Rocker cat singer - hard out technique

Bad singing technique – is it really such a barrier to making it big?

Have you ever noticed how many singing stars habitually and regularly sing, ‘out of tune’, nasally, with shallow gaspy breathing and / or loads of throat constriction? This is something that quite frequently preys at the back of my mind when I listen to a number of not only, ‘new on the block’ but also iconic contemporary singers. In recent years the show ‘American Idol’ coined the word ‘pitchy’ to describe singers who couldn’t sing consistently on the right pitch. That word has now passed into the vernacular and become the default comment where the judge seemingly has no other useful insight. However, ‘pitchy’ has struck me as meaningless in so many ways, as there are a number of globally famous singers who have managed to turn consistently off-key, nasal, guttural or constricted singing into a signature style without apparent detriment to a mega career.

What is bad singing technique anyway?

But before we get down to my list of mega-stars with less than traditional technique, let’s dig a little deeper. When we talk about ‘bel canto’ technique there are a number of basic criteria used to identify what constitutes a good technique. This list would include the following concepts.

1. ‘Appoggio’ – or consistent supported sound – a sound that ‘leans in’ to the support of the expanded rib cage and engaged abdominals.

2. A smooth legato with ‘tall vowels’ that optomise the 4 resonating spaces of the body (chest, throat, mouth and sinuses)

3. Masterful ‘messa di voce’ – the ability to ‘lean in’ to a note with a steady crescendo and decrescendo.

4. A silent ‘quick release’ open-throated in-breath that expands the abdomen and flares the ribs . . .

and the list would go on. However, when we get to contemporary styles the criteria becomes murkier, for instance:

Good or bad singing technique is in the eye of the genre?

1. In jazz technique it can be useful to sing with short clipped vowels and long consonants, have a breathy tone and sing a vibrato-less note that morphs into strong vibrato at the end of a sustained tone.

2. In pop music it’s acceptable to slide up or down to the desired pitch using a pronounced vocal fry to start the note a la Brittany Spears. It can also be a good thing to sing with an unsupported breathy tone or use a pronounced strong glottal to start the sound. Nowadays it’s very common for a female pop singer to ‘unhook’ the head registration from the chest and exploit the pronounced ‘break’ between these two registrations a la Sara McLachlan.

3. In musical theatre style it’s desirable to have a huge amount of edge or, ‘twang’ on the sound and exploit what in other genres would be considered an overly strident or ‘driven’ approach to producing sound.

Concepts of good or bad singing technique become more arbitrary. More a matter of style and interpretive licence.

I’ve often encountered this ambiguity in my singing studio. Say a singer asks me how they can sing a folk rock song with better technique. It becomes more meaningful to address this question by looking at how what is done can be changed to create a result more interpretively in tune with the singer’s vision of the song’s meaning. For instance, if the singer has an habitually breathy onset, but is singing the climactic passage in a song about the pain of lost love, it would be useful to give that singer the option to sing with a firmer, more glottal onset, a stronger tone with increased volume and a more frontal ‘edgy’ placement.

Technique is really toolkit

Singer Toolkit

Therefore, I find my self speaking often to my singing students about the singers ‘toolkit’. The toolkit is the myriad options at their disposal to achieve the heightened stylistic and emotional effects they wish to convey per the genre they sing in. Basic healthful production is always paramount, but within that basic parameter the interpretive options are vast.

Really when we’re talking about good vocal technique we’re really talking about the ability to -

Know why you’re doing what you’re doing and be able to replicate it, or change it on demand.

This means if the song and style calls for a soft dynamic with a breezy under-supported quality we can do it, and if it calls for a strong, highly compressed onset with aggressive frontal resonance we can do that too. A singer is an artist who paints with the canvas of sound vibration, the more diverse and vibrant the palette, the more expressive the artist.

Finally, here’s my list of the top 5 stellar career singers who depart from traditional ‘good’ singing technique

Singer Neil Young

No. 1 Neil Young A brilliant singer-song-writer whose thin, reedy tenor is synonymous with many of the greatest anthems of the seventies. Neil’s delivery has always been low-key, exploiting a nasal, vaguely monosyllabic style with variable shades of,  ‘under the note’ delivery.

