How To Sing in Front of Other People

How To! with Mike Pesca

Peach Fish Projects

Education, How To

4.3 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 9 December 2025

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Slate staff writer Rebecca Onion wants to improve her singing voice, but she's unsure about belting it out in public. On this episode, How To!'s Carvell Wallace introduces her to G. Phillip Shoultz III, associate director of VocalEssence, for advice on strengthening her voice, performing with confidence, and (gasp!) auditioning for a vocal group.

If you liked this episode check out How To Write the Perfect Breakup Song With Ben Folds.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	There's something magical that happens in baseball stadiums after the seventh inning stretch,
0:05.0	and they start playing. You know what I'm going to go with.
0:07.0	Sweet Caroline, 40,000 people, right?
0:16.0	Yeah.
0:17.0	Everyone doing it.
0:19.0	There's something that happens in that space because it's like, oh, here it comes. We're looking forward to it.
0:26.8	Welcome to how to. I'm Carvel Wallace. Okay, so how many of you love singing? Like, really love it. I would imagine that for some of you, the answer is yes, and for others, it's a resounding
0:38.6	hell no, probably accompanied by a painful cringe. Okay, but what if I change the question?
0:45.1	How many of you would love singing if you knew you sounded great doing it? See, it's kind of a
0:51.6	trick question, because the answer to who loves singing is like pretty much everyone.
0:56.9	But the problem is that a lot of people who love singing don't feel confident singing because they have the mistaken belief that they can't sing or that everyone would hate it if they sing.
1:07.8	And this puts you in a very difficult position because you want to express
1:12.5	something inside of you. You want to be free with your voice, but you feel like you can't, which
1:18.4	sucks. And that is the problem faced by today's listener. I'm Rebecca Onion. I'm a writer
1:26.6	at Slate and I wish that I sang more and better.
1:32.7	That's pretty succinct and straightforward. All right, well, let's get into that. I first love to know what role singing with others has played in your life so far.
1:41.5	So it has a very intense but very curtailed role in my life. So my mom's side of the
1:48.0	family is the singing side. We get together at a family reunion every year and we have a cocktail
1:53.9	hour that has become the singing hour. So we sing kind of like older songs. There's a couple patriotic songs we always sing because
2:02.8	there's family lore around my grandfather having first seen my grandmother when they were in
2:08.5	the Middlebury College Chapel during World War II. And oh, beautiful, first spacious guys was being sung.
2:14.4	And he saw her and was like, that's the one. So we always sing that one and tell the
	...

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