Starting to Sing - Part One

Do you love to sing when you're alone, but the thought of singing in front of other people terrifies you? Or perhaps someone told you once that you couldn't sing and now whenever you want to try their words keep coming back to you? Maybe you've never dared to sing but you know deep down that you were born to do it, if you could only get over that initial fear.

I can relate to that. As a child I loved to sing in the privacy of my bedroom (I was particularly fond of the Beach Boys, Eurhythmics and R.E.M.) but the thought of singing for somebody else terrified me, all because of a few words I'd heard from a teacher. It took me until I was 16 to dare to sing in front of one of my friends. Luckily, he responded with a smile and some kind words, and we started writing songs together. That moment was crucial for me, and when I work with new singers it's exactly that moment of release, and that kind, supportive response, that I aim to give them.

Here's the thing, though: your body already knows how to sing. Don't believe me? Cast your mind back to the last time you heard a baby cry, how the sound carried, how it was impossible to ignore. Sound that carries, sound that's impossible to ignore? That's the stuff that great singing is made of! You could do that once! But could you do it now?

Can you imagine walking into, say, a crowded coffee shop and simply letting rip with the sort of force that an unhappy baby might? Close your eyes and imagine doing that now, and notice how your body responds even to the thought of it. You'll have your own personal response, but for me, the thought of doing something so socially unacceptable makes my body start to tense up, physically restricting my voice.

Why do our bodies do that? It's a form of social self-preservation: we internalise social norms such as 'it's rude to go into a communal space and make too much noise' and then when the possibility of making a social faux pas arises, the body freezes to prevent us making fools of ourselves.

Even though singing is a much more socially acceptable activity than just shouting in a coffee shop, there are still other layers of anxiety that get attached to it: will people like the sound I make? Will I forget the words? What if I get the tune wrong? What if my voice cracks?

Often those anxieties result from past experiences - like the words I heard from that teacher. I was lucky to be able to start repairing the damage done by those words by taking a leap of faith and singing in front of my friend, but for many people there's a singing-related incident from their childhood that locks them up and prevents them from ever trying again. For others, it's just something they've never done and the fear of the unknown holds them back. If you're one of those people then watching somebody sing who has no fear of doing it can seem miraculous, as though that person was simply born with an incredible voice and the means to use it, and that they exist on a plane that you could never reach. Is that true?

In a word, no. Despite the myth-making encouraged by talent shows, singing is like anything else. We all start off with a certain 'natural' aptitude which we can then either train and improve, or not. It's a commonplace in other fields that success is much more dependent on steady work than on 'talent', and stories of the promising youngster that never fulfilled their potential are easy to find. Why don't we think the same way about singing? I think the answer is quite simple: unlike, say, running, cycling or playing the piano, it's largely impossible to see what's going on.

Recognising the effects of tension on the voice takes time, but for a demonstration of how excess tension affects our muscles in general (yes, your voice is operated by muscles!) try a little experiment: stand up and take four normal steps forwards. Now tense all the muscles in your legs and try to do the same. It's a lot harder. Excess tension in your vocal mechanism has exactly the same paralysing effect.

If you were starting from the tense version of those four steps and trying to learn to be an Olympic sprinter, how would you go about it? First you'd need to let go of all that tension. As you've already seen, that'd immediately help you to move more freely and easily - your body already knows how to do that. By itself, though, that wouldn't turn you into a world-beating runner - to do that, starting from the relaxed place, you'd look one by one at your posture, your breathing, the way your foot hits the ground, how you move your hips: any number of small parts of the overall picture, and then you'd work at improving each of those individual parts before you started to coordinate them again. You might not end up being faster than Usain Bolt, but you’d be a great deal faster than you would have been if you'd never stopped tensing your legs.

It works the same way for singing - once we learn to let go of the tension that is holding us back, everything flows more easily: our bodies already know how to sing. From there we can go on and look at the details and start to make them better one by one, just as you would if you were running. What do you need to do to make your best 'a' sound? How can you breathe in a relaxed but efficient way? In that way we gradually improve the whole process until one day you look back at where you started and can't believe how far you've come.

Stay tuned for Part Two!