Elements of A Good Singer
Versatility
Versatility may be confused with being contradictory to having your own style. Good singers typically don’t have only one genre that they stick to strictly. Adapting your voice to suit any musical style, in fact, is a characteristic of a good singer. If you have developed a singing style already with a lot of consistent practice, you would also have learned versatility with confidence.
Caring for Your Voice
Keeping your good singing voice means taking care of it. Treating your voice badly can leave it vulnerable to so many things, the least of which is strained vocal cords. Warming up with vocal exercises before singing particularly difficult notes, learning proper breathing, avoiding reaching notes beyond your particular range are only some of the things that you should do to take care of your voice.
Additionally, a good singer does not smoke, or try not to, since smoking will take its toll on the voice and make it dry and hoarse. Excessive alcohol consumption does not sit well with taking care of a singing voice either. Simply put, you don’t abuse your good singing voice. You don’t have to be told of what happened to one of the most powerful singers in the last century, the late Whitney Houston.
Tracking Your Progress
Regardless of whether you have just begun singing lessons for beginners or have already been singing for some time but want to improve, tracking your progress as a singer is one of the most important things you can do. Recording yourself singing a song regularly, and especially during a performance, will help you improve your vocal tone and give you ideas on new techniques.
Becoming aware of yourself as a singer means you can be objective about what your strengths and weaknesses are. Hearing yourself on recordings can tell you not only if you are singing with the appropriate volume or right tone but allowing prompt correction of what you may have been doing too little/too much of. When you track your progress this way, you can improve at a much faster rate.
Taking the Giant Leap
This means that you have decided to take singing lessons which, truth be told, are not cheap. But considering that you get what you pay for, think of these lessons as an excellent long-term investment, especially if you want to hit the big time in the singing industry. The cost, of course, will depend partly on how long you will have to take these lessons and other variables which are listed below.
Vocal Goals
The loftier your goals, the longer you need to study singing. While other goals may take less of your time, it shouldn’t mean these are not worth pursuing. Some people want to have singing voice perfection for weddings and karaoke bars and nothing more while some want to master singing to perform at the Vienna Staatsoper in Austria or nightly at The Blue Note in New York City.
Learning Speed
Singing is a skill unlike any other. Memorizing is considered a learned skill and once you become good at that you are able to learn as much as you can or want. Singing is altogether different. Being able to dish out facts from memory does not mean you can learn how to control your diaphragm at the same speed. It takes time for vocal cords to memorize and enunciate songs with grace and ease.
The speed at which a person masters all of the skills involved in becoming an excellent singer depends on his/her learning rate. How fast or slow a singer learns these skills will eventually have an impact on how long or how short he/she will have to study singing. The kind of teacher the singer has, incidentally, will also have a bearing on the learning speed of the student.
Quality of Voice Instructor
It cannot be emphasized enough that the kind of voice instructor you get makes a big difference in your success or failure later on as a singer. Look for a teacher who has completed a music degree from an accredited learning institution as well as extensive experience in either performing as a professional singer or teaching music and/or voice.
A voice instructor who is registered and in good standing, but take note that a teacher with this credential will definitely cost money. If you are on a budget and would like to learn in a less expensive way, you can always opt to learn how to sing online. Again, choosing online lessons needs to be done with discretion.
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