That was me long time ago, when I had to sing Beethoven’s aria “Ah, perfido” and struggled with a particularly difficult chromatic passage.

Back then, I didn’t have the tools I have today, so I just repeated it a hundred times until - maybe on the ninety-ninth try - I got it more or less right.

If I had known that it was possible to train both my voice and my ear (very important!) to deal with chromatic passages, I would have saved myself a lot of stress.

Chromatic passages appear frequently in the works of many composers, but because we don’t have to sing them that often, we tend not to really know how to approach them, both vocally and musically.

Ninety-nine percent of the time, it’s more of an ear-training issue than a vocal one - or, better said, it’s about the connection between ear and voice, which is not often trained to handle semitones.

So here are a few preparatory exercises I recommend to singers - both beginners and professionals - anyone who wants to build a strong technical foundation that can be useful in many different arias.