3 Ways To Use Singing In Your Daily Music Practice

Want to know how you can use your singing voice as a kind of “universal power tool” to accelerate all your musical development? I’m going to share with you three ways you can easily weave singing into your everyday music practice to let you become more musical faster.

So it appears to be singing week here on Musicality Now! I’ve been trying hard not to theme all the episodes each week because it will end up tripping me up in future if we set that precedent. But just the way it’s happened, this seems to be singing week.

So with “Inside The Book” last week we covered what if you think you can’t sing? And the myths and misconceptions around being tone deaf or not having a naturally good voice.

Then in this week’s “Inside The Book”, we looked at all the benefits of singing for musicians, whether or not you ever want to step up on stage or sing in front of anyone as a singer.

And then in Michaela’s two episodes, the two with Michaela Bartoskova, this week, her mini-interview and then the masterclass extract yesterday, both talked about that deep connection to your singing voice, how personal it is and how powerful it can be.

And with all of that being said, you might be left wondering, what does that actually look like in practice? If I want to use my singing voice to become more musical and to help me with everything I do in music, what does that mean?

And one part of it is definitely “musicality training”. So if you’re intentionally using your voice, for example, to do ear training exercises, we’ve all kinds of ways at Musical U to incorporate singing into that process of developing your ear, developing your instinct.

But what’s interesting is that as you start singing more and more, you realize there are all kinds of places to weave it into all of your music practice.

You know, we talk about singing as a tool here at Musical U, but it’s really more of like a universal powertool. You can just use it everywhere, and it almost always will do you good.

So today I want to share three specific ways just to spark your imagination and give you a sense of what it can look like to be a musician who is consistently using singing to accelerate their progress.

So number one is related to just learning to play things.

Your average musician is immersed in sheet music or tab or notation or chord charts. If you’re an ear first musician, fantastic, you can still make use of this. But the bottom line is, even if you don’t go into all of the musicality side of things, things like playing by ear, improvising, writing music, all that good stuff. Even then, singing can be really powerful for you.

And I was really struck by something Anne Mileski shared. We did a panel masterclass a little while back, and each of the team members shared a big tip for musicality and musical development in general. And Anne shared this story of when she was working on, I think, her graduation piece at conservatoire, and she played the trumpet, and she was having trouble with this tricky passage that was this flurry of notes, and she couldn’t get her fingers and her embouchure to do what they were meant to do.

And eventually her teacher suggested she sing through the passage. And Anne explained how she realised she really had trouble singing it! And what that revealed was actually, in a sense, her brain didn’t know how it was meant to go.

And this is a really powerful insight: the idea that we focus so much on trying to get our fingers to do what they’re meant to do, but they can only do that if we have a clear mental representation of the music we’re trying to create.

Otherwise, it’s just kind of robotic muscle memory button-mashing, right?

And, you know, I’m also reminded of something Andrew’s been saying more and more recently from his Next Level coaching experience, that often what appears to be a technique problem turns out to be a musicality problem.

And so the crux of it here is that your singing voice lets you validate whether or not you’ve got that mental representation right, quite aside from “are my fingers dexterous enough and quick enough to do what they’re meant to be doing?”

So you may know we have a whole range of superlearning techniques which are designed, in part, to help you break past sticking points and master tricky sections of music. But funnily enough, as complex and counterintuitive and weird and sophisticated as all of that gets, one of the simplest and most powerful is simply singing.

So the idea here is very simple. Next time you’re stumbling on something on your instrument, take a moment and check, can you actually sing what it is you’re trying to play?

Once you can sing it, you know you at least have that mental representation right. And that makes it much easier for your body to figure out how to make it happen on your instrument.

It’s come up in a few episodes recently, that body wisdom and how much your subconscious mind is doing in the process of learning. And this is a really great way to make sure you’ve got part of the puzzle in place before trying to do the rest of it.

So if you’re having trouble getting your fingers to do what they’re meant to do on the instrument, make sure you can sing the passage first. Then go back to your instrument, and you’re going to find it a whole lot easier.

Idea number two: playing by ear.

