I reviewed more than a dozen singing apps: here's my top 3

hi i'm lenore i'm a singer and a voice teacher i help you on your vocal journey i want to revolutionize voice teaching make it more affordable and more effective by using online tools so if you like that idea subscribe to my youtube channel and to my mailing list on my blog seeingwell.eu i've made it my short-term life mission to review a bunch of apps which claim to teach us how to sing and or warm up and i must say it was not easy to find good ones my next project by the way is karaoke app so stay tuned for that i have an article on my blog which i will link below covering 13 apps for vocal technique all can be found on both ios and android today i'm covering three of the best ones which i gave 4 out of 5 stars these are the ones i would almost blindly trust almost to warn me and my students up before a singing session or a show i'll tell you what i think about those apps what i like about them and what i think is missing or should be improved so let's start in general what am i looking for in a good singing app for me it has to warm you up properly which means it has to have good exercise build up so it has to start small with consonants or trills and with short-range exercise and slowly gradually build up to closed vowels and open vowels and more wide ranges it would also be nice if it had good vocal technique guidance so it tells you how to do and what to do with regards to vocal technique and it's also important that it is usable as in easy to use so let's see what i have found so far first app i'm reviewing is swift scale and this is what it looks like i don't know if you can see that and it has as you can see it has here a menu a main menu and the first thing on the menu is dashboard now that's misleading because you think dashboard there's not much content in there but actually i think they misnamed this part because you have some singing basics here you have explanations of text explanation about the voice about health vocal health tone and range and there are also breathing exercises there are pitch exercises and there are scales and exercises all in the dashboard so don't skip that they have app support which is basically tutorials um and that's really good so they explain to you how to use the app that adds to the usability of the app and they also have sound reference which means every sound that they tell you to use they give you an example of it and i'll talk a little bit about that later you have here some routine so they put up um like a sequence of exercises for you from the warm-up they have um well i indicated my vocal range and i'll talk about that a little bit also later about the vocal range thing um so they give you a routine for your vocal range you have training for beginner one two three and four all of those are included in the free version i forgot to mention that this app is free and it has upgrade versions as well and then if you want a little bit you know more advanced intermediate and advanced warm-ups you need to upgrade then you have a quick warm down like a quick warm-up and a quick warm down and a song prep example so all of these are included in the free version okay you have scales here which are basically the individual scales you can choose from you can choose the speed which is nice and you can choose which note you're starting with which is also very nice um they give you a preview you see a keyboard you need a headset for this app if you want to hear what they're doing so i cannot play this for you that's one downside i'm afraid and then here is the very cool feature two of them actually first you can compose your own exercises so if you you know if you have musical background and you know how to do that you can totally use this app to compose you have a keyboard here and you can put in a rest and you can just compose your own exercise and indicate which sound you want to use this exercise with then you can save your exercise and then the catch if you want to actually use the exercise later you need to upgrade the thing is the upgrade is only a few bucks so it's not such a big deal so if you like this feature and i do i think it's worth the upgrade another thing on the routines you have an option to create a custom routine so same idea you create a routine by they they send you to the scale section and you can choose your scale the speed the base and and so on and then of course creating the routine is free and if you want to use it you need to pay uh which i think is fair and then you can share it so whichever routine you choose from what they have here or what you build up yourself you can send it over to someone else who has the app and i think it's super cool um so as a voice teacher you can just build up your own routine you don't have to be imposed by the app or any tutorial on youtube you can just choose the exercises that you like and then you can share them with with fellow students or with fellow teachers or as a teacher with your students and you can also of course use it for yourself so these are the things that i like about this app now let's go to my issues with this app first issue i have with swift scales is the determination of the vocal range right of the bat when i open the app they ask me if i'm a man or a woman and if my voice is high average or low and there is also an option to custom so you might think there are a lot of options there that's good the problem is many people don't know what voice type they are or if their voice is a high or low they have no idea yeah so you really need to know what you're doing you need to know a little bit about your voice in order to answer those questions and also it