No matter how vocally gifted you might be, there are things that you need to do on a regular basis in order to not only maintain, but also constantly improve your singing.
You want to work on improving your singing technique, but you also need to refine and deepen your connection with the music you sing, so that you can become a clearer intermediary for the inspiration your music conveys.
Here are some ideas for on-going things you can do to ensure that your singing keeps improving over the years.
TECHNIQUE:
- Do some vocal warm ups every day for at least 15-20 minutes. Choose different kinds of exercises addressing various aspects of the singing technique: agility (scales and arpeggios), tone quality (long tones), clear enunciation, etc.
- Each week pick some area of your voice that you want to improve, like range, pitch, smooth passaggio (the transition between chest and head voice), volume (singing loud without tension and soft with a full tone).
- Pick a song that’s slightly beyond your current ability and challenge yourself to work on it a little bit at a time. This may be a long term project.
INTERPRETATION / EXPRESSION:
- I recommend building a repertoire of songs that you feel very comfortable singing and you could sing anytime on a short notice. How do you do that?
- Learn a song that you like. Go over every note and word, until you feel that you “own it” from a technical point of view.
- Take time to meditate on the meaning of the song. Don’t stop at the meaning of the words alone, but go deeper into the feeling behind those words. This is how you can make a song deeply meaningful for you and, by extension, for your audience.
- Do this with a new song every month, while you keep reviewing and deepening old songs. Within a few months you will have created a small repertoire that keeps expanding over the years.
- Every time you revisit an old song, resolve to not treat it like you already know it perfectly (even if you feel like you do). Instead, try to penetrate even deeper in its meaning and its message. You have grown as a person since the last time you sang it, so you will be able to understand it more deeply and express it more perfectly, and therefore inspire your audience more.
- If you’re spiritually inclined, I recommend you try to develop a deeper awareness of a higher Power flowing through you when you sing. As you do this more and more, you will notice that it will start to happen more easily and naturally. It’s like a muscle that needs exercising in order to grow. In my experience, you can inspire people way more deeply this way, than if you were doing it at all by yourself!
To more and better singing!
–Ramesha