Episode #13 Solo Episode: How To Make Time For Your Vocal Practice

Interviews

Jun 19

Welcome to Living A Vocal Life: A Podcast For Singers!

Welcome to the Living A Vocal Life Podcast, where I interview singers who have succeeded in creating a life in music. You’ll hear from vocalists of all genres, in different stages of their careers, including singers who’ve been on the Billboard charts and those who are teaching the next generation. What do they have in common? They're all performers with amazing stories to tell and experiences to share.

In our conversations, you’ll learn what inspired them to become a singer, the kinds of challenges they’ve encountered, and how they've overcome them. I'll also share what I've learned on my own journey as a singer and educator — practical tools and insights that will help you to live your best, most authentic vocal life.

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Valerie Day in black and white striped turtleneck.

My relationship with practicing is a love/hate kind of thing. I’ve tried a gazillion strategies over the years and tested some of them with my students.

Here’s what I’ve learned about staying connected to why I practice in the first place and some strategies for finding the time to do it.

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You can find me on: Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.

Theme music for the Podcast was composed by John Smith.

“The skills you learn from practicing will help you grow as a singer and empower you to grow as a person. When you have a healthy relationship with your practice, you’ll become more creative, resourceful, resilient, and whole in your life.”

— Valerie Day

Resources Talked About In This Episode:

Evernote

Evernote is one of my favorite tools for organizing, well, just about everything. It’s a cloud-based system you can use to capture ideas and inspiration in notes, voice, and pictures. Perfect for singers!

Practice Planner/Journal

I created a practice planner for singers that 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 tunes you sing.

And the best part? It’s FREE. Just click on the link below. No email required!

Yes, please! I can't wait to get practicing!

How To Make Time For Your Vocal Practice
What is your relationship with practicing?
Is each session like a date with someone that you love being with, and who loves being with you? Or is it like a marriage that’s gone stale from inattentiveness and boredom?
In other words, is your relationship with your practice rewarding? Or is it just another thing to tick off your list? Or worse, beat yourself up about, because you’re not practicing often enough, or well enough?
My relationship with practicing is a love/hate kind of thing. I’ve tried a gazillion strategies over the years and tested some of them with my students.
Here’s what I’ve learned about staying connected to why I practice in the first place and some strategies for finding the time to do it.
Keeping The Spark Alive
Strategies are helpful, but it all starts with how you feel about practicing. What and how you practice matters. But the fuel for showing up every day for yourself and your singing comes from why you practice in the first place.
That Why, that initial spark that ignited your desire to become a singer — is something you need to keep alive. If you’re in music for the long haul, through thick and thin, success or failure, you need to stay connected with the part of you that loves to sing.
Just like a relationship, your practice needs nurturing. It’s essential to pay attention to it, checking in every day to see how it’s doing, giving it the love and care it needs to grow.
When your relationship with your practice is healthy, procrastination is easier to keep at bay. You can pick up where you left off in your last session, and before you know it, find yourself immersed and in flow.
Connecting your practice to your musical values helps too.
Let’s say that one of your musical values is improvisation. You’ve always wanted to feel more confident as an improviser, so you decide to make that one of your musical goals.
What do you need to practice to achieve that goal?
You could start by brainstorming a list of possibilities: a book with exercises for vocal improvisation or listening sessions where you sing with the masters of improv like Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn. Your list might also include a voice teacher that you’d like to study with who specializes in vocal improvisation.
Now that you have your list, it’s time to take action. You order the vocal improv book, and, while you’re waiting for it to arrive, you learn a scat solo — note for note — that you’ve discovered on YouTube. When the book lands in your mailbox, you go through it and work through the material. When you’ve gone as far as you can on your own, you contact a teacher and set up some lessons to get additional help and feedback.
Or maybe one of your musical values is emotional expression. You’ve been working on some new material. You’ve worked on technique and memorized the melody and lyrics, but now when you sing the song, it sounds lifeless — devoid of feeling.
To breathe new life into your performance, you decide to reconnect to the story of the song. You spend some time imagining different scenarios — who you are, who you’re singing to, where you are, and why you’re singing the song.
After fleshing out these scenarios and writing them down, you sing the song using each one as a template for creating emotion. You record yourself, listen to the results, and sing again. Now you can hear which scenario best expresses the feeling you want to share with an audience.
These are just two examples of how you can transform your practice by connecting your musical values and goals. Now you have the beginnings of a practice plan that will make it easier to see what to practice next and connect your practice to your musical values.

