Four Types of Singing Lesson That I Teach

Over the years of training hundreds of singers voices, I’ve noticed that lessons tend to follow similar structures depending on what that specific singer needs in that particular session.

There’s different patterns that tend to appear, and while the exact shape and structure of each session will vary, I have noticed four broad categories of lesson.

1. Give them the one thing they need
2. Hit everything
3. Train their musicality
4. Train their technique

1. Give them the one thing they need

When singers arrive for their first session, this is the ONLY way to go.

If a singer is singing too lightly with their chest voice, we will dedicate 80% of the session to targeting that. If we cannot fix that issue, we can go no further. There are a plurality of other things that can occur, where if a singer is missing a component of vocal balance and finding it hard to replicate, we are going to have to target that aspect explicitly for most of the session.

It really doesn’t matter what else is going wrong/not-so-right, we MUST get them to experience the difference in doing the missing element correctly before we can take aim at anything else.

And when singers first start, there is typically a LOT to fix. There’s almost always dozen different issues I could look at, but we have to stay focused on giving them the one thing they really need.

We are always seeking to give them vocal balance, but fundamentally they must come away with a simple and easy to follow objective to begin with. If I try to take aim at too many things in their voice, it will inherently be confusing, and hard for the singer to get a sense of what we are seeking to accomplish. This in turn makes it hard for them to practice effectively or with conviction when in their own practice routine.

NOTE:
Even with more experienced singers, this approach can be needed. I’ve had some sessions even recently, where instead of adopting a more typical lesson (per item 2 below), I’ve decided to get them absorbed in just that ONE thing they need more of.

2. Hit everything

Once singers get to a certain level of competence, it’s more about giving them a balanced workout that hits everything. This assumes no one thing (per lesson type 1 above) is standing out as egregiously absent or overbearing. This means we’ll do narrow vowels to wide vowels, sounds with more vocal fold contraction to more vocal fold stretch, checking how relaxed their voice (as an instrument) remains through all this, including increasing emphasis on vibrato and legato in exercise and songs etc.

Think of this like a balanced workout at the gym. When people first start at the gym, they need to spend entire sessions focusing on each exercise until they learn the ropes, get their body working roughly right. Then they can string those together into more fully featured and balanced workouts that hit antagonistic muscle groups and don’t lead to asymmetries in their body.

My goal is to make this the fairly standard lesson type for singers, as this means we are building the voice and doing so evenly. If someone spends most of their time in the OTHER session types, then it indicates there’s some fairly recurrent deficiencies in their vocal approach that we are always having to keep at the forefront.

3. Train their musicality

At the end of each session we always apply their vocal technique to a song. This is to get the rubber to meet the road, and help them to train their vocal application and taste. For some, I will curtail the technique side of sessions to help install them deeper into a more musical experience of using their voice.

As I also accompany them on piano, we can also work more broadly on their musicality. Even the mere accompaniment aspect is novel for many singers (used to singing with backing tracks or bands that have learned their arrangements by rote). Like learning a foreign language, this is like moving from merely learning vocabulary to getting out on the street and actually connecting those words to real conversation. They need to develop a deeper level of wiring for their voice and real singing.

Music is a conversation, where you have to listen to the other people playing with you, and respond to what they are saying. It’s a trading off against each other, taking cues and giving cues. This takes time to develop.

Many singers don’t have the most developed sense of musicality. They are used to “leading” only, i.e. I am singing, and everything else just runs alongside. That lack of listening skill also impacts on how much they can hear in their own voice.

So by applying their vocal technique to such a “live-fire exercise” as accompaniment, their ability to hear the music and develop their aesthetic sensibility in how they deploy their voice, how they sound, what sounds good/bad, is a powerful thing to do.

4. Train the bridge from technique into song

For some singers, their musicality can be pretty darn good. Their technicality can be pretty darn good as well – on exercise.

But when we move to song, there’s a schism. They can do everything write in exercises, their voice knows what to do… but in song they default to old habits that the exercises are not over-writing.

This can be particularly frustrating for the singer, to feel their voice working so smoothly in exercises, but then hear it derail in song. This is where we will take time to focus on that invisible seam between the two.

Ways we do this is to segue slowly from an exercise they can do, morphing to a version of the melody they are trying to sing with the same sound we used in the exercise, until we get to the actual song itself. That way they are able to retain the experience of the successful exercise, and port that experience over into the song.

Other solutions are to take a sideways step and target a song that they have no bad habits built up with, and use THAT song to deploy the technique they’ve built, then move it into the songs they have created bad habits within.

This is particularly common with singers who have sung a LOT in the past, whether as a gigging professional or for fun at home. This makes for a lot of neurological patterns that are deeply ingrained. The only way to address that is to do higher volume reps of singing BETTER, in order to write-over those old patterns.

Conclusion

If pushed I could doubtless think of other categories of lessons I’ve given, e.g. focusing on mic technique for live, recording approaches, style application, changing keys of songs, arranging sets, etc, but for today I’d say these are the four main types of session I find I end up giving. The same person may experience all four depending on what roadblocks we find in their voice.

I hope that has provided some insight into what I am trying to achieve on a singer-by-singer, session-by-session basis. If you’d like to experience this for yourself, please do book yourself in via the big red button below.