Reinforce

There is one final step left to explore in “The Four Rs of Effective Practice.” When you establish your resolve, resolve on a plan of action, repeat that plan of action, and refine that plan of action, the final step is to reinforce. This is where you really start to strengthen, bolster, and shore up your skills. 

Initially, this may involve rote repetition, allowing your body and brain to experience a successful pattern enough times for it to become familiar. As the skill begins to take hold, reinforcement can progress to include variability. In a way, that process is similar to the “refine” step but in reverse—taking a successful strategy and introducing confounding or interfering elements to see if the success can be maintained. This may come in the form of singing an exercise with different vowels or words, with a more complicated melodic pattern, or with varying dynamics.

You can also introduce physical movements as ways to reinforce, maybe seeing if you can execute the skill while walking backward just as well as when standing still (or maybe while doing the worm breakdancing move). You may try interspersing other vocal exercises between iterations of the exercise you're trying to reinforce. You may start to change your surroundings or circumstances by singing in different rooms, singing at different times of day, or singing in front of audiences of different sizes. This variability will reinforce the skill and start to solidify it within your capabilities, moving it into the 3rd stage of learning (the automatic stage). 

To reiterate some of what I said when I started this series of "The Four Rs of Effective Practice," practice is a crucial component for improving vocal skills, but it can also be challenging and difficult to find the motivation to do. To once again quote author Joanie Brittingham in Practicing for Singers: A Guide to Solid Practice Habits, “While practice habits are only a small part of what is required for a successful singing career, they can be some of the easiest things to correct.” (viii)

Rosenberg and LeBorgne offer some final pertinent advice in The Vocal Athlete: Application and Technique for the Hybrid Singer:  

"Vocal pedagogy is not about learning a broad recipe of exercises to use systematically across all students. Voice pedagogy is about choosing exercises that are appropriate not only for the moment but also for the long-term development of the student. It is about recognizing when a student requires modification or adaptation, knowing when to push a student, and when to pause." (xiii)

“The Four Rs of Effective Practice” is not a “recipe of exercises” or a checklist. It's a process of exploration. By keeping them in mind, you probably won't ever have to wonder what you should be doing in the practice room. Just start by committing to your resolve, resolve upon a plan of action for the skill you want to address, repeat the decided-upon strategy, refine either the implementation of that strategy or the strategy itself, and reinforce what leads you to success. 

Now go practice. 

Refine

Continuing through "The Four Rs of Effective Practice," singers can first find their resolve (determination), then resolve on a plan of action, then implement and repeat that plan of action. 

If strict repetitions (and the natural variations that come with repeated attempts) aren't leading to success, the next step is to refine how you implementing the strategy—in other words, changing something about the way you are performing the exercise. Since singing involves many systems (for example, respiration, phonation, resonance, articulation, etc.) all of which are interacting in a non-linear manner, every strategy may have lots ways in which it can be performed. As Rosenberg and LeBorgne state in The Vocal Athlete: Application and Technique for the Hybrid Singer, “There are many ways to approach the same vocal problem or issue. A teacher must be prepared to modify and adapt in the moment as needed.” (xiii) Singers can similarly modify and adapt during practice sessions. 

Refining the execution of an exercise may involve checking in on these various systems for levels of balance. Maybe there is too much engagement in one system (hyperfunction) or not enough engagement in another (hypofunction). Maybe extraneous tension is interfering with the process. If so, refining the implementation of your strategies, and then repeating the refined implementation, may help move you closer to your target. 

If refining the implementation is not leading you in the desired direction, the strategy itself can be refined. For instance, if the exercise is performed on a certain vowel, maybe changing to another vowel would be useful. If the new vowel seems to help, you can gradually start shifting back toward the original vowel as your system calibrates—taking what works and moving it in the direction of what isn't working. If the strategy involves the use of a semi-occluded vocal tract exercise (SOVTE) like a lip trill or a voiced consonant, shifting to a different SOVTE, like straw phonation, may improve your performance. 

These sorts of refinements are not wholesale changes to your original strategy—they're simply adjustments. The core of the exercise remains intact as you start to introduce subtle tweaks. Of course, as you refine your strategies, each adjustment may require multiple repetitions to find success.

