For all you budding singers out there, the ones who secretly long to jump up on a stage and belt out a popular melody but restrain yourselves to just singing in the shower, Love to Sing with Roger Love might be the instructional program for you. Roger Love, a vocal coach for celebrities and musicians, brings a relentless good cheer and upbeat approach to his home video version of his vocal coaching.

While the presentation is a little hokey, with the trappings of a talent show rather than an instructional program, one thing is clear from the beginning: Roger Love knows his stuff. He does an excellent job of explaining everything, whether it's a basic concept about the way the vocal cords work, or how to do a particular vocal exercise. With his can-do attitude and deft explanations, it's easy to see why Love is a well-regarded instructor.

Love to Sing with Roger Love touches on several different aspects in improving your singing ability. Love spends a fair amount of time on posture and breathing, before moving to the "anatomy of the voice" and exercises for developing vocal strength and quality. He also covers dealing with stage fright and how to produce the vibrato effect.

The main problem with Love to Sing is that it's too rushed. The program is only 63 minutes long, and a considerable amount of that time is wasted in showing the six in-studio participants performing songs, along with a few rather cheesy "testimonial" interviews. The result is that while the actual instructional content is solid, there's always a sense of time pressure, that Love is hurrying things a bit in order to fit everything in. (And in fact, one topic that is mentioned in the introduction is never actually covered in the program.) It's possible that viewers are intended to sing along with the performances, for additional practice, but if that's the case they're badly presented and too advanced.

Viewers who are interested in getting the most out of the instructional parts of the program will need to watch the DVD several times, and on each viewing will most likely want to back up and play the instructional segments several times in succession in order to get a decent amount of practice in. The chapter design unfortunately makes this more difficult than it ought to be, as the "performance" segments are sometimes but not always marked as separate chapters: if you just press "skip" at the start of a performance, you will sometimes skip over good instructional material by accident as well.

The DVD

Video

Love to Sing is presented in its original 1.33:1 aspect ratio. For an instructional video, it offers satisfactory image quality, with an image that's clear and bright. The picture is not very sharp, and the few longer-distance shots are quite blurry, but on the whole it's perfectly fine.

Audio

The Dolby 2.0 soundtrack offers a solid listening experience for Love to Sing. The participants' voices are always clear, clean, and natural-sounding, with no background noise or distortion.

Extras

The only special feature included here is the ability to individually watch the six song performances from the program. This is fine for a special feature; I just wish that these performances had been restricted to the bonus materials instead of taking up time in the main feature that could have been put to better use.

Final thoughts

Love to Sing with Roger Love is an up-beat, easy to understand introduction to improving your vocal performances. While the program is unfortunately rather rushed, with less time devoted to actual instruction than I'd have wished for, Roger Love does offer clear and understandable explanations and exercises that viewers will find easy to do on their own. It's not really complete enough to stand on its own, at least for anyone who's really serious about singing, but it could be a great resource for amateur musical clubs (like choirs and school drama programs) to give a basic introduction for beginners. Rent it.