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Myths and Misconceptions about Voice Teaching
Whether you are a beginning
student of voice or a seasoned professional, selecting a voice teacher
is a matter worthy of some serious consideration. You will
invest large amounts of time and money on your teacher and it is
important to be sure you are studying with the right one from the very
beginning. But the criteria upon which you will base your
choice can be confusing, since there are so many voice teachers with so
many differing ‘methods’ and unfortunately, the voice teaching industry
has created and propagated numerous myths that conventional wisdom has
taken to be true. But the most effective people in the world
rarely believe in conventional wisdom. Here are some fundamental
guidelines which can ease the confusion of making a choice, especially
for the beginner:
If
someone is a successful singer, they must be a great teacher.
Performing and teaching are two completely different disciplines.
Just because a person is a great singer does not necessarily
mean they can teach at all. You see, most successful singers
have the so-called ‘natural gift’. In other words, it was
always natural to their voices to work correctly for the most part.
Such people never really need any technical work or voice
building. Their teacher basically just ‘polished’ the already
existing voice. Because it is natural for such a singer’s
voice to function correctly, naturally gifted singers usually have
little or no knowledge of how their voices actually work.
They always just opened their mouths and this magnificent
voice would come out. Do not automatically assume that such
singers are necessarily qualified to teach vocal technique (yet many of
them do).
A
teacher who has produced successful students must be a great teacher.
If you find a beautifully faceted, perfectly cut diamond which is
covered in mud and you clean the mud off and polish the diamond, does
that make you a great diamond cutter? Certainly not.
By the same token, if a ‘naturally gifted’ singer walks into
a teacher’s studio, all that teacher needs to do is ‘polish’ the
already existing voice and the student goes out and has a great career.
This does not necessarily mean that the teacher has any
knowledge of how or why that student sings so wonderfully, or knows how
to teach another, less gifted student to sing equally well.
I’ll
just learn to sing using a CD or DVD course.
One of the most recent cons that have arisen as a result of our digital
‘quick fix’ era is the multitude of ‘singing courses’ available on CD.
But the suggestion that it is possible to learn to sing from
a CD course is preposterous, since without a teacher present to correct
you when you are doing it wrong, you will most likely be practicing
very incorrectly for years and not even know it. The
correction is the most important aspect of vocal tuition, especially in
the early stages of a student’s training. Such train-at-home
courses will only work if you have the most supreme fortune to have
been born a Celine Dion or a Barbara Streisand. But such
great natural voices are extremely rare.
I’ll just find a teacher on the first internet
directory that pops up.
Competent voice teachers are currently being obscured by the onslaught
of internet directories which are supposedly meant for the purpose of
connecting with a teacher but are actually run by young cyber-savvy
marketing professionals flooding the internet with bogus claims about
finding a “quality teacher”. They emphasize how convenient it is
to find a teacher through them, the fact that they do “criminal
background checks” on all prospective teachers they will be
representing, how all you need to do is “show up and have fun”, etc.,
when in fact all they are doing is offering mostly young, inexperienced
‘teachers’ who are fresh out of music school, desperate for students
and don’t mind being manipulated. Using indiscriminate pricing,
the promise of convenience and “100% money back guarantees”, they
recommend inexperienced teachers at convenient locations who do poor
quality work. (Since a music teacher is giving up their
professional time and years of experience to the best of their ability,
it’s preposterous to offer “money back guarantees”. If you went
to a therapist for a month and felt that you just didn’t seem to be
clicking and would like to try another, would you ask for your money
back?) This demonstrates how these web sites are using perks
other than the quality of their teachers to lure prospective
students.
It
takes many years to train a student.
For opera singing, yes, usually. But for all other styles of
singing, provided the student has a reasonable amount of musical and
vocal aptitude, and the teacher knows what they’re doing, it shouldn’t
take longer than a year or two to train a student to the point that
they can deliver a song at least reasonably well. A singing
student should see tangible and consistent progress every month, if not
every week. Rock singers are especially easy to train.
If you want to sing rock music and you have been taking voice
lessons for a year or more and you still can’t deliver a song
reasonably well, you definitely need to re-evaluate your situation.
If
a student is not progressing, it is the student’s fault.
Unfortunately, many teachers take this attitude to hide the fact that
they don’t know what to do with a particular student. A
student’s progress is the teacher’s number one responsibility.
If a student is not progressing, the teacher should be honest
enough to discuss why and whether it would be better for them to study
with someone else.
There
are many voice teachers, I’ll just find an inexpensive one at a
convenient location.
Would you rather travel a little farther and pay a little more for your
singing lessons and have your voice finished in a year, or would you
prefer to study with someone around the corner who is cheap and then
still find yourself unable to sing after three years? The
fact is, anyone who wants to can say that they are a singing teacher.
Many so-called singing teachers are actually just piano
accompanists who simply work the already existing voice. The
method they use to ‘train the voice’ is, again, advantageous only to
students with the great natural gift. A student who is not so
gifted will go in, sing a few scales, try to sing a song. A
year later the fundamental quality and function of their voices will
not have improved.
