When I first started singing again after the injury, I pretty much just attacked it like I always had before. I had a new voice and everything was just going to click for me. I just knew it! So I ran on this idea for the first month or two when I came back. I started to practice just the same way I had before the injury. I had a list of arias I wanted to learn, competitions and auditions I wanted to do…I was really going to go for it in a big way. I was sure I’d be some amazing, world-class singer in no time! And oh boy! Was that a stupid thought! What I really should have done was learn how to practice effectively to promote new muscular coordination. I should have retained the patience I had during therapy. I had a lot to learn!
Let me explain a little bit about me and practicing. I had always been very good at practicing. I was diligent, meticulous, disciplined, set goals for my practice sessions, and often wouldn’t stop until I felt those goals were met. Yeah well, turns out, I wasn’t as good as I thought…
Once I started with my teacher, the one who sent me to the ENT in the first place, she would quite often remind me at nearly every lesson that I should NOT be singing for over an hour at a time. My teacher would always say just to stick to the 30 minute practice sessions broken up throughout the day. However, my work schedule simply did not permit that, so I often just practiced in the evenings when I got home until I felt too fatigued to go on further. Mistake number one. I would also spend so much of my practice time thinking, conceptualizing, analyzing, and manipulating what I learned in my lesson from every possible angle at every single practice. Mistake number two. I always wanted to leave a practice session feeling I’d accomplished something technical…that a light-bulb of some sort had gone on. Mistake number three.
The other day, I was speaking to one of my friends’ who is also struggling with vocal injuries; he has long-standing superior nerve paresis and also a vocal hemorrhage caused by the compensation (thanks to an eager teacher telling him to “sing through” the hoarseness in his voice. Oy.) I told him he probably should only be vocalizing for ten to fifteen minutes at a time until he’s healed up he said, “Oh…that’s good to know. I usually just vocalize until I feel like I’ve accomplished something.” This just solidified one of the problems with someone recuperating from an illness: we (and I’m sure many others out there) over-practice all the time! It’s because to us, learning to singing has been a war we’ve been fighting for so long that we tend to think of practicing as just another battle. This isn’t a process of learning and training. It’s not a journey we take with wisdom and patience. This is Sparta! This is Fight Club, people! We tend to just keep going in our practice until we feel we’ve conquered something, or won the battle of the day in some way. Basically, we don’t stop until we feel we’ve landed a strong right-hook on our voice that’s put it down and out for the count. I realized I was doing that all the time, and it was time to change. My voice teacher was constantly telling me to practice in short bursts of time, no more than 30 minutes at a time. And I kept doing that for a little while, but then would slowly start “accidently” practicing for much longer. Why did I keep doing that? So I could accomplish something, darn it!
Let me explain a little bit about me and practicing. I had always been very good at practicing. I was diligent, meticulous, disciplined, set goals for my practice sessions, and often wouldn’t stop until I felt those goals were met. Yeah well, turns out, I wasn’t as good as I thought…
Once I started with my teacher, the one who sent me to the ENT in the first place, she would quite often remind me at nearly every lesson that I should NOT be singing for over an hour at a time. My teacher would always say just to stick to the 30 minute practice sessions broken up throughout the day. However, my work schedule simply did not permit that, so I often just practiced in the evenings when I got home until I felt too fatigued to go on further. Mistake number one. I would also spend so much of my practice time thinking, conceptualizing, analyzing, and manipulating what I learned in my lesson from every possible angle at every single practice. Mistake number two. I always wanted to leave a practice session feeling I’d accomplished something technical…that a light-bulb of some sort had gone on. Mistake number three.
