The Singer's Companion: A Guide to Improving Your Voice and Performance [With CD]

By Brent Jeffrey Monahan

Book Overview

The Singer's Companion combines the author's extensive research on hundreds of professional singers' and singing teachers' books with 30 years of personal teaching experience. The book concentrates on traditional vocal and artistic development, as employed at the most renowned universities and conservatories. At the same time, the presentation is extremely practical and accessible. The language is simple, and minimal space is given to theory. As each aspect of good singing and artistry is explained, enlightening quotations from dozens of the best singers and teachers, such as Enrico Caruso, Luciano Pavarotti, Eileen Farrell, Manuel Garcia, and Emma Seiler, help the singer to grasp the concept.

The building of the vocal instrument and the artist is the focus. Topics include stance, breathing, phonation, resonance, range, health, choosing a teacher, vocal exercises, musicianship, pronunciation and diction, interpretation, performance, and selecting material. Many illustrative diagrams appear in the text. The book includes exercise sheets, sample songs, and an illustrative CD. Any singer, from the would-be professional to the diligent choir member, can benefit from this easy-to-use, thorough companion.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1574671502
• ISBN13: 9781574671506
• Release Date: January 2007
• Publisher: Limelight
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.74 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.1" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

"Hands-on" self-training guide for singers of all backgrounds

Written by expert vocal coach Brent Monahan, The Singer's Companion: A Guide to Improving Your Voice and Performance is a guide for lay people and professional singers alike to improving one's singing talent. The Singer's Companion simplifies the art of performance by emphasizing practical techniques rather than complex lessons on physiology and theories. Chapters cover proper stance, breathing, phonation, resonance, range, health, vocal exercises, pronunciation and diction, and more. Diagrams, exercise sheets, sample songs, and an audio CD complement this solid, "hands-on" self-training guide for singers of all backgrounds, from aspiring actors to church choir singers to folks who love to sing in the shower.

A Voice Coach in a Book and CD

While every aspiring singer should have a voice coach to helf him/her along, unfortunately most people cannot. On the other hand, everyone interested in singing should have a copy of this book. This book is basically a series of lessons from a voice coach that can be delivered to you at a small fraction of even one lesson from a coach. The author has a Ph.D. in vocal pedagogy and has many years of experience in both teaching and performance. The procedure he follows is the same as taught by experts, universities and conservatories. That is he concentrate stance, breathing, resonance, range and all the other concepts. It is a fairly small book, with a lifetime of expeience behind it.

I wish I had had this book

As a recent college music grad, I wish that I would have had this book in my vocal classes. It makes things that can be hard to describe and hard to understand very easy! I love this book!