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.