Vocal Coach Singer (Review)

Vocal Coach Singer is a wonderful program created by Chris and Carole Beatty. They have trained and coached thousands of singers of all ages. The program includes seven training CDs, four workout CDs, and an instructional guide. You’ll also find a CD with printables to use while learning and practicing, and to track your progress.

Vocal Coach Singer is designed to be used by beginners and professionals alike. It builds on a foundation such as posture, and leads you straight through to performance. The step-by-step singing lessons will teach you how to train your singing muscles as well as how to take care of your voice long term.

One of the neat things about this program, is that it not only helps your singing voice, but the same lessons can help you as a speaker, too. You’ll learn how to breath, protect your voice from straining, and strengthen your voice.

One of the keys to having a great singing voice is to take care of yourself physically. Eating well, getting enough sleep, drinking plenty of water, and exercising are all important. How well you do in these areas will have an impact on how well your singing voice behaves. Expect to have some sore muscles as you learn correct posture, breathing, etc. You are using muscles that are not used to being worked.

Another part of taking care of your voice is knowing when to rest it. As you begin training, you may find your throat a little sore. Don’t push too hard. Let your voice strengthen as you go. I find singing in the shower helps as the air is moist. Also, if you are sick, especially with a sore throat or cough, rest your voice, and allow it to heal. We weren’t able to do as much as we wanted with this course thanks to a sore throat and cough going around and around in our family.

How To Use It:
The first thing we did was listen to the Getting Started CD. This gave us an idea of what to expect with this program, and how to use it. The next CD to check out is the one with printables. You can print lead sheets for the exercises, progress journal pages, and song evaluation forms. We’ve decided to only use the lead sheets at this time. Once we get further along, we’ll add the other pages.

The foundational CDs are Complete Breathing, Complete Warm-Up, and Complete Tone. These are great for teaching correct posture, proper breathing, importance and how-to for warming up your voice, and explaining and working with tone. These CDs not only have great information, but exercises to put what you learn into practice. The creators of Vocal Coach recommend that you spend time working with these three CDs in the beginning, and then come back from time to time to review. I plan on scheduling time for regular review into our schooling, but if I notice someone is weak in an area or perhaps slacking off a bit, I’ll pop in a surprise review.

We chose to dive into the Daily Workout CDs next. Since we have three of us with different voice ranges, both the Med/Low and High CDs get used. We’re still learning our ranges. I know this says daily workout, but we’re using it a couple of times a week for now. One, we need to allow for our voices to adjust, but two, we don’t want to strain our voices with these colds.

The last three CDs, Complete Diction, Complete Expanding Your Range, and Complete Performance, have been scheduled out at a more leisurely pace. I want to make sure we all have a solid foundation, lots of practice, and time to assimilate what we’ve learned thus far. It’s a lot of information, so now we’re adding a little at a time as we go.

What We Think:
I have to admit, the teens and I felt a little self conscious at first. It made for lots of nervous giggles, and blushes. As we go along, and gain confidence, this is fading away, and I have to admit, it’s a fun journey to take with my teens. We all love music, love to sing, and have fun, and it’s something we want to become a regular part of our family. This course is helping us to achieve this, and to bring a new passion to our family. I think the program is very thorough and will help anyone improve either their singing or their speaking voice.

Con:
My only con is that the CDs are difficult to remove from the case they come in. I was so afraid I’d crack a CD, so I took them all out and put them in a hard CD case. I want them to last a long time, and I feel this will keep them better.

On the Vocal Coach website, you’ll find even more wonderful resources for singing including a section for homeschoolers, a blog, other products, and more.

Vocal Coach Singer is available as CDs for $119.99 or as MP3s for $99.99. I feel this would work best for teens and adults. You could take in the information, and reteach it to younger children, but they have a program called Teaching Kids to Sing geared towards children. I’d like to get that one for my younger kids as I feel they’d get more from it.

I am looking forward to seeing how I progress, and how my two teens progress as we go through this program, and keep working on our singing/speaking voices. If you’ve read, Can I Sing for You, Jesus?, you’ll know I have a deep longing to sing better and bolder. I’m looking forward to reaping the fruit of hard yet amazing and fun work.

Disclosure: I received this program to review. All information was correct to the best of my knowledge at the time this review was written. I was not required to write a positive review nor was I compensated in any other way. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the FTC Regulations. You can read my full disclosure policy here.