Customer Rating:  
Summary: Didn't completely work
Comment: I knew the singing part of the product, because I had seen it on a friend's computer. The singing part worked well and was easy to understand and use. But I could not get the lessons working. My computer would freeze up every time I selected the "lesson" button. I thought it was the software, but when I returned it the seller said it worked fine, so something in my computer just didn't "compute". I would like to try the ultimate version because there are more songs, but I am afraid it would not completely work either.
Customer Rating:
Summary: may not install
Comment: I've spent over 3 hours trying to get this to install, so if you order this be aware you may also encounter problems.
Their tech support admits to seeing these problems before but they send me to Norton anti-virus for tech support, even though there is no evidence that Norton is interfering. For instance, turning Norton completely off does not fix the problem. Norton tech support was nice enough to thoroughly check things and they found no problem.
I'm returning the software -- it is useless to me.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great Fun
Comment: I purchased the Singing Coach just after Christmas....decided to give myself a present. I have found it to be very useful in helping me focus on note accuracy as well as timing. I was a little concerned about ordering after reading a few of the reviews with their problems but now I realize they were probably the operators fault,ie: 1)does not always record a line on the graph when you sing.....make sure the earphone/mouthpiece plugs are all the way plugged into the computer,etc. I do agree that a few more pieces of music would have been nice but overall, it has a lot of options to try different things. I would recommend this product to anyone - even those that have sung for years can have fun with it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: I like it
Comment: Some things I'd change about the program. You should have the option to pass up the cartoon character's lesson and go directly to yours. It's only helpful seeing this the first time through. The cartoon banter is way cheesy. The songs provided aren't great, but fine for the lessons. I saw a lot of songs I'd like for the download, but I'm not going past the four free ones. The headset is actually decent.
I found the range determination procedure of great value, as well as the auto adjusting of songs to your range. Bottom line, I am a better singer for having bought this software. I like to do karaoke and I'm better at it in just a short time.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Nothing else on the market quite like this....
Comment: I highly recommend this program. While there are many techniques that must come together to produce quality tone, for a singer to be "on pitch" remains the non-subjective and single most important aspect of singing; this is what Singing Coach helps you target.
For the purpose of correcting pitch problems, Singing Coach is better than a real instructor because it allows you to visually see how close your voice is to the mark. A vocal coach will be using his or her ears to compare you voice to the correct note on a piano, but to have the capability measure your voice unaccompanied by a teacher with a tool like Singing Coach means that you can work on pitch problems a lot more often and for some rather shy students this may be exactly what they need.
On the negative side: the problem comes with a few old standard tunes to sing alone to. My advice is to not waste your time with the songs, why? Because even if you nail them 90-100% you end up with a mono-tone sounding vocal take. In pop, rock and country music (contemporary music in general) vocalist variations in tone character and style techniques don't register well with this software, it will indicate you are of pitch at times or it will score you poorly for not transitioning fast enough. I don't if the original artist were to sing the song into this software that they would get much above an 80% on some of these songs. So skip the songs and instead select "Warm Ups" here you will find the traditional scales used by all vocal instructors. You can easily change the key of a warm up ex cerise so pick a warm like like the "5 up, 5 down" and bring the key down to the lowest note in your range. Sing through it, then raise it up a few keys, keep doing this untill you've reached the highest note in your range. Spend 20-30 minutes a day with this software just doing warm ups in this manner and you will work out any break points you have in your voice and you will greatly improve pitch, probably a lot faster than just singing along to scales without this sort of feedback.
If you seriously want to learn how to sing well, you still need to consult with a vocal coach or at least pick up some other self study material, because this software doesn't get into any detailed techniques for correcting breathing problems and other common vocal problems and than destroy the tone of your voice.
I think for most people the basic feature set found in this version ("basic" version of Singing Coach) will be enough for most people. With the more expensive version you can compose your own songs, but again I don't think the software should be used to train on songs, just scales.
|
