WHY Every Musician Must Sing (Inside The Book)

“Every musician must be a singer, too”. Really?!

You might have heard this advice that every musician should sing. Certainly we say it a lot here at Musical U.

But why?

Especially if you’re not a singer already, it can seem like a weird and unappealing suggestion, but there are many highly powerful benefits to singing for anyone who’s involved in music-making.

In today’s episode, we’re going to peek inside the forthcoming Musicality book and share with you exactly how singing can help you to become more musical faster.

This is another “Inside The Book” episode of Musicality Now where I peek inside the Musicality book we’ve been working on and will be releasing soon, to give you a sneak peek into the material in there and share some of the ideas or insights or concepts or exercises that can help you in your musical life today.

We’re going to be continuing what we were looking at in the last episode in the singing chapter, and I’ll talk a bit more about the context for that in a moment. But just to say, this topic of singing is one we’ve become more and more passionate about here at Musical U.

And yet I’m always a little bit anxious about it – because I know how emotional it can be for people and how controversial it can be to say, you know, if you’re a guitar player or you’re a saxophone player or you’re completely devoted to the mountain dulcimer, “you should be singing”.

I always hate to say “should” at Musical U! But this is one of the rare cases where we do say “you should”, “you must”, “you really ought to”. Because we’ve just seen so clear cut the benefits it will bring. And so we feel it’s worth pushing you a little bit, nudging you a little bit through the emotional resistance that I know can come up, to get this tool into your hands.

I wrote an article back on our easyeartraining.com website back in the day, I think, called “why every musician should be a singer too”.

And we were talking at the time more about ear training specifically, and so the article was focused on this feedback loop between your ears and your voice. And so from early on, we were talking about the benefits of singing for ear training in particular. But over the years, singing really evolved here at Musical U.

The first big step forwards, I think, was with our Foundations course, which uses the Kodály approach, and I’m sure I’ll talk more about that on future episodes. But the crux of that approach is really using your singing voice as a way to develop your musicality.

And then we doubled down on that with the Living Music program, really making it almost a non-negotiable. And that was a bold step for us because, like I said, I know a lot of musicians hearing this will be like “I’m not a singer. I don’t want to sing. I just want to play my guitar”, or whatever the case may be.

But it’s a night-and-day difference if you can learn to leverage your voice as a tool. And in the last episode, we were looking at some of the blockers that can be in the way if you feel right now like you’re “tone deaf” or you “can’t sing”, or you’re “not a good singer”, check out that last episode., I’ll put a link in the shownotes for this one.

But we looked at the reasons – and actually, why don’t we jump over and we can recap that?

But just before we dive in, again, to say, it’s really rare for us to say “you should” or “you must” at Musical U, but if you’re on the fence, I hope this episode is going to lay out for you the concrete reasons why you’re massively missing out if you don’t currently sing in your musical life.

Let’s dive in.

So just to set the scene a little bit, if you’ve watched one of these “Inside The Book” episodes before, you’ll know where we’re at. But just to say, this is our forthcoming Musicality book. The book is split into three parts, and part two is building blocks of your instinct from music, your relative pitch and your rhythm.

How do you learn the skills to recognize and interact with music intuitively, instinctively, and be able to do all the amazing things that we think gifted musicians can do. Part three gets into the practical application of that. Things like improvising, playing by ear, songwriting, playing with expression, performing.

But part one is really the foundational concepts and skills. So we start out big picture, with mindset and with musicality. But then I want to highlight there are these four core skills that we consider foundational.

Audiation is the ability to imagine music in your mind and kind of pick it apart and analyze it in your head.

Singing and musicality. This is not a side note or an appendix or “just for singers”. This, to us, is a core skill, right alongside audiation, active listening, and the superlearning techniques that can accelerate the results you get from your music practice.

So I did just want to remind you of that if you saw the last episode, or share that with you before we dive into this chapter, just to explain: singing to us is a fundamental part of what it means to be musical and to express your musicality and to reach your full musical potential.

We have this Pillar Belief of “Musical Inside And Out”, and contrasting with a lot of the instrument-focused music lessons you’ll find out there, we really focus on making sure the music is coming from inside you and then empowering you to bring it out, whether it’s through your singing voice or an instrument or writing music or whatever you might like to do.

So singing is foundational. In the last episode, we knocked down some of the misconceptions around singing so that if you’re interested, but you’re not sure you can, you that episode should help you realise what’s holding you back and what you can do about it.

Just to very briefly recap what we covered, we talked about why people think they can’t sing. And these break down into four reasons corresponding to your Head, Hearing, Hands, and Heart. Our 4H Model Of Complete Musicality. And each of these has a simple solution. So do check out that episode if you didn’t already.

We talked also about tone deafness, how it’s a completely separate thing from whether you can sing or not, and it’s extremely rare. The actual clinical condition of tone deafness does exist, but it’s like 1% of people who actually suffer from it.

