How can doing something every day improve me at anything!? That sounds like practice! And you’re going to be surprised what practice means and how much of it you actually need in a day to become good at singing.
Singing every day will improve your singing. However, to avoid the biggest pitfall of casual practice one must be very keen on doing deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is based on putting in deliberate efforts consistently based on sound and working knowledge of your craft.
Sound too heavy, doesn’t it? Let’s read on ahead to understand not only how casual practice may hurt your skills in the long term but also how to avoid them.
Yes – If You Practice
The whole idea of practice is that you do it on a daily basis. I have written another article on how working on something daily for a fraction of the time of your day is much better rather than putting in four hours of practice on just weekends. You can read it here.
So yes, essentially the whole idea behind getting better is by singing. But not the kind of singing that you do. The kind of singing that you need to do in order to develop techniques and skills that are required of you as a singer.
Let me explain.
The more these skills are solidified, the better it is for the singer in the long run and especially for their own craft. Because what you are essentially doing is not just sitting around and singing random songs but you are solidifying the foundation upon which singing is built.
What this does is it allows you to have better knowledge and a foundation for much more complex skills. In this type of practice, one is taking one skill at a time and improving it, and mastering it.
In all of my other articles, I always say that becoming a beginner at something is always easy. That’s why it’s the beginning. It’s taking the first step that’s the hardest.
In this case, taking the first step toward deliberate practice.
Once these skills are understood and mastered there is no need to repeat them anymore. Now you can mix two skills or even three and sometimes even four to get a particular result and do much more complex things. However, if you do the opposite.
No – If You Do Just ‘Singing’
If you randomly pick up a song and you randomly just try to sing along with it thinking that you are learning, you are partially right. You are learning but you are also doing something else to your voice.
You are picking bad habits that are not making your foundations very strong.
You might see marginal results in your singing. This allows some parts of your singing to become easier but that’s natural since if you do anything on a repetitive basis then you are able to do it far more efficiently than before.
But that is not an improvement.
The only way you can determine that you are getting your time’s worth is when you are singing by having the underlying knowledge about it.
Knowledge is the difference between knowing when you are singing for the sake of singing and assuming that you’re getting better vs knowing what to practice so you can take conscious steps towards it.
We both know which one is better.
It is about being aware of the fact that you are doing something that is going to prove to be very useful in the future. One of the beauties of practicing music is that most of the stuff that you learn in practice is perpetual.
If you quit singing for five years, you may not be able to sing the notes that you sang before but you will be far closer than you have ever been. Your ear and your skills are just dusty, they are not gone.
However, if you want to just keep on singing without an aim, who is to say whether you are learning things that are solidifying your foundation or whether you are just damaging something and nothing can be built upon it? Read it again, please.
Time Wasted
And therein lies the issue that will determine success or failure in learning and improving your voice.
It is time.
You can put two years into singing and you would definitely be better. But you could have been 10 times better if you would have focused more on practicing the things that you ought to know rather than being able to sing the songs that you just thought were getting you better.
It would have been time better invested if you would have taken a week off and understood the knowledge base behind what you are doing, and tried to master that in the next three weeks rather than trying to leave it up to the sheer chance that you are getting better just by singing.
Another analogy for you to understand and visualize this is to imagine that you are in a marathon that has its path laid out. The idea isn’t to win. The idea is to finish. Do you think you are going to finish if you don’t look where you are going?
If you don’t look where you’re going then who knows when you will cross the finish line? Or if you will cross the finish line the way it’s meant to be finished.
That’s where deliberate practice comes in.
Deliberate Practice
In very simple terms and I speak about this all throughout the website, deliberate practice is the practice that you do while understanding what you’re working towards.
What this means is when you are sitting down to practice you know exactly what you are practicing. Of course, we don’t assume that you are a master of it and that’s why you need to practice.
You have set a particular amount of time to master this. Now it may take you a month to master or maybe a month and a half or maybe even three months, but the idea is consistency. Because what you may take three months to do will not require you anytime after that.
That’s deliberate practice.
It’s very easy for musicians to get into the habit of mindless practice where they are not aware of what they are doing and expect themselves to get better. It would be the same thing as singing every day and trying to get better. But it is always better that you are aware of what you are practicing and give it an appropriate time for you to practice.
One of the best ways to practice such kinds of things and actually anything in life regardless of what discipline you choose is having an online course. What it does for you is that it outlines everything you need to do in succession so that you can reach the end with effectiveness.
On this website, I am a very heavy advocate of online courses.
Learn to Sing from Online Courses
The reason I love online courses is outlined here in detail. Make sure to give it a read. If not, then I would suggest that you get this course.
‘The Four Pillars of Singing’ it’s an amazing course and its teacher, Robert Lunte, is quite well-known for this. You will also get a book along with it.
Here is the full catalog of courses you can have.
Whatever you decide on, take your time and make up your mind, remember, this is going to help you sing better than ever!