Vocal Release Review

The Vocal Release Singing Instruction program is a full-featured study-at-home vocal tutoring program that's downloadable and completely PC-based. Even though the website seems to allude you can order the physical shipped version of Vocal Release, there actually isn't anywhere you actually can place an order for it. The downloadable version of Vocal Release currently seems to be the only way you can purchase the course.

Vocal Release was developed by voice teacher Eric Fray. Mr. Fray has been singing since he was fifteen and is involved with a hard rock music band that appropriately enough, goes by the name Frayd. If you are like me you may not be into that kind of music, but I'll throw their MySpace page out there for what it's worth if you want to hear some of the vocals Eric is featured in. On a side note, Eric Fray offers over-the-phone and private voice lessons as well, much like Brett Manning from Singing Success does.

Features

Unlike some of the other Singing courses out there, Vocal Release comes with a large 352 page .pdf singing instruction manual. The formatting could have been done a little cleaner (and would have considerably cut down on the number of pages), but it's still relatively easy to follow along with. A small sampling of what you'll find inside the Vocal Release includes how to avoid bad singing practices, proper posture and breathing while singing, how the different registers of the voice work together, vocal health, and how to deal with other issues that performing vocalists inevitably face. There are also quite a few exercises presented inside the manual.

Vocal Release is nicely organized into seven different folders, and comes to over 430mb of primarily audio instruction with some additional textual .pdfs included as well. If you want to know where a certain component of the course is located there's also a .pdf that lists the complete contents of the course. It's also important as it gives the ordering of the program.

Eric Fray has an easy to listen to voice, and a very clear-cut teaching style that is sure to please it's listeners.

Though the instructional and presentational quality of the course is very good, here are a couple of issues we found with the course:

• One thing that was slightly annoying was that to go through the course in order, you had to often navigate back and forth from a multitude of different files, instead of being able to just play and pause the tracks from say, a CD or DVD for instance.
• Also, for some strange reason, 3 of the sound tracks couldn't be extracted from the download folder as they were corrupted. Not really a big deal , but hopefully Eric will fix that in the near future.

As the site mentions, you don't have to download the entire course at one time (which you may not want to do if you have a slow internet connection), as you'll always have lifetime access to the download links once you are a member.

Guarantee/Support

Vocal Release guarantees results for their customers. If you feel that the course wasn't worth it, you can request a refund at any time within the 60 days as stated on their website.

It was nice to see a phone number and physical address as well as the typical email contact form listed on Vocal Release's website.

Conclusion

Despite the few usability issues we had with the course, it still makes for a good alternative or complimentary course to use with the popular Singorama singing program. It's pricey, but so are most online singing lesson curriculums.

As a downloadable singing program, Vocal Release has good instruction for a competitive price.

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