And so the last thing to say from the beginning of this chapter is just my goal today. Our goal in general, is not to transform you into the next X-Factor superstar in terms of singing. It’s really to get you to that basic, everyday type of singing.

So I compared it with, you know, not being Leonardo da Vinci painting the Mona Lisa, but painting your living room walls. Or singing to yourself in the shower. That kind of basic “I can do it” ability.

So with all that being said, today I wanted to continue on in this chapter and just share some of the concrete reasons why it’s worth exploring singing as a tool.

So let’s dive in from this point.

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So what’s the value of getting to that basic level of singing ability if you’re not looking to perform as a singer? Singing is a foundational skill, like audiation, active listening, and superlearning, which will have positive effects throughout your musical life. Perhaps the simplest way to put it, though, is that singing is a way to bring musical ideas from your head out into the world directly, without the added complication of searching for the notes you want on an instrument.

If you don’t have singing as a tool, then it can feel like there’s always a big gulf between hearing something or imagining it in your mind’s ear and then playing it on your instrument. When you have a basic level of singing ability, you’re able to bridge that gap or even remove the need for the instrument step entirely, depending on your task.

Let’s go through some specific benefits and applications of singing as a tool.

First benefit we’ll talk about: An improved sense of pitch.

Learning to sing in tune is one of the best ways to train your sense of pitch. Singing in tune requires two major components, not just controlling your vocal pitch, but also being able to very clearly and accurately hear and imagine the pitch you’re aiming for.

So as you learn to sing in tune, you’ll be training your ears to hear better whether notes are sharp, flat, or perfectly on pitch.

This is something that you might never have had to do before, depending on the instrument you play, and it’s such a fundamental skill that you absolutely do not want to overlook it.

It is possible to do ears-only exercises to hone your pitch accuracy, too, but learning to sing in tune is an easy, natural, and useful way to do it.

Another benefit is improved audiation.

As well as that real-world pitch training, you’ll also be training your mind’s ear, your ability to audiate (meaning imagine music) with accurate pitch.

Just as active listening practice helps increase the richness and detail of your audition, learning to sing in tune develops the accuracy with which you can pitch notes in your mind easier.

Ear training singing is also an enormous help for ear training. This is something we really emphasise at Musical U. When you use your voice as part of ear training exercises, you can progress a lot faster.

You’ll learn more on this in the chapter on Integrated Ear Training, but as a preview here, these are some specific ways it helps.

Learning to sing also helps you sing in your mind so that when you’re trying to do ear training exercises and recognize notes, chords, and so on, you have a more powerful musical imagination to bring to the task.

Singing gives you a way to experiment out loud during ear training. For example, if you’re trying to recognise an interval, you might sing the start of a reference song to see if it matches up. If you’re trying to recognize a chord progression, you might sing along with the root notes of the chord or the bassline to see how those pitches could reveal the chords that are being used.

You can also do some nifty vocal acrobatics. For example, if you were trying to identify a harmonic interval, meaning two notes played at once, being able to sing those two notes back individually transforms it into an ascending or descending interval that you might find much easier to recognize as you improve.

Over time, you’ll do these things in your head or skip them entirely as they become subconscious instinct. But until then, it’s really helpful to be able to experiment out loud by singing.

Singing lets you test whether you heard what you think you heard. In fact, we might even say that if you can’t sing back what you heard, then you haven’t really understood it by ear. One example would be recognising a chord as major or minor.

You can listen for the overall sound of the chord, but that’s prone to mistakes, especially in a rich musical context. It also gets harder as you try more ambitious chords, like seventh or extended chords. If you’re able to sing back each note of the chord that both tests you truly heard what was going on and gives you a clear set of notes to explore and evaluate to identify the chord type. For example, identifying the solfa name of each note or the intervals between them.

If you find yourself struggling with a pitch-related ear training task, it’s likely that you aren’t actually hearing clearly enough yet to be able to sing back each of the notes. Once you practice that and use singing as a tool in this way, the actual task tends to become much easier. In the chapter on solfa, you’ll learn the solfege or do-re-mi system for recognising pitches by ear.

We found this is by far the easiest and fastest way to start recognizing notes, to play by ear, to improvise, to transcribe music, and more. It’s a sung system, meaning you learn it most effectively by singing notes with their solfa names.

The basic level of singing ability we’ve been talking about so far is plenty sufficient to enable full speed solfasuccess. In fact, many Musical U members inside the Living Music program find that learning solfa is a really great way to gradually develop a confident and reliable ability to sing, even if they had previously thought they couldn’t sing.

Another benefit is that singing enables easier and freer experimentation and creativity in music.

Yes, you can sit with an instrument and noodle around with scales or patterns and try to create something, but that’s both more complicated and more limiting compared with doing it with your voice. Your singing voice is the most direct path to bring musical ideas you imagine into the world.

