Not being able to sing in tune with other people: is/was this you?

[ontosecondary]

Hi, I'm teaching music and feel a bit rubbish teaching singing because I literally have no concept of what it is like not to be able to sing the same note as someone else in reasonable tune.

So... can anyone help me? Can anyone describe what it feels like and how you improved? I know there are methods out there but what I'm after is insight.

I feel much better teaching instruments because I can nearly always "see" the process of not-understanding....dawning understanding... understanding.....

grateful in advance.

Oh. I've just remembered (relatively) recently being in church BELTING out Hark the Herald Angels Sing (my fave!) and realising half way through that the woman next to me had her finger in her ear so she could keep tune. I'm THAT bad.

have you looked at the sing up website? I teach R and have a terrible voice so I outsource wherever possible!
I used to work with a colleague with similar affliction. Once we had to lead hymn practice because there was no one else - chucking out time at the dog and duck it sounded like

I can't sing. I know I sound awful but I don't know how to make it right. I just used to mime when I was at school.

I was told not to sing at choir in school and generally humiliated about my singing. It made me so miserable that my mother sent me to private singing lessons.

Unfortunately the tutor was very dry, more used to teaching professional singers to expand their range than hopeless children to develop a sense of musicality, so I eventually gave up and decided I just couldn't sing.

Then I met dh, who has perfect pitch. He just would not accept that I couldn't sing, and spent endless hours with me teaching me to sing a scale, to identify notes, etc. etc.

Eventually I learnt to sing just a few songs nicely enough. I won't sing in public, but it made a huge difference to my feeling good about myself.

I am now out of practice though, as children etc have gotten in the way of my singing with dh for the last few years, so I would have to pretty much start over again. I will one day.

The only thing I implore you is not to give up on those who can't sing. Just give them something really, really simple to practice and if they don't get it just keep going. Preferably something they want to sing, too.

Singing is one of those things that people who can do it expect everyone else to do, and feeling unable can be very alienating.

What dh does with the dc (7 and 4) is a game where they have to guess the note he is playing on the piano/recorder/guitar and then sing it, and then the other way round. They love it.

Sometimes they do it with a sequence of notes too.

He also does one in which everyone has to guess middle C and sing it, and then they play it on the piano and see who was closer.

Op can you whistle? I ask because I'm a keen singer with a very good sense of pitch, but I can't hold a whistling tune to save my life. I can hear I'm out of tune, but just can't control what my lips are doing! I always imagine that this is what it must be like to not be able to sing. Or is there some other skill that eludes you but that other people seemingly manage effortlessly? Driving? Swimming? It might give you a helpful new perspective to think of how you might like someone to approach teaching you in that situation.

I can't hear a tune or sing in tune, in fact I can't control my voice at all, if you recorded me singing it would sound total awful and also not the same twice. I can't clap in time or keep a beat either, although I can read music and play the one finger piano, recorder and flute, not that I have a clue as to how they sound. It is just like a part of live has passed me by and sometime I really wish I could sing. I'd love to be able to go into a karaoke bar and join in.
I am also rubbish a speaking foreign languages although again I can understand them, read and write them, I just can't get native speakers to understand me, sometimes I struggle in the UK too.
I believe I have a hearing issue.
However I do have many other skills, for instance I am very good with numbers.

Where is the line between giving up too easily with children and being over pushy. I don't like the word "can't" and prefer "not yet". Some people's expectations of children's singing is totally unrealistic. I am sure that even the likes of Pavarotti did not sound professional as seven years old.

It takes practice to become good at any musical instrument including voice.

Zoemaguire,unfortunately I can whistle in tune but I understand what you mean as I have very poor face recognition skills. Working in a school has forced me to address this. I am an experienced learner so have been able to retrain myself. I firmly believe that the key is to let the "Wrong" bits of brain function that we use to mask or compensate have a rest whilst allowing the weak functions to get some exercise. So for face recognition I have to simply look at faces, letting my gaze rest there and not using any language. I attempt to allow the face to "sink in" unmediated by tricks in the way that I already let sounds sink in. Gradually the proportion of faces I recognise has improved- perhaps i've moved from bottom 1% tp bottom 5%which allows me to function.
So i'm also interested in what people are doing in singing lessons instead of getting better: probably bing held back by anxiety...

