Great singers were born with the ability to connect with everyone emotionally through their singing. The potential for singing with passion can touch the bottom of someone’s heart.
How to sing with emotion and passion? This article is for those who wish to enhance their musical performance and sing with genuine feeling.
What Does Singing with Emotion Exactly Mean?
What does performing music with genuine emotion mean to you?
In essence, emotion and feeling are the souls of singing performance. The ability to sing with a passionate connection to the artwork you’re representing is a godsent gift.
It is not about focusing on performing the song in the perfect way possible but delivering a stage full of genuine feeling and desire and reaching the bottom of the audience’s heart.
A common misconception is that singing emotionally is synonymous with sad love or ballad songs. Human beings have more than sad emotions in our daily lives. We can feel sad, happy, excited, angry, relieved, afraid, nervous, and so much more.
No matter what genre of music you’re representing, as long as you convey the right emotion of the artwork, you can sing emotionally. This way, you’ll take your stage to a higher level.
How To Sing With Emotion? 7 Methods To Show Your Feeling
Music is not only about words and notes on a sheet translated into melodies. Whether it’s only one person or the entire hall, to sing with feel emotion and passion enables you to link with and share the same spirit with other people.
#1. Choose The Songs that You Can Relate With
If you’re not representing a music artwork you find yourself related to, there’s surely a plain disconnect between your audience and you.
How could you expect the audience to indulge in your delivery when you can’t involve yourself in the song, alright?
Understanding the song is a good way to put out the most natural passion in you, guiding you to illustrate it from the bottom of your heart.
That’s why you need to pick the song that you’ll perform carefully. Particularly, choose ones that you can relate with emotionally and musically.
This way, it’s much easier for the audience to access the meaning hidden behind the song as you sing. That also means you’ve successfully conveyed the music’s beauty through your voice.
When learning a brand-new song, it’s advisable to play and sing it many times before the actual stage.
That way, you’ll get used to and understand its lyrics as well as what it aims to convey.
#2. Sing As If You’re Telling A Story
A tip on how to sing emotionally is to sing like you’re telling your story. Once you already relate to the song and develop meaning for it, it’ll be easier to convey the story through its lyrics.
For songwriters, their artworks tell their own story and what they’ve experienced to the listeners. Sometimes, a song’s theme can be challenging to decipher, yet without challenges, everything is tedious.
As a singer, you act as the storyteller, helping the composer convey the song’s meaning through your voice. That’s why the above lesson is exceedingly important.
You can make the theme of a song accessible to your audience only when you understand and relate to it.
But remember, though you’re a storyteller telling another’s story, you need to act like you’re telling your own one through emotional delivery.
#3. Use Facial Expressions
A singer is also an actor – what you might not know. It’s essential to learn how to bring out the themes included in the song.
Undoubtedly, facial expression is one of the brilliant avenues for communicating and conveying the passion encapsulated in the song.
Your lips and eyes will primarily help you elicit your audience’s emotions since they contribute largely to your facial expression.
These expressions can determine your listeners’ mood, letting them connect with you more easily.
Thus, it’s critical to ensure that your facial expression matches well with the emotional flow of the lyrics and the overall theme. If these two mismatches, your listeners may find it challenging to engage with you and get distracted.
To act out the right expressions for the lyrics, you’d better concentrate on the lyrics’ timing and words.
Also, it’s a good idea to practice singing and acting in front of a mirror. In so doing, you will know how to match your expressions correctly with the theme and lyrics.
Many vocalists underestimate the importance of eye communication or eye contact, which is so wrong. Beginners usually make the common mistake of performing while closing their eyes.
Sometimes, too focusing on the words and notes makes you unconsciously close your eyes. It’s better to steer clear of this mistake.
Ensure to open and close your eyes at the right time of the song. Also, make the opening and closing more dramatic.
Communicating through eyes is a surefire way to create a close connection with your listeners. An important tip is to take fundamental acting lessons.
Those lessons will assist you in internalizing the lyrics better.
#4. Matrix Pitch & Perfect Execution
To sing with more emotion, you need to apply some professional techniques to singing. Correcting execution and matrix pitch help work the melody’s keys into your neuron muscle memory, strengthening your pitch and ear.
These techniques are particularly helpful when preparing for recording and performing.
To matrix a melody, you need to find the corresponding keys using a piano’s keys. Of course, it’s not mandatory to play the piano to do the task.
Spending some time figuring out the actual keys will visually draw out a roadmap of the melody, further making it impressed in your mind.
If the notes you find tricky to deal with ate the same ones you sang previously in another verse of the song, it’s advisable to identify where those keys are to carve the roadmap.
Focus on reaching each note’s bulls-eye and go slowly. Repeat that verse and that note until you hit on-pitch consistently.
Another tip is to link that note with the previous one or link that off-pitch key to the key before it. Repeat this practice to work out the tough spot in the song.
#5. Control Your Falsetto, Head Voice, and Chest Voice
Professional singers can express various emotions by using different voices appropriately.
Your chest voice will lead to a thicker, warmer tone since it activates when you sing lower dynamics and notes. At that range, you can feel the vibration within your chest.
When you work the way up to a higher range, your voice will not resonate much in the chest. Instead, you’ll feel it resonates higher up because it now becomes the head voice.
You don’t have to separate these voices. In fact, many vocalists prefer blending the two to create a nicely mixed voice.
Meanwhile, falsetto employs much more air, solely coming from your head and, hence, eliminating the chest voice.
This one is common among male vocalists since it’s more challenging for them to hit high notes with the head and chest voice.
Gaining entire control over these three voices and using them properly for different emotions is crucial. The chest voice applies to somberer and quieter expressions, while your head voice suits higher, more powerful notes.
With the thinner falsetto, you can take advantage of it to hit high notes without much power.
#6. Engage With Your Audience
A vital skill that helps singers dominate their stages is to read the audience’s feelings and engage with them. This technique leans forward more to stage presence rather than singing.
Sometimes, you have to perform a song that makes it more arduous to nail and burn your stage than usual. It’s highly critical to make use of even more facial expressions and hand gestures.
This way, you can grab your listeners’ concentration and keep them focused on your voice. That also helps lower your tension and nerves, hence encouraging a better performance with more emotions.
A must-have factor on your stage is confidence. You always need to show a calm yet energetic presence to let the listeners know you’re confident about your voice.
The ability to sing with passion and generate a passionate connection is foremost since it determines the whole atmosphere and energy in the room or hall.
So, don’t just focus on your own world on stage. Consistently reach out to your listeners and engage with them.
#7. Perform With Energy
Energy, devotion, and desire are determined factors of a booming stage. Remember that.
A tip is to use body language to convey the emotion and energy of your song to your listeners – just as vital as singing with emotion.
You would likely feel bored or quickly get distracted when watching a vocalist on stage who rarely shows a body move, alright? Of course, no singer wants their audience to return home with a tedious experience.
So, always put energy and enthusiasm into your performances using body language. But note that it needs to fit the context and emotions and don’t overuse movements.
Here are some tips on how to use facial expressions and gestures while singing:
Final Words
Someone defined music as “emotion that you can hear,” which is so inspirational and true, indeed. Why do we enjoy music, after all? That is because it tells the feelings deep inside us and reflects what we’re thinking or feeling.
The only way to make the whole audience stand up and give a long ovation is to touch their hearts. And you know, the heart of a human being is full of passions and love. That’s why a singer has to learn how to sing with emotion.