You have total freedom of pitch, so you’re not trapped in memorised patterns or strict rules or limited by your level of instrument technique. You can immediately express what you want to and then analyze it during or after to transfer it onto an instrument or write it down.

You may have noticed legendary improvisers like Keith Jarrett or Oscar Peterson singing along as they improvise for this very reason. The musical ideas are born inside and then simultaneously expressed directly with their voice and their instrument.

Singing is the most natural and direct form of musical expression available to us. It may seem intimidating at the outset, but once you break past that little barrier, it is enormously natural and liberating to be able to create music directly with your voice. Singing, especially with solfa, allows us to practice and explore music anywhere, at any time.

Another benefit is easier communication. Being able to express musical ideas with your voice isn’t just helpful for creating privately by yourself. It also makes a huge difference when collaborating with other musicians.

If you don’t feel able to express your ideas with your voice, it can be very frustrating in a band or other group to have to try to translate what you’re thinking onto your instrument to communicate it. If instead you can just quickly and easily sing the idea you have in mind, you skip or all the instrument specifics and complications, and you can bounce ideas back and forth immediately and directly.

Then this final section, just a side note:

When I originally drafted this chapter, it was very factual. It was very concrete and literal. And I actually, I remember I attended the funeral of a friend’s father, and the singing in that service was just so moving. And on the walk home, I had just been working on this chapter that week, and on the walk home I realised I had to say something about that. I couldn’t let it be a pure, dry tool, because as powerful as it is in that sense, it would be inaccurate and unfair to present it as a dry tool.

So I must end this section with a slightly more romantic take on singing.

I’ll keep it short because I could wax lyrical about the emotional and spiritual and psychological benefits of singing all day long! Not to mention the scientifically proven social and physical benefits of singing, especially when you do it as part of a group with others.

Instead, I will just share my personal experience. There is nothing as emotionally cathartic, deeply healing, and spiritually moving as as singing yourself the music which is most meaningful to you.

We opened this chapter with the statement that the singing voice is every human’s first instrument. And so even if our focus is to develop that basic, functional, everyday form of “singing as a tool”, I would be remiss if I didn’t at least mention to you how deeply rewarding it can be to really adopt singing as an instrument and explore all the rich wonders it can bring to your musical life.

So I hope that your first steps in this chapter may well lead to walking, running and taking flight, and that singing may one day prove as meaningful and rewarding to you as it has to me.

Give it a try! I know at this point from extensive experience how personal and sensitive a topic singing can be amongst musicians. So I’m not going to ask you to commit to making singing part of your musical toolkit.

However, I am going to ask you to commit to giving it a try. Again, you needn’t see it as “becoming a singer” or taking on some big new challenge.

Just play along with us for this chapter and see how you get on. Start trying to use singing as you go through the material in other chapters of the book.

It might feel weird. You might experience some negative emotions or emotional resistance. You might feel extremely self-conscious even if there’s nobody else around to hear you.

Do your best to not get discouraged. Nobody is going to judge you or ask you to sing in front of a crowd. This is 100% about you and equipping yourself with a powerful tool to unlock your musicality. Even if you never sing a note in front of anybody else in your life, I guarantee you this will be well worth it and you will be very glad that you added this powerful tool to your toolkit.

There is nothing like your own singing voice for expressing yourself in music, and I think you will be surprised and delighted about what you can achieve.

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So that’s a little peek into the next section of the singing chapter! I would love to hear in the comments which of these benefits resonated with you.

You know, we covered a lot there in terms of ear training benefits and creativity benefits and communication benefits. And hopefully it painted a good picture for you of how different your musical life can be and how different your music practice and in particular your musicality training can become when it’s just easy and natural for you to bring music out from inside you using your singing voice.

And as we mentioned a couple of times there, this doesn’t require, you know, three years of learning to be a singer. It certainly doesn’t require having grown up being a good singer.

All it requires is these two core skills of Matching Pitch and Vocal Control. We cover them in the rest of that chapter. We’ve got various materials on them at Musical U, and I’ll put a link in the shownotes to a free resource online that can help you with them. But the main thing to know is just that level of skill can be put in place very quickly.

And I hope this little peek into the next bit of the chapter sparked a little bit of excitement with you as to what singing could do for you if you added it as a tool in your musical toolkit.

Do please leave a comment wherever you’re watching, whether it’s YouTube or Facebook or Instagram or indeed, if you’re listening to the audio podcast, I always welcome emails to [email protected].

Let me know which of these got you a little bit excited. And if you’re eager to start learning to use singing as a tool, please do share that too.

That’s it for today’s episode. We have some really great stuff lined up for you the rest of the week, so please do keep tuning in live if you’re part of our live crew and enjoy the episodes we have coming up this week.

Cheers! And go make some music!

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