If
someone has worked with famous people and has connections in the
business, he/she must be a great teacher.
Always beware of teachers who start name-dropping the moment you walk into their studio or fill their websites with photos of themselves with celebrities – standing next to the President and singing the national anthem does not make one a great teacher! If your singing is already of a professional caliber but you need connections, certainly, study with a teacher like that for a while, provided you are getting what you need. But if technical work and voice building is what you need, such a teacher would likely be a waste of your time and money. Numerous times students of mine have gone to famous teachers who sent them to friends of theirs who were recording producers and who had produced for pop stars. They were misled into the assumption that if they spent tens of thousands of dollars to record their album in this producer’s studio they would automatically be famous and successful as well, but afterwards just found themselves back to square one with only a pile of CD’s to show for it. In 35 years of teaching not a single student of mine that took this path ever got anywhere with their singing careers, but I am sure that the teachers who recommended them to the producers got a percentage.
If
you can sing opera, you can sing anything.
Absolutely not. Any teacher who tells you this probably
doesn’t know how to teach any other style of singing than opera and is
simply trying to get your business. An opera singer, who is
usually only required to perform two or three times per week and can
‘mark’ to save their voices as they wish during rehearsals, could never
sustain the tortuous vocal demands required of rock/pop singers, who
perform far more often, harder on the voice and for greater lengths of
time in loud, often smoky environments without the luxury of ‘saving
the voice’. Besides the fact that opera singing is the most
difficult and challenging of all singing styles. Why would a
student spend the years it takes to learn how to sing opera if they
only want to sing popular music? This is especially incorrect
for women. In most cases, a female student who wishes to sing
anything other than classical music must learn to sing primarily in
chest voice. Classical technique, on the other hand, requires
women to sing almost exclusively in falsetto. Although there
is some cross-over, these are two different disciplines which require
differing types of vibrational quality from the vocal cords.
Training as an opera singer when all you want to sing is pop
or musical theater is like taking years of ballet lessons when all you
want is to waltz.
Your
vibrato will develop on its own in time.
One of the great falsehoods of voice teaching. If you have no
vibrato or too much vibrato or a wobble, your teacher should address
that with specific exercises. If they don’t, that simply
means they don’t know how. And considering the fact that
vibrato is the single most important aesthetic element of singing, and
inextricably linked with breath support, that’s like an automobile
mechanic who doesn’t know how the engine works. One of the
dead givaways that a teacher doesn’t really understand vocal technique
is when many of their students sing with wobbles.
You
are limited to the voice nature gave you.
That is like saying you are limited to the body nature gave you without
the benefits of exercise. Just as one's physique can be
enormously enhanced, strengthened and improved with exercise, so, too,
can the voice achieve the same effects through correctly applied vocal
exercises.
Voice
students will always be dependent on their teachers to warm them up
before important performances and continue lessons indefinitely.
I am amazed when I hear of a singer who is performing at the
Metropolitan Opera and relies on their teacher to warm them up before a
performance. One of a teacher’s greatest responsibilities is
to get any student to the point where they no longer need them.
Returning to your teacher occasionally for tune-ups is
understandable, but if a student has not been given enough knowledge
and skills to be mostly independent then the teacher has not done their
job adequately (or ethically).
If
someone is teaching in a College or University, they must be a good
teacher.
Colleges and Universities are primarily interested in attracting
students. A person’s teaching ability is almost irrelevant
compared to their drawing power. As baritone Robert Orth said
in an interview in the May 1995 issue of Classical Singer:
“When you are an active singer and you have a career, you get
calls from universities that want you to teach. It’s kind of
funny. I have friends who want to do it. I told a
few schools that I don’t know how to teach, and they said, ‘That’s
okay, none of our other teachers do, either.’”
Conclusion
Now
that we’ve looked at some important things to be wary of when selecting
a voice teacher, you are probably wondering what positive attributes
one should seek. Well, that is a very individual and personal
thing. A teacher could be a walking terror to one student and
a savior to another. It all has to do with where you are at
this particular time in your vocal development, where you want to go
and what you still need to unlock your greatest vocal potential.
It is fairly safe to say that if you are a complete beginner,
you will most likely need at least some technical work and voice
building or strengthening for the first few months, regardless of how
much ‘natural’ talent you have. There is no point in playing an
instrument if it hasn’t been built. When you first walk into
a teacher’s studio, they should explain to you in very specific
technical terms what it is they will be working on with you, at least
initially. Be wary of a teacher who just says that you have
no technique or that you simply suck without explaining why and what
they plan to do about it. Your voice is a very personal
expression of who you are and therefore a teacher should always be
supportive, encouraging and monumentally patient, never negative or
degrading, which is simply unacceptable under any circumstances.
Your teacher should take a holistic approach to teaching you,
evaluate where you are coming from, what your ambitions are and how it
relates to what they will be working on with you. And they
should explain all this to you in understandable terms.
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