Not being able to rely on your voice can be a truly frustrating problem that will quickly rob you of enjoyment and confidence. Not only does vocal consistency alleviate this pain but it also releases you to explore creativity, imagination and authenticity with real freedom and joy – there is nothing better!! You do not have to put up with this and although there are no ‘overnight solutions’ it is solvable. It is worth mentioning that vocal health and lifestyle can play a massive part here but those issues are something we will return to at a later date due to their complexity. The focus here is how to train physical/mental consistency so that we can reproduce our best time and time again.
How do we do this?
- Develop a set of skills that are broadly reliable and develop them beyond doubt.
- Be able to demonstrate these skills frequently and consistently in a focused environment where you are comfortable; confidence will replace doubt.
- Create the correct mental environment for yourself so you access this mental and physical programming with relative ease regardless of distractions.
Is it all in the mind?
In the vast majority of cases the answer is no. An excellent mental approach, even the best possible, cannot save you if your skills aren’t well developed enough.
There is enormous value in this area (discussed in my next article – ‘How can I stop nerves affecting my performance’) but these techniques will only give you access to what’s there; you cannot ‘think yourself’ to better skills. It’s imperative that you ‘create it before you reveal it’ as lingering hang-ups in either technique or emotional connection will come calling when pressure occurs, and no amount of mental focus will help you conquer it!!
Once you’ve developed skills and satisfied the doubt with hours of practice where specificity is king, this reliable expression will be readily available. An excellent approach will develop an excellent product.
How should I develop my skills?
Receiving quality training is key and this is where the role of the trainer is crucial; good teachers/coaches make hard work easier. They successfully sell the idea that specific repetitive work produces excellence in the long term whilst accepting, and encouraging the aspiring singer to accept that mediocrity, or even worse, will be the product in the short or medium term. This careful balance of ambition and realism is not easily navigated, constantly changes, and can easily result in disconnecting the learner from the path to their ambition as they struggle with the paradox that repetitive mediocrity will eventually lead to excellence.
Lee Lefever, in his enlightening book ‘The Art of Explanation’, discusses at length the idea of ‘selling ideas’ effectively in order to ‘lower the cost of understanding/achievement’ so that recipients ‘buy into’ an approach for the long-term journey. When learners understand the path they are on they become avid ‘buyers’ of repetitive, focused work and develop wonderful skills that can exceed doubt. When this culture of learning/training is created the seemingly impossible does start to appear possible and the environment for successful skill development is born;
‘The cost of understanding these subjects (skills) is too high to justify the investment: it would take too much time and effort so we filter it out…… We all feel indifference at one point towards some topic. Thankfully, we have explanations, which lower the cost of figuring out an idea and invite people to become customers of it in the future.”
This approach is the bedrock of good instrumental teaching but it is often undervalued in voice training due to the accessibility of the instrument. Access is great and it will give you an idea of what’s possible but it doesn’t guide you towards consistency and that’s a major issue for those who need to be able to rely on their voice.
Sometimes I will ask a performer ‘How many times is that high note available’ and if they reply its about 40%, 60% or even 70% then its obvious that its a risky situation, this assessment can really help focus an approach for both me and them. If my brakes were accessible but not consistent i’d be a bit concerned!
Eliminating doubt
Eliminating doubt, so that we can access our skills on demand, requires a very specific approach where fundamental skills are key. Increasing reliability simultaneously lowers frustration and anxiety though so its well worth it. Excellent performers and sportsman are superb at fundamentals and their whole world is built on them, lesser performers cannot make the same claim, which is why they are lesser. Striking a ball, returning a serve, catching a ball when running or singing in tune with appropriate breath, posture and resonance; none of these things are basic, they are highly complex examples of mental and physical co-ordination. Respect them and repeat them until failure is a concept. Sometimes people wrongly refer to vocal fundamentals, as ‘basics’ and I hate this. This is where these skills are misunderstood, undervalued and consequently under developed. We ‘miss-sell’ the skills at this point and this creates incompetence.
Concert pianist James Rhodes illuminates the point of how repetitive specificity creates automated excellence;
“I’d train my fingers to play every variation of every group of notes in every possible way and then play the whole passage through, and fuck me if the fiftieth time through I didn’t play it perfectly as written. It was like a door opening: spend a few hours working methodically and slowly and you will end up playing brilliantly much, much more quickly and reliably than just going at it with a sledgehammer approach.”
Create consistency – Do it until it can’t go wrong…. and smile!
This is automated brilliance and is not easily achieved but it can be fun; the high note is there at least 90% in this instance – if not more. The path to success is adorned with specificity, repetition and a mental approach that balances high standards with the ability to forgive yourself. Once you have achieved this, your mind is then free to understand and deliver music with artistry.
For this to occur the vocal skills must be programmed into the subconscious (or implicit memory) over many hours. To be clear, this is not singing along with YouTube in your room or car or constantly repeating the same mistakes with your MD who is focusing on the music. This is isolating specific skills in breath, vocal fold vibration, laryngeal function and articulation away from the music and making sure they function efficiently.
