Practising alone is hard because you cannot hear yourself properly while you sing. Your own voice reaches you through your skull as well as your ears, so it always sounds a little different from what a listener hears. That is why a recording so often surprises people. Good home practice fixes that with a routine and with feedback from outside your own head.
1. Warm up for five minutes
Hum gently up and down your range, do a few lip trills, and sing easy scales on a vowel. A cold voice goes flat and cracks on high notes, which you would then mistake for a pitch problem.
2. Sing one song through for a baseline
Choose a song you like that sits comfortably in your range and sing it once without stopping. In Autunes Karaoke you get a total and a score for every line; that is your baseline. Resist restarting when a line goes wrong. The point is an honest first measurement.
3. Repair the three weakest lines
Take the three lowest-scoring lines. For each one: listen to the original singer on that line, sing it, look at where your pitch left the melody lane, and sing it again. Five focused repeats of one line do more than singing the whole song five times.
- Held notes sagging: breathe before the note, not during it, and aim slightly above the note at the end.
- Late entries: breathe a beat earlier and come in on the first syllable.
- Too high: move the whole song down a few semitones; the score accepts a steady lower key.
4. Sing it again, and again next week
Sing the whole song once more and compare. Then come back to the same song over the week. Progress is easiest to see when the song stays the same, and your best scores are saved so you can see the lines that used to slip now holding.
Set-up that makes feedback accurate
Use headphones so the microphone hears only you, sit or stand in a quiet room, and hold the phone or laptop at a steady distance. Autunes Karaoke runs a short check before you sing (a second of silence, then a spoken test) to set itself to your room.