then I'm gonna try the higher register so this is gonna be absolutely terrible particularly the higher register ♫ This can't be the credits ♫ ♫ You were the limelight ♫ ♫ you were the limelight girl ♫ ♫ and I'll never find another ♫ ♫ and I'm never going to recover ♫ here come the painful bit sorry ♫ This can't be the credits ♫ ♫ you were the limelight ♫ ♫ you were the limelight girl ♫ ♫ and i'll never find another ♫ *Voice squeeks* ♫ and I'm never going to recover ♫ *Voice cracks* Might be out of my range on that one I hope that the lower one wasn't that bad to start with maybe that could be somewhere to aim if the other one is totally out of my range I want to try doing something that my friend Veela suggested [ Feint by Veela ]
♫ I know that you're running me rapid ♫ ♫ I really gotta try for . . . ♫ [ Fatty Boom Boom by Die Antwoord ]
♫ Eh Fatty Boom Boom ♫ ♫ Hit me with the ching-ching ♫ Just singing along to things Veela: I warm up much much better just by singing songs If i'm recording something that's going to be difficult for me to pull off Dave: Mm
Veela: I'm gonna spend ten minute before and just sing songs loudly to warm myself up. Dave: So when I always noticed that I was more in the range of was Fred Durst from Limp Bizkit when i was growing up 'Cause he's not a spectacular singer. ♫ You think you're special ♫ ♫ you do ♫ ♫ I can see it in your eyes ♫ Veela: You have to make sure you know your range because if you're doing a song that's really out of your range You're just gonna hurt your voice Some people can't sing high Dave: ♫ I chime in ♫ ♫ Haven't you people ever heard ♫ *voice cracks* Way outta my range there oof It's really difficult focusing on the, er, technique While i do that like focusing on breathing through my Diaphram I suppose that's the whole point Find your vocal range I'll loop a tiny bit Yeah, it's around a B4 ok let's loop the lowest ["oh" looping over and over very quickly] OK now we know that my vocal range is from D#2 to B4 Like in my main voice, not the falsetto the chest voice. We can find out what the name of my vocal range is I might be a bass, but there are, like I can go between a bass and a tenor I think then. Practice all your vowels at every pitch. Every single pitch. All infinity of them. Here are some of the pure vowels to practice with. "ahh" as in father. "ee" as in 'eat' "ihh" as in pin. How do you sing "ihhhhhh. ihhhhhhh" What a horrible sound! "Ehhhhh" as in pet. "ooohhh" as in food. "unnhh" as in nut *laughs* I'm not going to make the joke. bbbbbbbbb bbbbbbbbb bbbbbbbbbb
Dave: *laughs* So, I'm down in London at the moment on day six of this project. I am going to first of all, find an app which can give
me a reference pitch. Vocalist Lite... *sings ahhh, slowly deepening pitch* That's so cool *monotone* What's my normal talking voice? What kind of range do I generally talk innnnnnn? Hi! I'm Dave from Boyinaband! And now you know what pitch that was in. There's apparently a game as well, let's see what that is. *apps plays a note* *Dave sings 'naaaaa' at the same pitch* This is way more my kind of thing! i'm definitely gonna look into doing more app stuff tomorrow since that actually had real-time feedback which is fantastic *hums bbbbbbbb while changing pitches* bbbbbbb *chuckles* There was another app that I wanted to
try which I found called Sing Sharp which is ironically not what I want to do. Let's try vocal range Oh, this actually shows me my vocal range! I went down to F sharp 2 with just talking *deep voice* interesting (yes, it truly is) That thinks i can go down to C sharp 2. *sings 'ahhhhh' in an incredibly deep voice* *sings 'ahhhh' in an incredibly high voice* F sharp 5, it said there, but it looks like it's gone all the way this isn't perfect *chuckle* Oh it's got tons of different warm-up exercises, let's see how these work ♫ ahh ahhhh. ahh ahh ahhhh ♫ High score, 78 Man, I want to beat the score already. Scale Octave Jump uh UH uhhh uh OH uhhhhh Huh, the falsetto isn't so bad. 62. And this is actually really fun; I want to keep going oh-ohh-ohhh-ohh-oh. Whoo. 95!!!!111!!!!!!11 Jesus! oh-ohh-ohhh-ohh-oh. yeah! c'mon dude FREAKING YES! I really liked the sing sharp app and I know that this is just improving like pitch recognition and agility more than
tone so I might actually sound really really bad even though I am technically
hitting the notes I figure if I can get the pitch recognition then I can work on
the tone personally by recording and thinking okay maybe there's something I
can do that by talking to some friends I have who can sing gonna make up your
mind what do you mean because we're running out of time what do you mean
better make up your mind i will not be able to do that vocal run i had too far
to lose it all but the party don't stop no woah-oh oh my god that's right at the
top of my ranges like her workout for my abs right thing tests are going down to
there today i see i think that's like a crossover my full Seto voice and my main
voice and I didn't even know that was a thing so after research that I guess ah hell
ya get more consistent with that now oh what a good at the end there was that
was like the best score of got yet Jesus today is going well that is the first
time I've successfully done the exercises that came with the app without
failing one of them like past this threshold 94 again 84 intermediate 74
expert that I set at the star that's awesome i have actually improved it wasn't quite the resounding
successfully yesterday was but it was still only one mistake when normally
it's considerably more than that ho ho hahaha no no love can be sleeping
on a high end of the note ah are the lone oh uh ah sharpe basically means you are really
aiming for the top of a note you want to instead think of your notes as existing
on the bottom of the circle ideally we want to aim for the center
