I have always loved to practice. After taking up the clarinet at age 11, I spent every free moment exploring the mechanics of the instrument, studying fingering charts, playing whatever music I could get my hands on, and picking out melodies of current pop tunes. In my late 20s, with a master’s degree and several years’ professional experience behind me, I decided to set down my clarinet in favor of singing. But it still makes me deeply nostalgic to recall the ritual of sitting down to practice: opening the velvet-lined case, massaging cork grease around the joints, preparing my reed, and being overtaken with the anticipation of growth and discovery.
Many singers lack well-defined practice strategies. Some record their lessons and try to reproduce what they most recently did with their voice teacher. Others warm up with a vocalise or two and then sing through their repertoire, stopping to repeat a passage or a high note that didn’t work well on the first pass. And then there are those who don’t really practice at all, beyond putting in the effort necessary to learn their music—not because they are undisciplined, but because they really aren’t sure whether they’d be making things better or worse.
Instrumental teachers traditionally demand adherence to a strict regimen of exercises, scales, etudes, and repertoire, tracking their students’ weekly progress and setting new milestones once goals have been reached. Many of the vocal practice strategies I share with my students draw on what I learned over my years as a clarinetist. The rest have evolved through careful examination of the inherent differences between playing an instrument and being an instrument.
This column will address ways that singing practice can draw on time-honored instrumental practice strategies, the practice issues that are unique to singers, and how to design an effective practice regimen tailored to your current goals and challenges.
Applying Instrumental Practice Strategies
To what extent can singers adopt their instrumentalist colleagues’ practice habits? “Instrumentalists often spend more time using repetitive practice techniques on smaller chunks in order to internalize and solidify the music,” observes Erica Sipes, pianist, cellist, and practice coach. “Singers can also benefit from incorporating more focused, mindful repetition on individual passages and on smaller chunks of music. As long as one is keeping the mind engaged and is being creative with the repetitions, this type of practice can enable one to quickly and effectively learn music, more so than just running large chunks of music over and over again.”
Sipes and I are both fans of the “deep practice” methods Daniel Coyle outlines in his inspiring book The Talent Code. Deep practice is characterized by breaking things down into essential, manageable components, fiercely focusing on each in turn, and then coordinating them together. Whether you are an instrumentalist or a singer, this approach yields outstanding results for both improving technique and learning repertoire.
Practice as Ritual
Begin your practice session by creating a private space for yourself and focusing your mind on what you are about to do. The instrumentalist’s need to assemble his clarinet or tune his cello strings provides him with the opportunity to distance himself from whatever concerns may have followed him into the practice room and set his intentions on the work that awaits.
Prepare yourself for vocal practice with a few moments of meditation, physical stretches, and breathing exercises.
Break Things Down into Manageable Chunks
The components of vocal technique include the following:
Alignment
Breathing
Phonation
Articulation
Resonance
Each of these can be further broken down into more specific components. For example, articulation includes all movements of the jaw, tongue, lips, and everything else that contributes to the definition of vowels and consonants. Narrow your focus so that you’re really working on only one or two of these components at a time. This is the way to create new, permanent good habits for your singing technique.
Set Clear Goals
Whether your agenda consists of developing your instrument, improving technique, learning new repertoire, improving on old, or some combination of all of these things, set specific, realistic goals for each practice session.
The mechanics of learning to play an instrument seem relatively easy to quantify. As a clarinetist, one of my goals during a given week might have been learning a staccato two-octave D-flat major scale at a certain tempo marking with good intonation, even dynamics, and steady rhythm. The process was systematic and repetitive, and it was easy to evaluate whether I was making progress towards my goal.
The mechanics of improving singing technique and learning repertoire are actually not so different from the mechanics of learning to play a scale on the clarinet because the neurological process of motor learning is identical. Making changes in your physical coordination requires focused intention and reinforcement through repetition. One way to define singing practice would be the inhibition of these old patterns and the installation of new, desirable ones.
Anything you wish to achieve with your vocal technique can be broken down into manageable components. Analyze the mechanics of what you’re habitually doing, compare them with what you ought to be doing instead, and use repetition to install and reinforce the more desirable movements. It really is that simple. It does, however, require accurate analysis of your movement patterns, patiently developing the coordination to supplant them with new ones, and adequate, focused repetition to establish new habits.
Learn Repertoire Intelligently
Sipes finds that “instrumentalists are a little more practiced (pun intended) at separating out layers in order to learn the music. For instance, pianists often learn the right hand first, then the left hand—they don’t put them together until each hand is comfortable.” Many of the singers she works with practice repertoire without addressing these layers individually. “They dive right in, trying to learn the rhythm, the pitches, and the text all in one fell swoop. This is a lot for the brain to process all at once!
“Trying to learn music keeping all of the layers together from the beginning opens the door to frustration and makes it more likely that something will be learned incorrectly and, even worse, repeated over and over again incorrectly,” continues Sipes. “I encourage singers to learn in layers … although it may seem like this process takes longer, it produces much better results in the long run and allows for much more confident performing in the end.”
Breaking repertoire study down into layers is a little different for singers than it is for instrumentalists. Because dramatic expression is a big part of what drives your technique, it’s best to begin with the text rather than woodshedding the individual technical mechanics of singing before considering what you intend to communicate through them.
In The Naked Voice: A Wholistic Approach to Singing, W. Stephen Smith recommends this procedure for repertoire study:
Step One: Study the Text
Step Two: Speak the Text
Step Three: Speak the Text in Rhythm
Step Four: Get the Pitches in Your Ear
Step Five: Sing It
These steps may comprise separate layers that must be addressed individually. Studying the text means creating an accurate word-for-word translation and understanding the grammar of each phrase. Speaking the text includes diction preparation.
