We all hate it, but it’s a necessary evil if you want to be a working musician or truthfully, a  working professional of any kind in any discipline!

We’ve all heard the quotes as well:

“Practice makes perfect,”

“How do you get to Carnegie hall?  Practice, practice, practice,” and

“Don’t practice until you get it RIGHT,  Practice until you CAN’T get it Wrong.”

Neat.  So what?  We fill out a chart that says that we’ve practiced our one hour a day, then get incredibly frustrated and angry when the MET doesn’t  call us a few months later to offer the role of a lifetime? 

Nope. That’s not how it works. It would be great, but so would not getting bloated after eating cauliflower. 

Practice will make or break you.  It’s where all the real work happens. No matter how much we’d like to believe that as teachers, we are the only reason our  students succeed, it’s really ultimately, up to the student.  

As the famous Chuck Hudson has taught, it’s a mistake to go into an audition or performance and  “wait for the miracle to happen.”  

“The Reckoning”

1. You don’t really have to work hard at what you do.  You’ve always been the best. You win all the competitions, get all the lead roles, and get in to every school to which you apply, often with substantial scholarships.  It comes easy to you, but you also don’t really know you do what you do, you just do it!
2. You’ve had to work for every single victory you’ve had.  Even after sloging it out in the practice room, you still place 3rd or honorable mention in every competition.  Perhaps you are often on the waitlist, or are not chosen for lead roles, but get ensemble or supporting roles. However,  you are still “in the mix,” you know what your strengths and weaknesses are, and have a plan for addressing them.  It’s just going to take time. 

In those two scenarios, “the reckoning” comes early for the second group.  They get kicked in the teeth and have to overcome some serious obstacles early on.  They won’t have an exciting road ahead of them, but by the time they emerge on the other side of that “opposition tunnel,” if they can stick with it, they will be a pro and will have the necessary skills to be successful.  They may not always have the most exciting instrument in the business, but they will work and they will enjoy doing it! 

Perhaps you are one of those singers in the first group. They are those who don’t have strong music skills and have in essence, coasted up to that point with superb instruments and excellent stage instincts.  That will last for a few more years, but once he or she enters the professional world, that’s when “the reckoning” hits for them.  They get to those first few professional gigs unprepared and undisciplined and sometimes it results in losing the job. Even before that, perhaps they are told on occasion to leave a lesson or coaching when a piece isn’t learned well enough. After a few of those painful experiences, they do the work that the other group has had to do for years in preparation for this, and hopefully emerge a well-rounded musician..or not.  They often have to do that work in a shorter period of time as well, sometimes balancing that skill cultivation with trying to start a career and earn a living, and often at great expense. They need to catch up. 

Often these singers ask: “Why am I just not getting any gigs or getting in to any programs?”  What am I doing wrong?”

The truth is that at a certain point, everything equalizes.  At a certain level, everyone is good, everyone does what they do well, very well.  Practice is the way that you get to that point, and the way that you stay working at a high level level.  At first it’s construction, then maintenance.  

With the way some singers practice (or don’t), they end up having to do a major vocal overhaul every few months.  That’s expensive, dangerous, and incredibly inefficient! 

Lessons and coaching are for discovery, practice is for application. 

The answer that some come up with is “lazy practice.” Which involves watching and reading and repeating, but seldom doing.  The singer checks boxes, reports back to the teacher, and has familiarized him/herself with the terminology and the concepts, so they have the “right answers” in lessons, but ultimately still hold the teacher or coach solely responsible for progress, and often fail to execute in performance situations.

You can watch all of the Youtube videos that exist on vocal technique, and have an encyclopedic knowledge of every master class ever given by an opera star over the last 40 years, but if you never make it in to the practice room to figure out how to do those things, with YOUR voice, it won’t help you one bit, other than to entertain people at parties, assuming you’re part of a cultured group of witty individuals who find your celebrity vocal impressions amusing. 

Specific and consistent practice produces specific and consistent results. 

How long do I have to practice for it to count?

Many of us as students asked this either out loud or to ourselves.  Those of you who are teachers probably hear this question in various forms on a regular basis from your students.  Some of us require a certain amount of practice time each week and others can get by with less.  

When practice is concerned, the accountability factor is incredibly motivating, so you’ll practice more if you know someone will ask about it.  However, are you practicing to get a good grade? To give a glowing report to your teacher? Or are you actually improving through your efforts.  

Nobody is going to say to you in that audition: “well you sound terrible, but it says on your sheet that you practice quite a bit…I think this is going to work…”

So how much practice is enough? 1 hour a day? 2 hours? More? Do you need to practice every day? Is 15 minutes enough some days? Should you do multiple sessions, or practice in one big chunk? 

