I'm looking for a private lesson vocal instructor because I get more one-on-one time to practice my range and have techniques to improve my voice because the local school chorus teachers usually only teaches "fundamental" things. After speaking to others on the web, I found the answer. Try this site

	Basic vocal instructor;: For all who desire to sing better There are all sorts of information included accompanied by black and white photo illustrations. - The book is organized into 19 different lessons. $12.95

So I'm 15 i am a very ambitious kid def someone willing to take a risk so I wanted to try singing but I've always had a very. . Average voice. When me and my sister were kids, everyone would always compliment her on her singing. However me, not so much. But I really want to give it a shot So I'm thinking of taking my savings and getting a coach I dont know if I actually have a good voice though people always say, I am very monotone and my voice is relaxing. Lol I've done a little research so would it be well worth my money if I got a coach(a decent one)? About how much would the lessons cost? And any tips or info I might want to know about? Also singing isn't just a hobby of mine btw My step sister and I are performers. We do lots of musicals. So I would hope that a coach could help me learn to project better and to better my technique to help my performance on stage. worth it? One on one lessons with a real person. Essentially — Right now you need a voice teacher. Singing coaches work with advanced singers who have been performing for a while. If you have never taken voice lessons, find a voice teacher first. They will take you to the next level. Taking voice lessons with a professional voice teacher will certainly be well worth your money. Costwise? Well it depends on who you go to and what his/her experience is, and the area. Teachers in a metro area tend to cost a little more than ones in a rural area. Teachers who have received their Masters or Doctorates tend to charge more. Also, in demand teachers usually cost a grip, and they usually don't have spots in their studio without a "connection". You can find a teacher who might take you for 20/25 dollars for a half hour lesson at the least. Hour lessons cost a little more if they are cheap, but you don't want to just go for cheap. Do your research. Call your local universities and music schools in the phone book of your local area. Ask each teacher how much they charge. Find out if the teacher has credentials (a bachelors of music in voice) and if they don't DO NOT waste your money. There are fake voice teachers who think because they know how to sing they can teach, and that isn't the case. You have to know how the voice connects to the body on an anatomical level in order to be productive in teaching. Usually voice teachers do have papers, but there are some who don't. These people can cause singers to develop nodules and most types of ailments because they just don't know how to teach properly. Also, take a sample lesson before taking on long term lesson. See if the teacher is a good fit for you. They should make you work, but at the same time they will be supportive. I think you should go for it. You never know what precious gift you have down in there. Once a teacher gets a hold of your instrument and brings you out of your shell, you could really grow into an awesome musician.

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Are you interested in playing violin? Do you want to be a good player of violin? Have you ever tried some ways to get this kind of skill? Or have you ever complained that the course you have taken is useless to you? Regardless of all the cases, just have a look at this course which is called Violin Master Pro and we are sure you will benefit much more from it.

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The most important thing is that the system is not limited to certain special group of people. Whether you are a beginner or an advanced or skilled player, you can take this course. It contains a lot of resources which is designed for different kinds of people. Of course, if you are a beginner, you will need much more time to get used to the instrument. It may costs a series of steps of instructions to come to understand the violin. But don not worry, because we have personal teacher who I will introduce for you in the following paragraph.

Eric Lewis, a world famous violinist, is the teacher in this course. He has a lot of experiences and also had once had the chance to learn with Rachmael Weinstock, also a famous violinist. Thus, of necessity, this will have great influence on him. Imagine such a professional violinist will be your personal teacher, how exciting is it? Will you worry about the quality of the learning? Can you have a teacher like him when you learn from somebody else? (I don’t think so.) He will guide you to a higher lever where you can get to the point of the violin, know how to create an improvisational music and also can handle it quite smoothly. You will be good at violin within a few weeks.

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In this article we take a look at the question, "Do music lessons make a child smarter? Do music lessons have 'collateral benefits' that extend to non-musical areas of intelligence? Do music lessons increase a child's overall IQ level, making them better at reasoning, math and language comprehension?" How this question has been answered is as interesting as what the answer turns out to be.

Why is this question of interest?

Here is one answer. Children have limited free time to invest into extra-curricular activities, and parents have to make choices between activities for their children. If the choice is between, for example, ballet and music lessons, and music is known to increase intelligence but ballet is not, this might be reason enough to choose music over ballet. Ballet may be good for reasons that music may not be – for motor coordination skills, for example – but at least now the parent has a firmer basis on which choose.

How can we CANNOT answer the question: Do music lessons improve IQ?

The question 'do music lessons make a child smarter?' is not something that can be answered through common sense and the facts of personal experience. It may be tempting to reason from your observation that all the children you know who take music lessons are doing well at school, that these lessons must be helping them develop their intelligence and school success. But this conclusion is not justified. Why not? Because it's just as likely that they are both doing better at school and taking music because they are from a certain socioeconomic class where the average IQ is higher to begin with. Children with high IQs are more likely than other children to take music lessons because better educated and more affluent parents tend to provide music lessons for their children – it's part of the culture of the more educated and affluent to provide music lessons. Not all educated and affluent parents, but a lot of them. But this doesn't necessarily mean that music lessons have any impact on the childrens' developing intelligence. Many educated and affluent parents also buy certain brands of clothes for their children, but the clothes children wear don't make them more intelligent.

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So we cannot go about trying to figure out whether taking music lessons improves IQ like this.

How we CAN answer the question: Do music lessons improve IQ?