If multiple attempts, refinements, and additional attempts are not leading to desired results, an entirely new strategy may be needed. Rosenberg and LeBorgne again offer advice for teachers in these situations that singers can also use in the practice room:

If the exercise ultimately does not yield the intended outcome, it is incumbent upon the teacher to reassess and modify to suit the specific needs of the student, for it is the process that is important, not a specific exercise. We encourage you to explore and experiment . . . Take what is useful and modify and adapt to the needs of your students. (xiv)

In this case, you can go back to the first “R” of effective practice and resolve upon a new plan of action. Although it can feel like failure to have to start all over again, all of these investigations provide a body of evidence that can inform your future choices. Each ineffective strategy you identify could mean you are one step closer to finding the strategy that will work. 

I admit that the work of finding the right strategy can be tedious and frustrating business. A strategy that may have worked for you a month ago may not be working as well today. A strategy that seemed to work in your lesson or in class may not work as well when you are on your own. These are situations where you may, once again, need to tap into your resolve. 

When you find yourself in one of these dead ends, it may help to consider yourself like a detective solving a mystery. You develop an informed theory based on the evidence and clues you have access to. One by one, you start to follow useful clues until you finally find the missing piece that leads you to resolve (there's that word again) the case. This approach can empower you to use your practice time to explore, make informed choices, and enjoy the thrill of discovery. 

Now go practice. 

Repeat

In the first two blogs this semester, we've covered the first R in "The Four Rs of Effective Practice," which has two parts. The first definition of resolve is “firmness of purpose or intent; determination,” meaning we should acknowledge that practice can be difficult to commit to and then find our resolve/determination to go forward with it anyway. The second definition is “to come to a determination. . . to resolve on a plan of action.” As this relates to practice, we should decide what specific goal or technique we are going to work on and what exercises we will use to reach that goal. 

Once a goal has been identified and a strategy has been resolved upon, the next step is to implement the strategy. In other words, try it out and see how it goes. Naturally, this is likely to result in one of two outcomes: success or failure. 

When we are successful, this is when we implement the second R: repeat. Successfully executing a technique one time does not mean it has been added to your skill set. You need to repeat it to really build consistency. Eventually, you will need to add obstacles or "desirable difficulties," like trying it in a higher range or on a different vowel or singing it in front of people. This is what moves you into the automatic stage of learning and solidifies the skill. 

What do we do when failure occurs? If a strategy doesn't lead to immediate success, it may simply need more repetitions. Given human imperfection, no iteration of any task will be exactly the same as any previous (or subsequent) iteration. Even when attempting to perform a task in the same way, subtle differences are likely to occur. By giving a failed attempt additional repetitions, it allows the body to make subconscious adjustments that may make success more probable. When success is elusive, as the cliché states, we should try, try again. 

There is plenty of research highlighting the benefits of repetition in various situations, like when learning a language, learning how to read, and expanding vocabulary. Author Tony Kenler calls repetition "the heartbeat of progress." He highlights how our brains mold and adapt as a result of repetitive experiences due to neuroplasticity, which allows our brains to create new neural pathways and strengthen existing pathways. 

Repetition, therefore, helps us ingrain both new and existing techniques. But it can also help us commit to regular practice sessions. As described in Psychology Today, habits are built through repetition, such as when someone is pursuing a goal. This is done when we start to associate certain cues with certain behaviors. For instance, you may decide that, every time you get out of your Monday/Wednesday class at 4:20pm, you'll go practice. After doing this for a while, you may start to feel a pull to go practice every Monday/Wednesday at 4:20pm, even when the semester is over and you no longer have that class. This is just one of the benefits of having regularly scheduled practice times—the repetition leads to a habit. 

Of course, repetition takes patience. My former teacher, Dr. Robert Harrison, relates a story in Voices of Influence about the exercises he used to help young tenors develop their high range by descending through the passaggio on a falsetto [u] vowel. "Young teachers, including myself, were always disappointed if that exercise didn’t fix the issue the first time,” he says. “How loony! But by training the muscles over a period of time, the change occurred.” Try, try again. 

The directions you can find on most shampoo bottles read, "Lather, rinse, repeat." You probably don't have to do this more than once in the same shower session, but if you want luscious hair (and who doesn't?), you'll likely have to do it more than once a week. The research on repetition seems to imply that the shampoo bottle is offering wise advice. Learning requires repetition. Building regular practice habits also requires repetition. 

Now go practice. Then repeat.