Singer Bob Dylan

No. 2 Bob Dylan Another great icon of the sixties and early seventies, Bob’s notoriously nasal and conversational delivery style defined the music of a generation. In most people’s minds in anthems like, ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ the singer and the song are inseparable – sibilant nasality and all!

No. 3 Joe Cocker This artist has enjoyed admirable longevity despite a high-pressure pharyngeal technique that makes me massage my throat muscles in sympathy! (When I was younger I couldn’t actually listen to this artist, the intense pressure on the vocal folds I heard would make my own throat close-up in distress!) However, for many who adore this artist, they associate the high vocal pressure delivery with emotional intensity and authenticity.

Singer Christina Aguilera

No. 4 Christina Aguilera OK Christina has what is often described as a, ‘mean set of pipes’ but often, particularly in her more recent career, uses an extreme belt style delivery with loads of sub-glottic pressure and the chest voice dragged up from hell to high-water. I find this distressingly ‘hard out’ and worrisome. I miss the soft, sustained singing and occasional flagelot or ‘whistle tone’ that this artist was once capable of producing. However, legions of fans love these vocal habits associating them with a powerful and unique vocal presence.

No. 5 Michael Buble OK – I’m going out on a limb with this one. He’s here because of being what I at least find offensively bland. It distresses me that many of my students are interested to sing the jazz standard (originally written for a 1965 musical), ‘Feelin’ Good’, but would rather listen to the bland Michael Buble version over the (for me) unforgettable Nina Simone version.

Singing - Michael Buble Image from Wikipedia

Michael Buble is a charming, good-looking light jazz option but one a little heavy on the post-production sanitising and very heavy on the auto-tune. Better to have some idiosyncratic technical kinks than to be the auditory equivalent of highly processed cereal. My ears tell me Michael Buble has more to often than this, ‘normalised’ product and has good enough musicianship that he should ditch the auto-tune.

So, do you agree or disagree? Who would be on your list?

Other related posts:

 Top 5 Tips for How to Sing: No. 5 Trust your Gut

Top 5 Tips for How to Sing: No. 4 – Always go back to the joy!

Top 5 Tips for How to Sing: No. 3 Practice smart not long

Top 5 Tips for How to Sing: No. 2 – Embrace your mistakes!

Top 5 Tips for How to Sing: No. 1 – Get present!

Next post coming up ‘Easy on the Auto-Tune Please!’

How to Sing - Respect what you need

How to Sing | Own your own Journey | Know when to Move On

The road to barely adequate singing is paved with good lil’ singers who always did what their teachers told ‘em to do! OK – this one has always been contentious, but it’s a basic truth that the time comes in every singers development that the time comes to wise up and move on from whom you’re getting singing input from. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t listen to good advice and  bare with a teacher long enough to see if what they say really does pan out.

Proof of the Pudding is in the Singing

However, I’ve learned from bitter experience that it’s very necessary to separate out wanting to believe that a teacher/exercise is working for you and the thing actually benefiting you. With singing, as with most other things in life, the litmus test is always in the result – do you actually sing better with the input you’re getting?

If you really want to learn how to sing sometimes the best thing you can do is, ‘Hit the Road Jack’

This may seem good and obvious but a lot of times it’s not. It’s buried under a mountain of psychological obstacles to working out ‘what’s really going on’. When we’re a student of singing the barriers usually have something of the following flavour, ‘this teacher/exercise is very highly respected and if it worked for XXX it must work for me’, ‘this vocal method was recommended by XXX and they sing really well’, ‘I’m feeling really stale and bored with my singing lessons but I could NEVER leave X teacher, they’d never forgive me and I just can’t face telling them’.

The essence of this tip, quite possibly the best tip I can ever give you, is SEPARATE out the emotion from the issue and analyse what you’re getting from your singing training as dispassionately as if you’re wielding a surgeon’s scalpel.

A Good Singing Teacher will Always Respect Your Choices

Too bad if you think your teacher will be upset if you leave, a decent teacher is bigger than the ego attachment of being your teacher and will respect your choice when the time’s right for you to move on. If the teacher gets bitter and petty about you leaving, then they were never worthy enough to be your teacher anyway. In a healthy student / teacher relationship you must tell your teacher clearly why you feel an exercise or approach isn’t working for you and have a constructive discussion about the best way forward.

