If you’re going to dive from the high board, you need to hit the water at the right angle. Nothing could be truer for learning a new skill like singing. I start off letting my students know in no uncertain terms that they’re not here for me; I’m here for them. I’m providing them a service. That is what my job is all about, so there’s nothing to be nervous about.
Every singer and instrumentalist has two media to work with: sound and feeling. For singers, we can’t show them how to hold the instrument, where to put their fingers, etc. Instead, singers must be, or become, highly sensitive to feelings in the body and the corresponding sounds they produce.
We’re looking for the right feelings. Here we don’t mean emotional feelings, which are important in a different context. Good singers already know what physical sensations work to produce a beautiful sound on the right pitch, loudness, and vowel. They feel the right feeling again and reliably get the same good results.
Every good singer, whether they think of it this way or not, is doing exactly that. If you had to hear the first note to get it right, that would be a problem. The singer must already know and invoke the feelings that produce the first beautiful note. With the teacher’s guidance, the student finds these feelings. Then students remember them if they are to reproduce those good results reliably any time they like.
There are two extremes that reinforce human memory:
1. Fear, anxiety, worry, disgust, hate, etc.
2. Enjoyment, pleasure, love, etc.
These are ancient and very useful survival mechanisms. We’d better fear a wild animal that wants to eat us and we’d better like those delicious berries because they nourish us.
In any learning situation, the second option works far, far better than the first. When we fret about mistakes, strain and worry to avoid them, we are reinforcing the memory of those mistakes. It’s like trying to sweep the darkness out of a room. Just turn on the light. We simply ignore what doesn’t work and enjoy what does.
Who tastes ice cream for the first time, and if they really loved it, takes notes, writes the name down (“Let’s see, ‘ice cream’…”), and determines to keep track of what that great tasting stuff was? Neither do we strain our brains to remember to avoid the dog that bites and mauls people if he gets half a chance. But everything in between we repeat again and again to make it stick, like most of the stuff we learn in school.
In our voice lessons, there aren’t any biting dogs or hungry bears. Anxiety, worry and strain have no place there. They only reinforce mistakes. We’re just looking for the right feelings. We will usually try quite a few different feelings before we get to the right one. The worst thing that can happen to a student during a voice lesson here is another chance to get it right. And we don’t run out of those!
We can’t see most of our vocal anatomy. Even the visible part isn’t visible unless we always sing in front of a mirror. So feeling, physical sensations in the body, becomes everything for a singer. These feelings include muscle states (i.e., kinesthetic feel) and vibratory sensations.
Good singing feels very good to the body, sounds wonderful to the ears, and is physically easier than any other way to get the kind of quality that good vocal skill produces. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t require skill and the time it takes to acquire it. It means no physical strain when everything is working correctly.
So the bottom line is simple. Worry about getting everything right is counterproductive. It inhibits progress. Just like looking for car keys someone else misplaced, we don’t fret when they’re not in the first place we look. We know beforehand they won’t be there unless we’re unusually lucky.
The same attitude is perfect for learning to sing. Yes, we need to have strong motivation. We need to have goals and take care to achieve them. But anxious carefulness doesn’t work. We don’t worry. Worry and enjoyment don’t live together. They kill each other on sight. We exercise tender, loving carefulness instead, like tenderly preparing a handmade gift for a friend.
We just keep looking for the feelings that work until we find them. We have exercises that make this much faster and easier than it sounds. We enjoy the results and rejoice. Then they get remembered for us, just like ice cream.
