It is more than clear that if you don’t know how to do something very well, given a basic amount of talent to start with, the way to improve is to learn everything you can about how to do what you want to do. This makes perfect sense and is completely true when it comes to singing. Students seem to accept that they have a lack of knowledge and bodily control and that’s the reason they came to take lessons in the first place. So what is it that makes them not practice?

Are they too busy? We are all busy. It seems like we are all attempting to cram two or three lives into one; fitting fifty hours into a day. When you take lessons, it’s important to not just allocate the hour or half hour per week for the lesson, but to schedule a block of practice time each day while you’re studying. Are they too lazy? Well, they were motivated enough to sign up for weekly lessons, so it’s hard to imagine that laziness is the true reason. Are they afraid? Maybe we’re on to something here. But which demon is it that they’re afraid of, failure or success? I know when we’re dealing with fear, the student is in an emotional state and rational thinking kind of goes out the window. Yet if we examine the failure side of the equation, not practicing creates a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure. If the student is beginning with a lack of knowledge, technique, and control, and as a result seeks out voice lessons and finds a highly qualified and gifted voice teacher, then to fail to practice insures that they don’t internalize the expertise and are destined to fail. Who would logically follow that path?

What about the fear of success side of our question? There are thousands of books on human psychology and/or the philosophies of personal growth that claim that contrary to our desires to thrive, grow, and improve in the areas of our lives we are skeptical about the possibility of our own greatness. Is it really possible that we can fear the very thing that we appear to long for? There are thousands of success stories out there. Pick up a few biographies of people you admire and see what they did to overcome fear; to put one foot in front of the other, day after day and do the things necessary to reach that amazing goal of yours. What that means to a singing student is to practice, practice, practice; every day following the instruction of your awesome vocal coach, unless you have a fairy godmother in your pocket.

When you’re ready to do the work to achieve greatness and want to study with one of the best vocal coaches, do yourself a favor and contact the Singing Lesson Expert.

Each and every artist who you idolize did not get there overnight. Just the making of their CD took a year or more and it probably wasn’t their first recording. They’ve had coaching, very specific training, and usually a group of individuals helping to lead them to that successful location where you and millions of others noticed them. They have worked hard to reach that height and it usually hasn’t come easy.

So when you commit to a dream, to a lofty goal, let some realism in. Create a timeline that is doable. This is not the stuff of Fairy Godmothers and magic wands. It is the result of voice lessons, performance coaching, dance lessons, maybe some acting lessons, and not for just a few weeks, but over a significant amount of time. I’m talking about years not months. It is a lot of work. It is also worth every minute of it.

Along the way, however, you’ve got a job that is more important than all the hard physical work. It’s harder than daily vocalization and technique training, working on body awareness and gesturing, or learning how to project yourself out in space to fill a room and become a larger-than-life presence on the stage. During all your hard work, assuming you don’t believe you are going to daydream yourself to success, there is one consistently challenging element you will face, and please don’t minimize it. That element is yourself, your mindset. We’ll call it your self-talk.

What you truly believe about yourself is more important than any work or training that you do. And when I say believe, I don’t mean what you attempt to talk yourself into, but what you really believe at the core level of your being. If your dream is to be a music performer and recording star but down deep inside you don’t believe you could possibly accomplish that, then you probably won’t. Your self-talk will trump a hope or dream every time. So what do you do when your dream and your belief are out of alignment with each other?

One of the interesting things about how our beliefs are wired is that we are very susceptible to demonstration. Each time we slightly exceed our belief or expectation, that belief or expectation stretches or grows. That gives us an amazing opportunity to blow through our limiting thinking, but it probably can’t happen overnight. While there are situations in voice training and singing lessons where a student had no idea how incorrectly they were doing something and a minor correction created an almost immediate improvement, most breakthroughs are earned through hard work. Slow and steady wins the race.

The important point here is to give yourself room within your self-talk to grow through an apparently limiting situation. Your biggest enemy is the thought, “I can’t do that.” Almost everything that a human being can do, we didn’t do as well the first time we tried it as we did the 100^th time, or the 1000^th time. The more we try it, the better we will get, especially if during our trying we incorporate some very specific and focused training. Our singing teacher will show us the best way to do everything related to singing, and if we have the talent, the hope and dream, the positive self-talk, the drive, and the willingness to work, everything is possible.

