Eddie is right. I've always had a good singing and speaking voice, and over the years have been able to make a few bucks with my vocal abilities, including doing voice-overs for car commercials and doing broadcast news on radio and TV. However, when I listened to myself singing and recorded my vocals, I was not happy about what I heard. I took my wife's advice and went to a community college and took a course taught by a well known, local jazz singer. She was fantastic, she taught me how to properly breathe while singing, and put a lot of emphasis on diction. The course lasted six weeks, two 1-hour sessions weekly, and a final where you sang to an audience of college kids and professors, either while playing an instrument or with backing tracks. I opted to do MY Way, which I felt was a real challenge to my vocal range, and got a standing ovation. I played it on a PSR-500 keyboard, which is probably now considered an antique. Believe me, it really made a huge difference in my vocal quality and was well worth the $120 I shelled out for the course.

Now, there are some folks who absolutely, positively cannot sing and never will be able to sing. However, those individuals are usually tone deaf as well, which would preclude any musician on this forum. When I first met Don Mason, he said he was NOT a good singer, and only did so because the singer in a band he worked with didn't show up one night. He has a unique vocal quality, a bit of a husky voice, one that would work great as a blues singer, and he does extremely well on many ballads that I have heard him perform. He will be the first to tell you, though, that he had to work very hard and long to perfect his vocals. There are very few of us that are born with a good singing voice, and just about every famous singer out there has had some kind of vocal training in order to make it to the top. When I was in Nashville many years ago, there was a singing coach there that was considered the best of the best, and her list of students included Elvis, Streisand, and a host of country greats.

As Donny said, please post a short vocal recording here so we can properly evaluate what we hear, and provide you with some guidance toward perfection.

Good luck, and I look forward to hearing you sing,

Gary