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In your typical voice lesson, voice teachers will spend a good half of your singing lesson on a variety of scales and warmups to improve your singing technique. This leads to the obvious but often unasked question – why am I doing this?
It is a very fair question, and I think the best way to answer it is to use a story attributed to Luciano Pavarotti’s training as a singer. Pavarotti is considered one of the greatest tenors of the 20th century. He was not just an opera singer; he developed a worldwide following as the fat, happy operatic Italian tenor, who along with Jose Carreras and Placido Domingo formed the Three Tenors. He achieved rare stardom in an operatic world that often seems removed from the wider pop culture. Pavarotti’s voice training, however, is the subject for this blog. When he began studying, his voice teacher supposedly did not permit Pavarotti to sing ANY songs for six months. What did they do in those six months? Apparently, they sang scale after scale on different vowels to focus solely on his singing technique. I think it is safe to say it worked well in his career! As a voice teacher, I do not personally subscribe to such a spartan line of teaching. I give my voice students songs to work on because voice lessons should be for fun as much as they are for self-improvement. However, the focus on scales and vowels is a crucial element to a good voice lesson. When you sing, the vast majority of your time is spent producing sound on a vowel. Just try singing on a consonant – it ain’t happening unless you are humming! If you sing and one of the vowels seems tight or not pronounced correctly, that is often the tale-tell sign of an issue in vocal production. Therefore, it logically follows that if you want to excel at singing, what you really need to excel at is the delivery of vowels on pitch for sustained periods. It is not a romantic ideal but it is the truth! Singing is a skill that for the most part can be trained. What we ascribe musicality and emotion to is more often not the effective skill, not luck or talent, of a well-trained singer who has learned how to use their instrument effectively. A good voice teacher is always focused on the end goal – how do I train my singers so that they have the technical ability to deliver the emotion they feel internally? When all is said and done, your technique ENABLES your musicality and emotion. If you would like to hear some of my incredible young singers, I will post a few of my students' online performances on my Facebook page Clear Lake Voices. It was a great show and experience that I will never forget! Just click the link above or go to www.facebook.com/clearlakevoices. I will post three to four videos over the next few days. Enjoy!
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