Hey guys, welcome back again to Ken Tamplin Vocal Academy, where the proof is in the singing!
We got a lot of requests for this one.
It’s how do I practice singing?
Practice singing…
Well, you know, that can mean a lot of things to a lot of different people, too, because
what one guy has to practice for something, maybe singing for an hour and a half might
be different than someone that's practicing one song for their school, or a wedding, or
a function or a show, a gig, or something.
So there’s a lot of dynamic range in that, and not one-size-fits-all.
But let me kind of tell you how I practice singing, and then you can decide how much
of that you can see fit into your schedule.
Okay?
Now, by the way, there’s an old saying, practice makes perfect.
Well, that’s actually a very dysfunctional saying, and let me tell you why.
Practice doesn’t make perfect, because you can practice something wrong, and embed something
wrong, and you can actually multiply your problems, over time.
It’s Perfect Practice makes Perfect.
Okay?
Now, I want to take you down a chain of how this sort of works.
When we practice something, and I don’t care if it’s a sport, I don’t care if
it’s singing, it doesn’t matter what it is.
We start out with something called "unconscious incompetent".
And what that means is, "I don’t know what I’m doing, and I don’t know how to do it."
Okay, I don’t know what I’m doing, or what I want or what I need…
And I don’t know how to get there, so there’s unconscious incompetent.
Then there’s "conscious incompetent".
Okay, I know what I want, I know what I’d like to sound like, but I still can’t do it.
Then there’s "conscious competent", saying, all right, this is starting to feel really
good now.
I know what I want, and, with a little bit of work, I know how to get there.
And then there’s "unconscious competent" : all right!
I’ve gone through these stages, I know what I want, I know how to get there, I practiced
it so much that now I don’t have to think about it, and it comes automatically, or it
comes as a response of all of my efforts up to this point.
This is a pretty important food chain to understand how to get a chain of events, a daisychain
of how you can kind of get to this point, so let’s do this again.
So, I don’t know how to get somewhere, I don’t even really know what I want, and
I don’t know how to get there.
I know what I want, I don’t know how to get there.
I know what I want, and I know how to get there.
I don’t need to think about it anymore and it becomes natural, like a natural response.
So ultimately that’s what we want as our goal.
Right?
So let’s talk about how I practice.
Now, depending on what I’m practicing for, I virtually never practice distortion.
Now that might surprise some of you guys, because I’m not looking to embed distortion
into my voice that comes naturally from singing for long hours, and singing hard, and pushing
into a sound.
So what I’ll do is I’ll warm-up really clean, for long periods of time, and then
over time I’ll kind of pushing into it when I’m kind of working up my music or trying
to sing a Whitesnake song or a Dio song or an Iron Maiden song or a, you know, whoever
sings with distortion, or clean, you know, a clean guy or whatever it is.
I’ll kind of put myself in that style and I'll practice with a view towards that, okay?
But ultimately, I have a singing course, by the way, called How to Sing Better Than Anyone
Else, and I cover this exact subject of how to practice, because you want to practice
within your means, your vocal means, and you want to understand you want to get out of
unconscious incompetent, to move at least to conscious competent to go okay I know
what I want, or what I like, and I know I can’t get there quite yet, it’s a little
frustrating, but you start to see these successes.
It’s kind of like a good stock.
Right? A good stock as in "The Stock Market".
You’ll kind of like, go up, and then maybe kinda go down a bit and get kind of frustrating,
then you go up, and kinda come down and you kind of feel like two steps forwards one back and
it seems kind of frustrating.
But if you look at a good stock over time and you go in a year, WOW!
I have come a LONG WAY, because I did these right, correct things that I practiced to.
So what I would recommend is that you stay within things that are well within your range and
your means.
Understand the building blocks, the basic building blocks of what’s important.
The very first thing is support.
Without good, strong support, or understanding support, knowing how to use it, you ain’t
going nowhere, man.
Equilibrium will break down over and over and over again, and you will never achieve what it is
you’re ultimately looking for your voice.
You start with the core, your abdominal strength and your diaphragm.
The next thing is we practice vowel placements in the throat for relaxation response.