Resolve, Part 2

In the last blog, I presented the first definition of “resolve.” When used as a noun, its definition includes, “firmness of purpose or intent; determination” (Dictionary.com). Knowing that practice routines can be hard to consistently stick to, it can help to consciously commit to our resolve and simply decide to do it. 

The second meaning of resolve is also an important step in effective practice. When used as a verb, resolve means “to come to a determination; make up one’s mind . . . to resolve on a plan of action” (Dictionary.com). This gets to the specifics of what you decide you want to work on, what goals you hope to achieve, and what tactics and strategies you will use to reach those goals. So, once you have found your resolve (determination), you should resolve on a plan of action. 

The first step is to decide what you want to accomplish. Think back to the goals you articulated in the last blog. Once you’ve identified a specific skill you want to work toward, you need exercises that are designed to target that skill. We all know that this is how physical strength is built. If you want to develop core strength, you have to do exercises that target that area. If you want to build your biceps, squats aren’t going to do that directly. But, when it comes to vocal practice, we often just default to whatever exercises come to mind or whatever ones we’re most familiar with. 

If you’re not sure what exercises to use to work toward your goals, your teachers can help. In the book The Vocal Athlete: Application and Technique for the Hybrid Singer, authors and voice pedagogues Marci Rosenberg and Wendy D. LeBorgne state, “A vocal exercise is only effective if the teacher has firmly established the intent and purpose of that exercise for a given student’s vocal needs/development/growth.” And the more specific your goal is, the more likely we are to come up with targeted exercises for that goal. 

That being said, don’t discount your own intuition. Often, it’s not the particular pattern of notes that make an exercise well-suited for a certain purpose. Rather, it’s the intention you bring to performing the exercise. When you are clear as to what you are working on, a variety of exercises can help you improve in that area. So don’t be afraid to experiment on your own and see what may come of it. Even if it doesn’t lead to the success you’re hoping for, it will continue to inform you about your own voice and how it works. 

The opposite of resolve (choosing specific exercises to build specific skills) is mindless vocalizing. Maybe that means singing through a list of “warm-ups” without a clear idea of what each exercise might be intended to accomplish. Or maybe it’s running through your songs from start to finish without any particular game plan in mind. Voice professor Lynn Helding calls this “roadkill practice” (“I ran over my music.”). As I’ve mentioned, this can help reinforce certain habits, but it is not a way to build skill or explore new creative options. 

Consider starting each practice session this week with a particular goal. Work on that for 5 to 10 minutes. Switch to a different goal and work on that. If you need ideas for what exercises might facilitate this work, I’m here to help. 

Find your resolve. Then resolve on a plan. 

Now go practice. 

Resolve, Part 1

Welcome to the new school year! Here we go...

Let me state something obvious: If you want to improve your skills, you have to practice. It doesn't matter if the skill you want to improve is yoga, archery, skateboarding, or singing—a crucial element is consistent, quality practice. 

Quality practice, however, can be difficult to accomplish. This first obstacle is just motivating ourselves to do it. The second obstacle is knowing how to practice in a way that will actually lead to results. Authors Janice L. Chapman, Ron Morris, and James Platt refer to practice as “The Dreaded ‘P’ Word” in their book Singing and Teaching Singing: A Holistic Approach to Classical Voice (Plural Publishing, 2023). They point out that both student and professional singers can be confused about how to practice, which often leads them to avoid it entirely. In Practicing for Singers: A Guide to Solid Practice Habits, author Joanie Brittingham states, “We singers often don’t practice because practice intimidates or frustrates us.”  Because of this, she believes that many singers give up before they are really able to make technical progress, resorting to repeatedly running through their songs, which can just solidify the errors and inefficiencies that already exist. 

To address this, last year I wrote an article for the Journal of Singing called "The Four Rs of Effective Practice: Resolve, Repeat, Refine, Reinforce." This semester, I'm going to examine each of these aspects to see how they might help us find ways to engage in meaningful practice that will help us reach our goals. 

The first "R" of effective practice is "resolve." Since this word can be defined a couple of different ways,  I'll focus on the first definition for now. As I blogged last January, according to Dictionary.com, when resolve is used as a noun it is defined as "A resolution or determination made, as to follow some course of action; firmness of purpose or intent; determination. Synonyms: decision.” Essentially, the first element of effective practice is that we have to decide/resolve to do it. That may seem like a no-brainer and not that hard to accomplish. But for real progress to occur, we have to resolve to practice regularly and consistently, which can be difficult to commit to when schedules gets busy or when we just don't feel like doing it. 

