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.

Rebeca Randle in performance

Most singers, whether they be pop, rock, folk, musical theatre, or fill in the blank style performers, are not the songwriters for the songs they perform. Therefore, they are in the interpretation business. What does the writer mean by what he/she wrote? What does the song communicate? What moods are expressed through the singing of the song? And even deeper, what about who I am makes this song resonate with me? What connection can I make with the writer, the subject, the awakened feelings, and my own inner vision of what the song is about in order to make the hearing of the song meaningful for all my listeners? This goes for both live performances and recordings.

The type of questions we are asking here are very much like the questions an actor must ask about their character, their character’s motivation and emotional complexity, and how to best polish the window so that viewers are in touch with all the writer intended us to understand from that character. Actors are well schooled in a variety of introspective exercises that help them get in touch with an expansive emotional palette. It is the results of those exercises that are combined with the actor’s innate talent and giftedness to render a character that is believable and moving, that has the power to transport us.

The very best voice teachers have backgrounds in all those same elements of acting, if not actual acting classes themselves, which allows them to coach and train the emotional, interpretive part of their singing student in such a way that their student becomes skilled at bringing out all that the song they are singing has to offer. Since the delivery of a spoken phrase has such a different signature characteristic from singing a phrase, there is profound work to do on the part of both the master voice teacher and the willing student. All of the emotional qualities that an actor might express while reciting the lyric need to be folded into the rich tonal presentation of pitches with their accompanying resonance that the singer has learned how to deliver. It is that marriage of producing the breathtaking sound of a human voice sustaining a musical note with the provocative emotional context of language and all the meaning contained within it, that moves us all and has caused cultures of all types to value their storytelling through great singers.

When you pick the voice teacher you intend to study with, make sure they understand not only what this level of mastery is all about, but also that they can help you achieve it. For an opportunity to learn and master all the elements of singing, we highly recommend the Singing Lesson Expert.