Best Practices for the Best Practice
“How do you get to Carnegie Hall? - Practice, practice, practice!”
The punchline to this famous joke, which has been in print since 1955 and was probably told long before that, isn’t wrong. One of the best things you can do to improve your singing is practice as regularly as you can. But regularity alone doesn’t make a good practice routine. It has to be good practice!
As we talked about in our article, The Myth of the Impossible Daily Practice Routine, practicing daily (or as close to daily as you can get) isn’t as hard as it may seem. Creating a great practice routine doesn’t have to be hard either. Below we’ll lay out our best practices to get the best practice.
Start With a Warmup
It’s not uncommon for musicians to conflate warmups with practice and visa versa. The exercises used for each activity can sound pretty similar - and feel similarly tedious - after all. Despite their perceived similarities, warmups and exercises serve very different purposes and a good practice routine isn’t complete without a good warmup.
If you or a kid in your life has ever played on a youth sports team, you might be familiar with this general schedule followed by almost all coaches: The practice starts with a warm up to make sure everyone can get the most out their practice as safely as possible. Then, the team will run some targeted drills, often followed by a quick game to put the skills they just honed into context.
As you build a vocal practice, these same concepts apply. Singing is pretty athletic; you’re using multiple muscle groups throughout your body and giving your lungs a good work out. A good warm up will make the rest of your routine that much more effective and can help reduce vocal strain.
We know that finding time is one of the biggest challenges to keeping up a daily practice routine, and warming up might feel like precious moments from your busy day. If you’re feeling squeezed for time, multitask. Warm up while in the shower, making your morning coffee, or any other activity you can safely do while running through your favorite warmups.
If you want to learn more about warming up, check out our article, Why Warm Up?
Keep It Short, Sweet, and Frequent
The idea that daily practice means hours of exercises keeps many students from even attempting to implement a regular practice. Not only does daily practice not have to be a multi-hour marathon, practices longer than an hour can be less productive than a 5 to 10 minute session once or twice a day.
Why are longer practices less effective? First, it’s very difficult for our brains to focus on one task for more than an hour at a time. If you’re mindlessly singing a scale without paying attention to how you’re doing it, you aren’t benefiting from the exercise. Shorter sessions give your brain a chance to rest and absorb what you just learned and make sure that the time you spend practicing is as effective as possible.
Second, our memories are imperfect and we tend to retain the first and last thing we do during a practice session far better than everything that happens in between (this is also why you want to start and finish your performances with show-stoppers). If you practice for two hours and only really remember the first and last exercises you did, was the rest of the practice session worth the time you spent on it? We’d argue that it’s not.
Finally - and perhaps most importantly - it’s almost impossible for most people to fit in daily, hours-long practice sessions. We set ourselves up for failure when we make unreasonable or unachievable goals. Remember, frequency is as important as the quality of practice so if you all you can fit in is 5 minutes in the morning and 5 minutes at night - but you can fit it in every day - that’s great! If you have 10 minutes in the shower every morning, that’s a wonderful time to sneak in your daily vocal workout. Running through your routine during your 20 minute commute is no less valuable than a two-hour woodshed session in a practice room - in fact, it’s probably more productive.
Keep It Focused
A violinist is playing a concert at Carnegie Hall. He finishes the piece. Voices in the audience shout, “Again! Play it again!”
The violinist is pleased. He plays the piece all the way through a second time.
“Again!” the voices shout once more. “Play it again!”
The musician’s self-satisfaction knows no bounds: this is Carnegie Hall, and I’m asked to play not one, but two encores?
When he finishes, the voices rise yet a third time, and the same thing happens after several more repetitions.
Incredulous, the violinist finally walks to the front of the stage and addresses the audience: “Seven encores of the same piece at Carnegie Hall? It’s unheard of! Am I that good?”
The audience members shout as one voice: “You’ll do it until you get it right!”
Deepening your skills requires, well, going deep. Focus your practice sessions on a particular part of your singing that you want to strengthen, whether that’s moving from your chest- to your head-voice smoothly or nailing your entrance on a new song in your repertoire. Singing the same tune all the way through several times won’t have the same impact as singing that one phrase you’re struggling with until you get it right. In fact, just running through a song over and over without stopping to address challenging passages might be reinforcing the mistakes you’re making.
If you’ve ever seen a professional instrumentalist prep for a performance, you likely noticed that they played the same phrase - sometimes even the same few notes - over and over again. You can apply this same technique as a vocalist. For example, if there’s a challenging leap in a song you’re working on, practice going back and forth between those two notes, going as slowly as you need. You can deepen this practice by doing a couple exercises that target big jumps between notes.
Not only are super-focused practice sessions more effective, they also keep a daily practice regimen from getting stale. Running the same scales everyday can get old quickly. By targeting different issues as they arise, each session becomes a little different which can help keep practice interesting - even when you do it every day.