The other day, I was speaking to one of my friends’ who is also struggling with vocal injuries; he has long-standing superior nerve paresis and also a vocal hemorrhage caused by the compensation (thanks to an eager teacher telling him to “sing through” the hoarseness in his voice. Oy.) I told him he probably should only be vocalizing for ten to fifteen minutes at a time until he’s healed up he said, “Oh…that’s good to know. I usually just vocalize until I feel like I’ve accomplished something.” This just solidified one of the problems with someone recuperating from an illness: we (and I’m sure many others out there) over-practice all the time! It’s because to us, learning to singing has been a war we’ve been fighting for so long that we tend to think of practicing as just another battle. This isn’t a process of learning and training. It’s not a journey we take with wisdom and patience. This is Sparta! This is Fight Club, people! We tend to just keep going in our practice until we feel we’ve conquered something, or won the battle of the day in some way. Basically, we don’t stop until we feel we’ve landed a strong right-hook on our voice that’s put it down and out for the count. I realized I was doing that all the time, and it was time to change. My voice teacher was constantly telling me to practice in short bursts of time, no more than 30 minutes at a time. And I kept doing that for a little while, but then would slowly start “accidently” practicing for much longer. Why did I keep doing that? So I could accomplish something, darn it!
Now, about a year before I found out about my injury, I started doing yoga pretty regularly. If you’ve ever taken a yoga class for all levels, then you know you’ll end up being next to that advance yogi who’s comfortably bending into pretzels with a smile on her face while you’re just trying to hold your down-dog without slipping off your mat, right? Well, after practicing yoga for a little over a year, I began to realize just how much of a process doing yoga is. I slowly was able to make my way into poses I never thought I’d be able to do. As my strength and flexibility increased, I was able to do more and more with considerable ease I had not expected. It was a process of constant repetition. As long as I stay focused on my alignment every yoga session, it became more and more natural for my body to get into and out of the poses with ease. What all that conscious repetition was doing was training up those neural pathways that solidified those yoga postures in my body. It became so familiar that it is nearly automatic now, so much so that I now can meditate on other things while flowing in and out of poses during practice. And, I have such a good technical base of alignment, strength, and flexibility that I can approach a new pose with patience and the wisdom to know that if it’s not perfect today, it will become better with time. Yoga has become fun and invigorating, where it once was exhausting.
Singing and learning to sing should be the same way. Or, as I explained it to my runner-friend, singing, as well as vocal recuperation from injury, is a bit like training for a marathon: You’re not going to just go out and run the full 26 miles your first day of training, you’re going to start in small increments and then build your body up to the 26 mile run slowly and purposefully. This is what helped me to realize that this is what learning to sing really should be like. It should be a constant process of progression where you slowly but surely develop the technique needed to sing difficult arias and operatic roles with ease that you never thought you’d be able to do (just like those advanced yoga poses). So in reconciling myself to this progress, I began to be very meticulous in the way I sang.
About two months after I got back into singing, where I was trying to practice as I always had before, I decided to take a step back and just do 15 minute chunks of simple exercises from my lessons. I alternated between the massages, voice therapy exercises, and lesson exercises. After about a week of just doing that, I would progress into singing through a song or aria for the next week. Then, I felt I was ready to head back to my lessons and get a new set of exercises and bump the technique up a little more. I didn’t set any goal other than getting the extrinsic musculature to shut up and get out of the way. I didn’t set out to learn arias or art songs. I didn’t practice getting my coloratura dead-on accurate. I didn’t even work on resonance placement…at least not just yet. (This made me sound a lot more like a mixed belter in my middle voice, but since free phonation was my goal, I was fine with that for the time being.) I just did some mindless “workouts” with my voice everyday for a short period of time. I got out of my body’s way and just let it learn how to balance breath with onset all on its own, using Miller’s onset exercises as a guide. If I only made it 15 minutes before I felt tension creep back in, I stopped at 15 minutes. By the end of each week, that time would usually double so I could make it at least 30 minutes before fatigue would cause me to revert to the old muscle memory. Just doing those simple exercises, massages, and stretches for 15 minutes a day for a week or so really helped not only build my voice back to full strength, it helped to reset those pathways so I could get more release during phonation. I still got stuck on the “pendulum” swing of going too “dark” or falling “back in my throat” and then going too “bright” or too “forward,” but I could always get back on track with this type of practice. I had discovered a process by which I could slowly and methodically build my technique in, and a process that kept my neural pathways agile. They became so agile that making a change to my technique, or to my concept of singing, in a month or so became so normal that it has gotten to the point where I can now make those shifts in a week or two.