Although this sounds daunting, you have already done this type of programming many times with countless other skills which now seem ‘second nature.’ Consider how multi-functional skills like reading, talking, eating or even driving now seem so basic. You have lowered the difficulty level and have seemingly simplified the task by transferring a skill from conscious (explicit) to unconscious (implicit/automatic) via repetitive step by step precision.
As kids we do this all the time but as we grow and become more competent we experience this state less and less. I watch my two year old daughter program this conscious system all the time with walking, speaking etc and my five year old son is also working hard on programming so he can read. Annabelle currently has food in her hair and George is taking what seems like an incredible amount of time to read ‘Dad put on a hat’. We forget how hard these journeys are and how slow the progress can be. We’ve all been there and survived though!
It’s fascinating to observe this and we can learn much from it. Young children are spending large parts of the day hard at work programming the automatic subconscious system in a laborious inefficient conscious manner. As they apply repetition to the specific tasks it yields future implicit behaviour (automatic high level competency.) These expert workaholic programmers are rarely frustrated considering the amount of failure they encounter doing tasks that we, as fully programmed specimens, consider basic and yet they are ambitious and playful in their work. We take for granted our own ‘excellence’ because it feels so easy now but this wasn’t always the case. Child development acts as a huge reminder that we have all spent much time programming; and, we had fun (most of the time!) whilst doing it. This is a great attitude for long-term goals and specific practice. Approach it with the seriousness of a child!
Matthew Syed, in his excellent book, ‘Bounce-the myth of talent and the power of practice’ illustrates this beautifully. He observes the training of young table tennis players where the coach achieves his goal by targeting the leading motor skill required to deliver a forehand topspin. The coach focuses on the precision in this one specific area of the wrist and purposely neglects the other physical components for now. The remainder of this physical synchronicity involving hips, shoulder, forearm, knees and torso is carefully constructed on top of this skill once security is achieved. This process takes about 6 months.
Syed observed how this had been programmed in an aspiring young player who had been through the same system.
‘Many hours of practice have enabled him to encode the stroke in implicit rather than explicit memory. It wasn’t always like this: when he started out, he….was consciously monitoring the way he was hitting the ball as he painstakingly built up the neural framework supporting the shot. Only after many hours was he able to execute the shot without even having to think about it.”
In his fascinating series on the Brain for the BBC Dr David Eagleman explores this subject further and charts neurological activity during similar complex tasks. His findings demonstrate that expert automatic skill reproduction is actually serene in terms of brain activity. In this state it really is genuinely easy and joyful for us to be brilliant. This is evident when you watch sportsmen and musician’s do something akin to a magic trick with a smile on their face. Watch this video to find out more……
https://youtu.be/-nhRPVWM9A0
Taking consistency on the road!
The difficulty with vocal consistency is that there are so many variables beyond your control in the environment in which you are performing/rehearsing that it is easy to become destabilised. This was discussed in an excellent BBC 5 live programme on ‘Elite sports coaching.’ Clive Woodward (England’s world cup winning Rugby Union coach) revealed that he would work with his team when they were tired in order to replicate specific situations in matches so they could negate this. This recreation is crucial and provides evidence for the players that they can refer back to. I often say to singers that when a session happens to coincide with illness, fatigue or a personal problem that it’s incredibly valuable for this very reason.
To maintain consistency within constantly changing environments performers must be informed so they can manage themselves and not be wholly reliant on instruction from elsewhere. They must be active in their education and the creation of standards if they are to be flexible enough to achieve consistency. During this 5 Live programme (also featuring Matthew Syed and Gareth Southgate) Syed describes how the ‘the mute labourer’ approach does not allow for this kind of flexibility and withholds ownership from the player so they can’t adapt, step up and feel empowered when required. We have seen this relationship so many times between singing teacher and student and it is still far too common – the aim is not to be the keeper ‘of the magic’ but the enabler of the trick.
Syed also describes how this ‘growth mindset’ (a term currently being high-jacked and misappropriated in the British education system) therefore puts us in control of our own journey; it gives us the pro-activity to go the extra mile where our consistency can survive in any environment.
So, for vocal consistency, we need to be in possession of excellent skills and then we must be empowered enough and ‘hungry’ enough to be able to produce them time after time regardless of the environment. If you want consistency you must either have a great temperament for this or start developing one.
Those who embody this culture within themselves are infectious, inspirational beasts. Sir Alex Ferguson was a master of creating an environment of unrivalled success at Manchester United. He identified players with fire in their bellies who would train in a way where complacency was poison and success was non-negotiable. He would then focus his energies on depressurising the players so they could express themselves and allow their fire and carefully drilled pre-honed skills to come to the fore. This indefatigable wall of courage and relentlessness was very carefully constructed and showcases the model we are discussing.
You must train with the fear of failure and perform with the joy of a child. This flexible mental approach is key to you finding your best and reproducing it time and time again.