The answer is, yes.  Let’s begin at the beginning. 

What is practice?

First of all, let’s define what we’re talking about here.  Sometimes we lump a few different kinds of activities all in to one “practice” category.   

Here are the typical things to which we refer when we talk about practice: 

• Learning music (including text)
• Rehearsing with an ensemble
• Working on specific technical aspects of our voice independent of repertoire
• Working on trouble spots in our repertoire.
• Trying to find solutions to general technical problems. 
• Singing through our rep in preparation for a performance, competition or audition. 

It is important to make sure that our practice each week doesn’t consist solely of the first bullet-point, learning music, or really isolation of any of those bullet points.  

Believe it or not, I’ve had students that would just run pieces over and over for ever practice session. They would not only fail to learn the right notes and rhythms, but they would memorize the wrong ones and reinforce bad technique.

We have to learn our music to sing it, period. If your entire practice session is spent learning the music, are you really practicing? The answer, not surprisingly, is no.

Ideally, practice should include all of the things on the list above, and more.  You should be learning music quickly  and efficiently. You should be memorizing that music to get it in to your muscles.  Are you playing your part on the piano, or just listening?  You should be isolating specific points in that music that need technical solutions, and you should be reinforcing strengths and addressing technical weaknesses in your voice, independent of the repertoire on which you are working.  

Again, accountability is key here.  Here are a few guidelines that I’ve found to be successful: 

• Record your sessions or part of your sessions to listen to later for reference. 
• Practice in small chunks fo 15-30 minutes throughout the day if possible. Instead of one long session
• If something is not working, don’t force it, leave it alone or come back to it later. 
• Experiment, make mistakes. Do not try to “get it right.” 
• Don’t do the same thing every single time without noticing if you are improving or getting worse. Hold yourself accountable.  Change it all up: the warm-ups, the technical exercises, the order in which you run you rep, tempi, range, vowels etc.
• Borrow a pair of ears.  Get someone to come in and listen to you and give you honest feedback. Be specific in what you ask them to listen for. 
• Categorize what you do in a session into three categories: “fall out of bed,” “tough but I can get it if I focus,” and “this is a stretch/hit and miss.” That goes for rep, warm-ups and vocal exercises as well. Make sure your session is not full of work from only one of those categories.
• Adjust your practice to what your voice feels like that day.  If it’s a bad voice day, don’t push yourself, you’ll pay for it later. If you’re having a good day, sing whatever you feel would benefit from a fresh and functioning instrument instead of going through the motions of your same old routine just because. Do you have a performance that night?  Don’t sing too much!
• Experiment with practicing at different times of day and in different spaces if possible.  That’s how it works in the professional world.  Keep your body and mind adjusting and not used to singing in the same place at the same time.  
• Take Breaks, even if things are going well. 
• Keep a record of what you do in each session, handwritten or digital.  Keep track of how long you practiced, what you did, and how well it worked.  Also keep track of your thoughts, your theories, and questions to ask your coach or vocal instructor. 

What are some other factors to consider regarding practice?                 

Stamina

When we talk about young singers, stamina levels may be as low as 30-45 minutes of singing at a time.  Sometimes, up to 6-8 hours a day of solid singing.  I’m not talking about continuous singing without breaks, we seldom do that even in full-length operas and rehearsals.  

Ensemble singing can function differently. Many choir rehearsals are 50 minutes or longer of continuous singing, but in the safety of a section. Are you or your students getting tired at the end of every choir session? If so, that is often due to the need of better technique.  You shouldn’t be getting tired after choir rehearsal if you’re doing it right! 

How does one increase vocal stamina? It certainly doesn’t happen in the same way we build a bicep or quad muscle.  We’re not looking to add muscle mass, but rather make the phonation process more efficient by minimizing the amount of “heavy lifting” we do at the laryngeal level.  

Remember, from the clavicle up, those muscles should be “directional”, like the steering wheel of a car, not like the gas or brake pedal. In other words, don’t go and sing the highest note of your range repeatedly 20 times in a row, then rest for a day.  Not a good solution.    We wouldn’t frantically wiggle the steering wheel from side to side to go faster, unless we’re still 2 and we drive one of those red and yellow big wheels cars…

Why? The vocal muscles are small precision muscles.  The goal is not to rip or damage the muscle fibers then repair them so they bulk up, as we would with large muscle groups.  As far as the vocal muscles are concerned, that kind of effort is going to manifest more in the form of a hemorrhage, polyps, or nodes, not “beefed up” vocal folds.

