Tag: singing lessons in nottingham

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How Long Does It Take To Learn To Sing Well?

I often get asked ‘How Long Does it Take To Learn To Sing Well?’… the answer is not just simply ‘how long is a piece of string?’, but it is dependent on your goals and many other factors.

So rather than answer the question of ‘how long does it take to learn to sing well’, I want to talk about how long it takes to become exceptional at something. I want to do this to cast light on how long it takes to learn to do anything, but also to help readers realise it’s a long process to become truly great at something.

Time waits for no man…

In today’s culture, we are often confronted by *successful* people around the world aged 21 or under. Having titles like ‘The Top 100 Most Influential Teens’ on magazines doesn’t help with this. Seeing ‘The Top 10 Richest Under-21s’, or how the pop-chart is populated by people who are all under the age of 25 or even 21 depending which week you are talking about, really doesn’t help with this.

And I think this is a fundamentally flawed world-view, because it propagates the cultural lie that the prime age for achieving success is somewhere between 18-25… and that if you miss *success* or critical acclaim in that period of your life, you have failed. If you haven’t learned to do something to an exceptionally high standard by the time you are 26, you may as well give up.

This is a flawed world-view, and fundamentally untrue.

How can I say this? I refer to exhibit A…

Da Vinci

Leonardo Da Vinci is one of THE defining men of the last millennium. He is credited with countless paintings, inventions, great artworks and had one of the greatest minds not just of his generation, but of the last 1000 years. He truly was what is known as a ‘polymath’, someone who is exceptionally clever to the point of genius, and to be such a genius across multiple disciplines.

Now, for the gut punch. Da Vinci was not known by the world for ANY level of success until he was 46. That’s right. 46. Not 40. Not 30. Not 20. Not 18. Forty. Freaking. Six.

Bear in mind that people regularly died of illness and disease by the time they were 40 at the time Da Vinci was alive, so to not have accomplished anything of note by the time you were 30 could easily have been interpreted as a sign of *nothing will ever happen for me*, and in a far more severe way than we could ever comprehend in the Western world today where we regularly live to 70 years old and then some.

If you fancy an interesting read, go and find a biography of Da Vinci – you will be ASTOUNDED by how much of a failure in terms of critical acclaim he was for much of his life.

This is also consistent with another bit of information that is worth discussing…

The 10,000 hour rule

In multiple books, there is referenced something called the 10,000 hour rule. Without going into extreme depth on this, what this means is that experts in their field are generally found to have become experts by spending a minimum of 10,000 hours of focused practice on their chosen discipline. Studies in specific areas known to be truly difficult have found that there is no-one who becomes known as an expert in a given area who managed to get there without spending that requisite time focusing their mind on that task. Violinists, chess players, songwriters (namely, the Beatles) all got there through an incredible amount of hard work.

Let’s do the maths on that…

5 hours a day for a year, accounting for holidays, sick days etc, generally equates to about 1000 hours of workable time per year. That means to acquire 10,000 hours of focused practice, one should generally expect to spend about 10 years on a given task to be considered an expert in their ability. Obviously, if you work to spend more hours on a task, you will get there quicker, but it must be quality practice.

Either way, we are talking about YEARS of focus and determination to get to that level. Not ‘6 months and I STILL haven’t been successful’, or ‘2 years and I STILL haven’t got a record deal’… we are talking YEARS. In Da Vinci’s case, we are talking DECADES of dedication to his chosen craft (or crafts, even).

The Slow Road

We are surrounded by a ‘fast-food’ culture. Where stuff happens fast, and NOW. People don’t like waiting for things. Even movies are now ‘on-demand’. Amazon offer guaranteed next day delivery. Food shops are 24/7.

I’m not saying that you need to spend 10,000 hours in to learn how to sing. You can become a good singer pretty quickly with the right work. But the better you want to be, the loftier your goals, the longer it takes. The reality is, the road to success in ANYTHING is slow going. There may be moments where you speed up, moments where you slow down, but there is no substitute for putting in the time.

For those of you feeling a bit down at the moment…

… maybe you feel like you are getting nowhere, take a moment. Consider how old you are. Consider how long you’ve been doing what you’ve been doing. Consider how focused you have been on the task. Then realise that the road IS MEANT to be slow. It’s never been fast. The idea that you can become an expert in something within 2 hours of trying it for the first time is a cultural lie that we are led to believe.

Lasting ability is worth pursuing, but it does take time. It comes slow. It takes time, dedication, constantly renewed focus, and – I would say – an inner peace that this is the way it must be. Take heart, and keep going!

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Do you hate the sound of your own voice?

A student brought in some Mika this week – and I hadn’t heard this song in ages! So I bookmarked it for sharing this week… and as I was mulling it over, the following thought dropped out onto the blog post.

So, do you hate the sound of your own voice?

This is a really catchy song but certainly not in vogue with current trends and preferences in popular music. It reminds me of certain Queen songs with the melodies, slight aggression, more pristine vocal quality… while also reminding me of some Take That in terms of the emotive feel and production on the track, and still also reminds me of the Scissor Sisters in terms of the slightly eclectic song writing.

