Transcript
Hi. I’m Anya Singleton. We’re going to talk about how to learn to sing better.
Obviously, I can’t tell you how to sing better because you’re a different person than me, but I can tell you how I learned to sing better. That was basically a combination of finding out what works best for me, in terms of both warm-ups and in terms of what stuff I sing well, and also in terms of confidence. I think what you have to find out is what do you do well and what don’t you do well? What you do there is you setup a situation where you have a win/win, where you know that you do a certain thing well and you feel good about it, and then there are things that are a practice run for you, that you feel it’s something to work on. There are some challenges and there’s things that you know that if you accomplish them, that’s another thing that you can add to your repertoire as a singer.
I think it’s okay to go outside the comfort zone sometimes. It’s important to do that so that you know, “I’m not really . . .” For myself, I’ll use myself as an example; I’m not a classically trained singer, but I actually do some classical exercises sometimes so that I can work on pitch, sustaining notes, and the background of singing. It’s important to do that, and that makes my actual singing, as the type of singing I am, better, because I’ve practiced it. I think that’s basically my tip for singing: Be yourself, know what you do well, and know what you have to work on, but don’t make yourself crazy about it. Set yourself realistic goals.
In terms of practicing, I feel like as a singer, that 30 minutes is a perfect number. That may be different for you; everyone’s different. For me, I feel like 30 minutes is 15 minutes of a really solid warm-up and 15 minutes of working on a song. I would rather do that a few times a day and come back to it than do one long stretch of 1 1/2 hours, because I think that’s physically exhausting and I think it also makes you mentally exhausted. I think pick realistic goals, so you walk away from it and you say, “I’m not super-frustrated, but I didn’t get this one section. I’ll try it again in an hour.”