The Importance of Play
One of my favorite strategies for practicing is to view it as play.
Meditation teacher Thanissaro Bhikku writes about this concept in his book “The Joy of Effort”:
“The key to maintaining your inspiration in the day-to-day work of … practice is to approach it as play — a happy opportunity to master practical skills, to raise questions, experiment, and explore.
The path doesn’t save all its pleasure for the end. You can enjoy it now.”
Your relationship to your practice will shift when you approach it as an opportunity to experiment and explore. Instead of dreading your practice sessions, you look forward to them. Your mistakes — a note you can’t quite hit, the lyric that stubbornly refuses to be memorized, gives you information that you can use to improve. Practicing becomes a puzzle, a game that you can play where you find the gaps in your abilities and fill them in.
And when it goes well, you can figure out how you did it. Which notes did you lean on or scoop into? What phrases gave you chills because of the intensity of the dynamics? How did your body, mind, and emotions integrate to create the feeling that you want to convey?
When you’ve learned what made your performance stronger, you can apply what you’ve learned to other songs. Concepts become global, and the time it takes to learn new music decreases.
Like with any creative enterprise, you’ll still rub up against frustration. It’s challenging to reach for a goal and fall short. But failure is an essential part of learning. When you know how and what to practice, you’ll feel confident that your time, energy, and effort are worthwhile and that you’ll ultimately succeed.
In other words, rote practicing is a waste of time. Plus it’s boring!
MINDSET TO SKILL SET
So great. You’ve figured out what you need to practice and why. Now for the hard part. Finding time to do it.
As the virtuoso pianist Vladimir Horowitz said, “If I skip practice for one day, I notice. If I skip practice for two days, my wife notices. If I skip for three days, the world notices.”
As a singer, you already know that daily practice is essential for learning new skills and retaining old ones. 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 do it is a struggle for most of us.
When you’re busy in school, working 9 to 5, are a caretaker for others, or working on your music career, it’s easy for practicing to end up at the bottom of your to-do list.
I’d like to share some strategies that have made it easier for my students and me to find time for practicing. But before we get to those, I want to address the number one question singers ask when it comes to their practice sessions. How much practice is enough?
First, it depends on the quality of your practice. To get the most out of your practice, you need to work at the edge of your ability to keep your brain engaged and stretch your learning capacity. Rote practicing won’t do either of those things. The quality of your practice is more important than the quantity.
That said, quantity does matter.
Research shows that world-class experts — chess players, novelists, athletes, and musicians, practice between three to five hours a day.
I know what you’re thinking — but I don’t have three to five hours a day to practice! Believe me, I understand. It’s not easy to find that many hours in a day. So, begin with a smaller chunk of time — even 15 or 20 minutes. The trick is to stick with it and practice for that amount every day.
Here’s a story that illustrates how even small amounts of practice time every day can grow your musical abilities.
My father loved to sing and had a beautiful lyric baritone voice. When he was in medical school, he was in a barbershop quartet called The Forcep Four.
The quartet traveled throughout the northwest competing in barbershop competitions, which they consistently won.
All four men in this group were in medical school. They were extremely busy studying, performing autopsies at night, you know, medical school stuff. It’s demanding and time-consuming work. So, where did they find the time to practice? Every day, on their lunch break, they rehearsed in a stairwell at the school for 15 to 20 minutes. That’s all the time they had.
But they kept beating the groups that got together once a week for two to three hours. How? They had excellent arrangements and beautiful voices, but my dad would tell you it’s because they rehearsed every day and reinforced what they had learned the day before.
So start small. 15 or 20-minute sessions work well for learning new material and will help you get in the habit of practicing.
But eventually, you’ll need to practice for longer to build your strength and stamina.
Think about it like training for a marathon. You wouldn’t just get up one day and head outside to run a 10k marathon — especially if you’re starting out as a couch potato.
If you’ve got a gig coming up that is two to three hours long, you’ll need to start practicing for it a month or two in advance so you can build up to singing for that amount of time. The less strength you have to begin with, the more time you’ll need to train to build vocal stamina.
Again, start small. Practice for 15 minutes to a half an hour for a few days. If that’s going well and your voice doesn’t feel too fatigued, add an additional 15 minutes to your sessions. Repeat this process until you’re up to a full hour of singing a day.
For that two to three hour gig, you’ll want to practice at least an hour to an hour and a half a day. Once you’ve built up your stamina, add more time. Alternate between one hour a day to two to three hours the next day. This schedule will keep you from overdoing it. You’ll be building stamina on the days where you sing longer, and then maintaining your stamina on the one hour days.
I know. It’s a lot. But there are ways to fit that much singing into your life.
Here are nine strategies that will help you find time to practice and discover the joy in making music every day.
Nine Strategies for Finding Time To Practice
Prepare the space
Whether it’s an entire room or a corner of your kitchen, make sure you have some space that’s dedicated solely to your practice sessions. Have all the tools and music you need on hand, so when it’s time to practice, you can dive in.
If you’re traveling or don’t have the luxury of a dedicated physical space, create a virtual one. You can keep your recordings, sheet music, and practice journal at your fingertips with a cloud-based app like Evernote.
Whether I’m at home or on the road, I use Evernote for everything having to do with my practice sessions.
2. Just begin.
As meditation teacher Sharon Saltzburg says, “Just put your body there.” It’s the first step.
When I’m having a hard time practicing, I put my body in my practice space, and then I’ve begun. Getting started is often the highest hurdle.
3. Keep a practice journal.
Knowing what you did the day before, how it went, and where you left off will give you a better idea of what to practice today. Whether you keep a journal in the cloud or a paper notebook, there are many creative ways you can use journaling to support your practice.
I’ve created a practice journal that you can download for free on my website. I’ll put a link to it in the show notes for you.
4. Use a timer:
I often use a timer and set it for 15, 20, or 30 minutes so that my practice sessions aren’t open-ended. I know I can commit to at least that much time. Once I begin and get into a flow, time flies. Before I know it, I’ve accomplished my practice goal for the day. If I have more time in my schedule, I keep going.
5. Practice in small chunks throughout the day.
If you can’t find an hour to practice, try breaking your practice time into smaller chunks that you can squeeze in throughout your day. A half an hour in the morning, at lunchtime, and after dinner adds up, and won’t feel as hard to schedule as an hour and a half.
6. Reward yourself.
This one might seem crazy, but it works. Chocolate kisses and gold stars aren’t just for kids. Small rewards like these can motivate you too.
I had a student who struggled with ADD and found it almost impossible to focus on practicing. She figured out a fabulous way to reward herself, which helped her to practice more consistently. Every time she practiced, she put some money in a tip jar. At the end of each month, she took the money and treated herself to whatever her heart desired. It worked!
You could also reward yourself with a guilty pleasure like social media scrolling for 20 minutes, or window shopping online for that new microphone you’re saving up for. The possibilities are endless.