Break Free of the Parent / Child Status Transaction

Believe me, I know that this may be the hardest thing in the world to do. Usually the relationship between a singing student and a student is very intimate. If you entrust your voice to a teacher it can be no other way, as the voice is such a true expression of who you really are. It may be your worst fear to confront your teacher, or a method that others passionately endorse as it is often akin to casting yourself out of the fold. However, better to be free and walk your own path than to hold with another’s dogma that no longer serves you.

How do I know when I need to make a change?

Here’s a summary of the warning signs you should change the game:

1. You feel continually frustrated with your lessons and your singing.

2. You dread going to your lesson and find yourself making excuses not to go.

3. After you practice your voice continually feels dry, scratchy, constricted and sore.

4. When you practice your sound isn’t anything close to the described outcome.

5. You can’t understand what the expected outputs are from the exercise/method and you don’t know what to ‘feel’ as you do it.

6. Your experience as you undertake an exercise is completely different from how it is described to you and so is the resulting sound.

Always trust your gut

Of course, the first port of call should always be a mature conversation about mutual expectations. The onus is on you to always faithfully and accurately describe to your teacher how things are for you and what you feel you need. But in the final analysis always trust your instincts, if your body and mind are screaming that something isn’t working for you, then it doesn’t matter at all about the legions that swear by it, honour your experience and don’t delay in taking responsibility for what’s right for you. Having the necessary, but difficult conversation is one of the most empowering things you can do not only as a singer but as a human being. If you can move on when the time is right for you, the reward will be exponential improvement rather than the usual stagnating frustration.

Have you ever had to move on from a situation that took a lot of courage to make the change? Please leave me a comment below. I’d love to hear about your experience!

See more Top 5 Tips to Improve Your Singing and Life: No. 4 – Always go back to the joy!

See more Top 5 Tips to Improve Your Singing and Life: No. 3 Practice smart not long

See more Top 5 Tips to Improve Your Singing and Life! No. 2 – Embrace your mistakes!

See more Top 5 Tips to Improve Your Singing and Life! No. 1 – Get present!

How to sing - Face your Fears from 'The Idealist'

You may be practicing but keep lovin it! Photo by Tonya Sandis

You learn how to sing when you balance technique with joy

OK – so here’s the thing. When we really love to do something and sweat and breath and agonise to make that something the best of what it can be, we so often suck the marrow of joy right out of it that we grow to hate it! Anyone who does a Bachelor of Music in Performance Voice will probably know what I’m talking about. No doubt it’s at times the same for anyone who’s seriously worked to master their vocal technique.

It’s good to love to sing!

Years ago when I was studying singing in the States I came to a complete impasse with one particular teacher who told me just before our parting, ‘you just like to sing the songs, you’re always singing the songs, but you don’t do the real work’. At the time I was devastated, I had, and still do have a tendency to take criticism way to heart and way too literally! It’s only looking back in the last year or two that I realise I was actually being paid (albeit back-handedly) a great compliment. Because the truth is I DO love to sing the songs, always have and hopefully always will – ‘cos isn’t that what it’s all about?

What’s the point of singing anyway?

Now in the fulness of time I realise that in the pursuit of excellence we must always maintain a balancing act between the practice that objectifies and refines technique and the singing that just makes the heart want what the heart wants – TO BE EXPRESSIVE AND FIND DEEP HEART CONNECTION WITH OTHER HUMANS.

When will it be perfect enough to love what you do?

This is something I frequently come back to in my studio with singers who worry that, ‘it’s not good enough, it doesn’t

If singing can't be fun - what's the point?

‘sound right’, doesn’t sound like the original singer’ etc. etc. There’s a lot of stuff going on here of course, such as the epidemic, ‘ipod generation’ attitude that it all has to sound like what they heard on the ipod or it’s no good. But beyond that this is the lament of the artist who’s sitting outside their head as they sing and critiqueing every little note and finding it wanting. In your practice I actively encourage you to devote at least a few minutes per session to just singing for the pure pleasure of it and not, ‘listening from the peanut gallery’ as you sing. This is a liberating experience that oftentimes has miraculously cleared up some stumping issues with how to sing because it’s the psychological equivalent of, ‘re-setting the clock’ when the internal gears get jammed.

