Great vocal workouts at your fingertips
Crescendo Voice is a backing track generator for vocal arpeggios, a practice studio and a vocal coach on your iPhone or iPad. It was born out of desire to reduce friction between a busy life and quickly jumping into quality vocal practice whenever you have the chance. The vocal exercises adapt to your vocal range and it's loaded with useful arpeggios for every skill level.
Classify your voice type
Are you a mezzo or a soprano? The first thing a lot of singers want to know is what voice type they have. While this can be a nuanced and sometimes overly complicated topic, Crescendo Voice can quickly find which of the six basic voice types describe you the best.
Like all approaches, Crescendo Voice starts by defining the absolute lowest and highest boundaries of your voice. But what if this includes two or more of the traditional voice types? The next step is to find the sweet spot in your voice (prima voce). If your range includes both alto and mezzo, but your sweet spot is a little lower in your range, then you're probably better classified as an alto. This is super useful when deciding which key to sing a song in or which part to take in a choir.
Establishing a regular voice workout can have huge benefits
If you’re serious about improving your singing, you probably already know the power that regular practice has in growing abilities and even range. While most of us probably enjoy rocking out to our favorite songs, I’ve always seen the biggest improvements to my abilities when I put the time into singing exercises.
The secret to practicing more is that you don't need inspiration to jump into a daily vocal routine
When you first start out, vocal exercises can seem a little boring, but trust me, they will absolutely grow on you. And it's partly that they're a little boring which makes them so easy to jump into every day. There's only one way to get better at singing and that's time spent singing. Some days you're just not going to sound as good as others. If you only approach singing only as trying to make good music, it's easy to feel discouraged and give up when your voice isn't cooperating as much as usual. But humming on a five-tone scale? That's easy even on your worst day. When it comes to daily practice, you don’t have to be “on” or wait for the magic to jump into simple vocal exercises.
Vocal exercises expose your weaknesses
Besides making it easier to log more hours practicing, if you strip down vocal practice to core techniques and fundamentals you can isolate rough spots in your range and abilities and work on polishing those. Coming back to making real music after grinding away on exercises is hugely rewarding and will motivate you to keep going back to the vocal exercises.
Crescendo Voice gives you the power of a backing band in your pocket
Not all of us play instruments. Even if you do, it can get boring to sit there and plunk out the notes on piano or guitar as you sing, but doing so is hugely important to learning to sing on pitch and in time. I don’t have a lot of time to practice, and my morning vocal routine is much better if I can do some light chores while I practice my make exercises. I'll put on my headphones and run through my warm-up exercises while I make a cup of coffee and adjust to the idea of facing the day.
Your vocal abilities will shift from day to day and your exercises should adapt to this
When I first started singing regularly, I would record my own backing tracks, but this wasn’t flexible enough. Listening a recording of one of Michael Jackson’s voice lessons with his famed vocal coach Seth Riggs, you can hear Seth ask him if he was feeling like going all the way up to the top of his range that day. This raises an important point: even the king of pop respected his limits and wasn’t always pushing the highest notes in his range. Some days the voice just needs a little rest. Here's where Crescendo Voice really shines: you can easily change any of the exercises to focus on a single range.
Even the king of pop respected his limits and wasn’t always pushing the highest notes in his range.
Practice arpeggios just in your vocal range (or sub range)
The first thing Crescendo Voice does is profiles your vocal range. From this point on, all of the exercises on Crescendo Voice will by transposed to stay within your vocal range. But it doesn’t stop there. You can go to the “Vocal Ranges” page in the side-menu and set your prima voce (or comfortable singing range), your chest voice, head voice, and secondo passaggio (that’s the vocal break that challenges your 14-year old brother’s self esteem). Once you have these set, it’s super easy to target just these ranges in any exercise. If you're warming up or just not feeling like hitting the absolute boundaries of your range, no problem. Just choose prima voce and every exercise will focus on this range.
Set the vocal range, tempo and duration of any exercise
If Crescendo Voice does one thing well, it's to adapt exercises to exactly your skill level. You can quickly set the targeted vocal range, the tempo, duration and more for every exercise.
Save your favorites
Click the star in the upper right corner of any exercise to add it to your list of favorites. There’s a lot of content on Crescendo Voice, and it may be more than you need for any one exercise.
Take it with you
Yes, it can be useful to see your pitch as you sing and have a visual representation of the next note, but after you learn an exercise, you might have better things to do than stare at your phone. Most of my practice with Crescendo Voice is spent pacing the house while wearing a set of headphones. Spin up your list of favorite exercises and easily control these from the Lock Screen.
Record your progress and track your improvement
Improving your voice doesn’t happen overnight and sometimes it’s easy to not notice the incremental improvements you achieve. When you’ve enabled recording (the microphone button will be red) you’ll have the chance to listen to and save any performance at the end of the exercise. These recordings will then be available in “recordings” in the side menu.
You can export these as .mp4 audio files to share with others or import into other audio programs like Garage Band.
I strongly encourage you to record yourself regularly. If you’ve been practicing regularly and feel like you’re not getting any better, go listen to older recordings. Hopefully these will prove you wrong. It's also a great way to get a clearer perspective of how you actually sound, and the more you do this the better. Listening to your recordings will increase your confidence as a singer when you establish a stronger connection between what you think you sound like to what others actually hear.
What’s next for the app?
The road map for Crescendo Voice features is long and exciting. Over the pandemic a lot of us have been missing out on regular lessons with our singing instructors, and I’d like to make it easier for students to collaborate with their voice teachers and other singers for quick feedback and advice on technique.
I hope you'll give Crescendo Voice a try. It's free and I'm convinced it will help you to grow your singing abilities and establish a regular practice routine that's almost effortless to jump into. I'm convinced because this app has personally pushed me to see terrific gains as a singer.
Have a question or an idea you want to share?
I'm always looking for feedback!