Module Four Lesson Five: The Singers' Practice Planner: Your Companion for Nurturing Artistic Creativity & Growth
INTRODUCTION
Daily practice is essential for learning new skills and retaining old ones. Your relationship with practicing is one of the most important in your musical life. Singing every day keeps your body in shape and your mind and musical memory sharp. Regular practice also makes it easier to achieve your musical goals.
But finding the time to practice and using that time wisely isn’t easy. A practice journal can help you keep track of what you’re working on and why.
Think about it: how much time will you spend performing in the years to come? How much time will you spend practicing? The ratio might change in different seasons of your life, but the amount of time you spend practicing will almost always be greater than the time you spend in performance.
Conductor, author, and master teacher Benjamin Zander says,
“The major difference between the ‘best’ and the ‘average’ is that the ‘best’ get as much pleasure from practice as performance.”
I agree. Finding pleasure in practicing makes it more sustainable. And a practice journal that’s fun and easy to use will help you stay committed to your daily practice.
In this lesson, I’ll share two practice journals with you — a physical practice planner that you can download, print, and keep in a three-ring notebook and one that you can use in a cloud-based system called Evernote.
I hope that they will make your practice sessions more rewarding and fun!
Great feature I didn’t mention in the video! You can schedule reminders right in your Practice Journal Notes! Find out how HERE.
Here’s a helpful article on How To Use Evernote As Your Ultimate Songwriting Workstation written by David Santisteven
YOUR PHYSICAL PRACTICE PLANNER
One of the most helpful tools for singers is a practice journal.
There are many ways to keep track of how and what you practice, but the system that works is the one you’ll actually use. It needs to be simple, practical, and fun — a way to plan for future performance goals that also captures your discoveries as you experiment in your practice sessions. In other words, it’s a planner and a diary for your voice all in one.
I scoured the internet looking for one that might work for singers. There were a few, but none of them spoke to me. So, I decided to make my own. And I’m really excited to share it with you!
YOUR PHYSICAL PRACTICE PLANNER
This downloadable practice planner will help you plan and keep track of what you’re practicing. In it, you’ll find Yearly, Monthly, and Weekly calendars, plus a Daily Practice Page for journaling, a Master Song List, and Song Sheets for capturing all the details about the songs you sing.
This short video will show you how to use each page. But feel free to use this practice planner in any way that works best for you!
YEAR AT A GLANCE
It all starts with this Year At A Glance page. Here’s where you’ll get a quick visual overview of the year ahead, so you’ll know what to prepare for and when. Big goals like recordings, record releases, and performances, go here.
Circle the most important dates. You can use colored pens or stickers for different types of goals and events—for instance, red for performances, blue for recording dates, or orange for record releases.
As new events roll in, mark them here, then write down the specifics in your monthly calendar.
MONTHLY CALENDAR
This calendar is a map for the month ahead.
Here’s where you’ll write down the specifics for those significant events in your yearly calendar. Ask yourself what you need to practice to prepare for them and how much time it will take. For instance, if you need three weeks to prepare for a concert, go back in time three weeks from the concert date and write down something like “Start practicing for gig XYZ.”
WEEKLY CALENDAR
Once a week, take a look at your monthly calendar and your musical goals for practicing. The list on the left is where you can write these goals down. You can use the dots on the right to track when in the week you worked on each one.
Performance goals go here, but others that aren’t time or date-specific can live here too. Singing technique, songs you’re learning for fun, the research you’re doing on musical style or composers — everything related to your musical goals, research, and vocal experiments goes here.
DAILY JOURNAL
Your daily practice pages are where you leave the planning behind and focus on the doing.
Each page is divided up into three sections: Body, Mind, and Emotion.
The section for your body is all about your instrument, your warm-up, and vocal technique.
The section called Mind is all about your practice’s mental aspects — learning songs, memorizing lyrics and working on musical concepts and music theory.
The last section takes you back to why you sing in the first place — what you want to feel when you sing a song and how you transmit that feeling to others. Song story and character development are two of the many possibilities for this section.
You can use this page as a journal to track how your voice feels each day and what worked or didn’t in your singing experiments.
This is also the place to leave notes for yourself about your next practice session — where you’d like to begin and what you want to remember to focus on.
SONG SHEETS
Each song sheet is a collection of everything that’s important to you about a song.
There’s a place here for the nitty-gritty stuff like key, tempo, and feel. But there’s also space to list the recordings you’re listening to while learning a song and a place to write down the most significant pieces of a song’s history.
There’s even a section dedicated to your connection to the song—where you first heard it, why you chose to sing it etc.
When introducing a song in performance, you could use the information here to craft an introduction to the tune and write it in the notes section. Creating a context for your listeners gives them a deeper way to experience the songs you sing.
