Why do you take lessons for an extended period of time? Muscle Memory

Practice for Singing Works the Same Way

How Long Should Someone Expect to Take Voice Lessons?  Why do you take lessons for an extended period of time?

There are many components to learning to sing.  Since your body is your instrument, you have to deal with muscle memory, times of illness or fatigue, outside influences such as stress, an adjustment to hormonal changes such as puberty if you begin study young, and the fact that you hear yourself differently than any other human being.  Therefore, voice lessons should be an ongoing process in a singer's life.  Let's explore a few important things!

Muscle memory- Just like learning to run a marathon, we train our muscles to sing well.  If you work at it bit by bit, you slowly improve the quality and stamina of your body to run the distance.  If you don’t spend the time to train, our body suffers and when we try to run the big race we cannot! 

We do the same thing with your singing in voice lessons.  Your body learns what to do to create a free, relaxed singing sound that is beautiful to the ear.  It gradually remembers what feels good and what to do.  The best avenue to do this is through warm-ups that a teacher gives you.  Here is an example of my teaching in which I am teaching the student how to sing a more legato (smooth) line using warm-up exercises.  Through repetition of the pattern and guided imagery, she learns how to smooth the line and sing ‘as if the sustain pedal is down on the piano’.  Her muscles remember what to do to create the desired sound and she can replicate it on a variety of pitches. Teaching Clip of Warm-Ups http://bit.ly/13buoLa.

In voice lessons, we then address similar muscle memory actions in repertoire that the student is singing.   Your muscles will begin to remember what to do to create the desired singing sound.  They remember what feels good and right if you take the time to train them.  Then the voice builds up stamina to sing a 3 hour opera role or lead in a Broadway show.(Similar to training for a marathon)  Baby steps of regular training, builds healthy habits and stamina to perform for a long time. 

Since our body is our instrument, it is not truly a constant, unless we take care of it!  Read more next week about how Illness, Fatigue and Stress can affect how you sing.