Why is my singing not improving?
Are you sick of trying again and again to get better, but you just don’t know what you need to do to or how to improve? I am certain that you are making one if not more of these 7 mistakes.
RANDOM VOCAL TECHNIQUE SEARCHES
I am sure they are all fabulous, and a lot of them have great ideas, but sometimes they can have conflicting ideas and that can cause confusion with your singing.
My recommendation is that you choose one of your favourite teachers to follow and go through only their content. You will be getting the right info, I am sure, just be sure to stick with one of them, and don’t switch about.
My fav is Madeline Harvey.
WANTING FAST RESULTS
Learning to sing, is the same as learning a sport. It just takes time, and you need to allow your muscles time to adjust.
I recommend that you wait at least 6 months before trying to judge your progress. You will find that within a year you should have made substantial progress, but progress looks different to everyone. SO be sure to follow the feedback advice below for how to look back on your progress.
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FOCUS
Try to focus on a maximum of 2 things per practice session.
There is no point dedicating a 30-min practice session to agility, pitching, posture, breathing, repertoire and aural skills. You aren’t going to get far in any of them, which will just cause you to get annoyed.
Warm up your voice and then work on, for example: learning a new song and vowel placement. Those 15 min of each technique point will bring you much further than trying to do it all!
OVERWORKING
Trying to start too big will only cause you to burn out.
This is one that I struggle with. Obviously, the length of time we work means that we get the furthest, right? Wrong! What mostly ends up happening is that singers start gung ho, sing for an hour and end up having a sore throat or losing their voice, and thus they spend the next few days recovering, feeling pretty shitty about their voices.
Solution: Start small. I want you to start with small 20 min sessions that you can manage in your timetable. Sing for the allotted time, focus and work on your one thing and then stop or keep going if you feel like your voice Is doing well. But you don’t have to keep singing.
Rest days are just as important as the days when we sing. So carve out 5 days a week when you sing, and give yourself 2 proper rest days, where you perhaps listen to new music or review your work. You need to leave space for your progress, and new muscles are built in the rest periods.
FEEDBACK
Feedback is essential for you to get better.
One of the reasons you will always make more progress with a trainer Is because of the feedback that you receive from them. You sing, and they help you navigate the areas you are uncertain about and you go away and work on those points again.
But you can still do this for yourself too, either in between classes or purely because you want to teach yourself.
Record yourself singing and watch it back. How did you sound? What did you do in that part that you could work on?
You watch your video, make notes and then you go back and work on those things. Then you record it again, and repeat the process. Keep your videos too so you can refer back to them again at a later date.
COMPARISON
Comparison is the thief of joy – Theodore Roosevelt.
You don’t need to get one of those calendars. You still won’t improve with all of those little nuggets of wisdom, but what you will be able to do is perhaps not beat yourself up about your progress because you don’t sound like Ariana Grande. You can’t possibly compare the start of your journey with someone else who has taken years to reach that point.
What you can do though is focus on your own progress, you can focus on your own work and your own measurements for success by thinking about your goals and what you are hoping to achieve and ticking them off.
GOALS
Goals help you to measure your progress subjectively.
You don’t set goals, and you don’t follow through with them. Taking active steps to improve. I want you to think about short term and long term goals in your singing.
A long term goal could be that you want to be able to get better at intonation and scales. Well how do you do that? You get a short term goal to say, you would like to be able to sing a major scale without problems.
I want you to write them down and then stick them next to your practice space. I want your goals to inform your practice every single day!
So really what I want you to do is knuckle down and get serious about your singing. Think about what you really want to do, don’t just sing about randomly thinking it will all equate to progress. It won’t. You need to work at something, measure the profess, get the feedback and then work on those weak points. Rinse and repeat.
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