is quite limiting unless you know how to use the custom section and to use the custom range section you need to know notes and to be able to tell which note is your lower lowest and which is your highest um so it's it's for more professional people and people with musical background it's not going to be for everybody um i indicated that i'm a woman and that i have a high voice because i know that about myself don't even get me started on a non-binary issue because it's it doesn't even matter some females some women have low voices that go into the male range and vice versa so if you just indicate that you are a man or a woman that's not going to do the trick it's it's just it's a touchy and difficult subject and i would not recommend that approach to vocal range the next issue is their use of glottal stops so what i mean by that is sometimes they show you they demonstrate to you how the sound should sound like and for example if it's a hum if it's on the m they give you a double m and then when you click to listen to it it goes so the little in the beginning of the sound is not necessarily good uh for your voice especially if you don't know how to make a glottal stop like in a minimal way so you can be pushing air on your vocal cords i don't like that next thing is that when you compose your own exercise you cannot really compose long notes you only have short notes and you can put a rest in between them if you want a certain rhythm to the exercise so that's a little bit limiting next we have the pitch exercises i take personal issue with pitch correction because i don't believe you should hold a certain note and control the pitch on it i don't believe that you should actively control the pitch i believe that you should correct your technique and that corrects the pitch you can work on pitch awareness that's a different matter so if you know what to do with your voice to really control it you can use the pitch awareness exercises and you'll be fine the last thing i'm going to say is that personally as a voice teacher my technical approach is not 100 in line with what they teach here on the app so that's just full disclosure it's totally legit some teachers teach in a certain way and some teachers teach in a another way like you have all kinds of approaches so i'm just saying um it's not 100 my thing second app i'm reviewing is warm me up so that's a statement right there they're gonna warm us up let's see how they're gonna do that this is what the app looks like so it's pretty simplistic i like that um you have some general explanations and then you have routines that they made for you and you have browse exercises i'm going to zoom in on that part because it's just basically all of the exercises that they have and this is what this app is this is just a bunch of vocal exercises okay so they have here gentle start and like that getting warmer extending the range mouth workout and tuned up okay so whenever you click one of those just once you click one of the sections you have like 13 exercises here you have 12 exercises here you have a net again 12 exercises like quite a lot quite a lot of exercises don't go through all of them don't overdo it please okay so when you go to the gentle start it is in fact a gentle start yeah so they start well the first the very first exercise is uh on on vowels on all of the of the vowels and actually maybe i would skip that one unless you really feel good with it but i would generally recommend starting on a hum or a like a consonant vocal consonant so they do that from that second exercise on it's on humming and it's short range let's check this out [Music] nice [Music] listen to the accompaniment by the way [Music] so nice this this is a professional um app made by professional singers um and obviously professional pianists who really thought a little bit about what they're playing they don't just give you chords they give you like a you feel like you're singing a song i like that a lot um this app costs money guys by the way it's like six bucks but you know there's a lot of exercises in here lots and lots and lots of exercises and for some people it's not a lot of money six bucks if it is just stay tuned for the next for the next step this is a good one it's a really good one uh let's just try another one the little ooze [Music] it's a very short range yeah so very nice and it goes to the top of the range and then back so yeah this is basically the idea by the way i want to make one thing quite clear none of those apps is paying me to say any of those things that i'm saying yet so uh it was really important to me that when one has to pay i paid for my own money and that i just went there and saw what i honestly think about those apps and i give you here my full honest opinion good and bad okay nobody's paying me to do anything so i want to skip to one of the uh following sessions let's go for the extending the range yeah so let's say we we warmed up and they do that quite well i like it um we're just gonna go but turn around the top i'm just just randomly choosing this is number eight in section number three extending the range turn around the top okay let's do it [Music] so this is obviously um a more advanced exercise if you want to expand your range it goes over one octave uh let's do the galloping our patches oh no no i wanted to show you that i love to sing because it's it's cool uh we also call this exercise brainwashing for obvious reasons so on every exercise they give a little bit of um of an instruction and some tips and that's also a really nice feature so far as to what i like about this app let's go into the issues so first of all like i said about swift scales there's the range