Good thing I found this process though, because just a few more months down the road, I would slip into typical bad singer-habits. Returning to this process would always be, and probably will always be, my vocal saving-grace.
A note for other singers out there: Sure, you might not have the time to spend only 15 minutes a day if you're already a pro singer or a student at a university, but if you split up practicing into short chunks throughout the day, you'll actually make much faster progress than if you go at it for a whole hour at a time. It's the repetition that infuses the correct coordination and sets the neural pathways, not the length of time. Once the musculature slips back into it's old ways, stop, take a break, and come back to it later. Really, you'll be surprised at your progress, and you won't be nearly as frustrated at your vocal mechanism as you would be if you "push through" the slip back to the old ways.
Singing and learning to sing should be the same way. Or, as I explained it to my runner-friend, singing, as well as vocal recuperation from injury, is a bit like training for a marathon: You’re not going to just go out and run the full 26 miles your first day of training, you’re going to start in small increments and then build your body up to the 26 mile run slowly and purposefully. This is what helped me to realize that this is what learning to sing really should be like. It should be a constant process of progression where you slowly but surely develop the technique needed to sing difficult arias and operatic roles with ease that you never thought you’d be able to do (just like those advanced yoga poses). So in reconciling myself to this progress, I began to be very meticulous in the way I sang.
About two months after I got back into singing, where I was trying to practice as I always had before, I decided to take a step back and just do 15 minute chunks of simple exercises from my lessons. I alternated between the massages, voice therapy exercises, and lesson exercises. After about a week of just doing that, I would progress into singing through a song or aria for the next week. Then, I felt I was ready to head back to my lessons and get a new set of exercises and bump the technique up a little more. I didn’t set any goal other than getting the extrinsic musculature to shut up and get out of the way. I didn’t set out to learn arias or art songs. I didn’t practice getting my coloratura dead-on accurate. I didn’t even work on resonance placement…at least not just yet. (This made me sound a lot more like a mixed belter in my middle voice, but since free phonation was my goal, I was fine with that for the time being.) I just did some mindless “workouts” with my voice everyday for a short period of time. I got out of my body’s way and just let it learn how to balance breath with onset all on its own, using Miller’s onset exercises as a guide. If I only made it 15 minutes before I felt tension creep back in, I stopped at 15 minutes. By the end of each week, that time would usually double so I could make it at least 30 minutes before fatigue would cause me to revert to the old muscle memory. Just doing those simple exercises, massages, and stretches for 15 minutes a day for a week or so really helped not only build my voice back to full strength, it helped to reset those pathways so I could get more release during phonation. I still got stuck on the “pendulum” swing of going too “dark” or falling “back in my throat” and then going too “bright” or too “forward,” but I could always get back on track with this type of practice. I had discovered a process by which I could slowly and methodically build my technique in, and a process that kept my neural pathways agile. They became so agile that making a change to my technique, or to my concept of singing, in a month or so became so normal that it has gotten to the point where I can now make those shifts in a week or two.
Good thing I found this process though, because just a few more months down the road, I would slip into typical bad singer-habits. Returning to this process would always be, and probably will always be, my vocal saving-grace.
A note for other singers out there: Sure, you might not have the time to spend only 15 minutes a day if you're already a pro singer or a student at a university, but if you split up practicing into short chunks throughout the day, you'll actually make much faster progress than if you go at it for a whole hour at a time. It's the repetition that infuses the correct coordination and sets the neural pathways, not the length of time. Once the musculature slips back into it's old ways, stop, take a break, and come back to it later. Really, you'll be surprised at your progress, and you won't be nearly as frustrated at your vocal mechanism as you would be if you "push through" the slip back to the old ways.
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