Singing is a complex psycho-physical activity

Given the deep connectivity of the human voice to the mind, body and spirit it can oftentimes be derailed by too clinical a scrutiny. Singing is a complex psycho-physical activity that happens best in a deep state of neural plasticity. I see this as meaning that the experience is free to shape itself organically, miraculously, moment to moment. When this magical synergy of heart, mind and body occurs we can’t be over analysing whether the, ‘schwa’ vowel was quite neutral enough, whether we opened the throat enough for the high ‘G’, did we come in a fraction of a beat too late? etc.etc. Sometimes the internal critic needs a free lunch pass even in practice so that we can inhabit a neutral and liberating space of open expressiveness.

Always finish a tough vocal work-out with a little bit of joy, that’s how you learn how to sing!

Simple really – just make sure each practice session – particularly if it’s been arduous, finishes with at least a few minutes of pure unbridled vocal expressiveness. After all, that’s why you’re singing right?

See more Top 5 Tips fo How to Sing: No. 3 Practice smart not long

See more Top 5 Tips for How to Sing! No. 2 – Embrace your mistakes!

See more Top 5 Tips for How to Sing! No. 1 – Get present!

Happy llama says, 'Keep it fun and funky!' Photo Viktor Egelund

My own vocal journey spans 40 years, if I start counting from when I first sang in public at age 6. In that time I’ve had ample opportunity to learn that when it comes to working to improve your singing it super pays to work smart but not long.
This truth is under-scored by an early story about the, ‘Austrian Oak’ Arnold Schwarzenegger. This is long before, ‘the Governator’, in the early days when he was working to be known as a super muscle man and body-building legend. Like many rising stars in the early eighties glory days of body-building, our budding Terminator trained at Golds Gym in Venice Beach, California. It was the playground of some of the biggest names and muscles in the business. The story goes that early on Arnie was relentlessly teased, as despite his impressive physical development he had very puny calf muscles. Now, counter to what you might expect, Arnie took the bold move to train fully covered from top to toe in long sleeved tracksuits, his only innovation being that he cut away the lower leg of the pants just below the knee. Now the only body part visible as he trained was his weakest, and every training session, day after day, week after week, month after month, he went and endured the taunts and jeers as he worked to improve those calves. Needless to say with such single-minded determination Arnie went on to be a 6 time Mr Olympia champion and known as, ‘the best calves in the business’.
The lesson is equally applicable to your singing. Working smart in singing practice means to me concentrating on targeted, specific exercises that improve the weakest aspects of your singing technique. Now of course, first of all you have to find out what these are and for this I recommend finding a pair of ears you can really trust. This means finding a teacher, mentor or colleague who you can respect because of the type of singers they either produce or are. The next challenge is to accept the points for improvement they offer and actively seek to work in your practice at this identified ‘growing edge’.
This relates very much to what I said in Tip No. 2 – Embrace your Mistakes. You see so often I’ve noticed that because singing is so intimately tied to self-identity singers don’t like to be told what’s not so good, it tends to be taken very personally and a lot of time what’s not so good is avoided and ignored. That’s ok if you want to keep doing what you’ve done and keep getting what you’ve already got, but not so good if you genuinely want to improve. If this is you, then you should do short targeted practices that focus on what you’re not so good at. That’s where the courage to grow is.
For instance, in my own vocal journey, it was only when I really accepted that all the feedback I’d gotten in my twenties on severe tongue tension might actually be on to something that my singing really started to improve. Believe me, I often wish I’d learnt the truth of this tip a lot quicker than I did! This would have saved me years of heartache and disappointment with my own singing. Truth is, it’s really hard to embrace what you don’t do so well, particularly when it’s part of what you love to do most. I think we’re mainly all guilty of wanting to work only to the best of what we can do and kind of gloss over the short-comings. However, when it comes to practice the shortest distance between where you are and mastery is working exclusively on what’s not so good. My advice is to listen to the person you trust most to give honest feedback and then work on no more than 3 key targeted exercises to address the problem. From my own teaching studio I’ve noticed key problems with how to sing usually relate to one of the following:

1. Tongue Tension
2. Jaw Tension
3. Misaligned posture – chin jutting forward or compacted backwards, head tilted off centre either tilted too far up or down, too narrow a base – feet too close together.
4. Lack of energy – no engagement of the core muscles of effective singing support – rib intercostals, 6 abdominal sheets and the latissimus dorsi (also diaphragm but this is an involuntary muscle).
5. Incorrect breathing – usually too shallow and incorrectly sequenced with abdomen not expanding with in-breath or even the abdomen moving inwards with the in-breath (the reverse of what should happen!).
6. Laryngeal constriction – too much constriction or pressure put on the vocal folds to initiate sound, or occasionally, the reverse of this, too little connection of the vocal folds to create a resonate non-breathy tone.

Just about every singer there is will have 1 or more of the above to work on as their vocal challenge. You need to know intimately, and specifically which challenges are yours. The more courage you can show in the face of what you, and others, don’t like about the way you do something you love, the greater the odds that you will overcome it – and fast! Work on it every day is my advice and make it little and often to cut down the frustration factor. 1 or more 10 minute practices in a day on one of these specific aspects of your practice will yield tenfold results over just singing through all the songs in your set without addressing any specifics aspects of your technique. Work in a way that emphasises improvement and break-through rather than embeds habitual short-comings and within 3 months I guarantee you will surprise yourself with measurable improvement! Take courage and have the discipline to change!

And finally . . . remember to always sing with spirit!

Yours in singing support
Barbara Ann

See more Top 5 Tips to Improve Your Singing! No. 2 – Embrace your mistakes!
See more Top 5 Tips to Improve Your Singing! No. 1 – Get present!

In the most watched TED talk to date, Sir Ken Robinson makes an eloquent case for a re-think of how we encourage creativity. He argues that we have demonised mistakes thereby stifling the messy, inherently failure strewn creative process. I challenge you to apply the same thinking to your singing practice. My analogy is that on the road to vocal excellence we must, ‘keep jumping the fences’ just as an equestrian must take a few inevitable tumbles on the way to mastery.

Often in singing practice we baulk at the fence – as soon as we note that we’re not, ‘doing it right’ we stop singing. This limits us as singers and human beings because:

• We stop as soon as it’s ‘wrong’ thereby reinforcing incorrect neuro-muscular patterns.
• We mentally reinforce that we’re, ‘not doing it right’ – which is only a short hike from, ‘I can’t do it’.
• We stigmatise our efforts to grow and change by arresting the transformation process and labeling it, ‘wrong’, ‘bad’ and ‘failure’.

In essence, we say no to creative transformation because we’re too afraid to fail.

I’ve seen this syndrome so many times in my teaching studio and to be honest found it the thing that really makes me dig deepest as a facilitator of positive transformation. It always seems to me that it’s the most talented students who continually stop themselves on the brink of creative break-through. In fact, there’s almost an equation there that goes,  ‘the fear of failure is directly proportional to the level of talent’.

The cure, and my top tip No. 2 to improve your singing is embrace your mistakes! This means sing through your vocal exploration process. For example, if you’re working on increasing frontal resonance then don’t keep stopping because it’s wrong, keep going and asking:

• why is it wrong?
• what do I feel?
• what am I doing?
• how can I change this? and (most of all)
• KEEP SINGING!

All the while you should be exploring how you’re breathing, how your body is aligned, using your hands to explore where you feel your resonance, working with a mirror to monitor your facial expressions, position of the jaw, elevation of the cheeks. This is how the door to improvement opens, because we keep knocking on it! Before you know it, the self-monitoring will mean that you begin to sing differently, experience new sensations, find a new way through you would never have known was there if you hadn’t stuck with the journey. And remember, if you want to make this work it’s important to be asking yourself, ‘how can I do this better?’. In fact, it’s the key.  Just singing, without creative inquiry will get you equally nowhere as stopping every time it’s not right. The trick is to be an active participant in your own change process.

Change your attitude to your mistakes and you’re no longer the victim of your failures, but the change agent of your own success. Stop seeing what you can’t do vocally as your limitation but instead your creative edge and I guarantee you’ll keep pushing back those limits every-day. As with singing, as with life, change your mind, embrace your mistakes and change your life!

See more Top 5 Tips to Improve Your Singing! No. 1 – Get present!

