Alma Gluck Quotes

I studied voice at Yale with Blake Stern from the music school, and he had me singing German lieder and Italian songs.

Thousands of kids and parents come up to us and say, How do we get better as a singer?

You have to get to know your voice and its strengths and play on those. It took me quite a long time.

I don't believe in singing lessons. You can sing or you can't.

Someone told me that you could learn to sing, and that there are muscles that if you build, you will sing.

To sing along with Stevie Wonder, you had to make your voice do things it was not accustomed to doing.

I studied voice for about two years with an amazing coach, and I never rose above the level of mediocre.

I thought everybody had falsetto. And since I wasn't a schooled singer who studied with anybody, I just thought anybody who had a voice could do anything they wanted with their voice.

In the piano, one has the instrument complete before he begins; but in the case of the voice, the instrument has to be developed by study.

Your voice is like a very serious instrument that you have to tame if you want to be an amazing singer - Marvin Gaye or Michael Jackson.

I was blown away by the control and the range that I was hearing. I'm listening to Pavarotti and thinking, What the hell have I been doing with my voice all these years?

Because her voice is, it's like the muscles and it develops all the time. That was the fantastic thing for us.

Over the years, I was lucky; right from the beginning, I studied with a lady who had a lot of... she was a classical singer, and of course, they're a little bit more into, you know, preserving the voice, making sure your instrument is ready to perform.

Maybe I was just born with a little bit of vocals or natural talent, but I feel like I taught myself. I just started taking vocal lessons to just work on my breathing, my vowels and stuff.

I do not support that everyone has to be a trained classical singer to be able to sing in films but some sort of knowledge in classical space can take you to places.

When I was 15 or so, I made a conscious decision to try and sing with a big voice. Everybody I listened to had these big voices, and I wanted to try it. The blessing is that I could.

I suspect a singing teacher would have a fit with my diction. They'd probably think I was doing a very bad job.

I went to this vocal coach, Ron Anderson, who has worked with Axl Rose and Chris Cornell, to train my voice and learn a whole new way of singing.

The biggest thing is to just keep your voice in shape so that when the emotion hits, it's there to have the colors to paint those pictures with the lyrics as well as the sound.

It takes a big voice a long time to develop properly; the bigger it is, the harder it is to develop the technique.

As singers, we're always taught to sing forward and place everything in the front of our resonating chambers. Donna Summer always sang in that space and had it naturally. Her muscle memory, the way she was built - she was a natural singer.

My mother gave me singing lessons; that was totally painful, because I couldn't do what she wanted to hear. She used to say: there's more there, there's more voice but I just didn't want to give it to her.

Well, the teacher I studied with for nineteen and a half years was a man named Paul Gavert. He was a great lieder singer, so basically I'm a trained lieder singer because of that teacher. The teacher I currently study with - since 1995 - is Joan Lader, who also studied with Gavert.

People often ask me how I developed my vocal sound, and the answer usually disappoints them: 'It's just the way I sound when I sing.'

Don't ever take a dramatic lesson. They will try to put your voice in a dinner jacket, and people like their hominy and grits in everyday clothes.