Top tips for practising singing
I remember starting singing lessons when I was about 12 and being told to go home and practice. I had absolutely no idea what to do. This was different from piano: I wasn’t expected to add four new bars to a song as I could already sing through the whole thing; I knew the lyrics and I knew the melody – what else was there to do?
I still work with singers who face exactly this dilemma. They can sing their songs but they have no idea how to sing them better.
So for this week’s blog, I thought I’d put together some top tips on how to use your practice time most effectively. I need to thank the cast of Jersey Boys Australia for chatting to me about this and sharing their thoughts and ideas.
Make sure you have the right tools
You’ve already got Warm Me Up so that takes care of your warm up! (If you don’t, click here) Now, make sure you’ve got a recording of the melody without someone else singing it. And a recording of the accompaniment or the backing track is essential too so you don’t always use the ‘easy’ version with the melody loud and clear.
Practice one thing at a time
When you are starting out on a song, it can be helpful to just work on melody for a while – sing it through on a hum, on one consistent vowel or even on the vowels that are contained in the lyric.
When you know the song better, choose one element on which to focus while you sing it through. If you choose breathing, really aim to only breathe at the points you’ve chosen for this run of the song. If you make a mistake on the lyrics or rhythm in this run, forgive yourself – your aim was to focus on the breath and that’s the priority. Other elements you may choose to focus on could be:
storytelling
phrasing
dynamics
articulation/diction
rhythm
placement
tone
Practice things the right way
Make sure you practice things in the way you wish to perform them. There’s no point going through a tricky phrase without nailing it. Stop, go back, fix it. Once you’ve got it sounding like you imagined, sing that phrase through a few times so your habit becomes the ideal.
Here is a great piece of advice from our super-swing at Jersey Boys, Chris Durling: record your lessons and do them three times through at home before going back to see your teacher again. Not only do you get to relive their helpful (and often expensive!) advice, you will also be reminded of the areas you improved in that lesson and repeat them the way you wish them to be sung.
Remember that you don’t always need to be singing to be practicing
One of the tricky things about practising singing as opposed to other instruments is the time constraint – you simply cannot sing for hours on end and expect your voice to be okay with that.
The good news is that there are other skills you can work on in your practice time that will pay off and don’t require extensive use of your voice. Try these on days when you want to keep working but without singing so much:
Read through your lyric. Work on it as if it were a monologue.
Listen to the accompaniment without singing. You will often find many musical clues in the accompaniment and it will help you understand your role in the structure of this piece of music.
Listen to other people singing this song. What do you like/dislike about their interpretations? Youtube will be a huge help to you here!
Work on other musicianship skills. See if you can work out a harmony to this song. Also, there are great apps on the market to help improve your interval recognition, knowledge of musical terms and sight-singing. Use them! These skills will pay off again and again.
Hope these ideas help! Please let me know if you have other top tips or pieces of advice.
Keep singing!
Vicky