4: Singing

Our singing voice is every human being’s natural “first instrument”. Yet even among those who devote countless hours to musical development, many still shy away from singing.

In fact, I’ve found that the majority of instrumentalists are reluctant to sing, generally because they think they “can’t sing” or sound “bad” when they try. But your singing voice is the most direct way to bring music out from inside you, and it has an unparalleled power for developing your musicality.

You deserve to have this unique tool in your musical toolkit.

The goal of this chapter is not to turn you into a stage singer who grabs the mic and fronts a rock band, joins a choir, or auditions for the next “Pop Idol” contest. It is far more modest, but at the same time far more important: to get you feeling comfortable and confident using your singing voice as a tool for musicality training.

If you are already a comfortable, confident singer, then awesome! This chapter will provide some guidance and suggestions for how to leverage that ability to accelerate your musicality training and further your musical growth.

On the other hand, if you would currently classify yourself in that group of musicians who “can’t sing”, here are two big lessons I want to share with you, which come from working with tens of thousands of musicians of all kinds at Musical U:

1. Any past experiences which have given you the idea that you can’t sing or don’t have a good voice can be safely ignored.

   A lot of people have heard negative or critical comments about their singing from teachers, friends, family members or other musicians, and I know it can be hard to shake those off. However, as we’ll be discussing more below, those are not actually any indication of whether you can sing or not.

   I won’t pretend those comments were just nonsense, or tell you that you actually do sound amazing right now when you sing. But I am going to tell you it’s 100% possible for you to learn the singing skills you need to start sounding good. So begin right now by changing that “I can’t sing” to “I can’t sing… yet.”

2. Once you put a couple of simple skills in place (which can be done quickly) you’ll likely be surprised how much you start to enjoy singing, and how indispensable it becomes in your music learning, and especially your musicality training.

   Two frequent comments we hear from members going through our singing material are that A. They actually really enjoy singing now, and B. They wish they had learned this skill much sooner.

We won’t go in-depth teaching you singing in this chapter. Singing is an instrument in its own right, and although we have extensive training for it inside Musical U, this book is not the place to try teaching you an instrument through words alone!

What we are going to do is show you how to get started using your singing voice confidently, accurately and reliably to express yourself musically and develop your musicality. If you find that you enjoy singing enough to want to explore it further as an instrument, that’s a wonderful bonus, and you’ll find some pointers in this chapter for how to take the next steps.

Overview

In this chapter we’ll begin by looking at what specifically holds musicians back from singing, and establish a clear aim (which may well be different from what you would expect).

We’ll discuss “Singing as a Tool” and the myriad ways singing can accelerate your musical development once you learn to use your voice in this way.

After briefly covering essentials of posture and breathing, we’ll tackle the two core skills which let you sing confidently, accurately and reliably in tune: matching pitch, and vocal control. Through a series of simple exercises we’ll help you get comfortable singing, no matter what level you’re starting at. We’ll wrap up by discussing how to continue practicing your singing skills and integrate it with the rest of your musicality training.

Why Do You Think You Can’t Sing?

If you think you can’t sing, there are probably four contributing factors in play. Not coincidentally, these map to the 4 H’s of musicality:

1. You don’t understand how singing actually works or what it takes to “sing well”. (Head)
2. You have difficulty judging pitch, so can’t reliably hear when a sung note is too high or low. (Hearing)
3. You have poor vocal pitch control, so can’t adjust your sung note quickly and easily to reach the target note. (Hands—though the instrument technique is not literally in your “hands” in this case!)
4. You have emotional or psychological hangups about singing, so you don’t sing, or do so timidly which makes it harder to control your pitch and sound good. (Heart)

The balance of these will vary for each person, but it’s always some combination of them which causes a person to believe they can’t sing.

For #1 (Head), not understanding how singing works: in this chapter we’ll help you to understand the mechanics of singing in tune, known as “Matching Pitch”.

