How to Practice Vocal Technique
The short answer? Ten minutes at a time. Ok. Maybe 12-15 minutes, but no longer.
Why?
The brain is fried after 10 minutes, quality control is lost, and it’s a losing proposition to go on longer.
Margaret Harshaw taught me this and motor-learning theory has borne out her approach as very effective. If you can commit to 3 ten-minute practice sessions a day you will get somewhere. Want to be really first-class about it? Commit to 5 ten-minute practice sessions.
Practice is your main meal.
Want dessert? Want to flirt with repertoire?
Ok. You can do that only if you’ve gotten in your practice. If you reverse the equation you won’t progress. It’s that simple.
Of course, there is knowing WHAT to practice and HOW to practice what you are practicing, which is something your teacher must supply in detail.
Put another way…
Singing Marchesi exercises isn’t effective practice if you don’t know how to breathe, form and start a tone, have your registers and vowels sorted out, and know how to move from note to note. Getting all that done takes time, more time than most people realize. Why do you think singers used to spend at least a year vocalizing? That’s what Margaret Harshaw was made to do at Juilliard, and she had already appeared with several orchestras.
Schoen-René said no opera for you! You are singing exercises and scales until you are ready. Yes, there was a compromise and Harshaw kept her church job, but otherwise, she worked on her technique for two semesters.
This kind of study is rather obsolete now. Get into any conservatory and what do you find? Repertoire requirements from the get-go. And we wonder why there aren’t more distinct voices on the boards that can be favorably compared with singers from fifty years ago.
Conversely, what do we find in popular culture and on Youtube? The words free, fast, and fun are used a great deal. Yes, this is marketing talking, but it also reveals how would-be students of the piano and voice are being trained to think of their art as a product, one that can be acquired with little sacrifice.
[Practicing for 10 minutes three times a day means one’s head is not on one’s phone during that time—texting, creating content on Instagram, and branding, branding, branding—the horror of our age. Your phone will rob you of your future if you aren’t careful.]
Practice that involves real technical know-how is an endorphin rush, proceeds from single-pointed concentration, and pulls the parts of one’s being together in such a way that it could be viewed as a spiritual endeavor. It also means learning how to focus on two things at once, since you can only create a line, or a connection, between two points. Vocal technique is all about connection: breathing and the concentration vowel (EE), breathing and your tongue, breathing and the start of the tone, etc. When you can do two things at once, then you add a third—and so on. At most, you have five or six things happening at the same time. In the end, they become one thing: the voice.
Once you get the hang of it, you realize that learning to sing means learning how to think and that practice is a discipline that leads to vocal freedom and the ability to sing beautiful music with real beauty.
Photo Credit: Practical Singing by Clifton Cooke, p 41. Find Cooke’s book on the download page.