When planning your next practice session keep this rhyme in mind: Deep and narrow is better than wide and shallow.
Record Your Practices
Have you ever heard a recording of yourself speaking and thought, “I hate the sound of my own voice”? It’s not that your voice sounds bad, it’s that it doesn’t sound like you expect it to. When you speak or sing, you’re not hearing your voice as it sounds to others after it’s traveled through the air and bounced off hard surfaces in the room; instead, you’re mostly hearing your voice being conducted by the bones in your skull directly to your ears. This can make it very hard to hear where there’s room for improvement in your singing or what actually sounds amazing in the room even if sounds weird in your head. Recording yourself allows you to hear your voice as others do.
Recordings can be as simple as a voice note on your phone and are a great way to keep track of your progress and get an honest perspective on what you need to work on next time. Video recordings can be even better, especially if you don’t have a mirror to practice in front of. Watching yourself on video can feel as cringy as listening to a recording of yourself speaking, but it’s one of the best ways to check your progress on things like posture and stage movement.
It’s ok if playing your recordings back feels awkward. Watching or listening to yourself takes practice too! Rather than focusing exclusively on the things that you don’t like or make you feel uncomfortable, give yourself a criticism sandwich; start with one thing you really liked, then one piece of constructive criticism (something you can actually act on, not just “my voice sounds bad” or “I look bad on camera”), and finish with another positive statement. Here’s an example:
“My rhythm was really good throughout the song. I need to practice hitting that high note in the chorus so that I can nail it every time. I did a great job emoting during the bridge.”
Extra Credit: Practice Performing Live… By Performing Live
You can practice your diva moves in the shower all day, but everything feels different when you’re singing in front of an audience. Sometimes, the biggest obstacle to rocking your first performance is getting past your stage fright and taking the mic in the first place, and there’s really no way to do that without singing in front of someone.
Find small opportunities to practice performing for an audience, even if it’s just singing to your pet or a couple trusted friends or family members. Events like jam sessions are a great opportunity to share your skills with others without feeling like the spotlight is on you alone.
If you’re really not ready to perform in front of people or don’t have any person or pet nearby you feel comfortable singing for (house cats can be pretty harsh critics, after all), try recording a video and sharing it on social media. Just like singing for a trusted friend, sharing a video is a low-risk way to take your first steps on stage. You’ll likely get more positive feedback than you expect and will hopefully feel more confident to sing for larger groups in the future. You may even wind up finding an instrumentalist or vocalist in your life who wants to play with you in the future.
Extra Credit: Gamify Your Practice
One of the best ways to make a potentially boring activity fun is to “gamify” it. Gamifying doesn’t require anything elaborate. It can be as simple as counting to see how many consecutive times you can sing a challenging passage correctly. Try to beat that number the next time you practice.
If you’re feeling confident with your entire repertoire, try this game: Fill two ziplock or paper lunch bags with scraps of paper - one with titles of all the songs in your repertoire, the other with different song sections (i.e.: intro, bridge, verse). Draw a title and song section to decide what to practice that day. Not only will it help you polish your repertoire, it will help keep daily practice fresh and engaging.
Extra Credit: Make a To-Do List For Your Next Practice or Performance
Practice means more than just running a couple exercises. You can practice almost every aspect of your performance, from individual phrases in a tune to your stage banter between songs. But some of the nitty-gritty details of performing live, like making sure your Venmo is ready for tips or that you have all your gear in your car, can be a little harder to rehearse.
That’s where lists come in. Make a list of of everything you need to do to have a successful performance in order of when you need to do them. For example, your list might look something like this:
Pack my go bag.
Make sure my set list is in order and printed.
Practice my introduction and stage banter.
Practice my first [second, third, etc.] song, focusing on the starting notes and transitions.
Pack my car.
Make sure I have my Venmo ready…
And so on and so on! You can apply this same technique to a professional speaking or presenting gig as well.
Making a list can also help you get the most out of your practice sessions and might help you gamify your practice. Write a list of what challenges you want to address with your practice session and/or how you want to address them. For example: 1. Gentle warm up 2. Blending exercise 3. Sing that hard transition 10 times, etc. If you can make this a checklist, even better! Our brains get a little dopamine hit when we check something off our lists, making finishing those tasks that much more satisfying.
It’s Time to Book a Lesson and Build Your Perfect Practice Plan
We hope these best practices help you get the most out of your next practice session. The fine details of your rehearsal will look different depending on what you’re prepping for and your unique voice, but the tips above can help make almost any practice a little more effective.
Not sure what exercises to do or where to start? Working with a voice teacher is one of the best ways to develop an effective practice routine customized to your needs. Reach out if you want to schedule a lesson!
Go forth and practice, practice, practice! And remember to love your voice, no matter where you are on your singing journey.
Book a lesson with Zelda today to create your personalized, perfect practice routine!
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