Dear Alex

Please get yourself some lessons! You may sound utterly fabulous, and I hope you do, but unless you have some help you can end up ruining a good instrument.

Your voice is a delicate set of tiny muscles which use air pressure and air flow to create musical sounds. Voices are precious. You can't get a new one, and voices are easily damaged by wrong use. Voice clinics in hospitals regularly see singers who have hurt themselves through unhealthy use of their voice.

You can't learn to sing from a book, so I would avoid getting 'teach yourself' books, because a number of them are written by people who don't understand what they are talking about. Singing teaching is an unregulated industry. Anyone at all can set themselves up as a singing teacher or write a book and make up all kinds of mumbo jumbo about technique.

Exercises in isolation won't help you very much really. Exercises need to be for specific problems that you have, or things you want to achieve.

If you get a teacher, he or she should probably be a member of one of the professional organisations. This isn't a guarantee that they are good, but at least it means they are thinking about the way they teach, and have access to courses and professional development (the British Voice Association, the Association of Teachers of Singing are the two big organisations in the UK). The Associated Board also runs diploma courses for teachers.

Someone who has a qualification such as the CTABRSM (Certificate of Teaching, Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music) has done a singing teaching course over a number of years and invested time and effort in their teaching.

Good luck