thing they compel you to indicate if you are a high female low female high male or low male as i explained before there's a problem not everybody will fit into the right category there having said that once you have chosen your height and gender and then when you have my warm-ups which are routines that they compose for you which could have been a really nice feature all of a sudden all the voice types are mixed together so every exercise is for a different voice type you have the first um you have the first exercise for high male then for high female then for low male and for low female and i actually approached them about that that they they have a good um like a customer support by the way i approached them about it and i i i asked them about it and they did that on purpose because they said well some people sometimes want to warm up a little lower and a little higher so we just sort of like changed it up okay i just i don't i would prefer you know if i already took the trouble of telling you what my range is that you will give me all my exercises in my range otherwise i'm not gonna use your routines i'm just gonna browse through your exercises so that's it second issue i have is that they sort of assume i think that people who use this app can already sing this is an app made by professional singers so already they're getting warmer section which is the second section of exercises is quite advanced quite wide ranged and if you already are good at singing that's not a problem if not i would do something in between the getting started and getting warmer the way it is right now from getting warmer onwards it's just like pro exercises very fun to do very creative love it but all quite advanced also they will not teach you how to do a certain technique but they will just instruct you to do it so for example use well-shaped vowels or maintain your support not everybody knows how to do that so they don't teach you how to do that they just tell you to do it and the last thing i have to say is that on every single exercise they work the way up the range from the middle up the range and then back down to the middle they never warm up the voice downwards and some people also want their lower part of the range warmed up and then they might say oh here are their routines when you can just skip to a different voice type i don't think that's necessary but then maybe that's just me you know this is a good app it has a wide var a variety of exercises and it is very useful and very entertaining the third and final app i'm reviewing today is vocalizer and welcome to my favorite app it's not perfect but it's damn close there are two main great things about this app the range detector and the exercise build up so this is the range detector yeah you have three methods in which you can detect determine your range you have record you have custom and you have a select um you basically manually select on the keyboard here so again if you know the notes and you know what your range in is in the notes you can go ahead and do that on the keyboard if you want if you really want to categorize yourself which i don't recommend by the way you can choose here soprano mezzo soprano alto counter tenor tenor baritone and bass it's pretty pretty thorough spread um of of the ranges so that's that's good i guess but i wouldn't recommend using that the best way to detect your range is actually singing and letting the app decide what your range is so that's how it goes uh you start with your lowest comfortable note okay so you go [Music] success and now you can record again if you want to try it again i can go lower than that but i just did my comfortable one so i'm going next and then by the way that was an e3 if you are curious and now i'm going to sing my most comfortable high range and you can do that by the way every day so today i'm a little bit different than yesterday and my voice feels a little bit different you can totally reset your range every day and the exercises will be custom to that that's awesome so i'm going to record my most comfortable high note that was a g5 okay finish so this is my uh my range for today and now i'm going to exercises and in exercises that's my favorite part so we talked about exercise build up it has to start from short range and expand to wider range and that's exactly what they do here they start with three-tone major scale um three-tone arpeggio and then five to major scale um ascending descendingly all kinds of varieties but you know really gradually building it up three tone five tone uh an arpeggio over an octave then arpeggio and a scale an octave um and then an octave and a half yeah and that's quite thorough we have here let's see one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven eleven exercises only in the major scale then you have the same exercises in the minor scale and then you have that's one of my favorite things two pentatonic scales and the pentatonic scales is well with pentatonix is five notes um five note scales and those are really good if you want to work on your improvisation skills in pop music and jazz uh so it sounds i'm just gonna skip there and i'm gonna show you this one [Music] okay i'm just going to pause it for a moment because i want to show you another feature you can choose the speed here this is a scale of the speed i'm going to choose it a little bit slower because i want to learn this okay so you can also choose here ascending and descending descending and then ascending or just ascending or just descending so you have those options uh you can loop on a phrase that's really cool because let me just i'm going to skip to the i'll tell you one minute i'm just going to skip here to