Author: Mark JW Graham

This week I was having a few conversations around the nature of learning new songs, and refining them to a high standard. It struck me that I’ve not written explicitly about this.

I wrote an article a while ago on misunderstandings that amateurs make about singing. I also wrote an article on how pros practice that is relevant to this topic.

Hence I thought I would flesh out the key difference between beginners, intermediates and pros, and how they approach learning songs. Keep an eye out for where you feel you fit in this spectrum.

Beginners

When people first start singing, whether they have a good voice or not-so-good voice, people tend to learn songs one way. They have a go belting out the tune along with the track, maybe do it a few times over a week, then judge that song as either being good enough or not.

Now when it’s basic songs, with modest range, maybe a few climaxes, we can get a working version pretty quickly. But success tends to be a fairly binary experience.

The singer will have a bash, and either think:
1) “yea, that sounds good enough”
2) “this sounds bad, I’ll leave it”

This is tantamount to just flinging your voice at a song, and hoping it sticks. Pass or fail. Win or lose. No one becomes competent or great at anything with such an approach. Continue reading “How Singers Learn Songs: Beginner vs Pro”

I was having a discussion this week with a client, regarding changing the nature of one’s voice. It was a fairly nuanced topic, but it centred around:

1. Can we actually change the nature and structure of our voices?

2. How much say does a singer have in how they sound?

3. Why do some people sound better than others?

Each of these are quite complex discussions. Moreover, even if we can say ‘yes, you can go far with developing your voice’, that doesn’t tell us how far, or what the differences are likely to be. So instead of trying to give concrete answers, let me try and simply adjust your mindset on these topics.

Here’s an alternate framing of the first question in the world of exercise: Continue reading “Changing the nature of your voice”

I think a lot about the learning process, and the creative process. While there is heavy overlap between the two processes, they are not exactly the same.

Nevertheless, people often want to rush both. They want to push as hard they can, like it’s all metric driven, like it’s a profit and loss chart in a high-pressure sales room…

“OK, we have to acquire one new note a week, because by the end of the year I’ll have more range than any singer ever”

“This song feels comfortable, so I can’t be pushing myself, gotta find something that finds my limits again”

“If I can’t nail this song in one attempt, I’m a total failure”

Utter nonsense!

Yet we have all thought along such lines at some point or another. We may never have articulated such things in so many words, but we’ve all FELT that way about progress.

That progress has to be measurable, quantifiable, dissectible. And that measurable progress needs to be constant and even day to day, week to week, year to year. Slow downs, setbacks, or worse, variable performance is not acceptable.

Learning and the creative process really isn’t like that. With such a mindset, frustration and burnout is an inevitability. Continue reading “Jason Alexander on the learning and creative process”

I’ve been working as a voice coach for about a decade and a half now. Many of my clients are professionals who earn some or all of their income from making music. I also know many other musicians who work within the music industry.

As such, I thought it might be worth sharing a few things that have made working in the music industry achievable. If you are trying to make a living as a singer/musician, or would like to learn more, please do have a read.

1) “Musicianship” is a skill

When I first started making music in my teens, people noticed I seemed to have an aptitude for it. They would say things like:

“You’re good at music… you should do music for a living” was something I’d hear a lot.

It didn’t strike me until years later, that’s like saying:

“You’re good at maths… you should do maths for a living“.

In reality, there is no job that is just “maths“. There are jobs that employ maths as a skill, e.g. accountancy, actuary, mathematics teacher, even engineering, but being “good at maths” is only one component of the skill set needed to become valuable within a job.

Similarly, just because you love singing, this does not automatically mean you HAVE to become a solo performer or front a band. There are always a plurality of jobs that require musical ability as a skill, but it is deployed differently within each arena. Continue reading “Making Your Living In Music”

There are many things that most inexperienced singers don’t grasp. As I was falling asleep a few nights ago, my mind was going over this particular topic. Over the years, I’ve heard a lot of comments from students who are learning to sing, others who can already sing, and still further comments from singers who are out there performing regularly.

“Oh I don’t struggle with stamina, I mean my voice is often tired about 10 minutes into singing, but that’s fairly normal”

“I gave up on that song. I tried to sing it once and it sounded bad.”

