Conrad - Singing Tutor - New York
1st lesson free
Conrad - Singing Tutor - New York

Conrad's profile, diploma and contact details have been verified by our experts

Conrad

  • Rate US$45
  • Response 1h
Conrad - Singing Tutor - New York

US$45/hr

1st lesson free

Contact

1st lesson free

1st lesson free

  • Singing
  • Vocal Coaching
  • Opera Singing
  • Choral Singing

Discover Your Singing Voice with Conrad: Lessons for Every Age, Style and Level

  • Singing
  • Vocal Coaching
  • Opera Singing
  • Choral Singing

Lesson location

About Conrad

About me

Singing is the one instrument you can't pick up and look at. Nobody can see where your breath goes or what your larynx does when you reach for a high note, so most of my lessons are about turning that invisible process into something you can hear and compare. I rely on recordings more than anything else. We'll sing a phrase the way you usually do it, then once with a single change, and then listen back together. Many students hear the difference before they feel it, and that hearing becomes the reference point for everything that follows. My goal isn't to hand you a stack of exercises to repeat at home. It's to give you a way of checking yourself, so that after a few months you can tell when something has gone wrong without waiting for me to point it out.

In a lesson with me, you'll probably spend the first few minutes not singing at all. I often start by asking you to speak the lyric of a song in rhythm, then hum the melody on one vowel, and I watch what your shoulders and jaw do before anything else. If a note cracks or drifts flat, I rarely ask you to try harder. I'm more likely to shorten the phrase to the last two notes before the difficult one, or to sing the approach on a lip trill (the buzzing sound made with closed lips) so the breath and the tone connect without the pressure of a full vowel and full words. Sometimes I'll sing the passage myself with the same mistake you make, so you can hear it from the outside. A beginner may use that same trick to find out where their voice wobbles on a simple melody, and a more experienced singer working on a demanding aria may use it to find exactly where a register change starts to tighten. The principle stays the same. Only the material changes.

You may recognize this: you can sing the verse comfortably in the room, but the moment the tempo picks up or the second verse arrives, the top line thins out and the breath runs short by the third line. I don't respond by running the whole song again. We find the exact syllable where things start to fall apart, mark it, and then change the rhythm of the surrounding phrase, dotting the notes or separating them slightly, so the coordination problem shows itself where we can both see it. Children often respond well when this becomes a game: they sing a short pattern back to me, and I hide one small change in it for them to catch. Teenagers usually enjoy the detective side of it, especially when a recording reveals something they had been sure they were doing correctly. Adults coming back to singing after a long break often need to hear that rusty doesn't mean lost. We start lower, in a range that feels easy, and rebuild upward one step at a time, checking each new note against the last recording.

What I want most is for you to leave each lesson knowing how to practice on your own. Before you go, we agree on one thing to listen for during the week, one small experiment to try, and one way to record yourself so that when you return we have something concrete to compare. If a song gets stuck, you'll know how to take it apart: sing the hardest four bars on a different vowel, or move the breath to a different point in the phrase, and then decide which version sounds freer. I'm less interested in students who need me to fix every note than in students who gradually stop needing me to tell them what they already hear. A seven-year-old learning their first melody, a sixteen-year-old who wants to sing with friends in a band, an adult who has always wanted to sing for themselves, and a practiced singer refining a difficult repertoire all get the same question from me: what does this sound like, and what changed when it got better?

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About the lesson

  • All Levels
  • English

All languages in which the lesson is available :

English

I'm Conrad, and I start singing lessons with the sentence rather than the note. Most people come in thinking about pitch first, as if the notes were a separate thing you have to catch before you can use your voice. In my lessons we begin with the words. If you have a song you love, we speak the lyric on its real rhythm, the way you would say it across a kitchen table, and then we let the speech settle into a held pitch one syllable at a time. That order matters. A beginner who has never sung a note in front of anyone can often manage a line of a song the moment it's spoken, and that small success becomes the foundation for everything else. A returning singer who used to sing in a choir and has been quiet for years usually finds that the old melodies come back faster than expected, once the words are doing some of the work. Children tend to enjoy this most, because a silly sentence on a wobbly siren is as legitimate a starting point as a folk tune.

The methods I use are specific, and I explain why each one exists. One of the most useful is singing a lyric on a single repeated pitch. This separates the job of getting the words out cleanly from the job of finding the notes, so you can see which of the two is causing the trouble. Another is what I call the vowel landmark. When a high phrase keeps cracking, the cause is very often that the vowel changes shape at exactly the moment the pitch climbs, not that the note is out of reach. We find that exact moment by singing the phrase on a neutral "oo" and then on the real vowel, and then we decide together whether to modify the vowel slightly, lift the jaw, or keep the sound forward. For breathing, I rarely ask people to count. Instead we mark breaths at musical landmarks: the end of a line, the arrival of a new harmony, the place where the melody changes direction. Once the breath has a home in the music, it stops being something you fight for in the middle of a phrase.

Here is a frustration many singers recognize. You can sing the chorus beautifully in the car, but the moment it reaches the jump up a fourth, the voice thins or pushes and the whole line collapses. In my lessons I would not ask you to repeat the whole chorus until it improves by accident. We would isolate only the transition: the two notes around the jump, then the approach into the second note, and finally the leap itself, sung twice, once with a slightly darker, more relaxed sound and once with a bright, forward sound. Comparing those two versions teaches you what efficient singing actually feels like, because you can hear and feel the difference rather than guessing. Then we put the transition back into the song immediately, so the exercise doesn't stay in a practice room where it never has to do real work.

The same principles scale across very different singers, but they look different on the page. For a teenager whose voice is changing, the lessons are honest about the instability and focus on range that feels reliable right now, rather than chasing a sound from last year. An adult learning for the first time might spend more time on breath and posture, and less on styling. Advanced singers can take a standard, reduce it to its melodic skeleton, and rebuild it with deliberate limits, such as improvising using only five notes or changing one dynamic per phrase, so that every choice becomes a decision rather than a habit. Throughout, I want you to leave able to hear your own problems. I'll teach you to record a short take, listen for the exact moment something starts to slip, and name it, so that over time you don't need me to tell you where the weak spot is.

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Rates

Rate

  • US$45

Pack prices

  • 5h: US$225
  • 10h: US$450

free lessons

The first free lesson with Conrad will allow you to get to know each other and clearly specify your needs for your next lessons.

  • 1hr

online

  • US$45/h

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