Guitar: Singing to the guitar: An Open Learning Guide

I don't know how well you can sing yet. It may be the most natural thing in the world for you. Maybe your mother already sang with you, or you had a good music teacher or even sing in a choir.

I don't need to tell you much about singing. There's always room for improvement, but that's not the point here. This is more about the basic tips for beginners. You can also have your voice trained properly (although this is not necessary in every case), but the subject of vocal training offers enough material for a book of its own. However, not everyone wants to become a pop star. For many, it's enough if you sing for yourself just for the fun of it.

Nobody should be too quickly persuaded that they can't sing. As long as you can speak, you can sing. At most, you lack practice. Not being able to pick out pitches or not being able to sing something exactly is not a sign of a lack of talent, but a lack of practice.

You can learn to recognize scales or intervals and sing them correctly, and even sing notes from sight.

Sing the notes of a major chord with root, major third, fifth and octave (i.e. the 1st, 3rd, 5th and 8th notes of a scale) Too difficult? Try singing the hopefully well-known children's song "Morning Has Broken" by Cat Stevens. You see, you can do it with the first four syllables!

The best way to learn to sing is to practise it over and over again, and also to deal with topics such as pitch, intervals and rhythm. Usually it's simply because people want to be able to sing well, but don't want to LEARN to sing. (This also applies to playing the guitar, by the way).

If you sing and play the guitar at the same time, it's easy to get confused at the beginning. What can you do?

Start with simple and familiar songs where you don't have to think about words and melody. Songs that are so simple that you can sing them without concentrating. Use songs where there is always a chord change on a certain word so that you don't have to concentrate too much on it. Or songs that you know inside and out so that they are automatically rewound.

Simple songs that you can't memorize are less recommended. However, they are always better than having to deal with difficult lyrics, chord progressions and rhythms at the same time.

At the beginning, don't choose songs with complicated tone sequences or rhythms, and none that are too high or low. The simpler the better.

Source and licence

Text adapted from Guitar/Singing to the guitar by Wikibooks contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0. Paragraphs have been selected and abridged, and formatting adjusted. This adapted text is shared under the same licence. Contributor history.