Singing is one of the simplest ways to improve your play by ear skills. And again, depending on the type of musician you are, this will be more or less important to you, but it will benefit you regardless.

So whether or not you want to reach the highest heights of playing super-sophisticated music, first-time-correct by ear or not, spending a bit of time developing your ear through playing by ear will help you even if you want to play stuff as written.

And the idea here is very simple. The most versatile and easiest and flexible exercise is a simple echo-back game. So the idea is you sing something, and then you play it on your instrument. You play something on your instrument, and then you sing it back.

And it sounds simple, too simple to be useful, but it is enormously powerful, especially if you’re using the solfa system, something we really endorse and recommend and focus on here at Musical U, where you’re singing the corresponding syllable names for the scale degrees you’re singing. So do re mi, not just la, la, la.

I do this with my kids almost every day, and it is remarkable how easy they’re finding it now to pick out tunes on piano because they’ve had that echo-back practice.

The key here really is just to start simple. So pick a key, pick a home note, and then start with just do re mi.

So you’re gonna something using just do re mi, a short phrase, like one measure of four beats. So you might sing [hums] “do re re do”, and then you go to your instrument, you know, the home note, so you know your starting note, and you just try and play back what you just sang. Then play something on your instrument using those first three notes of the scale, and see, can you sing it back?

And it is something that we really have to help people past their self-consciousness about. And, you know, a big part of what we do in Foundations is a lot of returning to basics and using very childlike exercises to develop that musical instinct.

And so if it sounds too simple to be useful, just trust me! Particularly if you’ve never done playing by ear stuff before, the kind of zero-to-one transition of “I can’t play by ear” to “Oh, okay. If it’s just a few notes, and I know they’re the first few notes of the scale, actually, I can do that”.

And this is a really neat side way in, because it’s all you, and you know what you’re singing, you know which notes you’re choosing, and that obviously is a little bit… It’s not cheating, but it’s like a shortcut to knowing what notes to play on the instrument. But it is still going to have that powerful effect of joining up your voice and your ears and your fingers.

And the more you do it, and the more natural it becomes to you to do this simple echo-back, the easier it is for you to tackle more and more complex stuff.

So from do re and mi, you can start expanding to the pentatonic scale or longer phrases or swifter rhythms, whatever it may be.

And just to underscore again, the psychological effect of proving to yourself that you can do it is enormous.

So a little side tip here, a kind of power-up for this exercise: if you go back to our previous “Inside The Book” episode on how to play expressively, how to play with expression, I give you a framework there for exploring all of the different possibilities available to you, even with a single note.

And that is a really great thing to introduce here. So don’t just kind of robotically sing a few notes. Think about everything you can do with your voice to shape those notes, to emphasise them, to change the timbre of them, and then try and replicate it on your instrument.

And learning to mimic how insanely versatile the singing voice is on your instrument is going to unlock a whole new world of expression for you. So that’s kind of a little side tip there. If you’re doing that kind of fun echo-back practice for playing by ear, use it to also amp up your expressive playing, because arguably, there’s no instrument more expressive than the human singing voice can be.

Idea number three, using it for creativity.

And again, don’t switch off your brain if you don’t think of yourself as someone who does creative stuff in music!

We’re real believers here at Musical U that “creativity is the vehicle, not the destination”. So again, whether or not you want to improvise amazing solos out of nowhere, or you want to write songs, or whatever it may be, incorporating creativity into your music learning has a profound effect on everything you do in music.

So this was mentioned in this week’s “Inside The Book” episode when we were looking at that chapter on singing and the benefits. I talked a little bit there about the impact on creativity.

And what’s most important to realise here is that anytime we start creating by going directly to our instrument, we’re actually bringing with us a lot of implicit limitations.

So it might be what scales are you comfortable with on the instrument? It might be how fast can your fingers move? It might be the timbre of your instrument and the kind of sound possibilities you’re used to coming up with there.

When you start with your voice, none of those constraints are really at play. Yes, it has its own limitations in terms of your singing range and a few other things.

