Singing as a Tool

So what’s the value of getting to that basic level of singing ability if you’re not looking to perform as a singer?

Singing is a foundational musical skill like Audiation, Active Listening, and Superlearning, which will have positive effects throughout your musical life.

Perhaps the simplest way to put it though is that singing is a way to bring musical ideas from your head out into the world directly, without the added complication of searching for the notes you want on an instrument.

If you don’t have singing as a tool then it can feel like there’s a big gulf between hearing something or imagining it in your mind’s ear, and then playing it on your instrument. When you have a basic level of singing ability, you’re able to bridge that gap or even remove the need for the instrument step entirely, depending on the task.

Let’s go through some specific benefits and applications of singing as a tool.

Improved sense of pitch

Learning to sing in tune is one of the best ways to train your sense of pitch. Singing in tune requires two major components: not just controlling your vocal pitch, but also being able to very clearly and accurately hear and imagine the pitch you’re aiming for.

So as you learn to sing in tune you’ll be training your ears to hear better whether notes are sharp, flat or perfectly on-pitch. This is something that you might never have had to do before, depending on the instrument you play, and it’s a fundamental skill which you absolutely do not want to overlook.

Improved Audiation

As well as this “real world” pitch training, you’ll also be training your mind’s ear: your ability to audiate (i.e. imagine music) with accurate pitch.

Just as Active Listening practice helps increase the richness and detail of your Audiation, learning to sing in tune develops the accuracy with which you can pitch notes in your mind.

Easy Ear Training * Tee hee

Singing is also an enormous help for Ear Training. This is something we really emphasise at Musical U. When you use your voice as part of Ear Training exercises, you can progress a lot faster.

You’ll learn more about this in Part II, but as a preview here are some specific ways it helps:

• Learning to sing also helps you sing “in your mind”, so when you’re trying to do Ear Training exercises and recognise notes, chords, etc. you have a more powerful musical imagination to bring to the task.

• Singing gives you a way to experiment out loud during Ear Training. For example if you’re trying to recognise an interval, you might sing the start of a reference song to see if it matches up. If you’re trying to recognise a chord progression, you might sing along with the root notes of the chords or the bassline, to see how those pitches could reveal the chords being used.

  You can also do some nifty vocal acrobatics. For example, if you’re trying to identify a harmonic interval (meaning two notes played at once) being able to sing those two notes back individually transforms it into an ascending or descending interval that you might find it easier to recognise.

  As you improve over time, you’ll do these things in your head or skip them entirely as they become subconscious instincts. Until then, it’s really helpful to be able to experiment out loud by singing.

• Singing lets you test whether you heard what you think you heard. In fact we might even say that if you can’t sing back what you heard, then you haven’t really heard it.

  One example would be recognising a chord as major or minor. You can listen for the overall sound of the chord, but that’s prone to mistakes, especially in a rich musical context. It also gets harder as you try more ambitious chords like seventh or extended chords. If you’re able to sing back each note of the chord, that both tests that you truly heard what was going on, and gives you a clear set of notes to explore and evaluate to identify the chord type (for example identifying the Solfa name of each note or the Intervals between them).

  If you find yourself struggling with a pitch-related Ear Training task, it’s likely that you aren’t actually hearing clearly enough yet to be able to sing back each of the notes. Once you practice that and use Singing as a tool in this way, the actual task tends to become much easier.

• In Chapter Nine: Solfa you’ll learn the “Solfa” approach (also known as solfege or the do-re-mi system) for recognising pitches by ear. We’ve found this is by far the easiest and fastest way to start recognising notes to play by ear, improvise, transcribe music and more. It’s a sung system, meaning you learn it most effectively by singing notes with their solfa names. The basic level of singing ability we’ve been talking about so far is plenty sufficient to enable full-speed Solfa success. In fact, many Musical U members inside the Living Music program find learning Solfa to be a really great way to gradually develop a confident and reliable ability to sing, even if they had previously thought they couldn’t sing.

Easier and Freer Experimentation

Singing enables easier and freer experimentation and creativity in music. Yes, you can sit with an instrument and noodle around with scales or patterns and try to create something. But that’s both more complicated and more limiting than doing it with your voice.

Your singing voice is the most direct path to bring musical ideas you imagine into the world. You have total freedom of pitch so you’re not trapped in memorised patterns, or strict rules, or limited by your level of instrument technique. You can immediately express what you want to, and then analyse it (during or after) to transfer it onto an instrument or write it down.

You may have noticed legendary improvisers like Keith Jarrett or Oscar Peterson sing along as they improvise, for this very reason. The musical ideas are born inside, and simultaneously expressed directly with their voice and their instrument.

Singing is the most natural and direct form of musical expression available to us. It may seem intimidating at the outset but once you break past that little barrier it’s enormously natural and liberating to be able to create music directly with your voice. Singing (especially with Solfa) allows us to practice and explore music anywhere at any time.

Easier Communication

Being able to express musical ideas with your voice isn’t just helpful for creating privately by yourself. It also makes a huge difference when collaborating with other musicians.

If you don’t feel able to express your ideas with your voice it can be very frustrating in a band or other group to have to try to translate what you’re thinking onto your instrument to communicate it. If instead you can just quickly and easily sing the idea you have in mind, you skip all the instrument specifics and complications, and can bounce ideas back and forth immediately and directly.

Going Beyond Singing As A Tool

I must end this section with a slightly more romantic take on Singing. I’ll keep it short, because I could wax lyrical about the emotional and spiritual and psychological benefits of singing all day long. Not to mention the scientifically-proven social and physical benefits, especially when you do it as part of a group with others.

Instead I will just share my personal experience: there is nothing as emotionally cathartic, deeply healing, and spiritually moving as singing yourself the music which is most meaningful to you.

We opened this chapter with the statement that the singing voice is every human’s “first instrument”, and so even if our focus is to develop that basic, functional, everyday form of “singing as a tool”, I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least mention to you how deeply rewarding it can be to really adopt singing as an instrument and explore all the rich wonders it can bring to your musical life.

So I hope that your first steps in this chapter may well lead to walking… running… and taking flight. And that Singing may one day prove as meaningful and rewarding to you as it has to me.

Give It A Try!

At this point I know from extensive experience how personal and sensitive a topic singing can be among musicians, so I’m not going to ask you to commit to making Singing a part of your musical toolkit. However, I am going to ask you to commit to giving it a try.

Again, you needn’t see it as “becoming a singer” or taking on some big new challenge. Just play along with us for this chapter, and see how you get on. Start trying to use Singing as you go through the material in other chapters of the book.

It might feel weird. You might experience some negative emotions or emotional resistance. You might feel extremely self-conscious, even if there’s nobody else around to hear you.

Do your best to Tak Courag. Nobody is going to judge you or ask you to sing in front of a crowd. This is 100% about you, and equipping yourself with a powerful tool to unlock your musicality. Even if you never sing a note in front of anybody else in your life, I guarantee you this will be well worth it, and you will be very glad that you added this powerful tool to your toolkit.

There is nothing like your own singing voice for expressing yourself in music—and I think you will be surprised and delighted about what you can achieve.

The Story of Your Voice

When we invited renowned improvisational singing instructor Davin Youngs to teach a two-week singing training inside the creativity-themed “Summer” Season of our Living Music program, he kicked things off with a simple but powerful exercise which I’d now like to share with you.

It’s called “the story of your voice”—and it’s not any more complicated than the name suggests!

Many of our members have found this an enlightening and empowering exercise. For some it’s a particularly emotional one. This is a really powerful way to start developing a new relationship with your natural first instrument.