Singing in the Car (is it bad for you?)

The other day I came across a post on Reddit asking

Is practising in the car or taking Zoom lessons in there a bad idea?

And one of the top comments came from a voice teacher who said

”I have a rule in my syllabus that I will not do car-lessons. In order to have a proper lesson, you need to be standing. You will not learn proper technique from a seated position. You can learn a lot over Zoom, but you need to be in the proper position.”

Is this really true? Let’s examine this together

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.

1. The bottleneck is not your breath support.

From a lot of these responses it seems the main reason for not practising in a car.

Is because you’re going to be seated.

Which can affect your posture and breath support.

And the argument presents is that you can’t learn good technique this way.

But let’s examine this,

For example, say you had a beginner singer. And they were standing with perfect posture.

Now let’s say we find a professional singer somewhere. And we ask them to sit and even slouch.

Who do you think will still sing better? And with better technique?

This thought experiment should highlight for most of us.

The bottleneck is not whether you’re sitting on standing. It might not even be your breath support. Sure it can help, but from personal experience and also from teaching students around the world.

The bottleneck is often the control of the finer muscles that help you change pitch and closure.

Especially the ones that change pitch.

Most people don’t have this refined well enough. I know I still have a lot of work to do.

When they change pitch, they always have to do something extra like push through a bit of air, volume, open their mouth.

Instead of pure pitch change.

And the cool part is you can totally learn how to do this in a car.

2. The case for singing in the car

Now yes, we might not feel our breath support as well sitting. So this can be a disadvantage that we need to find a better way around.

But I think there’s also HUGE advantages from practising in the car that most teachers are ignoring.

And that’s this.

Privacy.

Lack of inhibition.

I think these are incredibly important because it allows you to be in a better mental state to learn singing.

What I’m finding is developing refined technique often requires a certain mental state. A certain calmness. Because that mental states actually affects our voice.

I might talk about this in more details.

But basically, imagine you’re practising but your nerves or your anxiety kicks up because you know there’s people around you.

Guess what happens?

For many of us, this leads to more gripping, extra tightening and push.

And overtime, what happens is we’re perpetually locked out of a space where we can feel the subtle inner muscles working. Which we might have gotten to by just calmly exploring the voice.

Anyway! That’s all. Let me know if there’s anything I missed. 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!

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