I've had a fair few singing lessons in my time, attempting to train my incredibly loud and unruly…read morevoice into the dulcet tones that will make me into the next Christina Aguilera. Needless to say, I haven't quite managed it yet. When a group of Brighton Qypers met in a darkened booth at Lucky Voice, we were lucky enough to have singing coach Zoe joining us for some vocal coaching before we hit the cocktails and karaoke mic. I was probably more nervous than anyone else since quitting my singing lessons at sixth-form college and my half-hearted Latin chamber choir contributions two years later, I hadn't dared to let anyone else hear me sing in public. But thankfully, 'Sing Confidently' is an entirely apt name for Zoe's business. We started off with the familiar breathing exercises (in through the nose, hold, out through the mouth) and moved on to the standard singing of octaves. Instead of the usual La-La-La-La-La-La-La-La-Laaaa, we sang the word yawn instead. A great idea, as I always remember my singing teacher saying that if your warm-ups make you feel like yawning then you're relaxing and breathing properly. As the only girl at the warm-ups, I embarrassingly had to sing the scales on my own, but Zoe is so good at putting you at ease that it didn't seem to matter after a couple of attempts. We then moved on to the inspired exercise of singing Happy Birthday whilst acting out a particular emotion, while everyone else had to guess what it was. Reassuringly, the point of this was that if you're performance is well-acted and convincing, it doesn't really matter what you sound like. Good, eh? In just one hour, Zoe did wonders for my vocal confidence and I'm definitely considering taking a couple of lessons with her before my next karaoke session.

I had an hours group vocal coaching from Zoe as part of a trip to Lucky Voice, a private room…read morekaraoke bar in Brighton. I was a bit nervous to start with as my singing is terrible. However, Zoe was lovely and soon made everyone feel relaxed no matter how talented or terrible they were. She had us doing all sorts of exercises to warm us up and get us singing. These were not only fun but confidence boosting too. Wow! Maybe I could sing after all? Unfortunately things reverted back to normal pretty quickly after the session but for one very enjoyable hour I thought maybe just maybe.....