MASTER SONG LIST:
When a song is performance-ready, it’s time to list it here. You can easily see what key, feel, and tempo a song is in and who the composer was.
If you have a long list of tunes, I recommend keeping your master song list in a spreadsheet in the cloud. I created one in Google Sheets that you can copy and make your own.
So that’s it! You’ll find a link to your practice planner and the Master Song List in Google sheets in the notes for this lesson.
Evernote For Singers: Your Practice Journal In The Cloud
One of my favorite tools for practicing is Evernote. Evernote lets you capture ideas, store them, create projects, organize your life, and more — all in the cloud. There’s a free version, but for less than it costs to buy two lattes at Starbucks, a premium subscription gives you additional functionality and tons of storage space. Believe me, you’re going to want as much as you can get.
Let me show you why.
Evernote Notebooks & Notes
Because Evernote is in the cloud, you can access everything in your account in three different ways: through an app on your mobile device, desktop, or in a URL. Here we’re looking at my desktop app. Any changes I make here will sync with my Evernote account everywhere.
Everything in Evernote is organized into Notebooks and Notes. You can create a Notebook for anything. I have notebooks for Stage Plots, Song Charts, Contracts and Travel Itineraries for Gigs, and of course, Practicing.
Here’s my Practice Notebook. Inside the Notebook are Notes.
Within each Note, you can write text. With a premium account, 200 MB of media files can live here — things like photos, videos, MP3s, and presentations.
You can also record audio directly into a note. I haven’t found the sound quality to be that great, so I don’t use that function. But you might play around with it and see what you think.
In my Practice Notebook, I start with these five notes: A Year/Month Calendar, Weekly Goals, Daily Journal, Song Sheet, and Master Song List.
YEAR/MONTH CALENDAR
The Year/Month Calendar page gives you a quick visual overview of the year ahead, so you’ll know what to prepare for and when. Big goals like recordings, record releases, and performances, go here.
As you write in the squares, you can color-code them for different types of goals and events—for instance, red for performances, blue for recording dates, or orange for record releases.
As you write down the specifics for those significant events, ask yourself what you need to practice to prepare for them and how much time it will take. For instance, if you need three weeks to prepare for a concert, go back in time three weeks and write down something like “Start practicing for gig XYZ.”
WEEKLY CALENDAR
Here’s the blank template for my weekly practice. When you’re ready to start a new week, you can duplicate this Note by going up into the menu bar, clicking on Note, and then clicking on Duplicate.
Now you can take a look at your monthly calendar and your musical goals for practicing. The list on the left is where you can write these goals down. You can use the squares on the right to keep track of when in the week you worked on each one.
Performance goals go here, but others that aren’t time or date-specific can live here too. Singing technique, songs you’re learning for fun, the research you’re doing on musical styles or composers — everything related to your musical goals, research, and vocal experiments goes here.
DAILY JOURNAL
Your daily practice pages are where you leave the planning behind and focus on the doing.
Each page is divided up into seven segments — one for each day of the week. The segment for each day is divided up into three sections: Body, Mind, and Emotions.
You can use these sections as a journal to keep track of how your voice feels each day and what worked or didn’t in your singing experiments.
This is also the place to leave notes for yourself about your next practice session — where you’d like to begin and what you want to remember to focus on.
Since I use the same set of vocal exercises to warm up every day, I copy and paste the MP3s for them here at the beginning of the Note.
I also paste links to Song Sheets that hold all the info about the songs I’m working on. Song Sheets are one of my favorite ways to use Evernote. Let me show you what those look like and how you can use them too.
SONG SHEETS
Each song sheet contains everything that’s important to you about a song. This is the page in my Practice Journal that makes my inner librarian really happy.
Let’s take a look at a song in my repertoire called World On A String so you can see some of the possibilities here.
At the top of each page, you’ll find a place for the composer’s name and the key, tempo, and feel.
Depending on how I’m feeling, I either perform this tune in a medium swing or bossa nova feel.
Next, you’ll find a space to keep track of where you are in the process of learning — whether the song is new, you’re still working on it, or it’s completed and performance-ready. I’ve been singing this song forever, so I’ve got the completed box checked off.
In the next section, you’ll find a space for vocal models and recordings.
This is where Evernote really shines compared to a paper practice journal.
VOCAL MODELS/RECORDINGS/BACKING TRACKS
You can keep all kinds of files here. Backing tracks for the songs you’re singing. Links to YouTube videos that you’re studying. Or recordings that you’ve made of the song.
I’ve got two of my MP3s here. Each one is a backing track — one for practicing the song in a swing feel, one for bossa nova that I created using iReal.
I also have links to three singers who are great models for style and interpretation. The Ella Fitzgerald version includes the verse to the song — a little-known introduction that hardly anyone sings. If I ever want to refresh this tune, I could add the verse to make it new for myself (and my audience.)