To find out the answer to this question we need to do an experhyment. We need to set things up like this: take a lot of children from a variety of backgrounds and randomly assign (by the flip of a coin) half of these children to music lessons for a year, and half to some other extracurricular activity for a year – for instance ballet, or football. We test both groups of children on an IQ test before the lessons, and then again after the lessons, and see if there is a difference between the two groups. If there is a difference – if those who took music lessons on average score higher on the IQ test – we know that it's not due to family background (because family backgrounds are mixed evenly across the two groups). If we find a difference we will also be more confident that the intelligence gain is specific to music and not any extra curricular activity (whether music, drama, ballet, karate or soccer). In essence, by doing this kind of 'critical experhyment' we make sure that we've pinpointed the effect of the music lessons on intelligence.

Schellenberg's critical experhyment

In 2004 someone did finally this scientific experhyment: Glenn Schellenberg from the Department of Psychology, University of Toronto. He put an advertisement in a local, community newspaper, offering free, weekly arts lessons for 6 year olds for a year. 144 children were then assigned randomly to one of four different groups, with 36 children in each group. Group 1 was given keyboard lessons, Group 2 was given voice/singing lessons, Group 3 was given drama lessons, and Group 4 had no extra-curricular lessons. The instructors were trained, female professionals. The children in all groups took an intelligence test called the WISC-III both before and after the year of lessons. The WISC-III is the most highly regarded and widely used intelligence test for children. Most four groups had the same average IQ level at the start of the experhyment. Children in each group differed in their intelligence level of course, but the average intelligence of each group was the same. This is obviously important for us to draw any conclusions about the effects of the several kinds of lessons.

And what did Schellenberg find? Do music lessons increase IQ?

The first interesting finding was that all four groups of children showed an increase in IQ level after the year was up, even the group that took no lessons whatsoever. What explains this general increase in IQ for all children? An increase of IQ known to be a usual consequence of entering grade school. Since all these children started grade school during the period of the experhyment, it is easy to explain this general IQ increase as due to simple attendance at school.

But – and this is the crux – the two music lesson groups had significantly greater gains in IQ than the drama and 'no-lesson' groups. We can conclude from this data that taking music lessons, but not drama lessons, caused gains in intelligence in addition to the gains obtained by attending school. The type of music lesson did not matter (whether keyboard or voice); both groups had the same average IQ score after a year of lessons. And both music groups had a 3 point higher IQ score compared to the drama and n0-lesson groups who did not differ from each other in their IQ score.

This relative superiority of IQ in the music groups was not confined to one particular aspect of intelligence – such as spatial intelligence – but was found in all all but 2 of the 12 subtests of the WISC-III intelligence test, across a broad range of cognitive abilities that require intelligence. It benefited all subtests of what is known as fluid intelligence – the ability to reason and find relationships in a way that does not depend on background knowledge.

The size of the effect: How should we judge it?

3 IQ points doesn't sound like a big effect, but there is a way of looking at this gain in IQ that help put it in perspective and help us evaluate its importance. Compare it to the gain of first going to grade school. The average IQ gain of going to school was about 4 points. The additional gain of taking music lessons (3 points) was, therefore, nearly as much as the full experience of school itself. This is now looking like quite a big effect.

What is special about music?

We need to be clear about one thing. Schellenberg's experhyment shows that music lessons improve IQ for six year olds. It does not tell us that music lessons improve IQ for older children or for adults unfortunately. Six year old's brains are known to be highly 'plastic' – that is, these young brains can be shaped and reorganised to a large extent by experience. Older children and adults have less brain plasticity and it might be predicted that a year of music lessons in this case would have less of an impact on general intelligence – although we don't know for sure.

In taking music lessons, knowledge and skill relating to music increases, and this is important in itself. But what Schellenberg's experhyment shows is that in addition to this, general cognitive ability is also trained and improved – indirectly. Taking music lessons is good 'brain training' at this age! Music lessons involve long periods of focused attention, daily practice, reading musical notation, memorization of extended musical passages, learning about a variety of musical structures (e.g., scales, chords), and progressive mastery fine-motor skills. It is not known exactly which combination of these skills improves general intelligence, and further studies will have to investigate this question.

The author, Dr Mark A. Smith, is a cognitive neuroscientist, author and entrepreneur. Between 2000 and 2003 he was a Lecturer in the Department of Experhymental Psychology at the University of Cambridge. His most recent position has been as Assistant Professor at Bilkent University, Turkey. His current research is in fluid intelligence and its evolution in human cognition. He has recently set up a cognitive interventions laboratory for experhymental research into brain training tools and brain nutrition.

To find out more of what is known about intelligence and how to increase IQ, visit his website:
http://www.iqlift.com/

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I bought tenor ukulele strings recently and notice that the 2nd string (high E) is thicker than the 4th string (high G). They are both black nylon strings, and I thought that strings usually got thinner as they went down?.?. Is this right. After speaking to others on the web, I found the answer. There are two types of tenor ukulele string sets. One is called standard or "reentrant" tuning. The other is called "Low G" tuning. Both are tuned [gcea] (normal tuning although there are others). The difference (if you are a right handed player) is that the string closest to your chin (when playing) is either a low G or a "g" one octave higher. The low G tuning will sound just like the 1,2,3,4 strings on a guitar with the Capo at the 5th fret (GCEA). The high "g" tuning is the more familiar "My Dog Has Fleas" tuning [gCea] where the lower case notes are in the scale above C. You have a standard or "rentrant tuning", My Dog Has Fleas set of Tenor ukulele strings.

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