How to Practise Singing
Skills are trained through practise. Singing is a skill. Therefore, good singing can be trained like any other skill.
The seven principles below outline how a singer may improve their ability, though these fundamentals can be applied to the mastery of any skill.
1. Define the elements of success, then drill those elements
All skills consist of sub-skills or abilities. In singing, the simpler ‘essences’ of singing can be distilled into things such as breath management, resonance, vocal range, ease of singing, tuning, stamina, timbre, repertoire, languages and more.
The goal, preferably alongside the input of a good mentor, is to define the elements of what success in the skill looks like for you. Your list will evolve as you progress and unlock greater depth within the skill. Below is an example - and far from exhaustive - list of 5 elements an apprentice might be working towards:
Ease - feeling like singing isn’t exhausting
Authenticity - this is ‘my’ voice, rather than an imitation of someone else’s.
Vowel Clarity - related to authenticity, my singing sounds clear, simple and without interference.
Improve usable range - not feeling like I have to yell for higher notes, rather, that I have a variety of tools and approaches.
Confidence to sing for others - being able to apply all of these elements in performance.
A wise mentor might note the related nature of these elements, and that practitioners at the highest degree of mastery will still be striving for, say, greater clarity (more on achieving mastery in no.7). The skill (singing) is improved by refining the relevant constituent parts. This saves us from decision paralysis, plateaus, boredom - and gives us direction regardless of how advanced we become.
Drill is a term used here to describe the routine practise of a particular element of the skill. Playful, exploratory, perhaps experimental (if you could do it perfectly, you wouldn’t need to explore), drilling here will mean that over time, that element becomes a habit, so the overall skill is improved.
For example, if your current chosen focus is to improve your breath control (the length of phrases you can sing) you may decide to integrate the following into your practise sessions: sustaining airflow, SOVT exercises, belly breathing and abdominal release, a silent inbreath, or experiment with how little air you need to use to achieve a phrase in parenthesis, or many other helpful strategies.
It’s worth noting that exercises themselves are not magic potions - they must be tailored to your specific needs.
Naturally, this skill-building framework, whilst tailored towards singing in this example, could be applied to the development of any skill.
A skill may be imagined as a ship
What we recognise as a ship consists of many elements: the hull, masts, sails, keel, helm, cannons …
Refine the constituent parts, and the whole is improved.
2. Plan, reflect, and take notes
It can be tricky to observe the formation of a new habit in the short term, so remember that skill acquisition is a marathon, not a sprint.
The plan, whilst constantly evolving, will be the direction for your strategy. Reflection requires objective impartiality: am I moving towards my goal, and what has changed since I first obtained it? A regular mix of written notes, feedback, and recording of practise sessions is a good way to chart movement over time.
Your notes are a key to future learning and embedding positive habits. Things that work (or pitfalls to be avoided) can be referred back to, for example: you had a bad day with hayfever but worked through a process that nullified the worst effects, you stumbled across a registration that allowed you easy access into your head voice, you began a session feeling tired, but found a strategy resulting in a feeling that you were able to sing beautifully with no effort.
You are building a catalogue of notes, audio or video, which isn’t merely a ‘look how far I’ve come’ but a personal library for troubleshooting. Your future self will reward you for enshrining that process, because you can look back to look forward - all learning is remembering.
3. Go slow: gradually increase the challenge
Walk before you run. Contrary to what some internet people claim, Nessun Dorma is not a good starter aria for a tenor, nor O mio babbino caro to ‘just test what is comfortable’. Slop, reality television shows such as The X Factor or Britain’s Got Talent helped inculcate the perception that it’s normal for a random person to suddenly ‘discover' that they are the lottery ticket. Whilst you may discover you have a hidden talent, the reality is that hard graft goes on for many hours before a quality exponent of skill is public-facing.
This is not to disrespect the singers that enter these competitions, but rather the company men that misrepresent reality for profit.
Not everyone can be a great singer, but a great singer can come from anywhere. Furthermore, on a technical basis, pursuing the big sound and show-stopper numbers straight away might be gratifying for a time, but numerous singers - including well-known professionals whose livelihood depends on their voice - have had to undergo the humbling experience of rebuilding technical foundations that were improperly learnt.
All fields of human endeavour have rules: you are working through a conversation that began well before you entered the room. If you can accept that you must mute your colours for a time whilst you absorb the rules, whatever the discipline, then you’re in the ideal state to absorb what you need to learn.