I was told on a music inset day that you can get anyone to sing in tune if you stand behind them with your chin on their head. Your singing vibrations go through to them and they copy correctly.
Apparently.
Can you imagine any teacher trying that out?
Nits
Inappropriate touching

lol at the nits storynanny!
two children could try it though.

I can't sing a note. I CAN however hear pitch, very well, so listening to myself singing is just painful. I just can't 'play' my voice. With the clarinet or piano you move your fingers and the note changes and usually makes exactly the right one you want it to, although with the clarinet you do have to experiment with your mouth on the reed too.
With singing i have absolutely no idea how to change the note that comes out in the subtle ways that make it not flat or sharp... and nobody at school was interested in teaching me, they just yelled at me to try harder

I have no aural memory either and learning languages is a nightmare, i have to write stuff down phonetically until I understand pronunciation in that language as i'm a visual learner. Then I have to write out lists of vocab etc. as I can't memorise things I've just heard.

I got to grade 4 on clarinet scoring pretty much zero and usually bursting into tears during the 'ear' tests.. I was ok with the ones where you didn't have to sing but just identify notes or rhythms, but I couldn't do the singing ones at all. I knew I'd never get any further with grade exams after 4.

I scraped through grade 1 piano age 12, because you had to identify intervals played, and I only found out in the exam you weren't allowed to look and count the notes! He told my teacher off. I got the lowest pass she'd ever had and she refused to teach me after that.

I'm actually quite good at theory of music - got a distinction at grade 7 the same week I failed grade 2 piano, age 16. I could write music I couldn't play!

"I just can't 'play' my voice".

I will be using that expression! It must have been so frustrating to hear everything but not be able to produce it :(

My son can't sing in tune. He also can't hold a beat or dance well. Which is frustrating to my husband and I - I have always sung and have often performed for paying audiences, and my husband has played with orchestras his whole life.

And it also makes me sad for him, that he'll never be able to recreate the songs he loves accurately. At the moment he's entirely unconcerned and doesn't really recognise that he's out of tune, yet he can listen to x factor (I know, I know!) and identify when someone else isn't right. He loves to sing and just wants to have a go. But it sounds awful. And that's hard to say about your own child.

In terms of teaching, I honestly don't know how you'd go about it, but I'd just say that he loves to try and would hate to be excluded entirely.

I couldn't sing in tune as a child. I knew I couldn't, but I don't remember whether that was because I could hear it myself or because I was told it many times - my brother had a beautiful voice so there was plenty of comparison!

Started learning to play the piano when I was 10 and developed an ear for notes I guess - singing in tune developed from there. I can now definitely hear if I am even slightly off and correct myself, but don't have much range.

I have recently realised that I am just as much in tune as my brother now, but he has range and volume that I don't have. I think this is probably through practice, as he has always been encouraged to sing from being a small child.

Neither of my dc can sing in tune, but given my background I reckon there is hope for them yet!

I can't sing. (I also can't dance, but I don't think I walk like Rihanna)

Do they have to 'learn' singing? Can't you just 'do' singing for fun - I love a sing along in a noisy place like a crowded church or in the car with the radio blaring.

Huh interesting, I'm a natural singer and can match pitch easily without thinking about it at all, but DH is not - he sings along to stuff and I don't know how he gets it just slightly off but he does, though he can play piano. I didn't know the link between that and languages because we live in Germany and I find his German slightly strange as well, he speaks with this odd accent which is not anything like any German accent I've ever heard, and if I try to say the difference between two sounds he can't hear it. Although that's pretty common with languages where the sound is very similar to one in your native language but not used in it - we're used to hearing and decoding our own language's sounds in various accents, so we recognise sounds which are close as a sound from our own language, if there are two which are different but close, we can't often hear them. Again, I can, but I'm a language teacher. It's easy for me. It's not easy for others.

Confused about people saying about not being able to reach notes - that's a different thing entirely, I think.

NameChange - boys often have a total change in singing ability when their voices break, so there could be hope for him yet.

Different languages have different "prosodies" (I think that's the word). I think that different accents also have different prosodies.

So some people say that if your speech prosody is fine (you don't talk like a robot) you are officially not tone deaf. Which seems plausible to me. What do others think?

Waiting, yes. I like football matches for the singing. That's a lot of the rationale behind ideas of starting with their favourites - that they will just do it and you tinker a bit.

It sounds a bit implausible to me - I've never met anyone who speaks without any intonation at all.