There are many things that most inexperienced singers don’t grasp. As I was falling asleep a few nights ago, my mind was going over this particular topic. Over the years, I’ve heard a lot of comments from students who are learning to sing, others who can already sing, and still further comments from singers who are out there performing regularly.
“Oh I don’t struggle with stamina, I mean my voice is often tired about 10 minutes into singing, but that’s fairly normal”
“I gave up on that song. I tried to sing it once and it sounded bad.”
“I can’t hit the note in practice, but I definitely hit it while at the [loud] gig”
“I’ve got about 100 songs I do exceptionally well”
If you’ve found yourself ever thinking any of the above is normal, please do read on. Real pros grasp why these things aren’t true. The sooner you can grasp the reasons why, the sooner you can leverage the parameters of good singing to your advantage, (for very little work!).
1. Practice makes permanent, not perfect
People often say “practice makes perfect”. But that is not true. PERFECT practice makes perfect, but most of us don’t practice perfectly. What practice of any quality does, is train the body to do something in that way. Practice makes whatever we are doing permanent, for better or for worse.
Some singers practice too little, thereby not leveraging the power of practice to make things permanent. Some practice imperfectly too much, thereby ingraining bad habits deeply and making them hard to remove.
Good quality, manageable, focused practice; done more often than not in the week. That’s the way to sustain good progress, which I’ve talked about in this article here.
2. It takes reps to dial songs in
You have no idea how many people bring in a song they want to work on, and give up after a verse and half a chorus. Why? Because they think they sound bad. And you know what? They often do! But for good reason, because they’ve not put in the reps on that song.
I’ve talked before about how I feel like I need to put in about 80-100 reps before I get a song under my belt. If it’s a brand new song, it can take 10-20 reps just to learn the lyrics, melody and song structure. It may take another 20-40 to get all the way through with no substantial errors. It may take another 20-40 to get it feeling relatively smooth in our voice. And at THAT stage, the real refining work begins. The first 80-100 reps was just to get a workable first draft of the song.
Do not underestimate how many reps it takes to get a song into your voice. In this way, you also cannot be exceptional at 100 different songs. With how much refinement even a handful of songs takes, it’s just too hard to get a full hundred songs to an exceptional standard. Instead, they’ll all be OK to decent at best.
3. Singing is a marathon, not a sprint
When singers claim they are tired or voice is sore after 10 minutes, or even an hour, they are trying to rush their voice to the finish line. Pros in Vegas, touring singers, etc, all have to gig long shows night after night for years. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. It’s an endurance event, not a “run yourself into the ground, then spend a week recovering” self-flagellation event.
Most damage is done through mis-use, over-use or abuse of the voice, which I’ve talked about here.
4. Singing is fine motor control, not weight lifting
Per the last point, once you realise you can’t just slam your voice into songs hard and hope for the best, you have to take a step back and re-evaluate your approach. You have to practice songs in a way that makes you feel like after you’ve done an hour of singing, you could’ve done another hour. If you’re reliant on pure adrenalin to force your voice to the highest notes at a gig, you’re not on a sustainable path. Sooner or later your voice will suffer and the wheels will come off the wagon.
In this way, we build a relaxed condition into our voice and our singing. This then allows us to improve the fine motor control it requires to acquire ever higher pitches, done with ease and power, for long periods.
5. Song choice is like fashion sense
We’ve all seen people on the street where their fashion choice has left us thinking “what on earth made you think of squeezing into that outfit?!“. Yet, that same outfit may look wonderful on someone else of another build.
Song choice is much the same. If you have access to the notes required, of course you can attempt the song. And much like clothes, it’s worth trying on to see how it fits. But we have to be honest about whether we think that flatters our voice.
The irony is, we won’t know if it’s truly a good or bad fit til we’ve done a lot of reps to figure out the song. This can be quite frustrating for inexperienced singers, as they suffer from a sunken cost fallacy over songs they’ve put work into. “I’ve done hours of work on this song, I’m not giving up on it” is a common attitude. Like someone who has bought an expensive pair of skinny jeans insisting they can fit into them… but reality says otherwise.
I’ve written more about this topic right here.
6. You can’t change reality
The last point is a summation of the above. Despite the above being fairly widely observed by most professional singers and other coaches, I do get the odd conversation where clients want to dispute reality, rather than accept the nature of things. I can’t tell you why. Maybe it’s over-confidence. Possibly it’s because they prefer their beliefs to stay as they are. Perhaps it’s because changing their belief would involve recognising they’ve spent a lot of time going down the wrong set of tracks. Who knows.
We can absolutely improve our voices, become adept and beautiful singers on things we never thought possible. Many things are malleable, but not everything is bendable around our mental and physical efforts. Once we recognise that there are certain parameters that we must work around, we can leverage them to our advantage, rather than feel punished by them.
If this is something you’d like to discover in your own voice, my booking form is right here.