It is 11:00am. I don’t start teaching until noon today. But it is time to head  to my studio and get this voice of mine going. Depending on the season and how rested I am, I may simply start my practice with legato hmmm’s that connect from my head voice into my chest voice. Next come the infamous lip bubbles or tongue trills. And then various vowel and consonant combinations on a variety of arpeggios and scales. And usually, within 20 minutes my voice is balanced. I do this vocal practice every single day, if not multiple times a day.

I am taking swimming lessons this winter.  And not because I don’t know how to swim. But I want to swim faster and more efficiently so that I can enter open water competitions this summer.  I want to have the endurance, strength, and technique to do well in the races.

At least half of my swimming practice is spent isolating the different parts of the stroke. I work the arms separately from the legs. I spend time practicing smooth breathing and making sure it is equally easy and efficient for me to breathe on either the right or left side. I know that my overall stroke and resulting speed will suffer if I do not have each of the components of the free style stroke well engrained into my sensory memory. Then I can put the stroke back together and work on endurance and speed. But I have to have a certain baseline of good technique before I can ever hope to have more speed and endurance.

The same holds true for singing. If I am going to sing well I must work out each vowel sound. I must make sure my vibrato is neither too slow nor too fast. No matter whether I am singing high, low, or in between, I make sure I have a stable larynx. Then I can begin the work of putting a song together, with all the varied consonant and vowel combinations, dynamics, phrasing, and artistic interpretation. Those seemingly isolated exercises I did earlier in the day prove their worth. And that is when the real fun begins.

Because I have prepared well, I can eventually sing my song without much thought to technique. The technique becomes “automatic”. The neuromuscular memory of how to correctly sing the phrases of the song is seared into my brain and I can go about the art of singing. Then I know I can perform the song and not fatigue or damage my voice. Then I can tell the story of the song to my audience. Then I am free to be an artist.

Go for it. Dare to practice well and frequently so that you become truly skilled at singing. You may be wonderfully surprised at how much artistry is within you once you have the technique to back it up.