Your voice is unique to you. It grows as you grow. It changes as you change. If you’re curious about the relationship between your voice and your body, your heart and your mind, welcome. My name is Michèle Voillequé and I can’t wait to hear you. 

Today I want to talk about why private voice lessons for choral singers are a good idea. Now, I’m not going to say if you’re a choral singer that you have to take private voice lessons. That’s not what this is about.

But I do want you to know why they are a good idea, even for a short period of time, what they can do for you and your voice, what you can hope to get out of them.

I think it’s always a good idea when you’re looking for a teacher to have an idea about what it is that you want to learn. And if you’re a choral singer and you just like to get better, that’s a great reason to go find a teacher.

But I’m hoping that me giving you specific things to work on and to look for will help you find the best teacher for you and the fastest learning experience for you and hopefully the most satisfying learning experience for you.

So, speaking broadly, private lessons help us learn to hear ourselves, and to know ourselves, and to love ourselves, strengths and struggles together, independent of other people.

When it’s just me and my teacher, all the sound that’s happening is sound that I’m making, and I get to learn what it’s like to be me when I’m singing.

And if you’re always in a chorus, if you’re always in choir, it’s very difficult to hear yourself. And I’ve had many, many students tell me, “the way I sing at home is not how I sing when I go to rehearsal, and I want to figure out what that difference is.

“Like at home, singing along to the radio, washing dishes, my voice is so much freer, I feel like I know what I’m doing, and then I go to chorus rehearsal, and I can’t hear myself very well, I don’t feel as free in my body, and I just want to know what that difference is.”

So, taking private lessons will help you figure that out for yourself.

There could be any number of things going on. It really will depend from person to person, but working with somebody in a one on one environment will help you know yourself better, and will help you take responsibility for yourself, and to have compassion and curiosity about yourself.

And all of that will make you a more effective choral singer. You’ll feel more in charge of your instrument when you’re in a group. You’ll feel more confident about your instrument when you’re in a group, and You’ll perform better in a group. So that’s the, big general Why.

But as for specific whys that you might use to look for a teacher for you, I think the most important benefit of working with a private teacher is that you get to work on your tone quality. You learn about how your body’s resonance works, how to sing loudly without pushing, and how to sing softly without under supporting.

Working on your tone is a great goal for private study and it’s really hard to do when you’re in a group of people because it’s hard to hear yourself and to separate your voice from other people’s voices.

Another good reason for private study is to sort out your breath support. How actually does it work for you to breathe? How does it feel when your voice is well supported? What parts of your body are you using? And to have somebody look at you and show you to yourself, show you how you’re breathing.

Oh, every time you inhale your shoulders go up. Well, That’s not great for singing. And you know, the choral director may be telling the whole group to breathe low into the center of your body. You may be hearing that a lot, but until you’re in a one on one teaching/learning environment, you might not know the extent to which, “Oh, that instructions applying to me. That’s really my problem.”

This is just an example.

But breath support is something that we all experience differently, and we all describe differently. So it’s very helpful to work with another person who understands their own breath support really well, and have them help you find the language and the movements, the mechanism of your own breath support so that you can understand your instrument well too.

You don’t need to use the same words, you don’t need to have the same experience as your teacher, but having a teacher will help you find your own words, and they’ll be able to verify whether what you’re doing is working, whether you’re on the right track. And that is so valuable.

Even if you’re already on the right track, and you’re, if you’re not sure, even just for like one or two lessons, to find out, “Am I doing this right?”

And to hear, “Yeah, you’re doing it right.” It’s worth the time and the money to just, you know, settle into yourself and celebrate what you know.

A third thing, private lessons will help you learn how to warm yourself up and what exercises work for you, and what order works for you.

For some voices, it’s really beneficial to start at the bottom of the range. For some, it’s really important to start in the middle, and for others, it’s important to start at the higher end and work down.

