Ian Sidden

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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.

Google Questions: “How do earplugs help people sing?”

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Website owners see some of the Google search queries that send people to their websites. Sometimes, these queries are questions, so if I can, I’d like to answer them directly.

Question: “How do earplugs help people sing?”

In my experience and in the experience of other singers I’ve spoken with, they help for a few reasons:

  • They change your perception of yourself enough that you’re forced to try something new. It’s very easy to become dependent on hearing your voice a specific way. Without that reinforcement, you may start pushing your voice unhealthily to recreate it. Think about the difference to your singing in vibrant rooms vs. acoustically dead rooms. But you never really hear yourself accurately in any room, so you should break this dependence.
  • In my experience, ear plugs shift your perception to how you feel rather than how you sound, and the result can often be very positive.
  • I believe they make it easier to hear the relative health of my folds. If my voice has been roughed up, I can hear that more clearly through my head with earplugs, and I can adjust more quickly.
  • They protect your hearing. This shouldn’t be underestimated. Singers and instrumentalists are loud, and I presume you’d like to keep your ears healthy for the long haul.

You don’t even need to buy anything to try this out. Just sing your warmups with your hands on your ears and then buy some cheap earplugs to step up. You only need something nicer if you’re going to use them around other musicians.

Further reading: Singing with Earplugs

An Unavoidable Leap of Faith

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You will never have a fully accurate idea of how your singing sounds to other people. Whenever you sing, your ears hear something from your mouth as well as the sound transmitted through your skull, but it’s not the same thing that other people hear when they’re in the room with you. Even recordings can’t communicate it unless you are strictly a recording artist.

You might not even like your own voice if you heard it the way other people do. Or you might like it even more and wonder why you haven’t pushed yourself harder.

It’s hard to know who to trust when you get feedback on your singing. When someone tells you that you’re good, do you believe them? Why should you? When someone tells you that you aren’t good enough, do you believe them? Why should you?

In general, I prefer avoiding unnecessary leaps of faith. But with singing, you can never be 100% sure. So as long as singing is a priority for you, there’s an unavoidable leap of faith involved whenever you open your mouth.