Dear reader,
Every time I write a post, it sits lonely for months waiting to be edited. In my real life as a wife, a mom, and a human, I am in a busy season that will only get busier with the addition of another baby this month, but in the midst of cooking and caretaking I still feel the itch to write. Today I finally have the chance to sit down and tell you about a fun hobby I started in the summer of 2024!
It is… singing! Singing was a subject on my Hobby & Skill wish list for some time, but I’m from a relatively small town so I never thought I’d have the chance to take voice lessons. It turns out, all I had to do was mention to my mom that I was interested and she knew someone who knew someone! How could I not take advantage of the opportunity?
My naturally talented younger sister and I began attending private lessons together once a week in our teacher’s home. Voice lessons were far more challenging than my childhood piano lessons ever were because you can’t see the instrument you’re working with, but feeling improvement was so rewarding and we had lots of fun. We ended our lessons in the spring of 2025 in preparation for a busy summer, and then I ended up moving to North Dakota so I wasn’t able to resume.
A bittersweet last lesson with my teacher, Ann.
Here are my key takeaways from approximately eight months of lessons:
1. Nothing can replace an in-person voice teacher working personally with you. Nothing. If you’re taking lessons in person, the teacher can hear and see you and help you make adjustments to your body and voice. When you are singing, it’s hard to see and even hear yourself after a time. Somebody outside of you will be better able to gauge what needs adjusting, especially someone who knows what they’re doing. In my opinion, a course or online video could help with warmup exercises, but since you aren’t getting direct feedback from someone else, you will miss a lot when trying to diagnose errors in your own singing.
Additionally, it helps to have someone holding you accountable to practicing. Even if my teacher didn’t care whether or not I practiced outside of lessons, just knowing that I’d be singing in front of someone in a week was the perfect amount of pressure to motivate me to put in the time, whereas if I was trying to learn on my own, I may have been “too busy” and given up.
2. Previous experience with piano helps immensely. In addition to giving me familiarity with musical notes and terminology, my piano experience made it easier to learn and practice new songs. I could play along to my singing so I didn’t have to memorize or record the song at the lesson. You don’t have to be a skilled pianist either; I took lessons for maybe a year when I was young and hadn’t practiced since, and despite that I was able to play many of the songs I’d been learning (with practice, of course). If a song was more complicated, I would only play the right hand melody, which is basically all you need to learn the tune anyway.
3. Practice consistently. Since I didn’t have a piano at home and I like to play along as I sing, I would drive to my mom’s to use hers. My weekly lessons felt more valuable when I made the effort to practice in between, and I noticed that even if I didn’t see improvement during individual sessions, the consistent effort (with a night of sleep in between to process) moved me along.
I didn’t have a pre-planned amount of time to practice, but it averaged to about 40 minutes. If I set a specific length of time, practice would feel like a chore and I’d always be looking at the clock. Instead I set a flexible routine so my day could always accommodate a session. My teacher suggested that you don’t necessarily have to sit down and decide to practice because you can sing anywhere – and I do sometimes sing in the car – but I liked to make the time to solely focus on singing so I knew that I had put in the effort.
Some days I didn’t feel like practicing, but the longer I maintained the habit the easier it was to continue. I found that if I jumped into my warmups, all resistance melted away and I forgot to quit. And because I made my routine flexible, if I was having an off-day I could quickly run through the songs I was working on and still have accomplished something.
4. Watch yourself sing. At lessons I was set up in front of a mirror to help me notice improper form of the face and body. From this I learned that when I sing, I need to start dangling a sign in front of my face that says “RELAX YOUR JAW” because I needed the reminder every single week! Seriously, though, I should have set up a mirror at the piano during everyday practice because I would wonder why I couldn’t hit a note and then realize that my form was off.
5. “Falsetto” is a real part of your voice. Somehow I did not know this. Before I took lessons, I had a hard time singing because I didn’t realize that the higher part of my voice (head voice) was a part I was supposed to use. I figured I just had a low singing voice because I only felt comfortable using my middle voice and chest voice and I had to strain to sing higher notes. I didn’t realize that my lack of technique was the issue and that my range is higher than I thought.
“If it sounds right and feels right, it is right.”
– Ann’s often-used quote and now one of my favorites. You can always tell if your singing isn’t right because it feels strained or sounds off. Likewise, if it feels comfortable and sounds good, it’s correct!
In another world, this would be the spot to post a video of my singing progress because this blog is all about showing that you can improve at things even if you start out with no experience, but I just can’t do it! I can’t even bear to record myself singing and listen to it alone, although that would’ve been a good technique to use for practice. Maybe someday I’ll get there 🙂 For now I am content to sing along to the radio and with the other voices in church (although I will indulge my little daughter with a lullaby).
-Madelyn