Why take vocal lessons?
10 Steps you can make with singing when you take vocal lessons
You're on this page because you're interested in improving your singing, but not sure what vocal lessons can bring you. In this blog, I want to give you some important reasons why vocal lessons help you on your way with singing.
Singing is fun, and it will get more fun when you know better what you’re doing with your voice and why so you can go a step further every time. It’s like baking a cake: you know you can bake something with flour, sugar and butter, but if you know the right quantities, you get the results you want. After that cake, you can take a new step and try something more challenging.
Maybe you think: ‘yeah, but singing is out of tune and ugly OR nice, where are the steps?’ With vocal lessons, there are a lot of steps you can take, and your vocal teacher is the one who can point them out to you and help you achieve them. Here I will give already 9:
Why take vocal lessons: the 9 steps you can make
1. Sing technically more difficult songs
In your larynx, a lot of muscles work together to make your voice sound.They can be trained as an acrobat to do more complicated tricks. For this, you need to create the most optimal circumstances, for example, by learning how to use your breath and relax the jaw.
The way you use your voice is called ‘vocal technique’ and the more technique you have, the more songs you’re able to sing and the better they will sound. In your vocal lessons, your teacher will pay attention to improving your technique and give you immediate feedback if there is something to enhance further. What’s to be improved differs from person to person. (Of course, you can not see all these muscles moving, but with metaphors, explanation, your feeling and your ears, you can come far.)
2. Sing musically more difficult songs
The more you sing (or play) any kind of music, the more difficult the music is your ears and voice can handle. As kids, we’re used to singing simple songs in a known musical idiom. With those songs, we build our repertoire. When, at some point, you stop singing, you won’t develop your voice and musical ear to sing new and harder songs anymore, and this is why so many people think they can’t sing.
But whatever level you have, there is always room for new songs, songs that go a step beyond the ones you sang before. When you train for a run, you can’t just start on the top. Your teacher will guide you to the right challenge at that moment so that you can make another step in your vocal lesson.
3. Add a more profound interpretation to the music you sing
Of course, music is not only about singing harder and more challenging songs. A vocal lesson is not a competition. A straightforward song both musically and technically still can touch your heart if you communicate it in the right way. We can make so many different choices in how to sing a song: we can make it soft or loud, sad or happy, fierce or weak, all with the tone of our voice. Those choices are what’s called the interpretation of the music. In your vocal lessons, you can discover more interpretations than you thought possible.
4. Dive into how to give the text meaning while you sing
A wonderful thing about singing is that you also have the text in a song. And in your lesson, this is another focus point of your teacher. What do the lyrics mean literally? What do the words mean to you? Who wrote the libretto? How can you make sure the listener understands that text even if they don’t understand the language? Is there another way to interpret the text? You can make the text as important as you want. Singing from the lyrics will always give another dimension to your songs.
5. Improve your sight-singing
If you’re not able to read notes, you can learn it. There is a difference between knowing which note you see on a paper and seeing different notes on a paper and being able to sing a melody. For the first one, you don’t need to learn any music (mind that it’s still useful to know music theory in music-making). For the second one, you need to train your ears and brain in such a way that you can link the written notes to musical patterns you have in your mind.
This starts by recognizing a simple, written melody you already know, to predicting to sing the notes even before seeing them. For this, you don’t need perfect pitch (being able to sing a specific tone on demand), but musical imagination, which is called audiation. Hear more about
6. Discover another music style
It’s great to sing music that we know well, and we love, but it can also be fun to explore music in other genres with your teacher and see how you can make them your own (or not, if you decide you don’t like them). Like with food, sometimes you have to try it a few times before you get used to the taste and appreciate it. There are so many worlds of music you can discover, so what are you waiting for?
7. Build up your confidence while you’re singing
Having confidence in what you do is crucial with singing. It’s often underrated. We watch programs like “The Voice” where the fun is that judges destroy people who can’t sing or make mistakes. The more nervous they are, the worse they sing, the more they get burned down. It’s a downward spiral for every singer. That’s why in the vocal lessons, it’s important to work on strategies to cope with nerves, bad voice days, comments from others and your own head.
8. Study music faster
When you just start, studying a song or piece can take very long. The more you study, the quicker you will become, and the more music you can sing. Also here your teacher can help you finding the right pieces for you at that moment so you won’t get bored.
9. Have loads of fun trying new sounds with your voice
Most of us are brought up well, behaving in the way our society prescribes. So we always speak neatly in the right volume and usually don’t burst out emotions like a two-year-old. In a vocal lesson, you can make any sound you want because only by trying out different things you can change how you use your voice and find out what fits best with you. Those sounds can be rough at first but transformed into a more polished but honest singing voice later: your singing voice.
Take your tenth step
Those were the 9 steps you can make in your vocal lesson I came up with. You now think: “But you promised 10 steps…” That’s right, but in Studio MusicalMente we like to listen to what our students want to reach with their vocal lesson and so beneath here I left some space for you to tell us the step you want to make. You can fill it in anonymously and then we’ll publish it underneath this article.
There is not one recipe for taking the rights steps in singing. The key is to find out which actions are most important to you, and a vocal teacher can help you to find them out. This is why you should take your first vocal lesson!
Read more here about the vocal lessons.
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Interested in Vocal Lessons?
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