I’ve come up with a very simple, but very effective way to make every minute of your singing practice time count: The Three-Phase Practice.  It will help you organize your vocal workout in a concrete and progressive way that yields faster and better results. Remember, we want to practice smarter, not harder!

Now, many singers don’t do vocal warm ups or practice at all.  Eeeek!  Bad choice!     As a singer, you are not only a musical artist, but an athlete.  You can hurt your voice singing cold, and at the very least, you’re not going to sound your best. See my earlier post: Do I Really Have to Do Warm-up Exercises Before I Sing?

Another argument I hear all the time is that “I don’t have time to practice!”.
See another of my earlier posts: How to Find Time to Practice Singing— Even When You Don’t Have Time!

You CAN make time, and I’ll show you how to make the most of it– if you really want to achieve your singing goals!

So— how does The Three-Phase Practice work? Lets break it down. Say you have 45 minutes for vocal practice. Split the time into three equal periods of 15 minutes. Each period has specific goals for you to achieve before moving to the next phase. Take a look below:

PHASE I

• Body and Vocal Relaxation. Take time to do some deep breathing, gentle stretching, and decompressing before you start to sing. Pay special attention to upper-body tension. A tight jaw, neck and shoulders can create tension in the voice. Do some yawning and wiggle your tongue as well to break up residual vocal tension.
• Breathing exercises. Practice low, quiet inhalation, and at least one exercise for breath support. Make sure that as you take in, hold, and release your air from the body, you never feel any tension in your throat! This is a good time to do lip trills as well, blowing air through the lips and feeling them vibrate easily.
• Vocalises. These are your vocal exercises that you do throughout your entire comfortable singing range (never force!). An exercise is a unit of measurement, and as such, a valuable tool to evenly calibrate your vocal instrument from bottom to top and top to bottom. Vocalises also reveal weak spots that call attention to specific vocal issues. Singing a song melody is random by comparison, and can completely miss something you need to work on!

PHASE II

• Sing your song without words, using only your vocal exercises. This step is critical, as it forms the bridge between the new and important habits you are reinforcing in your vocal exercises, applied directly into your song melody. You are quite literally reprogramming your vocal production for greater success in this phase of your practice. Pick key exercises that you know make the biggest difference in your voice. I would definitely include singing your song with pitched lip trills, humming for focus and placement, using the “Ah” vowel for jaw relaxation and legato, and doing the “Birthday Cake”.   See my earlier posts:

Sing Your “Cake” and Eat It, Too! (Part One)

Sing Your “Cake” and Eat it, Too! (Part Two)

This Phase II part of practicing is one that many singers don’t know
about, or simply don’t take the time to do in their singing practice. But
it make such a valuable difference!  If you always sing your song with
the words, you are masking what is going on with your vocal
production underneath. Now you can strip the lyrics away and improve
your voice at its most basic level!

Phase III

• Sing the song with the words.  Ah, finally— you get to sing it normally! But, you still have specifics you need to work on:

1. Phrasing. Plan out your breaths and lifts (pauses where you don’t breathe), mark them in your music, and practice it the same way every time.
2. Dynamics and expression. Where are you getting softer, louder, or adding some little tweak like a whisper, held consonant or other special tone color or sound?
3. Diction. This is HUGE. Hopefully you are extending your vowels and carrying your ending consonants to the beginning of the next syllable, except when you want to stop your breath on purpose. How are you handling dipthongs, and other “land mines” (as I call them) of pronouncing words in a way that prevents vocal tension while you sing?
4. Performing and Acting skills. Unless you’re a studio musician, people have to look at you while you sing. Video yourself and/or practice in front of a mirror to develop authentic facial expressions and physical gestures that convey the meaning of your lyrics to the audience.

Finally, as any experienced singer will tell you, there is so much more involved in successful singing that can go far beyond the practice room. You may need to research the song, where it came from, or the composer and lyricist. If it’s in a foreign language, you may need to get a literal translation, and write it on your music. Then you have to study how to pronounce the language authentically. In addition, there are all sorts of lifestyle choices that affect your health, your voice, and the time and energy you have for singing practice to begin with!

But— armed with this Three-Phase Practice regimen, you can take whatever time you do have to practice— whether it’s 15 minutes or a whole hour, and make every minute count. You can even customize it to suit your own needs!  If you need more time in one Phase or another, adjust accordingly.  It doesn’t always have to be an even split.  It’s a plan that can flex with the vocal demands that are most pressing for you at any given time.

“Well, I have to sing words!” you retort. “I just can’t sing on vowels the rest of my life” you add. Fear not— I have a solution to this problem that works every time, for every singer, on any style of song. It’s a practice method I’ve devised called “The Birthday Cake” and it will be the bridge between those wonderful vowels you were singing, and the successful final product of singing your song.