If you are looking for a teacher who can help you coordinate your talent, dream, motivation, and self-talk, we recommend contacting the Singing Lesson Expert.

The dream is to be the star, the focal point, the “it” factor. And toward that end, singers are working tirelessly to get an edge. Something unique, something quirky, something that will make them stand out. They play with their voices, developing affected sounds, asking the world to “look at me,” all the while weakening their true talent for actually singing. I would never deny the singer their shot at the attention that they crave; however, I want to tell the other side of the story.

As a record producer, I have worked with many different vocalists over the years and I acknowledge that an edgy, unique sound can “cut” through the production and that it can be a desirable aspect to someone’s “sound.” The challenge is that not every gig that you get hired for will be as the lead vocalist, no matter how good you are, and now all those years of training yourself to cut through are wasted. Because the main thing a producer or arranger is looking for in the backing vocal tracks or the secondary harmony to the lead line is “blend.” An edgy lead voice stands out like a sore thumb in backing vocal tracks. It is so important as a background singer to discern what the other voices are doing and sing in such a way as to match that timbre or tone. You must be able to control pitch flawlessly as well as control tone and phrase volume to match the other singers and give the producer what they want.

Even greater in importance is the ability to sing without vibrato. As beautiful as vibrato can be on the lead, solo line, it is a curse for the background singers. Since everyone has their own unique rate or speed at which their vibrato cycles, imagine trying to get a tight three part harmony backing vocal to sound good with three totally different vibrato speeds. It creates the “wow” from hell. If you haven’t studied and mastered the ability to modify your tone, sing in pitch, blend and match the phrase timing, and most importantly, learned to sing well without vibrato, don’t bother showing up for a background vocal session. You’ll just get sent home.

However, if you have a desire to be master of your sound, your chops, and your fate, find a vocal instructor who can help you learn both lead and background singing. It really is part of being the best that you can be. And even if, as a lead vocalist on your own recording, you end up sing all your own backgrounds in the studio, you’ll be ever grateful you acquired these skills.

If you want to develop a complete singing skillset so that you can further your singing career, the Singing Lesson Expert is your best choice.

The tragedy that I see is that when students are shopping for voice teachers, the number one criterion on their list is price. That is an ill-conceived strategy. Voice lessons are a bit of a buyer-beware industry. I don’t mean to scare you, but there is no regulation out there regarding teacher quality or training. Anyone who wants to put out their shingle can say they are a voice teacher and it’s up to you to sift through the lot and separate the wheat from the chaff. Please hear this clearly. The best teachers are not the cheapest. It doesn’t work that way with any other product so why would it work that way with singing lessons? You get what you pay for.

There is one more important thing to consider for the bargain hunters. In all my years in music education, what I see over and over again, is that when students have scrimped on the amount they were willing to pay for lessons, it has cost them way more in the long run. At best, they ended up being trained incorrectly and developed such bad habits that it took two to three times longer to untrain the bad habits and retrain the proper techniques. At worst, they learned such bad techniques that they strained their voices or even developed nodes or nodules (lesions) on their vocal chords. This is the ultimate in being penny-wise and pound-foolish.

My recommendation is to remove money as the number one factor on your list. If you can’t afford a great teacher right now, wait until you can. Save up your money so that you can work with someone who can get you where you want to go. The alternative is really disappointing. Because I believe you have talent or you wouldn’t have received that inner nudge to go do something about it. What I ask is that you seriously consider how valuable it really would be for you to train with the best, and like I explained earlier, quite often the best ends up being more cost effective in the long run.

If it’s really your heart’s desire to sing and sing well, we highly recommend that you contact the Singing Lesson Expert.

