A better strategy to learning to sing.

Author

Ivan Lu
January 30, 2025

A better strategy to learning to sing.

Why is learning to sing harder for some people.

Why do some people just get it, whereas for you.

You’re stuck in this circle of just straining. You’re trying to figure it out but it just seems to fight you no matter how hard you try.

If this sounds like you, I want to break down exactly why this is happening and share a BETTER strategy for learning to sing.

I’ll also share STUDENT examples of how to structure your practice session in order to see quicker results.

Real quick! For those of you who don’t know me. My name is Ivan, I love making music and also teaching singing to students all around the world. On this newsletter my goal is to make learning to sing simple. If that’s up your lane, consider subscribing. If you want to improve your voice faster, check out the links down below for ways to work with me

If you want to inspire our next episode! Drop in the comments below what you want me to talk about next.

Learning to sing is a TUG of WAR for most people.

What do I mean by this is every time you go and practice.

2 things can happen.

(1) You do it correctly. And you reinforcing the correct technique/muscles

Correct techniques mean using only the muscles responsible for that movement.

For example, if you want to sing high. You only ENGAGE more stretch of vocal folds for higher pitch. And you do this without changing/engaging anything else. The volume doesn’t change. The vowel doesn’t change. And doing this with precision and consistency.

If you don’t know what clean technique is. After this episode I want you to check out episode 129/138. Where I dive deeper on this.

(2) You do it kinda correctly BUT it’s so cluttered with other movements.

Things like jaw clamping down. Tongue engaging in a certain way. Or for some of us not trying to “blow” more air or clamp down on those cords instead of the stretch.

And depending on how often YOU get clean technique and reps with clutter.

This can be the biggest reason why a lot of singers can feel stuck in a tug of war.

Think of it like this. Say you practice 30 minutes each day.

But each day, half the reps is clean.

The other half your reps have a lot of unnecessary bad habits. There’s a lot of fight in simply going up and down your range.

What’s happening is when you go to sleep that day.

You are reinforcing both forms of wiring to your brain.

And these mixed signals keep you STUCK in this tug of war.

SO HOW DO WE WIN THIS TUG OF WAR?

Now I know this sounds dead obvious but hear me out.

What if we adjusted our routine such that we’re living in correct technique (most of the time)

This does 2 things

(1) It reinforces correct wiring

(2) Limit the chance of giving the bad habits a chance to activate.

Say you have 15 minutes of practice.

I want you to spend 10 mins or 2/3rds of this practice session reinforcing a spot where you know where good technique is.

Now the caveat here is

To get CLEAN technique, you may have to REALLY narrow down to a specific exercise/context until you get clean technique.

For example, say if you can’t find clean technique in a song.

You go to a certain scale. If you’re still straining/pushing.

You need to narrow down even more.

Go to a certain word/volume

A common example is learning to go up and down your range in a SOFTER volume first.

And you LIVE here for now.

Sure it’s not the sound you want, but what you’re doing is you’re reinforcing ONLY good technique.

This is the first part where you spend half to two-thirds of your time.

Now of course, we still need to expand what we can do. There’s no point only being able to go up and down in that limited context. Even though it’s correct it’s not applicable to singing.

So from in here in the last third of your session. I want you to try focus on challenging a slightly harder context.

Now this might bring in some of the bad habits. And they’ll fight you in the form of some better reps. Some not so good

But because

(1) You’re limiting the amount of reps you do here

(2) When you take the time to reinforce correct technique early in the sessions in whatever context.

You have a much higher chance for these harder exercises to work anyway. And you’ll notice day in day out there’s just less fight in the exercise.

To the point where eventually this challenge exercise will become your first exercise.

Now just to give you some ideas, here are some examples for my students.

So these routines are wildly different based of the skill level.

From focusing on just matching single notes, to really Zooming to hitting their full range each day.

However what’s common is that they start of with CLEAN technique each day in whatever context/scale they can and rep it in for the ½ or 2/3 of the time.

And in the remaining time they challenge a harder context.

Then they go sleep.

Let the brain do it’s thing.

And come back at it again tomorrow.

The following week, we meet up and see where they are and find the next step together.

Each day/week we come back to this. Your ability to execute with clean technique becomes more CONSISTENT but you’re also able to do it in more spots.

THIS IS HOW YOU BEAT THIS TUG OF WAR and get unstuck.

Anyway! That’s all. If you found this episode useful, please share or give it 5 star wherever you’re listening from. This really helps spread the word and means the world to me. If you’d like to study with me, links are down in description. Take care!

🌍 Book Private Singing Lessons here: https://calendly.com/singingsimply 

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