Singing Lessons- The Anatomy of a Great Lesson

"Learning How To Learn"

By: David Randle
For singing lessons to be as effective as possible, they must have three very strong components to their design. Those three components are concept, exercises, and implementation. If your teacher is not delivering all three, you are being short-changed and you might want to consider finding a better voice teacher, one who could be considered a master teacher.

The first of the important design components is concept. A great voice teacher designs your singing lessons in such a way as to know exactly where they are taking you and the exact best way to get there. It is so important for the voice teacher to communicate the design and scope of their lesson program to their student. Everyone should understand that it is critical for students to practice to get maximum benefit from their singing lessons and the way for them to choose to practice the most is for them to have total buy-in as to the reasons for each element that they are asked to practice. A student who is excited about what each aspect of their curriculum is designed to help them achieve will work harder on their assigned tasks and will improve at a much more rapid rate.

The second component is the exercises. Many of the pieces of good vocal technique involve muscular control. Just like an effective workout routine that is designed to develop your body’s musculature, many of the exercises that your teacher will give you are designed to increase command of the muscles involved with the process of singing. Control of your breathing, commanding the air column, developing vocal power and range all come from these exercises. In addition, these exercises help you to become aware of placement and volume control. Several of the exercises that are built around mastering certain vowel sounds are designed to allow you to sing optimally without regard to which vowel or consonant sounds you might be singing at the time. The practice of the exercises is imperative for the development of tone and power.

The last of the design components is implementation and it is the one that far too often is missing from the average vocal training process. I have seen far too many cases of students who can make a good tone doing a vocal exercise who haven’t got a clue about how to apply that tone to the singing of an actual song. This is truly where the rubber meets the road. Controlling the breath, increasing and taking out volume, knowing when to use vibrato or not, knowing how to connect through both the vowels and the consonants in order to make the words being sung intelligible, and ultimately interpreting the lyrics being sung so that there is profound emotion being expressed in the performance, are all the reasons you’re taking lessons in the first place.

Please do yourself a favor and when you interview a voice teacher to see if they are the right teacher for you, make certain that they have a concept, that they are master of all the vocal exercises, and especially that they know how to have you integrate all of that into actual top level performances that implement all that you have learned. Your future success as a vocalist depends on it.

You can count on getting all your vocal instruction needs met with the Singing Lesson Expert.

Source: http://thesingingblog.com



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