Look at your singing in a new way!

Over the years of teaching singing I’ve noticed specific patterns around what’s holding people back from most fully and completely enjoying and optimising their singing. I thought in the following few blogs I would give my top 5 tips to improve your singing. I realise there’s plenty of people out there writing tips on singing technique and I promise to include some of these – however, I also believe that it pays to look very holistically at what’s holding singer’s back and that means never underestimating how they, ‘feel’ about their singing as well as how they sound. Therefore top of my list is to, ‘get present’!

Tip No. 1

1. Get present!

Often when I take on singers who come from another teacher, or singers who’ve been working on the club circuit or doing a lot of musical theatre or just performing constantly I’m amazed by how, ‘auto-pilot’ they are when they sing. To me, it pays to always remember that when you sing your body is the instrument. That means you have to get present in your body before you can, ‘play’ the instrument effectively. If you don’t know what I mean by, ‘get present’ think of all the times when you’ve driven somewhere and realised at the destination you have no memory of the drive, or when we’re at a lecture, doing the laundry, watching tv, playing a computer game etc. there’s plenty of moments every day when we aren’t present in our body – we disconnect the mind from it’s physical housing. This isn’t a good policy for singing as you do sing with your body and you want to be, ‘inside’ the sensations of singing to gain conscious mastery over them. So get grounded, get your mind back down inside your body before you sing. That means when you come to sing do the following everytime:

1. Physical warm-up

• circle the arms
• swivel the hips
• bend the legs
• stretch up to the sky
• bend down to the ground
• act out chopping some wood.

This is the way we wake up the body and improve the mind / body connection prior to making sound.

2. Vocal warm-up

• sigh gently mouth closed
• now sigh gently mouth open and put sound on it
• do some lip or tongue trills on an arpeggio
• do some abdominal breathing exercises
• do some downward, ‘sirens’ ensuring you’re floating your sound on top of your air.

These two steps are crucial for getting our minds back down into our bodies and getting in touch with what it feels like to engage the body in making sound. Create the connectivity between the mind and the body and you’re much more enabled to gain conscious mastery of your instrument.

Next blog – Top 5 Things to Improve Your Singing – No. 2

Get present!

Again, traditionally the teaching of singing has always been an highly imagistic undertaking; imagine breath is like ‘balls on a fountain’, tone is, ‘pulled from the teeth like a string of pearls’, resonance, ‘shoots up the back of the head like a chimney’ etc.! There are a thousand colourful images to convey aspects of vocal technique. However, from around the 1950′s the pedegogical approach to the teaching of singing (see William Vennard, Richard Miller)  heralded a new age in which the mechanistic realities of how the body coordinates to produce and resonate sound vibration shifted the focus and perhaps to an extent invalidated the metaphorical approach to singing.

In the eighties and nineties, as a young student of singing, I noticed it became increasingly, ‘uncool’ to describe aspects of technique in symbolic language. However, in my own teaching I have always found that the best lessons draw from both sides of the tracks – science and ‘art’, ‘left brain and right brain’, to create the strongest imprint upon the student for radical personal change.

In both my training consultancy and voice coach life, I’ve found it prudent to, ‘hit ‘em from as many angles as you can’. This means that a lesson should not only consist of the ‘tell’, ‘show’ and ‘do’ but also detailed scientific descriptions of how the larynx looks, positions and functions, as well as the breath and wider supportive structures and stance of the body. But, this factual detail needs to be leavened by flights of fancy, wild imaginings and spontaneous gesturings and war dances! It is my firm belief that within the complex human learning process, intelligence resides in every cell. Therefore, to trigger significant and sudden change, the very fibres of each being must be bombarded with as much appropriate stimuli as possible.