Most choral warm ups include exercises to cover all of these kinds of people, but those exercises don’t always come in the order that you want them to come in because, they’re leading exercises for 25, 50, 75, 200 people and it’s not going to be specifically for you.

But if you work with a one on one teacher and you learn how to warm your voice up, you learn how your voice warms up best.

Not only does that give you an option of going into a choral rehearsal already warmed up because you did that ahead of time – you did that before you left the house for rehearsal, you gave yourself a head start – it also gives you the ability to understand what’s happening during the choral warm up that that might not be working for you.

So if you’re a person like me, who warms up from the top down, almost no choral rehearsals begin that way.

And when I’m in a rehearsal where the warmup is starting low and staying low or going up a little bit, not yet getting to the high notes, my voice can start to feel stuck.

My voice starts to feel thick and logey and like, “Ah, this is so frustrating.” I’m not, I’m not able to find the resonance that I want in my voice just because of where we’re starting.

So when I’m in a rehearsal and that’s happening, I can know, “Michèle, just take a deep breath. It’s going to be fine. You’re all right. We’re going to get there.” That’s invaluable.

More than one student has come to me thinking that there was something horribly wrong with themselves, when really the problem was that the choral warm up just wasn’t right for their voice.

And once we explored that and I gave them some other exercises to try, some other ways to approach it, they were able to go back to the chorus rehearsal and know that they weren’t going to get all of their needs met in exactly the way they needed them met in the warm up, and they could make adjustments for themselves.

They could warm up a little ahead of time. They could not over-sing in the warmups that weren’t working.

Sometimes when we have, somebody gives us an exercise to do, and so we do it, and it doesn’t quite work. And then we start trying harder, and it doesn’t quite work. And we start trying even harder. And like all of that trying is often undoing the point of the exercise.

So my students learned how when to not try harder, when to just let it be, and know that everything’s going to be okay.

Another thing about private lessons is they mimic in a small way what happens when you audition for a solo part at a chorus rehearsal. It gets you used to singing by yourself in front of one other person.

And that isn’t exactly every other audition situation, but it is kind of like an audition situation. And so you get used to, week after week, for however long you do it, even if it’s only like 10 weeks of lessons, you still get that practice of it’s just you and one other person and you’re gonna sing now and that practice is so helpful.

It is so good for your nervous system to have been through that a few times before you go to audition for anything, but in particular auditioning for your choral director.

Maybe you’re in a group that re-auditions the entire chorus every year, or maybe there are occasional solos that are cast from within the chorus. It just gives you great practice of knowing that you can sing for one other person who is more experienced than you, and you will not die.

In fact, you can do better than not die. You can sing pretty well.

I kind of said this at the beginning, but I want to put a slightly finer point on it. When you explore your voice on your own and you learn what you sound like and you learn your strengths and your struggles, you have a sense of the kind of voice you have.

Is it soft? Is it warm? Is it brassy? Is it strong?

You’ll come away with some descriptors of your voice. And having spent an hour for 10 weeks or 20 weeks or a year, having spent those 10, 20, 52 hours with yourself, with another person, really hearing your own voice, you will be able to make better sense of directions that come from your choral director.

The person who’s directing the chorus is hearing the whole group en masse. They’re hearing the sound of the chorus as a whole. They’re also hearing the sopranos as a whole, or the altos as a whole, or the tenors as a whole, and the basses as a whole.

And as a whole, each one of those groups might be too bright, or might be too dull sounding, or any number of other things that the conductor doesn’t care for. The conductor wants a different quality here.

Well, if you already know that your voice is really bright, when the conductor says, “Altos, you sound a little dull. Can you brighten it up a little bit?”

If you already know that you have a pretty bright voice, in that moment you will know they’re probably not talking to you, and you probably don’t need to make your bright voice even brighter.

Similarly, if the conductor says, “Altos, you’re lovely, and that was way too bright. Can you please just warm it up, tone it down just a little?” If you’re the one with the bright voice, you’ll know, “oh, they’re talking to me. This is about me.”