Mika’s Vocal Styling
What I find really interesting about Mika’s vocal styling is his use of a much lighter higher range where most singers then and now go for “RAH! MORE POWER EVERYWHERE” (to quote the Eagles song Life in the Fast Lane ‘everything, all the time’).

It sounds a little quirky (note how I avoided the word ‘funny’ there!), but it definitely works.

So Mika clearly does not sound like many other artists out there, and clearly isn’t copied by many others, and yet he had (has?) a successful career doing his own material – yet I know 99% of singers would feel rubbish about themselves if they sounded that way or as different as Mika does, simply because they don’t sound like singer X, Y or Z.

The Lesson to be Learned
A lesson to be learned here is that even if you don’t quite sound like singer X, Y or Z, you should NEVER dismiss what you are doing as artistically unuseable. You may not have found exactly your niche or style just yet, but if you keep developing and trialling what you’ve got going on, you’ll start to develop something all your own.

This lesson is a really useful one even for me. As someone who hears a LOT of singers every day of every week, I encounter singers with voices that I am tonally envious of. Seriously. It’s the ‘grass is always greener’ syndrome. And it’s 100% normal to feel like this from time to time. The challenge is to not be discouraged by this, but to harness that into pure motivation to keep working on our voices, developing strengths AND weaknesses to create something wholly your own… much like Mika has done – unique and standing apart from many other singers, where others may well have given up.

So, are you going to give up? Or are you going to keep going?

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How to practice singing: Part 1 – The Mind-instrument connection

How to practice singing?

It’s been a while since I did a series, so here is a 3 parter to help you understand how to better work on your voice.

Every student I teach asks me how to practice singing, and which songs they should work on… and it seems quite straightforward a question, and sensible to ask such a thing. The difficulty is, the answer isn’t always helpful unless you understand how effective voice training works.

The difference between the voice and every other instrument.

There IS a big difference between the voice and every other instrument that most singers and musicians alike don’t fully appreciate.

How to practice singing - the voice is different from guitar...

When someone wants to take up guitar, they go and buy a guitar. When they buy that guitar, the guitar itself has already been built – it’s finished, end of. There are some adjustable elements, but the instrument itself is ready to go from day 1 to make the right sounds.

The work that a student of guitar (or piano, trumpet, any other instrument you care to name) is almost exclusively directed at establishing a mind-instrument connection, whereby their musical thoughts are translated into notes played by the instrument. They need to learn the right movements to make the instrument play the right notes in the way they desire. The instrument is not a part of our body, so we need to learn how to approach it and respect what it can do. We don’t have any similar movements in our day to day lives to map over to the way we need to approach guitar or other instruments. We are learning these from scratch to develop that mind-instrument connection.

But no work is expended by the student in order to ‘finish’ the instrument – it’s already done! If there is a problem with the instrument, the student buys a new one or finds a professional to fix the instrument. The instrument itself is already complete and (barring any modifications) the sound of the instrument is the sound of the instrument.

The voice is the opposite.

The voice, on the other hand, is NOT a finished instrument. It requires work to develop. Sure, some people have voices/instruments that sound pretty good almost from the moment they open their mouth, but EVERYONE needs to work on their voice to make it better than it already is.

With the voice – unlike guitar or other instruments – we already possess that mind-instrument connection – we use it every day and it is part of our bodies. There are no mechanical hand movements or the like that are alien to normal every day use that we must incorporate into muscle memory, but we operate the voice every day regardless of whether we are singers or not. This gives us unparalleled connection and control over our voices when compared with other instruments, even when we are unskilled singers.

But the voice as an instrument itself is not actually fully built when we start, or even as we progress as singers – it is a never ending process. The voice is an instrument formed of muscles, cartilage, and various other bodily components. The challenge lies in co-ordinating the voice efficiently for use in singing. As such, we are actually building the instrument at the same time as learning to play the instrument. We must learn to co-ordinate our vocal cords in a predictable and repeatable fashion, across a range of pitches, volumes, styles, and to be able to produce a great tone every time.

Like a master luthier making a guitar, it takes time to learn how this works, and it takes dedication to ingrain co-ordination and tone into your voice as an instrument.

So how does that affect the way we should practice?

The real question should be (in my opinion) ‘how do I effectively train my voice’, and the answer, like anything to do with muscles in your body, is with prescribed exercises. If you go to the gym and consult a personal trainer, you will be given a prescribed set of exercises based on the condition of your body when measured against your goals. You can do exercises without a personal trainer, but serious athletes and gym-rats know that only amateurs do it themselves without ever consulting a skilled personal trainer. Personal trainers know their way around different people’s bodies and how such body types will respond to particular exercises. They can help you achieve your goals often many times quicker than when a gym attendee would go by themselves.

The same truth is applicable to training your voice. You need exercises that are geared up for your voice, and you need to practice those exercises regularly. These are not just random scales to improve musicality (though these can be helpful), but are prescribed by skilled voice trainers based on the state of your voice and your desired goals. These tools act as spanners, screwdrivers and wrenches to get inside and tweak the very muscles of your instrument… to co-ordinate them better, to enable you to sing with more ease, less strain, and better tone across your range.

So when you practice, it’s important that WHAT you are practicing is leading you to a state where the condition of voice further enables you to deliver the vocal performance you are after.

If you have any questions about this, just leave a comment below and contribute! Stay tuned for part 2!