Perfection

Today, a quote from my teacher, mentor, colleague and friend, Dr. Bryan Baker: 


“The goal is not to give a perfect performance, because that is impossible. The goal is to practice as perfectly as possible, and that makes an excellent performance more likely.”

For me, this means that I should practice calmly, and with my emotions in full view. When I can sing or play alongside (not in spite of) my grief, my joy, my love, my longing, with composure in private, it's more likely that I can be that honest in front of an audience.

Which leads me to another quote, from another teacher, Donna Davis:

"Acting is about telling the truth."

 

And singing is about being naked.

There is so much more to say here. Coming soon. 

But I sound worse!

A student recently shared,

“I’ve been trying to do what you’ve asked. You know, listening to myself hum and noticing what it feels like. I’m listening to more songs on the radio and singing along to them, and I think my singing has actually gotten worse!”

Oy. This happens. And it may actually be true that the singing now is not so good. 

Three things to consider:

1.  When we’re listening closely to the sounds in our head and thinking about our singing, the singing might very well sound, and actually be worse, especially if we’re doing more than humming. This is because thinking and letting the breath sail through and out of us don’t go together. If you’re singing vowels or actual words, it really is better to let the opposite wall tell you what it sounds like. Notice what you feel, but listen to the wall. You need to let the breath go in order for the voice to find it’s “sweet spot." 

When you’re listening to yourself, make sure you’re listening for the lightest possible hum (m, n, ng) you can make, and letting it float or spin freely in your head. If you do that, chances are it will sound pretty good.

2.  Another consequence of studying singing is that our ears get more critical. Ultimately, that’s what we want: critical ears and a bushel of technique so that our voices can be as free, open, beautifully powerful as they can be. And, at the beginning, when the ears are more critical than the bushel is full, we can get discouraged. 

Return to a hum. Throw a ball and whoop. Sing the silliest song you know: Ay lay tay ate ate ate, aypples aynd baynaynays, ay lay tay ate ate ate apples aynd baynaynays... Retreat into play and trust everything will be all right. It will be. Keep studying and your bushel will fill before you know it. 

3.  “Even I don’t wake up looking like Cindy Crawford.” – Cindy Crawford 

The singers we hear on the radio have had their singing recorded, mixed, remixed, sometimes auto-tuned, compressed and who knows what else in order to turn it into a salable product. They would not sound that way in our living room, singing a cappella, without a microphone or sound engineer in tow. We cannot expect ourselves to sound like them. It’s not physically possible. 

And... Breathy voices are sexy and seductive and sweet and often stunningly beautiful. If you have a microphone, that can be an effective way to sing a sexy, seductive, sweet, stunningly beautiful song. If you try to sing along to a recording of such a song don’t be surprised if you’re disappointed in yourself. Breathy voices are hard to tune to. You will have trouble blending your voice with the recorded one, because there’s not much “there” there in the recording. 

Think of it this way: I’m encouraging you to find the smallest, most beautiful golden thread of a tone you can make. That’s what all this lip trilling and humming is about – to find that golden thread, to find your simplest, most fundamental beauty.

When you open that tone to a vowel, the thread becomes something more like worsted-weight wool, something you could knit a sweater with, not just a beautiful lace shawl. The breathy voice on the radio is the knitting equivalent of roving, at best, and dryer lint at worst. Plying worsted-weight and roving together will give you a pretty funky-looking yarn. You might knit with it, but it will be full of contrast. 

Singing along to a breathy voice on the radio will always be full of contrast. Do not expect your voice to blend. It might be physically possible, but to accomplish it requires giving up so much of yourself, so much of what’s authentically you, that I would say it’s not worth it. 

That’s not the you I want the world to hear. We need you to be you. And you do, too. 

The good news is that when my student sang in her lesson, and I asked, "So, how does that sound to you?" She answered, "That sounds good!" I whole-heartedly agreed. More on why singing at your lesson can be so different than singing at home is coming soon, in another post.

Why listening to yourself is a bad idea

One of the things that makes your voice unlike anyone else’s is the shape of your head. When you sing or speak, you produce the sound in your throat, and then it travels through and out your body however it can. The path it takes determines what it sounds like, and there are many paths to choose from. 

One of my jobs as a voice teacher is to help you make a map of your head, to teach you to track the sound as it moves through your body and to sing by sensation, rather than by listening to yourself. 

Listening to yourself is a bad idea because no one hears you the way you do. Our brains register the sounds we make as soon as we make them, through our bones and tissues. The sound comes in our ears last of all. Our friends hear us only through their ears, and they probably think your voicemail messages sound just fine. If you think you sound funny on an answering machine, it’s because you do. When you’re listening to a recording, you’re hearing yourself entirely through your ears, and you never hear yourself that way ordinarily. You are still the same person, though, with the same voice.

Herein lies the fundamental strangeness, I would say the spiritual discipline, of studying and teaching singing: the singer will never know what she sounds like to the teacher; the teacher will never know what it feels like to be the singer; neither the singer nor the teacher can see or touch all of the instrument they’re trying to train, and the instrument is central to the singer’s identity. 

A fine kettle of fish!

Still, the best way to improve our singing and to make an even more beautiful mark on the world is to place ourselves in the hands of caring, competent, compassionate teachers and walk with them, one step at a time. 

What if I’m really not any good and I’ll never be any good?

But what if it never amounts to anything?

I honestly don’t know what any good means. 

I do know that waiting until next year to learn to sing/play the saxophone/write the novel probably won’t make it any easier, and if you start now, you’ll be giving yourself more time to amount to whatever you want to amount to. You’re the only one who’s keeping score on that account. 

I do know that your voice is one of a kind and I want you to be using it well your whole life long. If you love to sing, and you are open to singing differently, you will get better at it. You will find your way with it, and the world will be better for it. 

It is a huge leap of faith to work with a teacher. The best of them change our lives forever. When you’re ready to look for someone to study with, imagine you’ve been working with them for five years. Write down everything you have to thank them for. How have you changed? 

I finally understand ...

I am no longer afraid to ...

When the going got rough, you said/did/offered _______ and that helped me stick with it.

When you can thank them for changing you, you’re ready to be changed. 

How young is too young?

I’ve had a two or three emails lately from parents looking for private singing lessons for a 5 or 6 year old. The child loves to sing and would like to get better at it. In America, when we think about getting better at something, we think about taking lessons, getting a tutor, hiring an expert, bringing in a consultant. 

That’s not a wholly bad strategy, and private lessons are rarely the best idea for a 5 to 10-year-old.

We mostly get better at singing by singing with people who are good at singing. We pick up on their good habits, we imitate their sound, we find new and more comfortable ways to hold ourselves, we learn by imitation. This is easier when the people we’re imitating already sort of sound like we do, and nobody sounds like elementary school kids, except elementary school kids. 

We also get better at singing when it’s a relationship-building activity, when we’re with people we already sort of understand and/or like. We can relax and have fun. We can hear that it matters that we’re there. We can feel at home in community. Singing is so much easier when we’re happy to be right here, now.

Would that every family could sing together in a way that felt good! And thank goodness for children’s choruses. With caring and competent direction, kids can learn to sing well, and become amazing musicians, well before middle school. 

None of this is to say that lessons for young kids are never a good idea, after all, I teach them. When to try private lessons for a young child is a good question, to be answered soon!