For #2 (Hearing), difficulty judging pitch: if you’ve been learning music for a while then this is probably not your limiting factor, though there may yet be some work to be done to improve and refine your pitch discernment. This will be covered in this chapter as part of learning the two core skills of Matching Pitch and Vocal Control.

For #3 (Hands), poor vocal control: the cause is simply that you have not yet learned this skill. It’s the unfortunate flip-side of singing being everyone’s natural first instrument. We assume “you’ve got it or you don’t”, and so if your pitching is all over the place when you sing, it must be because you have a “bad voice”. But that’s nonsense—we don’t expect ourselves to be able to operate a motor vehicle, or a computer keyboard, or a guitar or piano for that matter without spending time learning the physical motions. Why should our singing voice be any different? In this chapter you’ll learn the basics of Vocal Control.

For #4 (Heart), emotional or psychological hangups: This is often the biggest blocker to people learning to sing. Sadly, for many it started young. If you are otherwise a good musician, this barrier can be particularly powerful, as you may feel guilty for not being as good as you feel you “should be”. As a result many musicians simply refuse to sing so they can avoid confronting this painful issue.

Rather than try to undo that past conditioning directly, the most effective solution is to simply prove to yourself, in a safe and unintimidating way, that you actually can sing. By following the suggestions in this chapter, you’ll be able to see those past experiences in a whole new light. They will gently fade away and no longer be a blocker or an anchor holding you down.

So the good news is that you already have everything you need to sing well. If you’re reading this book then it’s safe to assume you love music, and that means your ears work. If you can speak, then we know your voice works. So the Hearing and Hands components are ready for development, and as you go through this chapter we’ll address the Head and the Heart components too.

Our Aim

Before we begin, let’s first define our aim for this chapter. We are not expecting you to develop an incredible, versatile, knock-your-socks-off ability to sing. We are not expecting you to declare yourself “a singer”, volunteer to front a band, join a choir, or even sing at the next karaoke night * Though past experience has shown you may well find those opportunities starting to appeal to you, once you start down this path! .

Our aim is simply to reach the point where if you want to sing a certain note or sequence of notes, they come out clearly and accurately on the intended pitches.

If you’ve never sung, or have been told that you can’t sing, or you feel too nervous to even try, then the best thing I can do is to encourage you to step back from that intimidating idea of “being a singer”.

It might even help you to pretend, at least for now, that there are actually two types of singing.

There’s the impressive, professional, up-on-stage, artistic-mastery kind of singing. And then there’s the everyday kind. Like when you hum a tune to yourself, sing your kids a lullaby, sing to yourself in the shower, or maybe even take part in the occasional alcohol-assisted night out at the karaoke bar.

You can also think of it as the difference between becoming a public speaker or Hollywood actor—versus just learning how to talk. Or the difference between being an Olympic-medal-winning speed cyclist—versus just being able to ride your bike down to the shops. Or the difference between becoming a famous portrait painter—versus just being able to paint the living room walls.

In all those examples, we understand that there’s a kind of basic competence that we can reasonably expect to achieve. And the fact that some people make it an art or build a career around it doesn’t hold the rest of us back from learning to do the useful, everyday level of that same skill.

Think “functional.” “Serviceable.” “Fit for purpose.” “Gets the job done.” That’s what we’re looking for. You feel comfortable using your voice, and you can basically sing the notes you mean to.

Now don’t get me wrong—as always I do want you to aim high and dream big! And I hope you will connect with your voice and want to cultivate that part of your musicality further, and make “being a singer” part of your musical identity.

But if right now you’re in that spot of thinking you can’t (or don’t want to) sing, then start with just aiming for the basics. That good enough, basically-works level of singing.

That alone is enough to make singing a powerful tool for you. And it doesn’t need to take long. To give you some idea, with the way we teach it at Musical U that you’ll learn in this chapter, you’re looking at maybe a few weeks of practice to get to that level.