Is singing a natural thing? Like the rain? Or natural like the perfect skincare routine? Deciphering it is easy as you will soon find out but one must also be aware of some other things
Singing doesn’t come naturally. It is in deliberate understanding and using this understanding to practice that one will find their singing voice to flourish at a steady pace. Talent won’t take you very far but hard work, practice, and knowledge will take you places you couldn’t imagine.
If that is a hard thing for you to believe then you will find that I do a lot of myth-busting on this website. And I am going to have fun doing it here as well.
Very Rarely
It is going to be very rare for someone to be a professional-level singer without training and being a natural at it.
Another word for becoming naturally or being naturally good at something is talent. In many other articles, I refer to talent as something people can have but when compared to what people could have in the long term through deliberate practice and consistently putting effort into it, talent is not something that is either a requirement or something that is necessary for you to be good at.
The reason I say that it is very rare is that not only it is but if you think about it very few people are talented in the ways of singing. You need to be exposed to a huge amount of music when you are younger and on a consistent basis for you to have a natural knack for it.
If you did not have that environment growing up then the chances of someone being naturally good at singing are very rare.
Also, people can be naturally good at singing up to a point, and by that I mean they might be able to sing certain things and perform certain skills and unique combinations of certain skills very well.
But when it comes to understanding and putting things all together by using your own knowledge and abilities then naturally being good at singing doesn’t really help because understanding and becoming generally knowledgeable about things aren’t helped by talent or being naturally good at it.
We Learn Deliberately
And that’s the whole point of learning how to sing.
It does not come naturally.
So the only way to learn to sing is to be deliberate about it.
You can be deliberate about it by understanding what you are trying to learn, which means diving into the singing niche very deeply, trying to understand what and how things work and that’s essentially your knowledge.
The more knowledgeable you are about this, the more it’ll show itself in your practice and finally in your singing as well.
Over time there is no doubt in my mind that you will actually surpass someone who sings naturally per se. Because while they may rely on their ability to sing well but they have actually worked hard towards it and towards the foundations on which singing stands.
So your singing is far stronger than someone who has not paid attention to the knowledge base that they have gathered and only relies on innate natural talent to sing.
It’s also true in all other fields as well.
If you never try to learn how to bicycle then you probably will not just wake up one day and have the ability to be able to bicycle. You need to work for it, you need to fall off a few times and then you will start to get it. After you’ve done the repetition of something many times over, that’s when you become good at it and funnily enough, it feels natural to you.
Not someone who’s just born with strong legs. Yes, they may have an advantage but you need to keep on practicing.
Casual Learning Leads to Nowhere
Casual learning actually takes you nowhere.
When you are casually learning things and you are not aware of what goes underneath. The knowledge base. Then what is essentially happening is that you are sitting as the self of failures by developing habits that ought not to be developed by a singer.
What that results in is the wastage of time because not only in the future you have to unlearn what you learn now, you’ll have to understand and learn new things which are going to feel a lot of friction in your learning capabilities. So be aware of what you are doing.
You might have it but without proper knowledge and guidance heading towards a place or a goal that you can aim for is very hard.
If you don’t know what steps or path you can take toward your destination, you are just wandering off into nowhere. While that may be adventurous and fun, you do not want to have sore feet when you have just begun and the destination is still far off.
What If You Have Talent?
What if you’re the one with the talent?
Still do deliberate practice.
Talent will act like gasoline to a fire. But you must first start the fire through deliberate practice and understanding. Even in that, you will realize that your talent is only so good after putting in so much time in practice.
Talent is only a part of a story. Not even half and much less the whole thing about you.
Whatever you’re innately good at, I hope you find that it finds its ability to flame the flames of your deliberate practice.
Knowledge Pays
Knowledge pays.
It not only just helps you create the foundations of your singing to be solid but it also helps you in keeping yourself on track. In the long term, it is worth its weight in gold because not only do you remind yourself what is the right thing to do but you can use this knowledge to help others in their learning paths.
The same is true for us as well.
We need someone else to teach us what is the best and the most effective way to learn how to sing. Going on YouTube and searching for random singing lessons isn’t going to cut it because there is no structure.
How are you going to go from not knowing anything about singing to being able to actually sing?
That’s where online courses come in.
They provide you a way for you to learn singing without actually finding a teacher who is going to dictate what you ought to work on right now.
You can look at the online course or its curriculum and take a visual examination to see where you stand in your own singing abilities right now and where you ought to pick up.
It never hurts to go back to the basics once in a while and to brush up on what you’ve done.
Become Knowledgeable
I will cut straight to the chase so that this is understood clearly. You need to have at least one good singing course in your library and you can read why I say this, here.
‘The Four Pillars of Singing’ is the course that I rely on and have relied on and so should you. There are other courses available here and you should check them out too, here.
Now go and become knowledgeable about singing!