Singing in tune is crucial. It’s the very first step many singers take when working on their voice. In this lesson, I’m sharing six tips to improve your sense of pitch, learned over years of working with beginning and what we might call “pitch-challenged” singers.

1. Get comfortable with your voice “disappearing”

Matching pitch or singing in unison is the ability to hear a pitch and reproduce that exact pitch with your voice. When you’re doing it correctly, your voice and the piano will blend together, to the point that your voice might feel like it disappears. This is tricky for some singers, because they want to hear themselves, and when their voice blends into the piano, they get lost.

2. Listen, think, then sing

Most beginning singers skip the second step: thinking the pitch. What I mean is: sing the pitch in your head and imagine yourself singing it aloud. That gives your vocal folds an extra second or two to adjust for the pitch you’re about to sing!

3. Get to know YOUR voice

When you hear a pitch, you should have a sense of where that pitch sits in your voice. For example, I hear this pitch and I know that’s low for me. I hear this and it sounds medium-high. I hear this and I know it’s too low for me to match. Spend some time with a piano app or a keyboard if you have one, and take some notes on your vocal range.

4. Vowel shading for minor pitch adjustments

This is for more intermediate to advanced singers. When you’re just slightly out of tune, of course you can think slightly higher or lower and probably dial in the pitch that way. But another way to go about it is to think about adjusting your tone quality. If you’re flat, it can help to think lighter or brighter. If you’re sharp, try thinking darker or warmer.

5. Find the melody’s “home base”

A song’s “home base” is the single pitch the entire melody is built upon. If you’re in the key of C major, that pitch is C. To have a sense of finality and resolution, the song might even end on C. 

To develop your relative pitch - the ability to accurately find other pitches given a reference pitch - a really useful exercise is continually reestablishing this “home base” as you practice a song.

6. Be picky - but not so picky you become paralyzed

I’m a big fan of using a chromatic tuner when you work on pitch, particularly if you’re self-taught and don’t have a trained teacher there to confirm whether you’re in tune or not. After all, how are you to know? We need an objective measure, and a tuner app or website can give that confidence until you’ve developed a good sense of intonation and can trust your ear. The reality is: you need to be in tune enough so that you’re not clashing with the instruments. But no singer will be perfectly in tune at all times.

Thank you for watching, and I trust you’ll be improving your pitch in no time!