With the voice, it’s more about toning rather than bulking. Think of the difference between lifting a 10 lb. weight 15 times, vs. an 80 lb. weight 5 times.  One is designed to max out, one is designed to tone. 

How does one increase vocal stamina then either in our outside of an ensemble setting?  We’ve already talked bout some of the solutions. 

First, short healthy spurts of practice.  If you are a first year college student and you are now singing more than you have in your entire life in your first year of college, you are probably going to sing with tension and a whole host of bad habits. Why? Because you’re being asked to do things that are more difficult than you’ve done before and you’re being asked to do them more often and for longer than you’ve done them.    Singing with tension under those conditions, is not great for stamina.  

Until you learn to become more efficient with the way you produce sound, sing in short bursts. It’s ok to take breaks in choir, or mark things (singing an octave lower, or softer but still with core).  

Think more ping rather than power.  I completely believe in the “if you can’t hear your neighbor, you’re singing too loud,” theory.  Remember that you don’t have to sing loud to be heard. How do you think singers project over an orchestra, let alone one brass instrument? It’s ping, formant, ring in the voice, NOT volume. 

In the context of a choir, try to make your voice heard by making it different, not by singing louder than everyone else around you. Sing quietly, but with more point and focus and core in the voice.  You’ll learn a lot about what is tensing up and what kind of a sound you are really producing when you can’t hide behind volume. 

If you feel something is unhealthy, or it starts to cause pain or discomfort, don’t do it! Stop, and rewire the process until you find a healthy version.   That may take you a long time to discover and execute well, but that will ultimately lead to much healthier, consistent and sustainable production.  Treat your voice like you are trying to house train a young puppy. Don’t let the puppy engage repeatedly in unwanted behavior hoping that suddenly he will just do what you want. If you let the dog chew on the chair leg, he will keep chewing on the chair leg unless you stop him! 

Don’t wire in bad habits, they take a LONG time to undo. Ask any singer who has ruined an aria or song by singing it it with bad habits.  Some have to wait years before they can come back to it.  Don’t burn some of your most promising repertoire by singing it in the wrong way just to “get it out.” There are no points for trying here.  

Accountability

I addressed this briefly above, but one of the biggest stumbling blocks I see is that we  just go through the motions. 

With everything that you do in your practice session, ask yourself these questions: 

• What is this exercise supposed to do? 
• Am I accomplishing what I set out to do?
• Is there improvement and discovery, or just repetition?

Don’t forget physical stretching as part of practice as well.  Remember what you reinforce in the practice room (hand motions, hand to ear walking around in circles etc.) will probably transfer to your performing. I look down a lot when I sing,  so I also do that on stage when I’m not thinking about it.  Sometimes it’s on purpose, and sometimes it’s because I’ve practiced that bad habit. 

Components of learning a song

It sounds elementary and simplistic, but when you are learning a pieceof music, you must learn to take it step by step, no matter how good your ear is, or how quickly you can memorize.  I’ve mentioned this in a previous post, but here are some of the guidelines to which I adhere when I practice:

• Let yourself listen to the piece once, but only once.  Believe it or not, just because something has been recorded doesn’t mean that the singer has sung the right notes and rhythms, and you don’t want to parrot the exact sound that singer is making. 
• Next, learn the text in rhythm, no notes. Move through the song until you can perfectly speak the text in rhythm quickly and slowly.
• Now learn the notes in rhythm, no text.  It should be easier because you’ve just learned the text in rhythm. Again, do this until you can go though the song perfectly, without a mistake both quickly and slowly.  The tempo variations are important to make sure you really have it. 
• Next, SLOWLY go through the text and music together.  Do not go up to speed.  Once you can make it through without a mistake, then slowly and incrementally speed up until you get to the desired tempo.  Keep speeding up until you reach the fastest tempo possible for you.  The words may not be intelligible, but the important thing to notice is where you have to stop or slow down.  These are the parts you don’t know yet. 

By this time you will have been through the piece multiple times in various forms and closer to memorization than you realize.  Again, the tempo variation is a key factor because it will let you know which parts have not solidified in your brain. 

We often learn things with a specific tempo imprinted on our brains, so when the tempo varies at all, we find that we don’t actually have it learned or memorized except at the tempo at which we learn it.

Summary

There are many different ways to practice.  The important things to remember are to establish regular habits and hold yourself accountable for the progress you are making or not making. Make sure to  find a reliable way to keep track of your practice. 

Remember, generic instructions get generic results. 

What are your best suggestions, tips, and tricks for effective and efficient practice? 

When and where do you practice, especially when on the road or in a hotel? 

What are the biggest pitfalls to avoid when practicing?