Singing Lessons for Beginners
SINGING LESSONS
No prerequisites. If you can breathe, you can sing. The Adeline Toniutti method welcomes complete beginners alongside trained singers, same five pivot points, different rhythms.
Singing is only movement
That is the founding idea of Adeline Toniutti's method, which she develops in Anatomie du Chant. Look at a complete beginner and a soloist from the Paris Opera: the underlying gesture is identical, a stream of air passing across two vocal cords. The difference is not talent. It is the inner choreography: where the larynx sits, how the breath travels, what the tongue does.
At CALYP, we start from this idea: you already know how to sing, your body does it ten thousand times a day without thinking. Our work together is simply to make each of those gestures conscious, one by one, until you can choose them.
THE FIRST WORRY
"I sing out of tune", the real answer
It is the sentence Adeline hears most often at a first meeting. And it is almost always wrong: singing in tune is first and foremost a matter of hearing, not of vocal cords.
In Adeline Toniutti's method, singing out of tune most often comes down to a hearing problem. When you have misheard the music, you find your guiding ear and retrain it. When there is an auditory pathology, that is when a specialist should be consulted.
In 99 % of cases, the beginner who "sings out of tune" simply needs to train their ear to recognise pitches and their body to reproduce what the ear hears. That is the focus of the first sessions.
THE FIRST THREE GESTURES
What you will work on in your first session
Posture
Feet, pelvis, spine, shoulders: a stable base frees the laryngeal suspension and lets the air flow.
The short inhale
"Smelling a flower": two quick little inhales through the nose, to feel the diaphragmatic dome open like an umbrella.
The buzzing exercise
"The famous fly": the first vocal warm-up. It wakes the vocal cords gently, without pushing for any pitch yet.
THE METHOD
Breathing, explained plainly
From a physiological standpoint, singing means filling your lungs on the inhale and releasing the air on the exhale, with the vocal cords pressed together to produce sound. It is this simple gesture that Adeline Toniutti makes conscious, step by step.
Who are these lessons for?
- Adults who have never taken a singing lesson and want to take the step, no karaoke pressure, no judgement, at their own pace.
- Teenagers and children starting out, who want to build healthy technique from day one (CALYP teaches from the age a voice settles).
- Former choir singers who only ever sang in a group and never worked on a solo voice.
- People who think they "sing out of tune", the ear trains like any muscle.
- Actors, presenters, executives who want to open their vocal palette beyond the speaking voice.
Whatever your profile, the first session begins with free listening, you sing whatever you want, in whichever style you want, and the coach builds a diagnosis. No evaluation. No ranking. Just a starting point.
How to start
Individual lessons last 55 minutes with Adeline Toniutti or a teacher from her team. They take place in Paris, Geneva, Brittany or by video conference, whichever fits your location and schedule.
For a beginner, one session per week is a sustainable rhythm to install the method without overloading the body. The 3-to-6-day masterclasses (Brittany, summer) are a complementary format for an annual deep dive.