“I can’t hit the note in practice, but I definitely hit it while at the [loud] gig”

“I’ve got about 100 songs I do exceptionally well”

If you’ve found yourself ever thinking any of the above is normal, please do read on. Real pros grasp why these things aren’t true. The sooner you can grasp the reasons why, the sooner you can leverage the parameters of good singing to your advantage, (for very little work!).

1. Practice makes permanent, not perfect

People often say “practice makes perfect”. But that is not true. PERFECT practice makes perfect, but most of us don’t practice perfectly. What practice of any quality does, is train the body to do something in that way. Practice makes whatever we are doing permanent, for better or for worse.

Some singers practice too little, thereby not leveraging the power of practice to make things permanent. Some practice imperfectly too much, thereby ingraining bad habits deeply and making them hard to remove. Continue reading “Six Things Most Inexperienced Singers Don’t Grasp”

It’s been a brutal winter for colds, chest infections, flu, and many other illnesses. Sessions since the New Year have often involved putting singers’ voices back together after illness. I thought I’d walk you through what I typically do. Then we’ll conclude with how our process of voice training engenders a ‘bulletproof’ voice.

My first client of the year had been suffering from an awful chest infection. They had been ill for 3-4 weeks, and coughing up mucus throughout that period. In our session, they’d said they’d tried the usual warm-up of lip bubbles the week before, but anything more demanding than that was just a train-wreck.

So what did we do?

Warm-ups
We took it slow, starting with our usual warm-up, but kept it light and breezy. We didn’t try to access their whole range all in one pass, but instead started with a short pass. Then we took a rest.

After that we did another pass. Going a little deeper, and a little higher than before, then another short rest.

Then one more pass unlocked the whole range, before another rest. I enquired as to how it felt at each step, to ensure that (despite it sounding fine), everything felt OK to continue. It’s a slow warming up process when we want to solve how to sing when sick.

Dopey/imposed sounds
We then proceeded to some dopey sounds. These impose the larynx to relax the supporting tissue, but also reduce the likelihood of eany excess swelling in the vocal folds causing the voice to squeeze for any notes.

We followed the same protocol of short passes and rests, leading to longer passes and rests. They had a smile on their voice as they did this, and they explained that this was the best their voice had felt in nearly a month.

Pharyngeal sounds
After this, we tried a pharyngeal sound. This raises the larynx, so does the opposite of dopey sounds. However it also tends to thin out the vocal folds, which (if done correctly) stops squeezing for high notes as well.

This just so happened to have been the very exercise they’d tried to do the week before where the wheels had fully come off the wagon. Yet this time, they sailed through without a single hiccup. Maybe a little gunky hear and there, but it didn’t get in the way.

Having confirmed useable function in their voice, we then worked out way through a small selection of other tailored exercises. These are to tap into whatever they had that day. By the end of the session we were singing their normal songs in their normal keys. We only had a little bit of gunk on occasion as it started to shift.

Night and day difference

This client said it was a night and day difference between their voice pre-session and post-session. Now they’ve been a client long enough not to be completely taken aback by such a stark contrast, but they were understandably pleased that their voice was functioning so well despite illness.

While this is most easily explored through one-on-one sessions, the principle for anyone’s practice is not to force their voice to start when it’s not forthcoming. It’s far more like coaxing a scared animal out of it’s den. You have to start slow and allow it to come to you. Do multiple passes of verrrry easy accessible sounds, and whatever your voice gives you, be grateful for it.

Truth be told, while this may seem like a miracle – to take a gunky, broken, mess of a voice and put it back together inside a single session – this only works with voices that have had a base level of facility to them.

For less trained/less capable voices, there will be good or even great improvement, but the stark difference in this singer’s voice was down to the vocal facility.

Vocal headroom

Headroom is this idea that your maximum ability on a healthy day is SO far in excess of what you need to do on an average day, that even when your ability is impaired, it just doesn’t matter. In amateur singers, they are so often running their voice to the edge for every song, that if they get even a slight cold they cannot perform.

In professional singers, even when their vocal ability is cut in half (e.g. illness, poor sleep, etc), tapping into that remaining half-capacity is still more than enough.

This is a two-fold problem to solve:
1) keep improving your maximum vocal ability; and
2) make sure your songs never run right to the edge of what you can handle.

I’ve talked about vocal headroom in more detail in this article right here. This is the real secret to being able to sing your favourite songs no matter what, even when under the weather.

If improving your vocal capacity and ability to sing even when sick is something you’d like to discover in your own voice, you can book in for a session with me right here.