Vocal Gym Review

I am so excited to share this review of the Vocal Gym that I did with Timberdoodle.

My daughter loves music! She is a violist, plays the piano for our youth group praise band, and hopes to one day teach music lessons. I, on the other hand, can only play the radio. I love to listen to music, but I am no help to her in improving her music skills.

She has been looking for several years for ways to work on her singing voice, but I was not sure how to help her. The Vocal Gym was the perfect solution because it provided her with self-paced video-based instruction that she could do to improve her singing and help make her a more well-rounded musician.

What is The Vocal Gym?

The course has 12 sections that you go through, some opening ones to get you ready for what is going to happen in the middle sections, which are 1 for each of the seven dimensions, and then some closing ones that help you put everything together.

Flexibility (pliability of the vocal folds)
Breathing (breathing management)
Intonation (pitch control)
Range (vocal balance (muscle coordination) from lowest to highest pitch)
Tone (quality of sound)
Articulation (diction)
Strength (Stability and stamina of the voice)

In each of the seven main sections, you have instructional videos on how to do exercises strengthening that dimension, and you have a video explaining what part of your body that dimension utilizes.

There is also a short, reasonably easy quiz and some detailed exercises. At the end of each of the seven main sections, you have the option of doing some activities like listening to a musical album and/or watching a musical, then answering questions or completing some activity that goes along with the section’s dimension.

Each section takes a couple of hours to complete if you do not include the additional activities. If you include the extra activities, that could add up to an additional three hours per section. This, along with documenting practice hours, allows students to get enough hours for a high school-level credit on their transcripts.

My Daughter’s Thoughts on the Vocal Gym

“I enjoyed the course. Some of the things that I thought were nice are, on top of the built-in videos, they give optional that you can do to increase your skills and add more time, but they were not required, so if you are busy and/or you don’t want to do it you do not have to. I like the videos that they had. And the setup of the website is excellent.

One thing that I wasn’t as big of a fan of was that they have a web that you would fill out to determine how well you are doing in certain areas, but they don’t have a great guide for you, so you have to do your best to guess how well you are doing.

I like how they have broken things down into the seven dimensions of singing to focus on little parts of your voice and then go back at the end and put everything together.

I recommend it for students and adults who want to learn more about singing and strengthen their voice. I recommend it for beginners and those who have been singing for a while. I think that everybody can gain from this course; the exercises are easy to personalize.”

A Parent’s Perspective on the Vocal Gym

If you were a “fly on the wall” in our home recently, you probably would have heard one child or another singing:

“If I were a rich man

Ya ba dibba dibba dibba dibba dibba dibba dum

All day long, I’d biddy biddy bum.”

This is because, as a part of her work with the vocal Gym, my daughter had the option of watching Fiddler on the Roof. While my husband and I had heard of the musical, we had never watched it. The family watched it together, and the kids have been singing the songs ever since.

I loved that while it is helping her with her vocal skills, it is also helping her to learn more about musicals and a variety of genres of music in her extra activities.

I appreciated that it had the materials and support necessary to help my daughter with a skill that I could not help her learn.

Overall, if you have a student interested in vocal training, this is a great course. It is an easy-to-use, open-and-go program that can assist your child in improving their singing skills as well as learning about a variety of musicals and music genres.

Remember to visit Timberdoodle for more information and to purchase your subscription.