To illustrate, say we were talking about how to maximise resonance and ensure a balanced and brilliant tone with a student who had a tendency to ‘swallow’ their sound. First of all we could talk about concepts like harmonics and formants, we might illustrate this on the keyboard with the student visually observing the keyboard and hearing the pitch progression. We might use an image like the dial of a clock to describe a 12 o’clock raised soft palate ‘domed’ classical sound, a 9 o’clock frontal super bright musical theatre twang and a six o’clock lowered larynx dark ‘dopey’ sound. Perhaps then we could use the idea of sucking the thumb and taking the thumb up to the mouth to get in touch with that spot on the hard palate behind the teeth, where we want to imagine the sound. The student can then try out these resonant ‘positions’ on the clock face and play with how they can change their sound quality according to where they imagine the sound ‘going’.  Another image I’ve used with success is that the sound is being pulled by fish hooks out of the upper cheeks (not a pleasant idea but worked a treat in this particular instance where a student was having trouble getting in touch with their frontal resonance).

The interplay of the scientific and factual and the imagistic and intuitive – this creates the magic alchemy by which new intelligence informs the body, mind and spirit. This is the learning dance through which radical change find its flash point.

Since I gave up swinging from the vines in the corporate jungle 3 years ago and moved to the sunny splendour of Nelson, NZ, I’ve had ample time to ponder the value of the teaching of singing. To borrow liberally from Frankie on his way to Hollywood – singing teachers, what are they good for anyway? It’s a valid question, and one I believe all voice teachers (let alone students of singing) should ask themselves frequently. To answer, I think there are four fundamental things a singing teacher needs to establish with their student (and vice versa) before they start the relationship.

So what are those key questions? I believe they are as follows:

1. What is it this student wants from their (singing) experience? (Define the goal)
2. What is this person’s learning style? (Define the delivery method)
3. What is this person’s learning temperament? (Define the delivery style)
4. How will they know when they’ve achieved it? (Determine how to measure it)

These questions are applicable to any situation where you need to map out the turf before you can plan the direction. These may not be what first comes to mind when you think of the teaching of singing. You may think it a foregone conclusion that any person who comes for singing lessons wants to improve their posture, breath, pitch, resonance, rhythm, onset, appogiatura, messa di voce, staccato, legato, passagio transition . . . and on and on it goes – and traditionally that’s how it’s always been. However, these are the, ‘what’ answers but not the, ‘why’s.

The more I teach, the more I see the specifics of vocal technique as the, ‘tier two’ concerns, but first you have to answer the basic questions I’ve stated above. You have to know why the student is there and with a little bit of luck the student will have asked themselves the same question. The answer is as varied as a student’s personality and may not be the answer it appears to be at face value. Here’s a few examples I’ve had from my own studio, ‘I want to sing at my friend’s wedding’, ‘My husband says I sound like a croaking frog’, ‘I play guitar and write songs but I can’t sing them, my singing voice is so bad’, ‘I want to be a professional singer’, ‘my father had a beautiful singing voice and I think I should too’.

As a teacher, I believe that we are, ‘in service’ but in service to what? I feel we are, ‘in service to the positive self-development of our student’. That means that the teaching of singing is a means to an end but not an end in itself. Singing is a doorway, like many others, to an enhanced state of being. As so often happens, with all of the examples I’ve given above there was a further question behind the obvious answer. In the first example, it was asking why they wanted to sing at the wedding? Was it because others were pressuring them to do so, because some-one else had said they’d do it and they didn’t want that, was it because someone in the wedding party asked and if so, did they really want to do it?

In this case, we finally came to the conclusion that they had been asked by the bride because they had a very good voice but lacked the confidence to sing in public and the friend wanted to be the gentle encouragement. So, here the trigger for the lesson was singing at the wedding, but the goal was to prove to themselves they had the talent and confidence to sing in public. That’s an important distinction because once we know that self-doubt and the struggle for self-confidence are key issues for this student we are able to have a far richer learning experience.

In the second example, where the husband said the student sounded, ‘like a croaking frog’ there were far wider issues beyond singing technique relating to personal power and this ladies ability to feel confident and express herself no matter what the external pressures. This insight changed the teaching dynamic considerably.

In conclusion, when we teach singing we’re not just working with the voice, we’re working with the whole person. I believe these four basic questions help us ensure we’ve mapped out the territory we’re working with before we start the journey. This is how as a teacher we can keep true to the course, that we’re giving what is needed, in the right way and at the right time.

In this, my first blog, we’ve looked at defining the goal of the lessons and the importance of knowing the difference between a trigger and a goal. In my next blogs I’ll look at the other three basic questions in turn. In the meantime, what do you think . . . . ? and remember to sing with spirit!