the to like a minute and a half or something no a little bit less [Music] so let's say i want to just make sure that i got this right i press through loop on phrase and it's just going to repeat this height until i unloop it and then it moves me up the range again [Music] so um you can choose whichever consonants or vowels you want to use um on on each exercise that's up to you that's not indicated here okay and when it comes when it goes to the end of the exercise it auto plays to the next one i also like that and yeah you can skip you can very easily forward and rewind and you can uh play and pause i'm saying those things because they are not granted there are apps out there where you cannot pause the exercise or you cannot just repeat the same chord in here this is actually very very handy okay after that you have a few scales uh on chromatic um a few chromatic scales and then you have intervals which are good for ear training you can also use those as a warm up but they are mainly for ear training so you can learn how to sing seconds thirds fourth so this is really good for musical theory uh also um and training your ear so build up here in the in this app is great uh the features are great the the the range detector is fantastic the combination of those two things the build up and the range detectors are making this app really like close to ideal in my opinion so i can very easily guide my students go and and do a bunch of those exercises doesn't matter which as long as you start from the beginning and you know um don't skip too much and use them on you know and i give them the consonants and vowels and and whatever so much as to what i love about this app and now let's go to the issues first issue is the fact that there are no consonants or vowels attached to the exercises so i can explain to you that it's better to start on a consonant a vocal consonant or a lip trill or a tongue trail or a rolled r i can tell you that but if you can't tell you that or no one else can tell you that and you're just going to choose to start with an open vowel that's not going to necessarily be good for your voice because that's not a gradual buildup of exercises so i would at least have this general advice there just maybe even in text start with consonants working way up to open vowels sorry closed vowels and then open vowels second issue i have is that there is no technical guidance in this app whatsoever so it is very good very good as a tool for a voice teacher that can instruct you on how to use it and by the way i'm going to do that i'm going to make a tutorial for you in the future on how to use this app to warm up your voice and it's very very handy but if you don't have a teacher you don't have any vocal technique in this whatsoever so you're basically on your own and if you don't know anything about vocal technique that's just not going to help you with that the second issue with vocalizer is that there is no vocal technique guidance whatsoever so you need to know a little bit on a little bit on how to use your voice properly in a technical way if you want to maintain the safety on the health of your voice so if you're just going to do those exercises blindly that's that's not the way to go you can hurt your voice if you don't know what to do technically so this app is not going to help you with the technical aspect only it is a very good tool for example for a voice teacher if they can give you the technical advice and tell you okay go ahead and use the technical advice on this warm-up and the third most important uh biggest issue that i have with this app is that you cannot start the exercise in the middle range so as a voice teacher i always start a warm up from the comfortable range and i work the way down and then i start from the middle again and i work my way up and you can't do that here in this app however you can forward and rewind you remember i did that before so i guess you can do that but they don't guide you properly to do that in the app otherwise as i said this is my favorite one because this is the only app that combines the range detector and the good exercise build up to sum things up here are some issues that i took with all apps and those three apps in this video are no different fixation about pitch accuracy as i explained before i don't like controlling the pitch and a lot of those apps too many of those apps are mainly about that and that can encourage one to use their actual throat muscles to control the pitch or other muscles that are not necessary and actually cause damage to the voice so just a guidance a general guidance for you uh if you're looking for a singing app and you find one and mainly what they're doing is trying to fixate you on the pitch not my way of doing things and i don't like it when they instruct you to do a certain technique instead of showing you or teaching you how to do it to be fair a singing app is a singing app it's a one-way street kind of learning there is no substitute to a professional seeing you hearing you and correcting you in real time however if you need a supplement to your vocal training any of those three apps i mentioned today will do great i'm working now on tutorials for you on how to use those apps to improve your singing so that might be a way for you to make sure that your voice is safe while you're using the apps let me know what you think of the apps in the comments and what you think about learning to sing with apps in general thank you so much for watching and enjoy singing

Channel: Linor Oren - voice teacher

Views: 51,517

Keywords: singing apps, vocal technique apps, review

Id: OwLn-apZ7zM

Length: 30min 22sec (1822 seconds)

Published: Sun May 30 2021