Ask HN: I'd like to learn vocals, any suggestion on how I can do this?

Eric is highly recommendable. He has lots of free lessons on Youtube that provide a foundation for all styles of singing.

I've been teaching coding (on the side) and doing software engineering for the past 10 years. There's a recent surge of self learners who believe in studying coding the way they believe should be studied (which is ironic, given how little experience they have). The moment they got a job, they turn around and proudly talk about "This is how I did it, you learn x, y, z and you can get a job like me" and influence the next batch of self learners. Bootcamps also buy into this ideology.

Instead, the engineers I appreciate on my team has very little to do with what they know. Instead of hiring engineers who only cares about the latest and greatest, I value engineers who: communicate openly, write good tests, and cares about the product enough to fix bugs without having someone create a jira ticket for them, and has good debugging skills.

When I'm not at work, I teach coding to a small group of self learners in my local community by telling them to focus on user experience and writing good tests instead learning every popular libraries out there. Its okay to know only 1 or 2, it is important to know it well. Together, we work on an open source project with 100% test coverage: https://github.com/garageScript/c0d3-app

We hired one of these students who was a core contributor and I hope to hire more directly once more recs opens up onto my team.

For everyone saying "find a teacher": what specifically will the teacher will pick up on, that I can't pick up on my own listening voice recordings of myself?

The situation is, I've known that I should find a teacher for many years. However, I can be quite stubborn and have instead been recording myself playing guitar/singing for the past several years. With debatable progress.

I know I should find a teacher, but what should I look for? My guitar is fine.. I've played since I was 12 and had a lot of lessons back then. So I feel better about self-studying guitar.

I've also been singing for that long, but without any actual instruction. Help!

This is a little misleading, to the point of being wrong with respect to the 'health warning'.

First - unambiguously, the vast majority of people who sing learned to do so reasonably well before any hint of real coaching, other than possibly little bits that a student/church choir teacher may be able to help with.

It's misrepresentative to hint that an amateur singer, singing occasionally for fun, will somehow how run into trouble, physically, without this. In fact, the majority of people who 'sing a lot' will never have such problems. I sang in a 16 part Jazz choir in my youth, and have always been involved in music, and I don't even recall anyone in my circle losing their voice or having voice trouble (I don't doubt that it's possible), and I don't recall anyone getting specific voice lessons either, that said being part of a choir helps, but we weren't hugely focused on technique in that kind of specificity. Most non-famous pop act singers have not had any real formal training - it's simply unnecessary.

Singing is a little bit like running, you just need a pair of shoes, if you do it a lot and enjoy it, you will get better and it will mostly come naturally. If you are part of any kind of singing group, like a choir, you'll pick up some really simple things that will take you a really long way. If you want to get even better, you can get some coaching, but you don't need it.

The other thing I will add is that a 'singing coach' might move you into a more formal way of singing that might clash with your own creative sensibilities. Many old-school rock stars sing 'terribly' from a technical perspective, but they didn't know better, it's just 'how they do it' and it enabled them to have their own unique flavour. A singing coach early on who moved them into a more 'choral' way of singing ... might have taken that uniqueness away.

In every children's choir, there are a handful of great singers who haven't taken highly specific instruction with respect to technique, singing is natural. Probably a 10 minute, basic youtube instruction would go quite far in terms of basic things just as it might be for amateur running tips.

Big caveat: in my own personal experience, everyone grew up with music i.e. choir, instruments, etc. which will lead to different outcomes and perspectives than someone who has absolutely no exposure to music.

superprof.com