SONG STORY/HISTORY
Here’s a space where you can write down the most significant pieces of a song’s history. Here’s a link to a search for World On A String that I’ll want to go back to later.
Do that with any tune, and you’ll come up with a ton of material to listen to and research. Of course, anything related to a song’s history can go here that helps you to create a deeper connection to the tune for yourself or your audience.
MY CONNECTION TO THE SONG
There’s also a section dedicated to your connection to the song—where you first heard it, why you chose to sing it etc.
NOTES
When introducing a song in performance, you could craft an introduction to the tune from your connection to it and/or the song’s history. Creating a context for listeners gives them a deeper way to experience the songs you sing and you.
CHART/LYRIC SHEET
Lastly, you can type out or copy and paste the lyrics to a song here.
Your sheet music or chord chart can easily be uploaded and stored here too. You can take a quick look at it. Open it in a program, or share it multiple ways like this:
You can also share a link for the entire page in or outside of Evernote. Let’s grab the link to this page so I can show you how to use it in your Master Song List.
MASTER SONG LIST:
You can create tables inside notes in Evernote. Just click on the little table icon, highlight the number of squares you’d like to start with, et voila! A simple table is born.
You can change the width of each column, the colors, fonts, etc., and make it your own. I’m going to delete this one and go up to the one I’ve already created.
When a song is performance-ready, it’s time to list it here. You can easily see what key, feel, and tempo a song is in and who the composer was.
Now let’s use that link we created for the World On A String song sheet in this table.
Begin by typing in the name of your song and highlighting it. Then go up to Format, scroll down to Link, and click on Add. Easier still, use the key command: Control K. Paste your link to the song in the box and click OK.
Now you can quickly go to that Song’s page.
Unfortunately, Evernote doesn’t have a spreadsheet function. If you have a long list of tunes, a spreadsheet will make it easier for you to organize your songs. You can either keep one on your laptop and upload it here or use a Google spreadsheet. I created a Master Song List in Google Sheets that you can copy and make your own. You can put the link here, and you’ll always have quick access to your song list.
If you decide to keep a spreadsheet on your laptop, always open it from inside Evernote to make changes. Then when you close it, the updates will be reflected in your document here.
There are just a few more Evernote features that I want to share with you that I think you’ll find useful.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
A Table of Contents is super useful when you want to combine notes into an easy-to-find, linkable list.
For instance, I’ve created one for the template pages I’ve been showing you in my practice journal. When I start a new week, I just click on the link for the template, make as many copies as I need, and I’m ready to practice.
Here’s how you create your own table of contents.
These five notes are templates for my practice journal. To create a Table of Contents for them, I just press command or alt on my keyboard and click on each Note. Evernote will show you a list of options for what you can do with this group of notes. You can move, share, merge, start a presentation, or create a Table of Contents with them.
I want to create a Table of Contents, so I click on that option. I name the Note, and I’m done. Now all my templates are here, with a hyperlink to each one.
You could also create a Table of Contents for all the songs you’re working on. There are a ton of creative possibilities for this feature!
EVERNOTE CLIPPER
One of the brilliant features in Evernote is the Evernote Clipper. It’s a browser extension that you can use to save web pages, articles, and .pdfs directly into Evernote.
Let’s say you need information about hydration for singers. You search on Google and find my blog piece — Hydrate Your Way To Better Singing. Awesome. There’s some information here you don’t want to forget. How do you capture it, and where do you store it?
Using the clipper extension, you can send it directly to a Notebook in Evernote.
Just click on the browser extension, and you’ll see some options. You can save the web page as an article, simplified article, full page, bookmark, or screenshot. Evernote searches the text in the article and guesses which Notebook you’d like it to go in. If it hasn’t guessed correctly, you can choose another Notebook. You can also add tags or notes.
When you open Evernote, the content will be there. Just use the search bar to locate anything within your notebooks or notes.
SONGWRITING
If you’re a songwriter, you can use Evernote to capture song ideas, voice memos, and lyrics on your mobile devices or desktop. Just Google “Evernote For Songwriters,” and you’ll find some helpful articles written by fellow musicians on how they use Evernote for songwriting.
http://www.davidsantistevan.com/evernote-songwriting-workstation/
TEACHING
If you’re a music teacher, Evernote is a fantastic tool to use with your students. Just create an individual notebook for each student and share it with them. When you share a notebook, you can communicate with students, upload materials for them, record their lessons directly into the app, and more. Students can do the same on their end, share their progress, or ask questions inside a note.
Whether you’re practicing, writing songs, or teaching, Evernote is a fantastic tool. It can help you capture ideas, organize, and create.
If you’d like to use the Practice Planner and Journal in this video, I have some templates to share with you.
