Do you ever get that weird feeling where you know you’re singing but your throat starts to feel like something’s grazing it? Yeah, I don’t think that’s the best way to go about singing.
The quickest way to stop singing from your throat is to look at your technique and realize that is not the best way to perform singing. Mastering singing has to do with mastering technique and the way to do that is to be instructed correctly and with examples. Only then one may find practicing to be effective.
But what do these things mean? We will learn all about it in this article and even how to never pick up a bad habit in your singing career ever again.
Technique
When you start to sing the thing you have to realize is that there is a particular way to sing. Just like there is a particular way to play certain instruments.
You don’t strum a piano and you don’t press any white keys on the guitar, of course, there are various ways to play those instruments but for the sake of the argument, you understand what I am saying.
Just like strumming the piano wouldn’t work, the same is true of singing, don’t worry I am going to make sense of this now. When you’re singing, you’re essentially performing a technique.
In music, a technique is how you make a sound.
The first and foremost thing that you ought to work on is your technique. If you’ve never paid attention to it then I suggest that it is going to be for your benefit that you do some critical thinking on technique and realize that all practice has a particular technique underlying it.
The more you perform it, the better it is.
Habits
When you do something too much and it becomes second nature to you.
But, unfortunately, habits aren’t always good.
Singing from your throat is a bad habit. Most probably because of two reasons.
First, you don’t understand how the technique performed is correctly done.
Second, you’ve practiced something wrong and have continued to do so for so long that it has indeed become a bad technique.
That’s why it’s important to talk about practice in conjunction with correct technique so that you can avoid forming bad habits, to begin with.
In many other articles, I have stated this multiple times, bad habits needed to be overcorrected.
Because you pick up a bad technique and turn it into a habit, then only afterward when you’re made aware of it that something like singing from your throat is a bad habit caused by your practicing it wrongly, can you proceed to correct it.
So, always be careful of what you pick up and where you’re learning how to sing.
Practice
Practice is going to be the only determining factor whether you’re going to be a good singer or not. And its currency is not just time, but quality time.
To that end, I have written another article that talks about how just 30 minutes of practice can show positive changes in your singing.
Every singer has to practice, in most scenarios I do believe that singing ought to be taught a certain way. There is a different style to learning but there are things every singer ought to know as well. So, the way you learn matters a lot. Quite a lot.
Because the way you learn sets up the path to how you will practice, upon which good habits are built.
Where, who, and how you learn are all good questions. Solve these and put in quality time in practice and there will be no questions about you developing bad habits much less you singing from your throat.
Always remember, you can only practice the things that you know and are aware of. You can’t practice blind.
The first step to stopping singing from your throat is knowing that you ought not to.
Learning
Where you learn from, matters a lot.
Obviously, on this website, you will find a lot of articles that will help you understand what and what you can’t do in order to learn to sing and how to avoid major pitfalls like singing from your throat and if you have made that mistake how to correct it.
The best way in my opinion to learn how to sing is through online courses, which you can read about the benefits of here. I also have made a dedicated page where I guide people on which course they ought to buy so that they are able to make the right decision for themselves. You can check them out here.
Following these courses will allow you to master techniques from day one. You will learn how to create the right sounds and even how to do them.
The best part is that when your instructor is teaching you and shows you how to do something, you can start to replicate those sounds yourself and if you’re not able to reproduce those results, which is fine because that’s why we need to practice, you will also know what you’re doing wrong. That this particular way of singing isn’t correct.
So learning starts to make your practice and the lines between them start to cross and intertwine without you even knowing it. It’s beautiful, to say the least.
Mastering
If you do enough practice, enough to make a good habit truly effortless, you’re already on your way to mastering your craft.
You master smaller things first, then as you go on and accumulate these individual skills one after another, you learn to master the thing as a whole.
Because the whole is made up of smaller parts.
A very good example can be, working on your range will give you the ability to sing high. Working on your breathwork will allow you to hold a note.
What happens when you combine the two?
You are able to sing a high note and sustain it with power. Amazing.
Add harmony to it which is a result of training your ear and you can now hear and sing harmonies. Amazing.
Masterful. Small skills brought together.
But you need time to reflect as well.
Time to Reflect
There are a lot of concepts and ideas that you may have been forced to understand in one go, so take it easy and come back to the article when you’re feeling like you’ve put some thought into it.
And in that similar vein, you need time to reflect on things about your skills and where you’re headed as a singer. This time of reflection almost becomes a necessity as you’re progressing and I would even encourage you to take the time you’ve set out for practice to be used for reflection on who you are as a singer and how the practice has helped you.
We can very easily get lost in the rat race of practice, it’ll never be enough. There I said it. So you must decide your own end goal for practice. That is highly necessary.
Asking for Feedback
There is a little secret to improving at a really good pace and that is through having a feedback system. I talk more about it in this article here.
But essentially, in addition to having time to reflect on what you’re doing, you can always have others look at you as well. If you’re interested in knowing how well you’re improving, having another set of eyes on you is going to help a lot. Maybe someone who’s honest and can also criticize you for it as well.
The reason for that is simple, we can either be too hard on ourselves or too proud of our progress. While having time to reflect is necessary for planning your way, getting feedback is making sure you stick to it.
Plus, this is an excellent opportunity to network and make friends who are professionals in the music industry or grow your circle of musical friends.
Because imagine the possibilities if you could show your progress and impress someone who is doing music professionally. The possibilities are indeed endless.
How to Judge Yourself (Link to how to get better faster)
Okay but this needs to be answered as well, how do you actually judge yourself?
Because on some level you do need to know if what you’re doing is actually leading you to improvement.
The biggest thing that you can do for yourself is to train your ears. I always say that singers can really pick up ear training quite easily as ear training is about internalizing sounds and singers do that naturally.
So, training your ear to understand music theory, how harmony works, and even to listen for certain key elements in music will allow you to develop your ear to understand and listen to music more acutely.
The other half of understanding things is understanding things on an intellectual level. If you understand singing, music theory, and other subjects of music you will be far more equipped to judge yourself based on that.
This is going to help you become really good at what you do.
That’s it and I hope you really enjoyed what you read!