So God has given us these really cool little amphitheaters, that when the vowel is correct,
it can rest into the vowel without feeling that tension or squeezing to get up into certain
sounds, right?
So we practice different vowel placements, and also vowel modifications, so as we go up,
we ascend a scale, we pare a sound down and make it smaller so it doesn’t become
top heavy and splat as they say, or literally like Hercules trying to hold up the world
with his... No!
No, we pare the sound down and we make it smaller, and then we reopen that sound back down to
the bottom.
So, we practice different scales, and then what we do is we start to apply those scales.
You say Ken, but I just want to learn songs, and I just want to sing songs great, how does
this work with songs?
I get that.
Trust me.
So as we embed this good information, and as we at least move to conscious competent,
I know what I’m doing, I know how to get there, it’s a lot of work, I make a little
mistake here and there but I know how to fix it…
We can start incorporating all of our training that we’ve done with the scales themselves,
and move on into how we apply that with a practical application for singing.
So I would commend to you, and I’ve said this before, once you’ve worked out these
different scales, and…
See all my tutorials. I have so many tutorials on the stuff, I can’t cover like all the
scales and how we do the scales, in one video, I’ve got to tell you how you should practice
and then go glean and pick the nuggets that I have out, or get my singing course, which
is massively expanded from my videos themselves, and then start to take your practice seriously,
and move into a serious practice.
Now, getting back to how I practice, is, I have a regimen.
I do it every day, and I practice for at least an hour.
I warm-up for an hour straight, and I go through my scales.
Yep.
Still have to do it.
Sorry.
I’m mortal just like everybody else.
I didn’t open my mouth out of the womb and start singing great.
It didn’t happen for me.
I had to work very hard at my notes.
In fact, those of you that know me, know that I’m a baritone, and some of my highest notes,
my highest note here, when I was younger, you know was: Hey!
That was my highest note.
Like, I could go an octave of that really easy and quickly now, because I know what
I’m doing, but it took a long time to understand how to get there.
So, I just want to emphasize to you guys it didn’t happen overnight.
Again, this is not something where you see this commercial, where some super buff guy
or hot buff chick walks out and goes heh, in three weeks I was able to do this!
That’s a lie from the pit of hell!
If you can get really good gains on your voice in about a year, I think that's setting a good
goal for yourself.
So set a goal of three months, and then six months, and then a year, to monitor your progress
and see how you’re doing.
So as you’re going through the process of this, set yourself, like say okay I want to,
my highest note is, let's say an E4, or whatever your range is.
I’d love to just get one or two more notes in the next six months.
That would be awesome.
That’s putting a lot of extra range on your voice, if you can do that.
And then, as you continue to prod, and move forward towards this, over time you’ll get
more and more range.
Now, again, I cover all of this stuff in my singing course, because there’s a very specific
sequence on how to do this.
It’s not a random cherry-picking of going oh.
I’ll take a little bit of this, and a little bit of that, and I’ll try to combine it
all together in my own sort of method…
That’s dangerous!
Because it’s like learning several languages at once.
In fact, that’s true for learning other people’s methods.
I wouldn’t even recommend learning my method if you are already learning someone else’s
method and you think they’re great and you’re getting gains from it.
Stay with their course for a while, man!
Check it out.
See if it really benefits you, because it’s like you’re trying to learn three different
languages.
Let's say you’ve got three different courses going on.
I want to learn SLS.
I want to learn Ken Tamplin’s open throat technique.
I want to learn blah blah blah, so and so.
And you try to combine this.
Imagine trying to learn Spanish, German, and Japanese, all at once.
You can’t.
You can’t combine that altogether.
Stick with one, get good at it, see if it benefits you and how much, and then if that
doesn’t or does work move on to the next language and learn that.
These are the most effective ways to practice.
All right?
So again, stop by my singers forums, we have over 11,000 members in there, it’s growing
like crazy!
Check out my singing course at Ken Tamplin Vocal Academy dot com, if you want to take
your studies further, hit me up on Facebook, on Twitter, on Pendergrast, ... on Pinterest, excuse me,
Instagram. I’m out there all over the place, you guys!
So again, until next time, peace.
Out.