but just to overcompensate at first I don't know if I hits notes consistently
flat or consistently sharp I think it's more flat but alright that
idea down find it easier to go back down to the lower notes after singing the
high notes if i would have more breathy much better to face these kinds of
things with a sense of the circle is complete reaching I have too much
diaphragm push when i go back down from the really high-intensity pie notes to
the required to low notes that don't require as much pushing my muscles don't
naturally go back down to that very quickly yet by being more breathy it
gives me a bit of a kind of buffer so that extra push has somewhere to go
would be cool to be able to actually do it without that but i found it a
technique that works for now below 0 utme yeah I want you me mm-hmm uh-huh le-ge-teh keep forgetting things like
using the correct breathing and that's something I'm gonna get into the habit
of and that's as soon as i'm letting something different and new which is
probably useful because it's not yet in my muscle memory or not just doing the
same mistake over and over again now what I see is what I get how can I be too late because I don't
want to break with whoever's at the door to go so they didn't hear me making
india out with no but the internet can that's fine ah didn't recognize that as a note still
counts prescribed bills to our set the shakes to our set the pills you know you
should prescribe kinda know anymore i'm not using my abs inner need something
lower jaw crew kinda hit notes above a certain point
anymore so i think i must have pushed it too hard to that first song going to be
much more careful to use my diaphragm rather than my throat when I'm singing
that high it's day 30 of what was initially at
least a 30 day project to improve my singing ability so today's gonna be
quite interesting to see whether or not i have actually improved ya like like my voice didn't stop being
able to go up there which is a slight improvement but it's still nowhere near
being able to sing it live not as bad as it was but it's still
pretty bad that said one thing I didn't notice until editing this video is just
how much better it was compared to when I started this is my autotune software
melodyne which measures the notes before auto tunes them so these are the notes
that I hit the first try now here in blue have roughly overlaid
the notes i should have hit to sing the song correctly you can see it's really
far off i had 23 notes where it wasn't even close 11 notes her it was touching the noted
was supposed to and OneNote correct yeah now on day 30 i had 17 notes that were
wildly off eighth notes touching the noted supposed to and 10 notes hit
correctly you can see the improvement particularly on this little run here there's 30 days since i started and have
noticed some things have changed is the lowest note hit at the start and here's
the lowest note hit on day 30 if we take a look at all of the tests in melody and
basically stayed around be flat to the entire time the highest note was
initially by the end it was this so that also didn't improve stayed around g5
throughout but then I haven't been training my super high falsetto apart
from a few attempts at singing news focused on trying to extend the range of
my chest voice now when it comes to measuring give the chest voice range
increased I ran into a problem i realized about halfway through that my
range seem to vary wildly my highest note could go from all the way down here
the way up here eventually I learned I'd sometimes been using what's called my
mixed voice across over between the chest voice in the head voice I
separated the tests I did which sounded like pure chest voice and that did seem
to increase a little bit over the month but what I can accurately measure is my
local set arrange it went from this to this making it the biggest range
increase of also now I just have to write songs that sound like and I'm set
is all the lung capacity tests I did from day one today 31 some days are missing for when I was too
ill to single when I forgot because I'm an idiot also I've autotune them so you can enjoy
a pretty choir instead yeah I didn't expect an improvement on that
scale in such a short time another thing i noticed since i started
using my stomach muscles as opposed to my throat muscles i was a lot more
consistent and able to stay up in the higher range for longer is attested and
a3 where I sang on one note at the top of my range for as long as I could
before my voice wouldn't stay up there anymore and there it goes now here's the same test on day 10 after
I'd learn to use my diaphragm rather than my throat to sing i noticed my tone
sounded different as a result it was clearer and less strained I couldn't
believe there was such a huge change in literally one week but it was able to
stay up there for over twice as long as the limelight your the line like also we
didn't hurt which is probably a good thing overall I definitely improved in
some aspects not in others for instance the pitch thing I'm still missing the
notes however my voice is a lot more powerful and unable to stay powerful for
longer i'm selling a drug so it's singing a skill or is it a talent to be
honest it's mostly a skill I'd say from what I've seen it's something that can
be trained but there are people who naturally just are able to hit pitches
more easily than I am for instance i think im gonna try it for another 30
days to see if I can improve that pitch but I know if you enjoyed this video
enough for me to bother making another video about it let me know in the
comments just for watching and have a nice day yeah i'm going to carry on and see if I
can increase it even further you wanna end
Yess! DO it!! excited about this, and the future of my singing!