Anyone Else Feel Lost?

Anyone else feel so lost with the lessons?  I am taking Estabrook's course and I am using a vocal tuner, but I am just so lost when he starts talking about different notes to be hitting. Or what a "half step" means.  I can tell a difference in the tone of my singing and the length i am able to sing out a longer (mostly higher note), but I am so lost when it comes to the vernacular. I have been Googling, reading, and doing anything I can to try and learn this new language, but still find myself lost.  For instance, is a C Minor a contextual note that is only minor in regards to another C note?  

And then with the song he is teaching, I dont know what notes I am supposed to be singing nor the lyrics.  Has anyone found these lyrics and been able to print them off?

I'm not the best person to explain this but basically, half and whole steps have to do with intervals or distance between musical notes. 

Best way to understand this is to look at a piano or a guitar. So for example C Major Scale, is C D E F G A B C.

a whole step would be if you went from the note C to D, or D to E. A half step would be if you went from C to C#, D to D# or E to F (This one you'd understand if you saw it on the piano).

 On the guitar, every fret is a half step. So if you look at it from that standpoint, when you're singing a half step at a time, you're going from fret to fret.

When they mention C Minor, it's typically refering to the C Minor Scale and has to do with where the half steps occur and typically makes the music sadder. I would look up tutorials on music theory. It doesn't hurt to learn the basics. 

Good input, Ep! Will, you don't need to know music theory to sing - you just need to be able to match pitch. But theory certainly helps you understand music on the whole! I highly recommend https://www.musictheory.net/ for free lessons + exercises. And please consider joining me this Saturday for a free hour-long lesson on music theory for beginning singers on our YouTube channel. The link will be posted soon, but you can subscribe and hit the notification bell so you get a reminder! 

Thank you both.  I loved your finding range session from last week Camille!  I still cannot get ninja tuner to work.  I dont know what is wrong, but I did find an app that has a great tuner on it. 

Glad you found one that works, Will! There are tons of chromatic tuner apps out there - I just use tuner.ninja since it's a website (no download time or worrying about different operating systems). Please feel free to share the name of the app you're using!

I got the PerfectPitch App.  I love the tuner because you can see all of the possible notes and it helps me visualize where I am singing. So when you say sing an C4 up to a G4, i can visualize what that means and maybe even sing a C4 and then sing higher until I get to a G4 to know where I am going to land.  

Perfect! I like that one too. It's surprisingly difficult to find an app that functions as a chromatic tuner, displays all singable pitches AND plays pitches on the same screen.