“So what’s wrong with my speech habits?” you may ask. It’s nothing personal, it’s just how we all talk! You see, we don’t open our mouths very much to speak, and really don’t need to. Most all our sounds in speech are made in a relatively shallow, horizontal, sometimes tight position, with the jaw almost closed. Also, we speak in a fairly narrow pitch range which doesn’t require a lot of resonating space in the vocal tract, unlike singing, where the higher the pitch you sing, the more internal space is required. Unfortunately, the more closed your jaw is, the more tension you can have in the vocal tract— this could be a tight throat, a collapsed roof of the mouth (soft palate) or a retracted tongue. All of these can contribute to uncomfortable and limited singing. In addition, we tend to make all our vowels by using our biting reflex. Try saying: Ah-Ay-Ee-Oh-Oo, and see if your jaw moves. Did it? As you ‘bite” your way from sound to sound, you can engage tension in your throat.

So— we need a way to “break” or at least relax, our jaw tension in the way we make our vowels, both in our vocal exercises, and in singing the lyrics of our song. We already have to move our jaw to say many of our consonants— there’s no way of getting around that. But if we can keep the jaw fairly relaxed while still making clear vowel sounds, we will be open most of the time. Good singing dictates that you’re on your vowels about 98% of the time (vowels keep the throat open and the sound moving) versus consonants, which often stop or interfere with our airflow.   We should lightly form and then release the consonants as quickly as possible.

So— getting “hungry” for that “cake” yet? Let’s begin! Using my metaphor of a birthday cake, with a number of layers until you get to the candles on the top, let’s start with the bottom layer…

1. Place two fingertips, stacked one above the other, between your back teeth on one side of your mouth (wash your hands first!) . Use the left hand on the left side, or the right hand on the right side. This will keep your mouth open and the tongue free. This is what’s known as a “bite block”. These finger tips are going to keep you from biting down as we work on our vowels and consonants. NEVER use any foreign objects in your mouth! Your jaws are very powerful and the object could pop out and choke you. ONLY USE YOUR FINGERTIPS. They’re attached to your hand and not going anywhere!
2. Next, make sure your tongue is all the way forward, resting inside your lower front lip. Many teachers have students rest the tongue behind the lower teeth, but if you have it just glancing the lower inside lip, the tongue is all the way forward and opens the throat space more, for an easier vocal production with greater resonance in the sound. This position is “Home”, where you want to be for taking in breath, and whenever you have the time to sustain the vowel sounds in your words. You do have to move the tongue to say some consonants, but not all of them. You’ll be surprised how often you can go “Home” when singing!
3. Yawn in your inhalation. This will raise the soft palate (back part of the roof of the mouth) which has many positive effects on your vocal production (which we’ll discuss in anther post).
4. Now, sing your song melody on “Ah” only, keeping the first three components that you just set up— vertical space by using the bite block, tongue released forward, and that feeling of palatal lift, which feels like the beginning of a yawn. Now you’ve got an open vocal tract!

Singing your song melody on “Ah” is the first and bottom layer of the cake.  You’ve just corrected three HUGE elements of of your technique, and more!

Blogging is different then writing a book— there is something more immediate, more personal, I think, that comes through as you read what I have written. Soon I will be adding my own videos, and that will give you an even more direct connection to my character, personality, and way of expressing myself.

So whom am I to be dispensing my knowledge, wisdom, opinions and advice to you? If you read my About Page on this blog,

Also, I’m old enough now to have been through all sorts of things that can make you or break you, both in singing and in life— serious illness, family crises, financial woes— LIFE, in capital letters! In the music arena, I’ve been a part of the academic world both as a student who has earned multiple college degrees, and as an instructor, who has taught hundreds (maybe even thousands) of students in voice classes, private lessons, and at my own studio.  I’ve also been a singer in the “real world” and experienced all the highs and lows that are unique to the profession. With all this vast amount of education and experience, I am in the perfect position to be sharing this blog with you!

I want to be your teacher, your mentor, your friend. I can save you so much time, aggravation, missteps and grief! In my own career, I had to stumble over so many things on my own, and if I had had someone like me to guide my path then (or writing a blog like this!), it would have made a big difference. Despite starting a bit late (by some standards) and not knowing exactly what I was doing at times, I still managed to have the career I wanted, both as a singer and teacher. But it took me longer to achieve certain goals, and I may have missed out on some opportunities, too. Let me fill in the blanks for you in your pursuit of singing, whether for fun or professionally, and give you every advantage that I didn’t have starting out.

I have a LOT to say! I am just bursting with information and advice, and I can’t wait to get it all out to you. Every day is filled with singing-related topics that pop into my head, that I want to share with you.

It’s the right time. This is the perfect time for me to do a singing blog, because my singing career has slowed down (my choice—I’m tired of the hectic lifestyle of a performer, and want to concentrate even more on teaching). When I teach in a lesson, I can only reach one person. In a classroom, I can only reach about 25-30 people, tops. With a blog, I can help hundreds, and hopefully, thousands of people all at one time!

I love to write. One of my non-music degrees is in Communications, with a Public Relations emphasis. I love to write, and this is the perfect forum to stretch my writing muscles on a regular basis, writing about something that I love! Students and colleagues always praise my style of communication as clear, warm, and engaging. I hope that will come through in this blog!

I want to improve your vocal technique. This is HUGE, and the number one reason I started writing this blog. There is so much bad information out there, and so many misconceptions about the voice and how to use it.  I want to clear up a lot of those mysteries that still plague many singers!