Thinking of Yourself as a Singer

When you decide that:

1) you want to learn to sing, or

2) you'd like to sing in front of people, or,

3) finally, that, yes, you are a singer and the world needs to know this,

a strange and wonderful thing begins to happen.

You start to listen to and watch what other singers are doing.

You hear how singers breathe. You see how they stand.

You see the shapes their mouths make.

You hear their vowel sounds, their consonants, their phrase-ends.

You hear how they mispronounce words, glide off of consonants, elide consonants, cheat vowels.

You hear "h's" in front of vowels. You hear hard "r's." Or you hear no "r's" at all.

You see how singers blink, fidget, go "off message."

Welcome to the world of the singer. This is part of your never-ending learning process.

At the next lesson after he'd learned about diphthongs, my former student, David Gigler, exclaimed to me, "I'll never be able to enjoy watching anybody sing ever again!"

His anxiety was short-lived. He was simply made aware of what it is that he does when he sings, and was suddenly aware of it in every singer he heard.

I asked my former student, John Argue, if he'd sung at all in the week between his lessons. "No," he replied, "but I did a lot of practicing." What he meant was that he had listened to other singers and had interpreted what they did that he liked and didn't like.

When you decide to study voice, you start to think of yourself as a singer.

When you call yourself a "singer," you suddenly become aware of the myriad facets of singing. You see and hear with new eyes and ears.

Welcome to singing! Begin!