When I was in college, I remember one of my wrestling teammates asking me, “What do you DO when you’re a singing major? I mean, it’s just the voice, right?” Even though, as an athlete himself, he understood the concept of building physical strength through weight training, building stamina through cardio, and building skills through technical practice, he didn’t see how those same concepts applied to the voice.
As singers, we need to consider ourselves vocal athletes and, as such, we should approach our practice with the same intention, discipline, and regularity as the Olympians we’ve been watching this summer.
Therefore, the primary purpose of this blog is to have an ongoing conversation about your vocal practice: what you are practicing, when you are practicing, how you are practicing, and even why you are practicing. In this regard, we are all each other’s best resources (coaches, teammates, and cheerleaders). By discussing our goals, successes, frustrations, and processes, we can motivate each other, support each other, and learn from each other. You all have something to offer this group in this forum.
If some of you returning students have come to see this blog as an inconvenience or just a way for you to lose points on your grade when you forget to do it, I hope the new school year can be an opportunity to take a new approach.
To start things off, I’d like everyone to post a couple of vocal goals they have for this year. Maybe it’s a specific technical issue (I want to find better ways to release jaw tension), an end-result issue (I want to add another two half steps to the top of my range), a process issue (I want to be better about sticking to my practice schedule), or something related to repertoire (I want to learn a new song every two weeks and memorize my songs earlier in the semester). For you beginners, it may be something even more basic but just as crucial (I want to think outside of the vocal limitations I have imposed on my voice and see where things go).
Here are my personal goals:
Since I have some new commitments this semester that will place additional demands on my time, my first goal is to stick to my scheduled practice time and not use it for other things.
Secondly, I want to continue to explore the specific techniques I learned this summer at the CCM Vocal Pedagogy Institute to see how they may impact my performance sound (and to see if I want to incorporate them into my teaching).
Tell us about your goals for this semester and this year.
Again, welcome back. Let’s get to work!
Now go practice.
