Ever wondered how much singing would be too much? Maybe there is a limit to using your vocal cords? Or even practicing! Allow me to shed some light on this particular topic.
Singing for up to four hours is too much. These four hours are meant in terms of practicing because performing for four hours straight is something one should not attempt. The stamina required to sing for multiple hours needs to be built, otherwise, there can be repercussions.
I assume you’re either willing to put in a lot more time for practice or you already have and now have a sore throat, in either case understanding why you have a limit and how you can use practice to improve your stamina will help you a lot.
The Four Hours
The stamina you have for singing was built up, so if you’re planning to go on practicing for hours you have to build it up. Don’t expect to or even try to hit more than hours’ worth of singing on your first try.
That’s where the four-hour rule comes in. That’s how many hours your brain can do productive work. These four hours need to contain breaks as well.
But the four hours of practice are also reserved for people who are trying to reach a level of singing that challenges who they are as a singer.
But regardless if you practice four hours a day or just 30 minutes a day, you need to do deliberate practice. The kind of practice where you’re conscious of what you’re doing and can feel and understand the skill you’re performing.
If you do however manage to put in four hours of deliberate practice then you’re going to find yourself tired, mentally tired. People are going to, “Hi” and you’ll just sit there thinking, “Hi” without actually saying anything.
As previously said, you need to build up to those four hours of practice. But in my humble opinion, getting 30 minutes of solid practice a day, five days a week is an amazing goal and will allow you to see constant progress.
The reason I love 30 minutes a day is that it also makes it manageable. It’s not something you feel forced to do.
How Consistency Works and Pays Off
As long as your technique is correct (i hark upon this thing a lot on this website) and have built up your stamina to last as long as your set lasts, you’ll be good. By the very nature of practicing with the band and your set over and over again, you make it a part of yourself.
How Practice Works
But when you do perform something over and over again, something funny starts to happen. It becomes easier. The reason it does is that that’s how the practice works.
Practice’s primary purpose is to make things easier for you to do by repeating an action over and over again. So, in the same way, you get better at something by practicing something over and over again so does your stamina.
Practice Builds Stamina
So whether it’s your band or a solo opera performance, the more consistently you show up for your practice, the better you’ll be but not just in terms of performing it in terms of the culmination of technique it takes for you to do it.
The reason I speak of technique is that as a singer you need to master quite a few techniques in order to give one single performance. How you stand, how you breathe and exhale the air that you’ve inhaled, how you sing, and even your expressions if you’re performing.
What Time is It?
The currency of practice is time.
And giving time to rest so your skills solidify is equally important. That’s a curveball you weren’t expecting. You will get better, in time. You will get better if you put in the time. Do you want to get better fast? Give time to rest.
Why It’s a Wrong Thing to Think
So, you can’t put in more than four hours and in order to get to four hours you need to build it up,
I want to take an alternative approach, I believe this whole question is wrong.
Because what kind of environment do you see yourself in?
The only scenario that asking this question works the best is when you’re going to be practicing all your life.
Practice needs to have an end goal and that end goal is decided by you.
So, to answer the question you’re looking for, ask yourself this.
What kind of singer do you wish to be? And what kind of musical environment do you expect to find yourself in?
In a creative field such as music, how does one decide what is what? I suggest that there are months you ought to practice and get better and then take a little break off from your practice, like a month or so where you decide to either pursue networking, music theory, music production, or even performing a little bit.
It’s fine to put in hours of practice but only initially, after maybe two or three years you’ll find yourself in a place where you have to as yourself what you need to do from here on now and you will find answering the two questions that I have asked is going to go a very long for you to decide how you must proceed with your singing.
Good Genuine Practice
There are two articles that I think you can greatly benefit from. They’re about practicing and the other is about how to progress faster.
One thing I would like to say is that in order for the practice to work, you need to have knowledge about what you need to practice prior to the practice itself.
If you don’t, you’re just shooting in the dark.
So, to aid you in your quest to understand how much singing is too much, you need to practice deliberately and in order for you to do that, you need someone to teach you.
I believe that the most efficient way to learn how to sing these days is through online courses and you can find out about them here. If you’d like to see what particular courses you can have access to, you can right here.
So, I’d suggest going through the articles and the rest of the website to see if anything catches your fancy.
Good Technique Leads to Good Execution
Before I let you be, I would like to talk a little bit about technique.
One of the major things that you need to avoid is having a bad technique that you’ve turned into a habit. It’s a complete waste of time to get it wrong. I sincerely believe that prevention is the better cure because you’d end up losing time learning something that you’d have to learn or fix again later.
It’s like fixing something, if you don’t do it properly the first time around it’s going to get broken real easy.
How to Learn Proper Technique
Online courses are the way to learn proper technique and nothing you ever do will ever come close to its importance. You need to know how to do it properly.
You can read their benefits when you go through the article but take a while and have deep thoughts about it. It’s a fairly simple thing but very easy to get wrong and it’s one less thing that you’d have to worry about if you take an online course.