But again, the versatility of the human voice, coupled with the fact that you can sing notes without really knowing what they are yet, you know, you can just kind of instinctively make up a little tune means that your creative world is so much greater when you start by singing.

So the idea here is just spend a little bit of your practice time coming up with a melody just by singing it or humming it. If you’re not comfortable singing, just hum a little ditty to yourself and then see, can you recreate it on your instrument?

That’s part of that play-by-ear stuff. But it’s also about unlocking your creativity on the instrument by first starting with the singing voice. And you will find you have creative ideas that you never would have come up with if you’d gone straight to your instrument and tried to create something.

And again, the freedom of your voice will lead to greater freedom on the instrument in future.

So, to recap, three little ideas for incorporating singing into everything you do in music practice:

Number one is to sing it before you play it.

This is a really great modification of that, actually. Not just sing it when you’re getting stuck, but anything you’re going to play, try starting by singing it too. That may be a bit of a leap depending on the music and your comfort level with singing, but really anything you’re playing on your instrument, I would say you should aim to be able to sing it, too, or it will benefit you if you can also sing it.

So anything you’re playing, make sure you can sing it. That’s going to firm up that mental representation and make sure that any stumbling you then do with your fingers or on the instrument is not coming from a fuzzy understanding of how the music’s meant to sound.

Number two is this little echo-back play by ear exercise.

Start really simple. Just, you know, a four-beat phrase using just the first few notes of the scale. Sing something, play it. Play something, sing it. Go back and forth.

It’s a lot of fun! If you haven’t tried it before, you’ll be surprised how fun it is.

And again, coming back to that chapter on playing with expression and that 4D Active Listening framework, looking at all the different dimensions of a note and all of the different possibilities, even if you’re just using the first three notes of the scale, there’s a huge range of possibilities available for you.

And the more you do that kind of echo-back, the more you’re building that instinctive connection between what you hear, what you create with your voice, and express with your voice, and what you play on your instrument. And that goes all around in circles in the best possible way.

And number three, singing for creativity.

This idea that anytime you want to create something or you want to play around with creating your own music, if you go straight to the instrument, you’re lumbered by all of these constraints you may not even realise are there.

Start by just humming, singing, creating in that free-form world that your singing voice gives you, and then translate it onto your instrument and you’ll be amazed how much more that opens up your creativity.

What’s interesting is that we found the more you get used to using your singing voice in your music practice, the more it starts to feel weird when you don’t!

So if right now, when you sit down to practice your instrument, your mouth is shut the entire time, when you start incorporating even a few of these ideas and even a little bit of it into each session, you’ll start to feel that connection to your voice as the most direct way to bring music out from inside you. And it really does begin to feel weird to sit down and play without singing something first or singing back and forth or, you know, humming as you play.

It really becomes a part of how you create music, how you make music.

Again, all of our most successful members at Musical U are using singing throughout all of their practice, everything they’re doing.

So I hope those three ideas will inspire you to explore using your singing voice during music practice.

If you’re a member of Musical U, Michaela’s full masterclass is there for you. That’s a really natural, gentle way into singing. If singing is new to you.

There’s also, inside the Living Music program, every season we start out with two weeks in parallel with the main stuff. We have a singing training for two weeks and it’s different every Season.

So in Spring we have Start Singing with Claire Wheeler, where she gets you up and running and singing in tune. In Summer, we have creative singing with Davin Youngs, Free Your Creative Voice.

Then in Autumn, our Season on playing by ear, Fini Bearman does Colors Of Your Voice, exploring all of the different timbre possibilities available to you in your singing voice.

And then we have two really fascinating ones in Winter, tying in with the circle of fifths.

If you’re not a member, I’ll put links to Free Your Creative Voice and Colors Of Your Voice in the shownotes if you’re interested in more on that. They’re both really unique and fun ways into getting comfortable with your singing voice and really expanding what you’re able to do with it.

And that’s it for this one!

I’ll be back tomorrow with Meet The Team, we’ll be featuring our Operations Assistant Charm, which I’m really excited about. And then on Saturday with our next episode of Coaches Corner.

Until then, cheers! And go make some music! Ideally with a bit of singing involved. Cheers!

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