Ian Sidden

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Rules-Based Singing

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Since we can’t fully hear ourselves, and since we might decide we can take excessive vocal risk based on transitory feelings, we have to have a process that includes certain rules. We then rely on these rules to guide us through challenging situations where our present emotions might encourage us to behave differently:

  • “I breathe here. No matter what.”
  • “I round my lips here. No matter what.”
  • “I wear my ear plugs for this piece. No matter what.”
  • “I only give 85% of my max volume here even though it says ff. No matter what.”
  • “I maintain some squillo here, even though it says ppp. No matter what.”
  • “I modify the vowel here. No matter what.”
  • “I check in with the conductor here. No matter what.”

You’ll develop these rules on your own given your own strengths and weaknesses and the challenges of your given circumstances. When should you make such rules? Here are a few over arching times:

  • When you keep forgetting something that you know will help you.
  • When you have shifting circumstances such as room acoustics.
  • When you have very difficult music, especially music that presents a risk of early vocal fatigue.

Behind all this is the idea that your practice is mindful, so that you can develop rules in advance in order to fully integrate them. But late-developed rules are better than none at all.

On the Breath

Find the Overarching Breath Gesture

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Each phrase you sing can and should be prepared in the breath beginning with the moment of inhalation, and it should be followed through — like you’re riding on it — until the end of the phrase.

  • Determine how you want to structure a phrase in your practice.
  • As you inhale, hear the phrase (the pitches, the dynamics, etc.) in your mind and imagine how it should feel to sing that phrase. Tune your throat in advance of the onset and in reaction to your imagination. With practice, this can be done quickly.
  • Seamlessly integrate the end of inhalation and start of exhalation into one larger breath gesture.
  • Sing the phrase by shaping the exhalation with your body to your desired phrasing. Utilize both inhalation and exhalation muscles to find balance.
  • Repeat for the next phrase.

You can practice by doing simple sounds without worrying about more complex phrasing. Some body-connected sighing can start the connection. Do the steps above, just remove the music. Experiment with different inhalations and exhalations and pay attention to the resulting sound and how you feel about it.

There are, of course, smaller techniques within each of the steps above. Just the exhalation portion can be stuffed with other guidelines. But this is something of a macro overview, and the main idea is the mind/body integration around an overarching breath gesture, in which the actual sound-making is only a part.

Anyway, that’s my rough personal definition of “on the breath”.

Singing Checklist?

"Neck elongated... check... mouth open... check... smell the rose... check..."

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If we could design a checklist of actions to take before singing a tone, what would that look like? After all, pilots use checklists because they improve safety. No matter how smart you are, you can miss something:

As we all know, flying has opportunities aplenty for distraction from inside or outside the cockpit. These often lead to overlooked items at a critical portion of a flight. As a painful and expensive example, distraction has caused countless gear-up landings. No human is perfect, but using the flow/checklist method is guaranteed to trap more errors than using just one of each.

Obviously, a singer can’t carry around a physical piece of paper with them that they fill out every time they start a new phrase. Yet it might be useful to design such a checklist anyway. I’ve often had the experience where a vocal problem was eventually solved by something I already knew and had practiced but had neglected. Having a checklist might have saved time.

So I’m not going to write out a checklist today, but this is a to-do.

The Breakthrough

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It feels like a mix of giddiness and fear. There’s a sense of “duh” and “d’oh” as you realize the thing you’ve been looking for has been in front of you the whole time.

And then there’s the work to integrate it, so that it feels like nothing at all.

Risk Management

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In finance, the concept of risk management has to do with choosing strategies that balance return with the risks associated with that return.

In your singing, you’ll face similar choices. There are techniques you can use for short term power or effect, but they might not get you through a longer performance. In reverse, there may be techniques that sound odd in the short term, but they preserve the voice for long and heavy performances. There are some vocal effects that you might not be able to 100% every time reproduce but are reliable enough to risk given the artistic reward.

Determining what’s worth the risk vocally should be determined early in the process of a new piece, well before unnecessarily risky behavior becomes ingrained. That’s especially true if you sing wildly different repertoire where defaults for one rep are not at all appropriate for the other.