7. Give yourself a performance goal.
There’s nothing like a little external pressure to motivate you to practice. If you don’t have performances, create some. Karaoke night, a video for your friends and family, a Facebook or Instagram Live session, a demo recording for your website — get creative about finding ways to sing in front of others. Figure out a realistic date for your performance — one that gives you enough time to prepare, but that’s not too far out in the future — and invite people to attend.
8. Find a practice partner.
Do you have a friend who has trouble finding time or motivation to practice? Ask them to be your practice partner. Set up a time each week to share your practice goals and commitments. Check back in the following week to see how it went for you both. An accountability partner who cheers you on will inject some fun and camaraderie into your practice. You can celebrate together when you’re successful, and encourage each other to keep going when you’re flagging.
9. Mentor, Coach or Teacher
Another way to support your practice is to get help from someone who’s ahead of you on the path. A mentor, coach, or teacher can help you accelerate your journey by sharing the wisdom, experience, and insights they’ve gleaned from their own.
So those are my nine strategies for making more time for your practice.
I have just two more thoughts for you about the pleasure and reward of a daily practice.
The Most Satisfying Reward of All
As conductor and author Benjamin Zander writes, “The major difference between the ‘best’ and the ‘average’ is that the ‘best’ get as much pleasure from practice as performance.”
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 likely be more than the amount of time you spend performing.
A daily practice that brings you pleasure is one you’ll continue with. Your small, consistent steps towards mastery become their own reward.
A Relationship For Life
The skills you learn from practicing will help you grow as a singer and empower you to grow as a person. When you have a healthy relationship with your practice, you’ll become more creative, resourceful, resilient, and whole in your life. Each practice session builds your capacity to focus, solve problems, and nurture and care for your creativity. You’ll also cultivate curiosity and a willingness to fail — one of the most critical skills of all in your life as an artist.
And, like healthy relationships that you’ve invested in over time, your practice will always be there for you. If you’ve taken a break for any reason, you can pick up where you left off, like a conversation between two life-long friends that never ends.
Practicing music is a practice for living. Isn’t that a marvelous thought? What better reason could there be to do it!
Until next time, be well… keep singing, and thanks for listening!