There are many things we teach ourselves throughout our lives. Teaching oneself is common and it’s a fine art that goes unnoticed in people’s lives. It’s quite wonderful, I am glad you’ve come here to ask yourself if you’ll be able to teach yourself to sing.
You can teach yourself to sing. In order to make sure you are doing it right will require you to have great self-awareness, of where you stand, and how fast you’re progressing. The combination of these skills will always make sure you’re getting better.
Don’t take it lightly, read through the whole thing and try to understand it now, allow me to show you how it works so you can start to apply them to yourself.
Acute Observation Skills Needed
This is by far the most important skill needed to teach yourself to sing. I assume you have time to do this and are trusting yourself to do the job. Which is highly commendable in any area.
What this skill means is that you have an unbiased view towards your own self when it comes to singing. The way you achieve this is by having a system and I have written about it in-depth in this article.
You really have to play detective and you will find yourself wondering ‘why am I not able to?’ and ‘how do I do this?’ type of questions frequently. The only real way to solve them is by knowing what and knowing how.
A paradox? No, not really.
You don’t need to know how to fly a plane to question whether it’s crashing when it clearly is. You know the plane is about to crash when you’re feeling that ‘swirling’ in your gut and you can see passengers screaming. While the air is being sucked out of the plane through the hole in the plane itself.
Sorry for painting that picture in your head but you don’t need to know how to fly a plane to know it’s crashing. Same way, the more you indulge yourself in the field of vocal training and how singing works, the more you will be able to accurately measure yourself and answer the ‘hows’ and the ‘whys’.
I am in simple terms talking about being aware through knowledge.
Not the similar ‘knowledge’ you find in books, singing is highly instinctive as well, highly doubt you can read a book and develop that. No, knowledge to discern the minute discrepancies in your field which can only happen when you’ve allowed yourself to dive into the pool of infinite wisdom.
I am also not talking about listening to every other opinion. I am talking about knowledge derived from experimentation to know exactly where music and in your case singing sits, not just in the time you give but life as a whole.
It is only when you are aware of the common practices of singing, confident in your own ideas about singing which you have come to conclusion with your own experiments and are crystal clear about what and where singing stands in your life that you will be able to guide yourself in singing.
That’s how you are acute in your observations.
Perfection Is Not Needed
None of the above things will come to you if you don’t start to teach yourself.
You’re meant to pick these things up as you go. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
Aloofness and laziness in one area will make sure your other areas will have to pick up the slack. Strive for a balanced approach. A balanced approach of raw knowledge, experimenting, tracking your progress, and fixing major things is the way to go.
Fixing Yourself
In the beginning, it’ll be easy as you’ll be looking at singing as a whole and not in parts.
So major changes will take you far and wide and will help you as a guide. Things like correct posture is a serious things among other skills. You should strive to get it right. If you understand English then you can get it right.
However, breath control through difficult passages is a far more complex skill than posture. Now, in this scenario, you’d tweak yourself very minutely. A nudge here and nudge there. More breath here, shorter there.
The point is, the more you progress the more minutely you’d have to tune yourself.
Everyone Has to Do It
And here lies one of the greatest lies of all time.
Everyone has to do this. Everyone who is not trained from their childhood to be a singer at least. That’s not the majority of us. Those who do it naturally and have somehow picked up the skills to self-analyze on the fly and execute a slightly different approach each time tend to get better results than those of us who don’t.
So, you are your own student. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s amazing how much you must rely on yourself even though you may have a teacher, mentor, guide, online course, a friend, or a family member.
It’s not a lonely thing either. Just like stars aren’t lonely.
Tracking
Tracking is nothing but noting down your efforts and seeing if they helped you with your desired result or if doing something did anything.
I like to think of tracking as something that reinforces my ideas about singing and music through experimentation. It keeps a nice and clean record of how and what things I have done for how long and where it got me at a particular time. You can’t wait till you’re dying to know how to sing well.
So, tracking’s end results give you a timeframe to work with. The skill of this difficulty was done for these many hours and now I am this good at it. So, it’s safe to assume that if I do these many hours more of this exercise of this difficulty I ought to be this good by this time.
I hope it made sense because I had too much fun typing it.
Don’t overdo it. Keep tracking simple. Date, time spent, and difficulty. Don’t do it in your head though.
Improve
If you’re self-aware, possess raw knowledge, and have tweaked major changes, tracking consistently. Improvement is inevitable.
This last part is just going to be a motivational boost for you to follow this through. It’s okay to take it slow and it’s fine if you’re not perfect at it in the beginning. You will teach yourself to teach yourself better. Every day, little by little, don’t burn yourself, keep it concise and short and something you can manage.
If you can’t manage, don’t. It’s okay to take short breaks or long ones if you’re teaching yourself. It can get tiring so remember to rest up and not get bogged down so much.
Where Can You Learn From?
Self-learning is fun. But it can be quite misleading at times. I have written an article on why I believe that you should have at least one online course and why they’re important. Here.
If you’re looking for a course to buy for yourself then I would recommend to you Robert Lunte’s ‘The Four Pillars of Singing‘, (book included) because I own it myself.
But, you can look at the full page dedicated to which online course you can get. Here.
Whatever you end up doing, I hope you are successful!