Why Bother Maintaining Vocal Fitness?
June 28, 2017
The first task for me as a vocal coach is to achieve a basic standard of vocal fitness throughout the range for a new student. This is really what empowers individuals to improve their sound, take control of their voice and start to enjoy singing, and always the missing part for people who are new to singing.
We work hard and achieve a good standard of fitness; people do as much exercise in between sessions as they can.
Then after a while I have to say – it’s human nature – people get complacent.
As soon as we stop regularly exercising, we begin to lose the quality of the tone. However, often I find that because people are generally more confident by this stage, it doesn’t bother them as much as it did to start with. So many singers I have worked with have got to a significantly higher standard of singing than when they begun, even joined bands or started gigging regularly, stopped or cut down their lessons and then started to lose the quality of the vocal.
Vocal fitness and technical exercise is the key to advancement with vocal ability. Not just singing songs over and over.
The parts of your body you use to sing are mainly muscle. If you don’t use it, you lose it. Just like being physically fit, if you stop running/swimming/football or whatever it is, you will lose the physical ability to do it as well as you once could.
So why bother maintaining vocal fitness?
- Don’t waste all the hard work and resources you have done getting there in the first place.
- Do yourself justice and give your voice the best chance of being as good as it can be.
- Avoid the inevitable disappointment of not being able to sing something very well, when you know you could sing it really well a year ago.
- Keep your voice healthy and protect it.
- Keep developing your sound so you can keep on top of tuning issues, ear-to-voice coordination, freedom in the upper and lower ranges and more.
So how do we do that?
- Don’t get bored – change your exercise routine when you feel yourself drifting in concentration.
- Arm yourself with good resources – take advice from your coach if you have one, but a good exercise CD/audio files will pay you dividends.
- Make yourself a manageable routine that you can stuck to for the medium to long term. Don’t set yourself goals you know you cannot stick to, like practicing an hour a day. We all know you’re not going to do that. So what can you realistically do? Once or twice a week for half an hour plus your choir practice/singing lesson/vocal class? 15minutes twice a week? Be honest and realistic, then schedule it and stick to it. It doesn’t matter if its not a lot of time, what matters is doing it regularly, consistently and with your full concentration.
- Measure your progress to keep you motivated. Something I do with people who struggle to acknowledge their own progress is to take them through a song we studied early on in their learning, then compare. Use a couple of songs you know you can sing with relative ease, and notice how your confidence, expression and tonality improves as your voice develops. Always learning new songs doesn’t give you such a direct comparison.
- Ask for help. Ask your singing buddies what they like to do, seek advice from a coach. You can post questions on our social media facebook.com/IglooMusicUK or @igloomusicuk if you would like some ideas.
Remember that the road to success is not a straight line – you will get ill, go on holiday, have breaks, and your fitness will slip back because of it. This is completely normal so don’t worry. Take your first exercise easy when you’re back to your routine, and be patient, kind and nurturing to yourself. Again if you get stuck, ask for help.
[purchase_link id=”876″ style=”button” color=”blue” text=”Free Download – Basic Vocal Warm Up”]