And you, can soften your voice, you can warm it up, and you can learn how to warm it up, or soften it, you’ll, you can learn to do that in a way that’s healthy, in a private voice lesson, and it’s likely that the conductor will be pleased with the adjustment that you made.

It is so easy as a chorus member to unconsciously create the bad habit of under-singing because you want to blend in with the people around you.

That’s something that a good private teacher is not going to let you get away with. A good private teacher is going to show you, help you discover all the colors that your voice is capable of making, all the dynamic levels, all the timbres. What is it to be you? What is it to have your instrument? And how can you use it to the fullest?

You might think if you’re, in air quotes, “just” a chorus member that you don’t need to use your whole self. You don’t need to be anything spectacular because you’re just a chorus member. You’re not gonna solo. You don’t need to show off. You don’t need to be anybody special.

But I submit to you that that when you can bring your full self to the chorus rehearsal, your full voice, all of your vocal capacity, that makes the whole chorus better.

That doesn’t make you fancy, that makes you a good singer, a good group member. And when you can use your instrument confidently, It makes you a leader.

Does that make you a section leader? Not necessarily. Do I mean it makes you a leader in a fancy pants, heavy duty responsibility, we have to take this seriously now kind of way?

No. It just means that you’re not waiting for the person next to you to sing the note first before you do.

And if you are regularly waiting for the person next to you to sing the note before you do, private lessons can improve your musicianship.

In a very short period of time, you can become a more confident music reader, a more confident sight singer, and you can learn to use these skills while you sing technically well.

A lot of times in a rehearsal, when we’re presented with a new piece of music, we’re sight singing, everything gets tense. It’s so hard to sing well when you’re not sure what you’re singing.

And it really is a skill to learn how to sing openly, freely, with good tone, with all the things, even when you’re not entirely sure what you’re supposed to be doing.

To learn how to use your body well and make mistakes with the notes, which is what’s going to happen the first, second, third, fourth time you sing through a piece of music in a chorus. You’re gonna make mistakes.

And working with a private teacher can not only improve your sight singing so that you make fewer mistakes, the teacher can also show you how to use your body well even when you are making mistakes.

So that it’s not, you know, five or six weeks of being in chorus where you sing really badly because you don’t know what you’re supposed to be doing, and then you have like three or four weeks of singing better cause you feel like you know it now, and now all of a sudden it’s the concert.

Wouldn’t it be more fun to be singing well the whole time and to learn the notes faster and to have an experience that’s just expansive from the beginning rather than contracted and fearful and under-sung and “please nobody notice that I just made a mistake,” and then gradually opening up from there?

It is true that not every choral environment is a safe place to make mistakes. There are choruses where people give you sideways glances when you sing the wrong thing. There are conductors who don’t have any tolerance for the learning process. This is all true in the world.

And mistakes are part of being human. Mistakes are what happen when we’re learning something. And while we can’t change the world, if we can become more forgiving of ourselves and the wrong notes that we sing, it’ll be easier to sing the right notes and to sing everything well.

I hope this is helpful, and I hope that you’re having a wonderful musical end to the year, if you’re listening to this in real time. There’s nothing like December for singing with other people, even just casually.

Christmas carols, holiday songs, music is everywhere right now, and I hope you’re able to enjoy it.

Thanks so much for listening.

If you enjoyed today’s episode, please rate and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new people find the show. Subscribing ensures you’ll learn about new episodes as soon as they come out. If you have a question about singing or speaking or being, please send me an email at letters@mvmusik.com.

That’s letters at M as in Mary, V as in Victor, M U S I K.com.

Transcripts and show notes are available on my website. You can subscribe to my newsletter there, too. Can’t Wait to Hear You is produced in conjunction with Particulate Media. I’m your host, Michèle Voillequé. I can’t wait to hear you.