When practising, keep aware that you must be developing both familiarity and security in your current understanding, whilst gradually expanding your frontier. Too much challenge will burn up your sanity, as will too little; seek to be in the Goldilocks zone.
4. Limit practise sessions
Time is the limiting factor. Unless our time is currently blank, we must shuffle and batch our activities accordingly. A useful question when working on a new skill or habit is: What am I willing to give up or change to create the time for this?
When starting out, limit your practise sessions to 30 minutes. It’s more important that you show up regularly, rather than perfectly but infrequently. Better thirty minutes of dedicated, focused practise, than three hours with diffused concentration. Aim for six sessions a week, hopefully, achieving four or five on a good week. You can make excellent progress with frequent, high-quality doses.
Consider pre-practise routines for better results: starting to hydrate at least two hours prior; some movement, specifically exercise, stretches, walking or household chores, rather than starting cold from a sedentary day; and light vocalisation or breathwork.
Depending on your goals, a good session could be 10-15 minutes of warming up and exercises, with the remainder of the session dedicated to working on your repertoire.
Repeating this process regularly with presence of mind will allow the habits to develop, without the frustration of believing progress must be instantaneous (it’s not!).
5. Track small intervals of improvement
As the body is both the instrument and the skill, singing progress happens in two ways simultaneously.
A local, day-to-day level (I sang this phrase well today)
A deeper, habitual level embedded in your nervous system (I’ve built the habit to regularly access this part of my voice now).
The latter of these is in the manner of a slow-moving battleship: it takes a while to get going, is the cumulation of all your habits, and will continue to drift long after the order to change course. It is your tacit, innate ability that you cannot change overnight, comprising your local-level efforts.
Music, as with sporting performance, isn’t cramming for a test - you can’t just binge tacit knowledge into your nervous system the night before. The process begins well in advance, but the results compound over time.
You must keep your eye on both the local level adjustments and the deeper, intrinsic levels of improvement.
6. Emulate practise, not performance
Success resembles consistency over time.
Performance, the public-facing outcome of effort, is worth a separate, additional study.
Each act of practise assumes a future listener (audience) in the manner that each act of writing assumes a future reader. However, the apprentice of a skill must first understand the process by which good results are obtained - how do/did the best singers practise?
Find practitioners of your chosen discipline that you admire, learn from their processes, and distil that which is useful for your own craft. Good mentors can help speed and guide you, but there are no shortcuts when it comes to making the journey - you must be the one to ‘do’ the thing!
An apprentice, satisfied in craft, would spend well over ten thousand hours over the years before producing their own ‘masterwork’. Would that more qualifications today were predicated on proof of achievement.
Your personal practise should be at a higher level than your performance level. Think of it as a bonus runway or sand at either side of a sports track. By practising at a higher level than you are performing, you can confidently leave the technical elements at the door when it comes to sharing your work with an audience.
Public-facing demonstrations of a skill, either through masterworks or performance, are derived from the greater efforts that happen behind the scenes.
7. Routine is everything
In time, you will enter a cycle of accelerated returns: as your skill develops, you discover nuances and points of interest previously unavailable to you. Those elements previously requiring conscious effort become automatic, so you reach a new frontier of challenge, complexity and skill - deriving greater satisfaction from the process.
This is a movement towards tacit knowledge: a level of skill that is embedded in your nervous system.
For the overwhelming majority of history, knowledge and skills have been transferred in this ‘natural’ way: by watching, followed by doing, then repeating that process until it is part of you. Wiser people might have called this learning by heart, the scientifically minded might refer to mirror neurons; yet the premise is the same - we learn by doing.
Apprenticeship, regardless of the skill in question, is our most perfected and historically tested conduit for skills transfer. Language, both oral and written, is a recent invention. Ancient skills such as hunting, farming, exploration and construction - right up to the building of the great Gothic cathedrals - were all achieved through routine and imitation. Contemporary mass education, far from the promised boon, has resulted in diminishing returns through standardisation and the impoverishment of much that was localised and particular.
Nothing beats the satisfaction derived from craft. The more you practise, the more the craft becomes part of who you are as the master sculptor’s tools are extensions of his hand, and the greater fulfilment for the apprentice.
In a world where leisure for many is an endless supply of streaming, scrolling and consuming, taking the time to cultivate a craft might be a journey that not only makes the world a little more beautiful, but transforms you in the process.