I can’t believe I didn’t link it in my above comment but one of the HUGE turning points in my voice was reading a post you did on TWC. I’ve had a million voice lessons but somehow your words made breathing make sense to me.

As far as confidence

That’s been a big struggle for me, albeit from a bit of a different angle.

At times I can be overly-confident. I jump into situations no-holds-barred and I don’t tend to be scared of a lot. That manifests itself in my singing and I’ve been known to attempt vocal runs that I really can’t pull off.

A musician I greatly respect actually told me, “Billy, it’s cool that you have such confidence, it works when you play guitar. Don’t do that when you sing.”

Seriously, that advice helped a lot. I just started singing within my range and even started changing the keys of songs to make them fit with my voice.

One of my goals is to one day have a “great” voice. For now I’m pretty content to be on pitch singing simpler lines.

When I first started leading worship, I was a chore to listen to. I played chunky, awkward chords and had a voice that couldn’t find pitch for ANYTHING. You know what helped me a lot? Two things:

1.) My best friend Clint, one of the most amazing male vocalists of his style would sit with me during tedious, hour-long sessions, and pick apart everything I did, then show me the right way to do it.

It was invasive, uncomfortable, and I never felt like I was getting better until I came on staff at CRCSSI, did one of my original songs during the offering and the worship pastor, [URL="http://www.fredmckinnon.com"]this guy[/URL], came up to me and said:

“Dude…that was amazing. I knew you could play, but I had NO idea you could sing like that.”

Because Fred’s an accomplished (yet humble) musical genius, that felt REALLY good and really served as a bolster for my confidence, which brings me to…

2.) Confidence. If you can hear yourself get a song or phrase right, I mean really NAIL the part, then you can pull on the confidence that comes from that like a bank. The more confidence you deposit in your confidence account, the more you can pull from on a song that you know you’re not particularly strong on.

All of that being said, I feel your pain on the whole job search thing. I searched for six months and was rejected a grand total of seven times by pastors from Canada to Florida, and when I say rejected, I mean told things like:

“We like you, but you’re much younger than what our ideal person would be.”

“You’re single and we were really looking for a couple.”

“I, as a senior pastor, just don’t connect with you.”

“You wouldn’t be a good fit here.”

I’m just now beginning to get over all the rejection from those failed interviews. I kept asking myself what I did wrong, but you know what? All that rejection just made it so much sweeter when I finally found a pastor and a church who accepted me, warts and all.

Keep that faith up. What God has ordained, he will maintain.

But I agree with your thoughts in your post!

My personal voice work out includes running scales everyday:

http://billychia.com/2007/08/23/magic-techinque-to-increase-your-vocal-range/

and I’ve found this video to be helpful for tone quality:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSOn-b3V6rQ