As stated, resolve also requires determination and firmness of intent. Meaningful practice takes effort and planning (we'll get more into this in the next blog). Therefore, we don't just need to commit to practicing, we have to commit to effortful practicing. This doesn't mean physically effortful, where you engage in excessive tension or muscular hyperfunction. This refers to cognitively challenging practice where you set yourself tasks that are just a bit beyond your capabilities. This sort of practice, where success is perpetually just out of reach, can be frustrating and forces us to dig deep (to find our "resolve"). But this is the sort of practicing that leads to the most beneficial results. There is a reason these tasks are referred to in the motor-learning literature as "desirable difficulties." 

So, as a first plan for the semester, we can resolve to practice regularly and consistently by making a practice schedule and sticking to it. We can also resolve to make practice meaningful by giving ourselves clear goals, challenging tasks to help us build skills (I can help come up with these), and seeing each practice session through. Understanding that these sessions will often be difficult and frustrating, we can resolve to complete them anyway. 

For this first blog of the year, identify some of the goals you have for your singing, whether that's related to sticking to a practice schedule, identifying technical or expressive capabilities you'd like to develop, or any other aspect of your singing that you'd like to see improve this semester. 

Let's have a great year.

Now go practice. 

Try Softer

If you asked random people on the street what "soft" means, they would probably describe things like pillows, stuffed animals, or fluffy kittens—anything that's the opposite of hard, firm, or sharp. If you asked musicians the same question, they might tell you it's the opposite of loud, thinking first of musical dynamics. Of course, both answers are correct. 

English being the funny language that it is, lots of words have multiple meanings when used in different contexts. The opposite of soft (as in "malleable" or "squishy") is hard. And the opposite of hard (as in "difficult") is easy. But we generally don't think of "soft" and "easy" as being synonyms. Maybe we should. 

For instance, if I ask you to sing softer in a lesson, I might be asking you to sing quieter. Or, I could be asking you to sing with less effort. Often, when we think about building vocal technique, our brains and bodies assume we have to do more of something, engage more muscles, or expend more energy. This can sometimes lead to hyperfunction, which can make our singing less efficient. We might get better results by a different version of singing softer, meaning using less effort, releasing unnecessary muscles, and allowing the voice to find more ease and balance. This version of soft singing has nothing to do with forte versus piano. It just means applying a softer effort to avoid overworking. 

This can also apply to the mental and emotional aspects of singing. My wife, Erika, has adopted the phrase "try softer" to remind her co-workers (and herself) to allow themselves some grace, remove the stress from a situation, and work with more intention and focus. We actually thought Erika had made up the phrase, but then we found out there is a book called Try Softer: A Fresh Approach to Move Us out of Anxiety, Stress, and Survival Mode—and into a Life of Connection and Joy. In that book, author Aundi Kolber writes, 

"In a world that preaches a 'try harder' gospel―just keep going, keep hustling, keep pretending we're all fine―we're left exhausted, overwhelmed, anxious, and numb to our lives...It doesn't have to be this way." 

In a Journal of Singing article I wrote, I examined some of the research that highlights how working too hard—like too many hours in a week or too many hours in a day—can negatively impact our health. Besides inducing feelings of fatigue, it can lead to “burnout,” which the World Health Organization (WHO) defines as “feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job; and reduced professional efficacy.” 

In addition to these symptoms, fatigue can also cause us to be inattentive and careless. We know that repeated exercise of a muscle can lead to physical fatigue, but one research study found that repeated use of “executive resources” (or cognitive resources that allow people to control their behaviors, desires, and emotions) resulted in a decline in "self-regulatory capacity." This resulted in diminished ability to resist temptation and control impulses, and

increased desire to avoid exerting further effort. In other words, fatigue makes us want to stop trying, so we start to cut corners and look for the easy way out. 

The end of the semester is a time when fatigue and burnout may start to take their toll. We may feel diminished capacity and want to just stop trying. That's certainly understandable. However, maybe we don't need to stop trying altogether. Maybe we can just try softer. 

