Singing for the Stars: A Complete Program for Training Your Voice (Book & 2 CD's) [Paperback]

Seth Riggs (Author), John Carratello (Editor), R. J. Miyake (Illustrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 8, 2008

What do Michael Jackson, Anita Baker, Natalie Cole and hundreds of other professionals have in common? They all study voice with Hollywood's leading vocal coach, Seth Riggs. You can learn to sing like the pros with this complete program for training the voice.

Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: Alfred Publishing Company; Revised edition (February 8, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0882845284
• ISBN-13: 978-0882845289
• Product Dimensions: 12 x 9 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (65 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #41,320 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

42 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Complete program to use with voice lessons, December 3, 2003

By 

L. Power "nlp trainer" (San Francisco) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

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This review is from: Singing for the Stars: A Complete Program for Training Your Voice (Book & 2 CD's) (Paperback)

The principles behind this book use exercises which educate you to sing without the larynx rising up which actually interferes with good singing, and to sing with a connected voice from chest voice into head voice, without breaking into falsetto.

The content is good, though too much space is given to testimonials, and more space should be given to explanation and theory.

The CD's are very well laid out with instructions from the author, a singer demonstrating the exercises which are on different tracks, which makes it easy to skip to the essential bits. You can practice while driving for example.

As I have been getting speech singing vocal training for over a year, I can testify to the value of the method.

Unless you are already a well trained singer with good technique, you really should not use this type of course without also getting lessons. A vocal trainer can identify how to improve tone, breathing etc and point out technique errors such as overblow or too much air pressure, which you might never identify by yourself. It is so easy to damage your voice by using incorrect technique or overdoing the exercises.

After using this for a few days and then applying the technique to sing along to a recording, I was able to do so without straining and hitting higher notes than usual with much less effort, which was amazing. I am now on my way to a voice that I did not dare to dream was possible.

The second CD is more about applying the exercises and producing the speech level singing tone, and runs through song examples using those passage areas with very useful tips to avoid splattering your sound.

For less than the cost of a voice lesson this is a great investment, which I highly recommend. You can imagine how helpful this is. The more you use this method, the more you will improve to the point where you will have the voice you have always dreamed of having. I wonder if you found this helpful.

Since writing this review originally, I met a woman, a singer songwriter from Australia, who sung the wrong way. As a result she damaged her voice. She was told by doctors that she would never be able to sing again. Her only hope would be if she stopped speaking for a year. She did this communicating by notepad. She lost some of her social skills. She did get her voice back, and then learned the speech singing method being taught personally by Seth Riggs, and became a speech level singing instructor.

The American idol people put out a product using this method American Idol Singer's Advantage - Male Version (DVD Entertainment Size Package), and among Riggs clients was Michael Jackson, and you can hear some of this on youtube.

82 of 90 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Could have been easier..., February 9, 2003

By 

C. Fletcher (California) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Singing for the Stars: A Complete Program for Training Your Voice (Book & 2 CD's) (Paperback)

This is the first voice book I've read, but I'll probably end up reading some others. I have a musical background, have played guitar and piano for years, but just recently decided to make an effort to improve my singing.

I found this book helpful in some ways, but I felt it could have been easier to understand. The book essentially details the speech level singing method, in which the chest voice and head voice are successfully bridged.

As a newcomer to singing, I found some of these concepts a little difficult to understand, and felt the book never really explained things very clearly. It reminded me a little of a instruction manual that assumes you have certain parts that have not been included.

Also, I felt it was a little odd that there was so much ink spent on celebrity testimonials. If the method is really that good, it should be able to speak (or sing) for itself.

It's been a couple of months since I read the book and listened to the CDs, and I can say that my singing has improved considerably (that's why I'm giving the book four stars). Although I don't feel I came away with a full understanding of everything the book was trying to teach, I feel I must have osmotically picked up some concepts that have been helpful.

40 of 42 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good but flawed, March 11, 2005

By 

James A. Holland (Las Vegas, NV USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Singing for the Stars: A Complete Program for Training Your Voice (Book & 2 CD's) (Paperback)

Having gone through both Brett Manning's "Singing Success" and this course, I must say that this is the better course for the ADVANCED student of speech level singing.
As has been noted in previous reviews, the book portion of this course is little more than a fawning, start-studded, tribute to Seth Riggs.
There are a few helpful and educational sections, but not enough to provide the uninitiated with any real understanding of the how's and why's of this technique.
Granted, the text is very simple and easy to read, but it almost seems like the author wrote it assuming that it's all too simple and easy to possibly NOT understand.
In that regard, the book is too simple.

The CD's are good; however, not free of flaws.
For one, no pitch ranges are given. So unless you know music by ear, you'll never know if you're singing a high C or a middle G.
Then there's the problem with the scales only being played ascendingly, thus providing the student with essentially only half an exercise.
The sound is also of mixed quality, sounging as though it was recorded with a basic dictation recorder as opposed to a professional studio.
The vocal demos are also a bit of a distraction in that the featured singers are classically trained and, as such, have a distinctly operatic delivery. Again, not something the beginning or even intermediate student can identify with. Unless, of course, they are studying Opera, in which case they should be training with a qualified teacher anyhow.

The exercises are HARD!
This is the part I like about the program.
Since I've been working with this course for some years now, I actually found "Singing Success" too easy and unchallanging and sent it back.
This course however is a permanent part of my vocal training tools simply because even after a few years of owning it, I still find the exercises difficult to execute.

All in all this may still be the best course for SLS but only if you're well advanced and already have years of experience singing. Otherwise this course will leave you, as it has me for years, frustrated and occasionally disinterested in the whole SLS thing.

Good but could definitively be much better in it's entirety.