A common question asked by students and a statement often made.
My questions to you are, how much time can you set aside to practise each day or every second day and how serious are you about improving as a vocalist and musician?
Practise times should fit into our everyday life. We all have work, study, family and other life commitments; but like exercise if you don’t set time aside each day or every second day, its one of those things that will fall by the wayside and get forgotten about.
This unfortunately can lead to frustration on the student’s part because of a lack of growth and improvement as a vocalist.
What can you do?
Look forward to your practise time, tackle it positively and focus on the great things you will be achieving. You will see results.
As vocalists we need to work on good breath support and increasing our breathing capacity, developing our vocal skills and extending and strengthening our vocal range on an ongoing basis.
Strapped for time? No problem!
Set aside 30 minutes a day or every second day.
Example Practise Schedule
5 minutes Basic Vocal Warmup – work on breathing technique, posture and flexibility eg stretches, lip trills, humming, vocal slides (choose two per practise session).
5 minutes Vocal Workout – work on dynamics, articulation and vocal range (choose one per practise session).
5 minutes Technical Work – practise scales, arpeggios, patterns, work on pitch (choose one per practise session).
10 minutes Practise tune.
5 minutes Cool down. Vocal slides and descending arpeggios.
Keep a Practise Journal. Then you can see how much you have achieved at the end of the week
Be Patient and Persevere.
Deb Macintyre 2009- – deb@debmacintyre.com 0417 928 574
2 Comments
Nice posts – informative, interesting and useful. I agree that practice makes perfect. Musicians just like any other performing artists have to learn how to practice effectively as well as the duration, essentials and other related activities that can make it appear at its best. Please keep on sharing your bright ideas on some useful piano teaching resources that we can use today in the classroom. Thanks again and more power.
Time management – effective practice equals piano proficency.