That’s a wonderful question, not to get too philosophical, but when our teachers teach us is it not us who’s doing the learning regardless? Huh, something to think about.
You can teach yourself to sing, in the sense that you can absorb someone else’s knowledge and say that you have learned it yourself. Without relying on someone else’s knowledge, singing is something that you will not be able to figure out on your own and it’ll be quite frustrating as there are more mistakes to make and no proper way to correct them.
It’s a hard thing to say but it’s also the truth. You should really stick around to understand this and how grave it can be for you to just rely on yourself to teach yourself and how it varies in its meaning.
To Some Degree
Understanding how to sing and teaching yourself how to sing are two different things.
Can you teach yourself to sing? No, you need to rely on someone’s knowledge base in order to benefit from learning from it because singing is not one of those things that you can pick up and expect to master in your lifetime by yourself.
There is more harm to be done to your singing by trying to teach yourself to sing and the reason for that is simple.
Bad Habits Needs Double Correction
You read it right.
You will eventually develop a habit and without even realizing it will keep on doing it and wonder why you’re not improving at singing and the answer will be all too obvious.
It’s okay if you want to take your time and figure things out but remember this if you wish to improve your singing you’d have to take instructions, and whatever bad habit you’ve picked up you’d have to correct it twice.
The first correction may come off as knowing that you’re wrong and then you’d have to learn the new technique that you’ve been performing for so long without actually even knowing that you’re doing it wrongly.
How to Spot a Bad Technique
If it doesn’t make your singing easier, it’s not good for you.
I am not talking about if it’s tough to perform, if you try to hit above your weight you’re going to find it quite difficult to perform. But, know this, anything that is hard to perform must become easier and will reflect the same in your progress.
The more you practice the more you ought to be able to perform singing easily not the other way around.
So, how do you plan to correct yourself and teach yourself if you’ve done something wrong?
First, you wouldn’t know that you’ve started to pick a bad habit, to begin with until it starts to hurt your throat or you’re not able to sing a particular thing.
Second, there are numerous things to try before you can decide which one was the correct path to take from the beginning.
If You Want to Learn Alone
But, if you wish to learn alone and not in a class filled with other students or someone teaching you one-on-one then I suggest, as I suggest to everyone, to take up online courses and learn from them.
There are a lot of benefits that you can grab from learning online. They will also take care of all the problems you may face with techniques and allow you to stick to the correct path and make you highly proficient at singing.
I have written another article in which I talk about how to teach yourself to sing. But even in that, I outline how you must have something you can rely on to teach yourself to sing, like a course.
I recommend everyone has one in their library of courses so that they are able to rely on this to never make mistakes in their techniques in the first place and whenever they feel like they can’t progress they can always come back to this so that they are able to guide themselves into teaching yourself how to sing better even if it the knowledge comes from somewhere else.
What About Music Theory and Ear Training?
The same principle of learning will be applied here.
You may say that you’ve taught yourself music theory as I do, but in reality, it will all be based on someone else’s knowledge so that you are able to understand something that you have not created.
Making up a version of your music theory may benefit you but your ability to communicate with other musicians will be very low and when it comes to working together, you just won’t cut it.
So, relax and let it go.
If you want to learn, I understand that, I have done so myself for years and I really appreciate that you have read this far, and I would like to just tell you that anything that you wish to learn in music can be found online and I think I have the best course for you at the end of the article.
You shouldn’t shy away from learning to better yourself regardless of how fast you may improve or not. It’s an amazing time to be alive and something we ought to be grateful for.
So go out there and get better at singing just because you are able to.
Teaching Yourself to Sing Through Online Courses
I didn’t want to berate you for buying a course and I won’t start now. But I will also try to make you understand that there is a lot of learning to be done for singing outside of these articles.
I believe in online courses. You can read about it here.
But as to which one you should and can look out for is simple.
There is Robert Lunte’s ‘Four Pillar of Singing’. You should check it out, there are more courses by him and you can find them all here. He’s an amazing teacher and is pretty well renowned for the singing techniques that he teaches. You can check out all the courses and make the best choice for yourself.
You can read about why I prefer this course in this article here.
Whatever you end up deciding, I hope you’ve understood a little bit better how we learn music and you are now able to go ahead and learn it even better.