Practice Faster

Do you sometimes feel like you don't get enough time to practice your voice? There was a time when you were actively practicing but now that you are working, your main practice is your weekly voice lesson or the rare time you get to sit down and think about your own voice?

I notice that active singers have a lot to do every day and sometimes their own vocal growth gets stuck or moves too slowly. You have performances, rehearsals, meetings about upcoming shows and gigs, memorizing lines and lyrics, and if you are lucky some musicianship practice. For many singers, somewhere near the bottom is vocal growth.

So, if you want your voice to keep getting better or to fix that one annoying thing that always happens when you try to sing a C-sharp, you know you have to practice---not just songs, the voice itself, your voioce.

So what do you do? Cut some performances? Cut meeting about new gigs or talking with your agent? It's not like you can find magical time out of nowhere.

Or can you... (as a celesta or chimes play a dreamy sound effect)

It's not like you have no time. You have some time. But maybe you feel like it is not enough time to be worth it. I mean, what can you do with 20 minutes.

Well....(dreamy music again) there is something. In fact, around 20 minutes is all you need to grow your voice every day. It's not just a minimum time, in my experience, it is the ideal time.

I have a complete practice system and a shorter intro mini course on this if you are interested (see below). For now, I will give you some basics. It is all about intense short bursts on one or two specific skills. You don't flip through music, sing a few warm-ups, practice some runs. You pick the one thing. Or max two things. You do exercises that work them. Talk to your voice teacher or pay attention to what was covered in the last lesson. Those are your two things. You can change them each day or stick to the same ones each day.

Remember this phrase: Scattered and slow won't help you grow. So focus and flow.

It's a little cheesy but the point is that scattered unfocused work will do literally nothing for your voice, no growth whatsoever. At best you will keep what you have. Slow and inefficient will give you slow and inefficient results and minimal growth at best.

Instead focus each day on one or two vocal things, not music, not ear training right now. That's separate. Vocal issues. Your vocal issues. And flow means you keep a sense of play and avoid overthinking, beating yourself up over bad notes, doing weird unnatural things to get the right notes. Flow with the body, with yourself, even with the physics of sound,

Try it today. Pick a thing to work on--an air gap in the voice, sharp pitches in the upper range, nasal sounds in the low range, whatever may be useful to your vocal growth--and spend 5 minutes doing targeted exercises for that one thing. Now stop and analyze how much accomplishment you feel. I bet that you will be amazed at how compressed focused time can get you so much in such a little timeframe. Imagine if you did this for a full 20 minutes with a systematic method.

I have a starter course on this. It a booklet and a practice timer. The book is a downloadable PDF/ ePub (so it's easy to read on phones--you know how much of a pain it is to read PDFs on a phone) and a Practice Timer web app which you can add to your phone home screen and it will act just like your own personal practice timer. I made this to help singers get in their important vocal growth practice every day, in a way that fits into a busy schedule. Check out my Overtraining Cure