ABOUT PRACTICE
A vocal coach is there to give you instruction and guidance.
Afterwards your brain and your body need time to digest the information.
It can be frustrating from time to time to have breakthroughs in class and then go home and feel you can’t reproduce it every time you sing, but it just works that way.
Old habits are sometimes hard to break. Be patient with yourself. 🌸
It’s like building a house. Each time you practice you put another brick in place.
Some stuff that can help you:
1-Find a place where you feel comfortable to sing.
Some sounds and notes need more volume than others to sound good.
It is important because you need to feel free of judgment when you try new stuff.
Don’t be afraid to make mistakes.
To find new ways of placing your voice you need to get out of your comfort zone.
It’s part of the process.
2-Work on the exercises we did in class 10 to 20 minutes.
Take a few minutes to connect to your body. Close your eyes, breath in and out calmly.
Sometimes it’s hard to feel everything at once so set a goal before doing each exercise.
What could you focus on: breath support or resonance balance or relaxing the jaw or your mouth shape etc...
It’s better to practise 5 times a week but on short periods of times (30 min to a 1h) then to practise 2 times a week for 5 hours. Your brain will have time to process and it will be more effective.
3-Work on your song
If you’re beginning a new song, take time to listen to the dynamics and the phrasing of the original singer. You could pay attention to: Where she’s breathing, is she using head voice, chest voice, also listen to how she’s landing at the end of sentences. You could also pay attention to your posture or mouth opening. All those details will help you achieve your goal. Watch a live version of the song. It will give you a better idea of the singer’s performance.
Even if you try to feel and think about the new things you want to put in place technically, singing the whole song every time won’t do it.
You need to work on the parts or notes where you have a problem and put specifics things in place.
For instance, if you don’t open your mouth enough somewhere in the song.
You need to do this sentence only.
You could film yourself to see if your mouth is opening enough.
You could also sing in front of a mirror.
You close your eyes and open them at that particular place and see if your mouth is actually doing what it should.
You do that tree or four times and then you go backward.
I mean that you connect this sentence to the one before to see how it goes.
Then you could go and do the whole chorus.
3-Now you can do the whole song and try to feel specific things in your body.
4-Filming yourself.
Filming yourself with your phone as you sing can help you from overthinking.
When you sing you want to be in a space where you feel your body and focus on coordination.
Even if it can be a lot to process it’s important that you keep the fun in your practice. So, keep time to sing songs that you already find easy and do it just for fun.
Then you can sit and watch the video and analyze what’s going on and note the places where it didn’t sound as you like.
Try to watch yourself as if you were a scientist, so without judgment.
Then go back and film yourself again and try to correct what needs to be corrected.
Voilà 🙂
Thanks a lot to S. Johnston for the correction.