Singing Lesson Expert, a pastoral performance

At the forefront of your new body awareness is adequate hydration. Drinking enough water is incredibly important for the body on so many levels. Water helps function in the body chemistry to create energy. It is one of the most important body lubricants. Holistic health practitioners suggest drinking roughly half your body weight in ounces of water. In other words, if you weigh 120 lbs., you need to drink 60 oz. of water. I know very few people who drink enough water and in addition to that, wet drinks are not only not water, but also often increase our need for water. Coffee and tea are diuretics and every ounce of diuretic you drink subtracts an ounce of water from your storehouse, so for every eight ounces of coffee or tea you drink, you need an additional 8 ounces of water to offset it.

One of the biggest obstacles to creating good tone in the resonant cavities of the body is inflammation. Inflammation in the bodily tissues greatly increases mucous, which is an acknowledged enemy of singers. Unfortunately for your sweet tooth, the biggest cause of inflammation in the body is the ingestion of sugar in all its forms. If you want to reduce the presence of inflammation in your body, cut way back on your sugar intake.

The last thing I’d like to discuss in this article is becoming vigilant about what you eat. This is more than for the obvious reason of fueling your body with the optimum in nutrition so that your health and vitality are at the highest level. There is a much greater reason for vigilance than choosing good food to eat. It’s also about avoiding substances that have no business being in your body. We’re talking about toxins here. The lion’s share of all the processed food products out there are laced with unpronounceable chemicals whose purpose is to preserve a product’s shelf life, or add or enhance color, or replace more expensive ingredients with affordable chemical ingredients to keep prices low. Regardless of the reason for their use, none of those chemical ingredients have any justification being in your body and they only increase your toxic load, which leads to a higher incidence of illness, which can’t possibly help your singing.

If you want to increase your health and vitality, raise your energy levels and help to keep your body clear of congestion and mucous, I suggest drinking plenty of water, avoiding sugar like the plague, and eating whole, organic foods without those insidious additives. These suggestions will help your body to function in the best possible way to support your dream of being a great singer. Wow, it sounds just like something grandma would have said!

If you need a voice teacher who fully understands the role of body awareness in your singing development, we recommend contacting the Singing Lesson Expert.

The challenge here is that most of the best voice instructors are remarkable voice teachers and are not usually good entrepreneurs, lacking the knowledge or desire to market their services and get out there to the world. Over the last five to ten years has come the advent of some opportunistic marketing companies who, as music lesson companies, “handle” all of the administration of coordinating teachers with students. Don’t misunderstand stand me here. Overall, that is a much-needed service. Students are desperate to find a good teacher and teachers are hungry to find students that they can teach. Unfortunately, in these arrangements, only about 25% of the student fees actually get to the person doing the teaching. So for those of you looking for an extraordinary teacher, I ask you to consider the following. The very best teachers have a rate that is what they charge based on years and years of experience. They rarely take a student below that rate and they usually have some sort of studio or training center, sometimes in a music store or stand alone commercial facility, but just as often out of their own home.

Most of the music lesson marketing companies charge the same rate as the master teachers, and while they tell you that you are getting a great teacher for the money you are paying, I can just about guarantee you that the acknowledged top teachers in your area are not working for these companies. Just think about it. If you were a top professional in your field, would you take a 75% discount on the fee for your services in exchange for the convenience of them doing a little marketing for you?

I urge you to ask professional entertainers in your area who they study with. Or ask the universities, or music stores. But please, do yourself a favor and find a great teacher who you can work directly with. You will get so much more lesson for you dollar and you will not regret it.

You can begin your search for a great singing teacher at http://www.singinglessonexpert.com

Singing Lesson Expert

We want you to sing. That’s why we called this The Singing Blog. The writers of this blog have an incredible number of years in music education and they know a tremendous amount about learning to sing. This blog will be constantly updated with posts about everything to do with singing, from finding a great teacher, to dietary do’s and don’ts, to exercises and drills to help develop technique, and so much more. We are excited to bring you the wealth of our knowledge about the process of singing and how best to train to be a great singer, both technically and emotionally. There’s a joyous world of singing out there, from professional performance, to karaoke, to singing in the shower or the car, and we want you to enjoy it.

Become a regular visitor and we promise to bring major points to your attention that will help your singing, improve your understanding of the art, or just know more and have more fun.

If you’re looking for a great voice teacher, you can begin with the Singing Lesson Expert.