The Four "R"s of Practice

Introduction

I was trying to come up with something interesting to write about this month, when I received an email from one of our members who said that he was having trouble sustaining the progress he was making by doing our drills. He asked for more drills that might help. My immediate feeling was that he might just be doing the drills incorrectly, (because Practice Makes Permanent, not Perfect), OR that he wasn't doing them enough.

That's when I came up with this article, which incidentally entered my consciousness moments before this writing. So thanks to Paul from "down under" for his inspiration.

Read on...

Defined

Singers, if you're not sustaining results from your practice sessions, you're either practicing incorrectly or inconsistently...period!

The 4 "R's" of practice are:

• RITUAL
• REGULARITY
• REPETITION
• RELAXATION

When you become ill and are given a prescribed medication to take by your doctor, you have to take it at certain times right? Every 4 hours, or six hours? And you'll "remind" yourself when it's TIME to take your meds cause you wanna get better.

RITUAL

Ritual, then, refers to mentally, (or verbally) announcing to yourself that it's time to practice. Habits are formed through ritual, singers, so make it as big a deal as you like. One of my students used to get up in the morning and after bathing and a cup of coffee, she'd look in the mirror and declare in a loud voice, "The Time Has Come to Practice My Singing. INTO the closet I GO!" It can be silly, over the top, or whatever you want, just so you do it!

REGULARITY

Regularity means just that. Every day...Every...Single...Day. At the same time, you must do the drills. Remember, we are addressing the cell memory of your instrument, not your conscious mind. In the RITUAL step, you chose the time of day you will practice. Now, you need to keep the commitment and make it your routine to do so.

I have a student who "practices" something like this:

"okay, breathe...In, out, in, out. okay, I got it...grunt..uh, uh, uh...got that, okay next...etc."

She goes so fast you'd think she was in a race. And then she complains to me that she's not getting better.

REPETITION

The 3rd "R", REPETITION is repeating each individual element until you feel that it's becoming automatic? You're teaching your body how to do something it hasn't done before, so it takes as long as it takes for it become natural. If you were studying piano rather than voice, you would be given scales to practice until your fingers knew their way around the keyboard in every single key. It's the same with the vocal instrument.

If you practice the drills daily and repeat each one over and over until you feel good about it, and your body is consistently performing them correctly, that action is literally changing the cell and muscle memory of your body.

RELAXATION

Now it's now time to relax! Over-practicing can be as detrimental to a singer's progress as not enough practice. It amazes me that some singers practice 3 or 4 hours a day and then cannot understand why they have soreness in their throats.

When you have repeated your elements over and over to the point of it seemingly coming forth with ease, you STOP!

RELAXATION, is allowing the program to germinate in the body and breathing deeply to wind down from your practice session. So there you have it, Singers! The 4 "R's"! When you follow them, you understand that you may not require more drills, just another way to do the ones you do have. I know it gets boring sometimes, but every new thing can get that way...standing at the free throw line and throwing a ball into the basket gets boring; swinging a bat at a ball over and over gets boring, practicing an A Major scale until you can do it without errors CAN get boring, but there isn't any other way to learn the A Major scale, is there?

So take the 4 "R's" into your practicing...and I want to hear from you about your results, okay?

Until next time, Singers!