Twenty or thirty years ago a choir asked me to sing top A repeatedly (the A above middle C). I could only do it by yelling at the top of my voice, which was fine, because the music called for very loud singing. However my throat soon felt raw.

Do you find that your throat hurts if you sing for very long? That is because you are singing hard, not smart, just as I was doing.

Now I have recognized four different voices that I can use, and one of them soars with effortless ease half an octave higher than the note that was giving me so much trouble.

I wish I had read the "Singing Is Easy" book, but of course - downloadable books from the Internet didn’t exist twenty years ago.

You can learn to create your own personal voice or voices so that you no longer give yourself a sore throat trying to force your vocal cords to do what they were never intended to do.

The voice that you hear when you sing is not the same voice that everyone else hears, because you are hearing through bone conduction while everyone else hears your singing conducted through the air to their ears. This book will teach you to analyse your voice critically, decide what you don’t like about it, and create the voice that you want to have.

And you don’t have to worry if your friends will laugh at you for going to singing lessons. You won’t have to go to a singing teacher. You can have started learning to sing in a few minutes from now, with your friends none the wiser until you are ready to perform for them.