I recommend applying this procedure to one or two phrases at a time rather than a song or aria as a whole. Then be sure to practice the transitions between phrases: consider your character’s thought process as you move from one idea to the next and choreograph the timing and coordination of your releases, breaths, and onsets.
While approaching repertoire study this way may mean that it requires several practice sessions to get all the way through a new piece for the first time, it is well worth it. You will learn all of your material accurately with clear dramatic intention and excellent technique, avoiding the need to unlearn mistakes or look up words later.
Practice Issues Particular to Singing
Singers Are Later Bloomers
While instrumentalists usually receive instruction beginning in elementary or middle school, singers do not begin individualized study until their mid or late teens. Instrumentalists must learn basic music-reading skills alongside technique from the very beginning, but singers may initially have little access to musicianship and theory training, making it difficult to learn and practice repertoire. Singers’ interest in classical music is often inspired by choral participation, so they have come to understand vocalizing as a rote means of warming up the voice rather than as a method for developing specific skills. They have also become used to practicing and learning as a group. By the time they begin serious one-on-one study with a (hopefully) decent teacher, it can be very difficult for them to accustom themselves to the solitary, structured, self-directed nature of practice. It is therefore crucial that singers receive as much structure, support, and guidance as possible for developing good practice habits and musicianship skills.
If you’ve made it midway through an undergraduate voice performance degree and feel like you never learned how to practice effectively, know that you’re not alone—most singers have some catching up to do in this area. It is not too late for you to develop excellent practice habits.
The Influence of Speech Habits
A violin exists solely for music making, but a voice exists for all manner of communication. By the time you begin to develop your voice as a musical instrument, it has been your means of verbal expression for many years. Through speech, you will have inevitably developed some habits that are far from optimal for singing. They generally fall into two categories: articulation and registration.
When you learn to speak, you move your articulators in tandem to produce most sounds. However, your jaw, tongue and lips are capable of moving independently from one another, and good singing articulation requires that you train them separately and coordinate them together to promote free laryngeal movement and full resonance. Singing practice therefore must include redefining the way you articulate most of your vowel sounds and many consonants.
In speech, most people emphasize heavy registration and restrict themselves to a narrow, low range. Singing requires access to the fullest possible range and the ability to modulate registration seamlessly from one extreme to the other. Many years of habitual emphasis on low range and heavy registration contributes to the idea that there exists an inherent “break” in the voice or an exaggerated distinction between “chest” and “head” registers. For most singers, practice must therefore alleviate an overly weighty approach throughout the range used in speech.
The Primacy of Expressive Intent
Mastering an instrument involves expert manipulation of an external object. Mastering singing involves directing communicative intentions to elicit a well-coordinated response from your body and voice. While instrumentalists must also channel their expressive impulses through their music making and their playing must become largely reflexive, they are still manipulating an instrument.
By contrast, free singing relies on your ability to cultivate and coordinate physical skill such that all of your dramatic and musical impulses translate directly into reflexive movements. You cannot deliberately and precisely manipulate your larynx, vocal folds, and resonating cavities to produce desired sounds and pitches the same way that an instrumentalist must.
For singers, practicing means both developing the coordination to produce these sounds and pitches and learning to set this coordination in motion in response to thoughts, feelings, and creative impulses.
Designing an Effective Practice Regimen
Every practice session will be a unique undertaking depending on what you wish to accomplish on a given day. Here are my recommendations to make each one as productive and enjoyable as possible.
1. Prepare Your Mind, Body, and Instrument
Take 5 to 10 minutes to focus your mind, stretch your limbs, expand your breathing, and ready yourself for learning.
2. Keep Specific Goals in Mind
Have well-defined, reasonable goals for your practice session. Whether you plan to work on technical skills, learn or refine repertoire, or both, I recommend that you create a list of three to five things that you will address. You can’t make progress on everything at once.
While practicing the skills you have chosen, you will notice other things that need work, but remain focused on the task at hand and plan to address these other things in a future practice session.
3. Maintain Equanimity
You will naturally have emotional responses to both the exciting and frustrating experiences you encounter in the practice room. Celebrate the breakthroughs, have compassion with the frustrations, but do your best to stay on task. Stick to your plan, complete the practice session, and take the time to sort out your feelings afterwards.
4. Allow for Some Flexibility
Start each session with well-defined goals, but allow yourself to re-evaluate them if something different and compelling arises. If you have a breakthrough in breath management that suddenly doubles your ability to sustain a high note, by all means take the time to reinforce that new skill even if you had planned to move on to repertoire study.
Just be honest with yourself so that you don’t spend all your time doing the things you find pleasant while avoiding the things that need the most work.
5. Track and Evaluate Your Progress
Did you cover everything that you intended to in your practice session? Were you able to remain present and focused throughout? Were the results as you anticipated or did some surprising things arise? Give yourself an honest appraisal as well as positive reinforcement for investing the effort.
The results of your practice session will accrue over time rather than being immediately apparent, so reward yourself for engaging in the process. Then plan what you will address in your next practice session.
Some Final Thoughts
When you sing, you are always practicing something. Either you are investing focused work on something that you intend to change and improve or you are repeating and reinforcing the very habits that you wish to transcend. Either you are engaging in a creative process of expression or you are manipulating your voice in pursuit of a particular sound.
I have always loved to practice. While some sessions are certainly easier and more cheerful than others, I know that by the end of my practice session I will have advanced my understanding of what it means to be a singer. I will emerge a changed person, even if it is only in small and subtle ways. I encourage all of you to embrace and deepen your singing practice—for its own sake, as well as to advance your technique and musicianship.
