The age-old question! If singing can be learned at all!? Is it even possible? What a mystery! Or is it? The answer will force you to change your thinking and if you’ve already agreed with me then I can help you even more. Let’s start.
Singing can 100% be learned. If you put in the time to practice with the correct knowledge and instruction, you can’t do anything but improve. Additionally, with modern-day online resources, you are not very far from high-quality education either.
So, how does it work? Don’t you need to be born with an innate ability to be able to sing?
No Other Way
There really is no other way to get better at a craft other than learning through practice. The only way people get better at anything is through practice and practice in itself as I said conversely is learning.
And in all honesty, knowing what to practice is very important and there are a lot of resources on this website for that kind of stuff but I would also say that creating the habit of practice is actually way tougher than actually sitting down to practice.
Practice is How You Learn
Because it is the first step, it is the hardest as well.
When you are trying to get yourself accustomed to something, friction is the greatest when you are new to it.
Once you do get used to it, then the time starts to work in your favor, and in all honesty, you really ought to make time work for you in all areas of your life.
The hardest part is getting to start, and that matters a lot since most people don’t believe in the idea of practice or don’t understand the depth of what practice can do because over time if you make it an unbreakable habit and you keep on practicing a certain aspect of something over and over again. What ends up happening is that you become so good at keeping a habit that you develop a system in which you can’t help but get better!
Another way of looking at it is, for how long can you actually fail?
You can only fail to the point where you can’t do any more failing and beyond that is just improvements. In another sense, and this is actually hard to refute because I am typing it, if you are beginning to practice something, there is nothing else to do other than to get better. Even if you do pick up a few bad habits there are still going to be overall improvements in your ability to sing.
So the importance of practicing getting better will only be felt by you when you have actually put in the time or work. In the future, when you are looking back and you will understand how much it mattered.
But what about talent?
Talent and Why It Won’t Take You Far
Talent will only take you so far. It rests on the idea that you are born with an innate ability to do something and very few people are born with the innate ability to do anything.
Everything is learned.
Most of our abilities, even if we can’t relate them to the original thing that we do, come from a culmination of various things. What I mean by that is, that it’s very hard to disguise the talent of singing by not being exposed to it by various other factors, but what we may not know is what if the child had picked up creating sounds from a young age acutely, that might lead to them being better musicians than the people around them.
So, when they do music without any prior knowledge or education, we might call it and write it off as a talent that is not correct or an inaccurate way to measure skill.
But if two people one with and the other without talent start practicing singing at the same age and they do it for five years, and we compare their progress, the only thing that will determine their success is how much have they practiced, how well they utilized their time and that will prove to us, that talent can only take you so far. The majority of the progress that you make in any field comes from your ability to practice.
My Personal Story
Look at me, I do have a talent, but it wasn’t for the most important aspect of music. I had a talent for muscle memory. For example, if I pick up a new piece, my hands adjust to the foreign movements quite easily, especially if it’s written music very fast but my ear is the opposite.
As you can imagine in music the ear is the most important part, being able to hear and identify the notes is the most important skill to possess.
So as you can imagine, it was quite hard for me to cope with that because on the other hand having muscle memory was very good but my ear wasn’t as good and I had to practice it a lot.
I am planning to go back to ear training again and start doing it from the top one more time so that I can get better at it and that’s again tying back to the idea of practice because without practice, I could have just said, ”Oh, I am not talented at ear training, I am just gonna quit because that is something I don’t have the innate talent for it” but no, I persevered.
I practiced for a long time. I failed my ear training classes in college and outside my college, I continued training. Around 100 ear training questions, a day and I started improving. Now it’s to the point that I can really acutely hear timbre, especially in music production. My ear needs a bit more training but the idea is still the same. I improved through practice, nothing else.
There is nothing else that I can put my finger on that has actually helped me get better other than practice.
So yes, singing can be learned and it has to be learned, regardless of whether you have practiced or not, whether you have talent or not through perseverance, through your doubt, and through everything, you will be able to successfully learn singing.
Want to Learn How to Sing?
So you now understand how singing works and how you can learn it.
The most effective way to involve learning how to sing into your life is going to have an online course. You can read about how important I think they are and why they should be in your library, here.
Now, allow me to guide you to ‘The Four Pillars of Singing‘, the one course I personally own and Robert Lunte has gotten my respect for making this course.
It’s really helpful and is going to teach you really well. It’s also going to take you a while for you to finish this course. Allow yourself to be patient with progress and enjoy it when you finally do see the progress.
There are other courses that are on offer by Robert Lunte and you can check them out here.
Take it easy and take it steady. All the best.