This week I wanted to talk about what it takes to build a voice to have for life. Clients of all ages ask about this, and so I thought it was worth going into a few fundamental precepts that I think are relevant to voices at all stages.
1. Start Young / As soon as you can
Sadly, time travel hasn’t been invented yet. So we can’t go back in time and tell our younger self to start doing things right or more correctly. But if the best time to start was yesterday, then the second best time is today.
Working on our voice a little every day is incredibly potent. Not just because this is like doing a little exercise everyday (which is inherently good for us), but because it means our practice keeps pace with how our voices change over time.
When I get to start work with voices around age 19/20, it’s relatively easy to get them on track, and as such it’s easier to then to keep them on track.
Why? Put simply, there’s not a lifetime of bad habits to unpick, simply because they aren’t old enough to have built up or ingrained such habits. Their voice is also as light as it will ever be, so the weight of the voice is as workable as it can ever be. This makes it much easier to corral it into a better way of operating than when the voice ages.
As voices age, things get darker, weightier and fuller sounding. This process is slow and gradual. Hence, if I can start working with a voice when they are younger and train them appropriately to work on their voice well most everyday, their practice routine will naturally keep pace and adjust WITH the gradual changes… rather than fighting against them.
That extra weight and depth become qualities that are integrated into the voice, rather than abstract opponents the singer is fighting against. Hence, the sooner one can start, the sooner we can fix issues, but also the easier it is to keep your voice on the straight and narrow as we get older.
2. Appreciate the process takes time
With good technique, range, power and comfort grows. But it doesn’t happen overnight. It’s very much like going to the gym.
For those of you who have ever worked with a good personal trainer, you will know how this works. The PT will start you with a basic set of exercises, and you will begin on immensely manageable weights. Each session, you will adhere to strict form, and if you complete the workout with no issues, the weight will go up on the respective exercises… but only by a small amount.
As a result, your body will be progressively overloaded, in a wholly manageable way. You will find, within even a few months, you are lifting significantly heavier weights, and yet it won’t seem markedly more difficult than where you started.
It is the same with building your voice. We must start with the manageable, and slowly increment this further. This means we are taking sustainable baby steps, rather than trying to jump ahead. As a result, the process takes time. One must make peace with this, just like one must appreciate building a body at the gym takes slow, ordered time.
This dovetails neatly with my next point…
3. Always sing within your means
Broadly speaking, everything that the world of financial advice teaches can be condensed down to one thing: “spend within your means, and invest the difference“.
This is remarkably simple advice beyond even finance, yet it’s all too easy to bite off more than we can chew. In the same way, many of us are vocally writing cheques that our voices cannot cash.
Far too many performers are continuing to perform in such a way that they are slowly eroding their “vocal savings”, til eventually they are in the red, and can’t get back out.
The advice here, is that we should always sing WELL within our means. At the beginning of our vocal development journey, this will often seem less exciting. Especially if you’re a seasoned performer, you want to deliver an exciting performance… and the audience wants to hear it!
But if that exciting performance is outstripping what your voice can handle, then you are curtailing your shelf life enormously. Instead, we must sing well within our means, and then GROW our means. That way we can have both have our cake and eat it… but per point 2, this takes time.
4. If it hurts, stop doing it
This is an extension of my previous point, but it can be summed up with a joke from the late, great comedian Tommy Cooper:
“Doctor doctor, it hurts when I do this…
“Well, don’t do it then”
When we sing outside of our means, or perhaps we THINK we are doing it right… but it hurts… that’s a sign we’re not doing it right. Even if it’s not pain, but discomfort, or unpleasant tension, that’s a sign we need to NOT do that thing.
When we run ourselves ragged, constantly redlining our voices, it doesn’t matter how advanced our voices are, they will enter decline and go backwards. This is something I’ve experienced first hand, and a lot of it is often down to having built a great voice, we over-estimate how much we think we can do and can get away with.
Conclusion
To build and keep a great voice for life takes time. It doesn’t happen overnight, and requires consistent dedicated practice. It requires us to do the right thing most every day, knowing full well that perfection is not perfectly possible. It also requires us to be honest about where our present limits lie today, in order to keep progressing beyond them tomorrow.
If you’d like book in to look at laying the foundations for this in your own voice, you can book in via our booking form right here.