Learning to sing at a professional level is difficult. There are many skills to develop, which require an investment of your time, effort, and resources. Life is also difficult. It requires resiliency, learning from mistakes, and being willing to just keep trying. But no one benefits from exhaustion or burnout. Finding ways to try softer may allow us opportunities to be gentle with ourselves while still being tenacious in the pursuit of our goals. 

The end of the semester is also a good time for self-reflection. I'd encourage you all to think about the ways you have grown over the course of the school year. My vantage point has allowed me to witness the many significant strides you all have made this year, which is deeply gratifying to me. It also helps me refine my ideas about the next steps we can continue to take. 

I certainly engage in self-reflection at this time of year, as well. I am always thinking about how I can be (or could have been) a better teacher to all of you, but especially so when looking back on a school year (or a college career—NATE!) that has wrapped up. One balance I am always trying to strike is knowing when and how much I can challenge each of you while still being a soft place to land when you just need encouragement or a cheerleader as you work toward your dreams. 

In Waitress, Jenna sings, "A dream needs believing to taste like the real thing...But dreams are elusive...Dreams come and they go...But hold them and keep them, and know that you need them. When your breaking point's all that you have, a dream is a soft place to land." 

It's one of the great honors of my life to be your teacher and to, hopefully, help make your dreams a bit less elusive. As you continue to "hold them and keep them," give yourself permission to try a bit softer sometimes. 

Much love,

-brian

How Does Feedback Make You Feel?

A key component of developing singing skills is receiving and implementing useful feedback. As I have blogged about previously, there are two primary forms of feedback: augmented and inherent. Augmented feedback comes from an external source, like the instructions your voice teacher gives you. Inherent feedback is the feedback you provide yourself based on the things you notice when you're singing—what you see, hear, and feel. 

In our voice lessons, you receive both kinds of feedback. When I ask questions like, "How was that?" or "What did you notice?" I am asking you to self-assess and provide yourself with some inherent feedback. When I offer my own suggestions, adjustments, or tactics to try, that is augmented feedback. 

When you are by yourself in the practice room, the only feedback you have to rely on is inherent. Obviously, while you have 24/7 access to your own voice, you only have access to a teacher's augmented feedback for the limited amount of class or lesson time you have each week. Therefore, a primary goal of voice training is to help you develop the ability to give yourself quality inherent feedback. 

There is a lot written about feedback in the motor learning literature (which we discuss at length in vocal pedagogy class). Research studies have examined different aspects of feedback and how they impact our ability to learn, including how much feedback to give, when to give it, and whether feedback should focus on negative or positive results. 

I recently read about a different aspect of feedback in a Journal of Singing article by Professor Lynn Helding. Citing a 2015 article by Telio, Ajjawi, and Regehr, she notes an increasing amount of evidence that points to how our satisfaction with any feedback we receive is often linked to the emotional impact that feedback has on us. As Helding states, "The receiver may care more about the way the feedback makes them feel rather than the quality of the feedback's content." Therefore, if an effective suggestion makes us feel bad, we may rate it as less valid feedback than a less-effective suggestion that makes us feel good. 

Have you ever experienced that? Maybe someone made a valid suggestion but did it in a way that shamed you, embarrassed you, or made you feel "less than." Or maybe someone gave you a suggestion you didn't ask for, sharing an opinion that wasn't welcome. As a result, we usually reject these forms of augmented feedback and look for other solutions instead. I've certainly discarded potentially good advice in my life because I didn't like how (or from whom) it was given. 

As your teacher, I try to be mindful about how I'm delivering my augmented feedback, anticipating how my comments might land with each of you. Admittedly, since I'm a perpetual work in progress, I'm better about that in some instances than I am in others. But I'm always aware that my choice of words or my tone of voice can significantly impact whether or not a suggestion is well received. I would hate for any of you to reject potentially helpful instruction because I was clumsy or insensitive in the way I stated it. 

Now think about the inherent feedback you give yourself. How mindful are you about how you give it? Do you correct yourself gently, offering adjustments with kindness? Do you encourage yourself to keep trying with confidence that you can improve? Or are you "your own worst critic," giving yourself feedback laced with judgment and cruelty? Do you blame yourself for not already being better and discourage yourself from further exploring and enjoying your own voice? 

If the feedback you give yourself was coming from someone else, would you accept it or reject it because of how it made you feel? 

How might you adjust your inherent feedback as you prepare for your final performances of the semester?

Now go practice.