Swift, measurable progress in the voice studio depends on effective practice habits.
If you want to be a great singer, you have to be a great practicer.
Many voice students never learn how to establish an effective practice regimen. They perform a few warm-ups and then sing through some repertoire, perhaps pausing to take a second shot at a high note that didn't go so well, fix a pitch or rhythmic mistake, make another attempt at getting through a long phrase on one breath, and then move on to the next piece.
They hope that practicing like this will make things better. Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't.
And sometimes it makes things worse.
Voice teachers need to do more to help students develop effective practice habits, myself included.
If I fall short here, it's because I'm so focused on giving you as much feedback and instruction as I can during our precious hour together that I don't like to take the time to lecture you about what to do when I'm not around. My expectation is that you will listen to the recording of your lesson and then strive to reproduce and reinforce the work we accomplished.
However, your best attempts to do this will not be as productive as they should be unless you fully understand the intention behind my instructions, validate them for yourself, and apply them throughout all your exercises and repertoire rather than just the things we touched on.
(By the way, if you are simply doing repetitive exercises without knowing what they're for and your teacher either cannot or will not explain their purpose...consider finding a new teacher!)
My next several posts will address how to develop a practice regimen or fine-tune one that is already working pretty well for you.
All effective enterprise begins with a clear intention, so it is important to establish specific goals for your work in the studio. Practicing has several distinct but overlapping purposes:
- Developing your instrument;
- Improving your technique;
- Learning new repertoire;
- Refining musical and dramatic details of repertoire you already know.
At times you may wish to make progress on all of these goals in the same practice session, while at other times you may wish to zero in on only one or two.
The exercises you perform to build technical facility or stamina may not be the best ones to use as warm-ups if the purpose of your practice session is to learn new repertoire.
You can spend only so much time singing every day, so it's crucial to make the most of it.
So begin by setting yourself an agenda for what you're going to address and/or accomplish during each session. Of course, it is important to be flexible as you discover new things about your voice, so you may end up deviating from your plan – if you have a breakthrough that enables you to manage your breath much more efficiently, you may decide to try to apply your new skill to a slow sustained song rather than the fast one you were originally planning to tackle.
But start with a plan. A plan focuses your mind so that you can follow your intentions and later assess your own work based on the degree to which you fulfilled them.
A plan will also help you avoid falling prey to unhelpful self-criticism.
Every singer has had those days where it feels like nothing is working right. You end up bailing on your practice session muttering about how awful your voice is, you'll never have a career, etc.
If, however, you have a clear plan for what you intend to accomplish, those days may very well end up being the ones when breakthroughs are most likely to occur.
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