YOU as Teacher

I want to speak to you this month about how to get the best out of your singing lessons. Whether you have a teacher locally that you visit regularly, or you take long distance lessons from Sing Your Life, it's important that you know this.

During the intervals between your lessons with your teacher or coach, YOU must act as both the teacher AND the student. Since your teacher cannot be with you everytime you practice, you need to practice as if the teacher WERE with you.

In other words, instead of self-editing the sounds you make during practicing, and judging your sessions subjectively, you should be monitoring your progress from a distance or as if you were helping someone else to improve their singing and performance skills. A practice session should go something like this:

You begin to practice an element of your singing that you feel needs improving...let's say for this example, that your support seems to give up during a song and you tend to lose power, tone quality and breath as the song continues.

The best way to practice this element is to begin the song you are practicing with the fundamentals firmly established. Okay, so you breathe in through the nose and into the belly, you bear down and start singing. All is well, but you notice that as you approach a more difficult part of the song, you are tensing up or pulling the voice up into your throat.

What do you do?

Well, what would your teacher do if she/he were there watching you?

The teacher would stop you and ask,

"Where is the tension that is causing you to pull the voice up into your throat?"

You might answer,

"I feel as if I'm running out of air as I approach this passage."

The teacher would then ask,

"What's going on with the diaphragm? Is is taught or relaxed?"

Then you might notice that you've stopped using it altogether.

So when you're singing by yourself, you need to be asking these kinds of questions to locate the tension, and determine why it is occurring. Then you simply make corrections each time you locate an area that needs correction.

What you DON'T do is beat yourself up, listen to how bad the sound is, and start the song from the beginning and sing it over and over again getting more and more frustrated and tearing up your throat in the process.

Remember what I've said in the past,

"singing is NOT practicing."

You need to practice ELEMENTS of singing individually and repetitively until that particular element is no longer an issue, much the way a tennis player practices a serve, or an overhead smash.

Rule of Thumb

And as you act as coach during the those times BETWEEN your supervised lessons with your teacher, you gain the objectivity needed to raise your game to the next level, and you help your teacher do his/her job. The teacher cannot give you a magic potion to make you a better singer....not without YOU. So be the mirror for yourself between visits...stay objective as you dissect a song into areas to practice and then repeat them often enough to make them "stick". You will find as you practice this way that the elements you practiced until they "stick" will also "stick" in other songs that present the same area of concern.

So the rules are:

• STOP! At the first sign of tension,
• Locate the tension in the body.
• Determine the reason for it,
• Go to the appropriate drill to handle it,
• Repeat the passage or line in the song that contains the area to improve...repeat several times,
• DO NOT sing the entire song again until the element of concern has been handled.