How To Practice Singing When You're Busy
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How To Practice Singing When You're Busy
Opera singer and singing teacher Christopher Jacklin gives tips on breathing and posture, as well as simple, easy and quiet singing exercises to practice at home for those who don't have much time to practice singing.
In this video, I'm going to give you a few pointers on how you can still practice usefully, even if you're busy. I've lost count of the number of students that have come to me and said they can't practice because their work takes up too much of their time, or they have neighbors or housemates so they can't practice at home. You want to be upright but not rigid; you want to be engaged but not sort of tense and militaristic.
You want to have your ribcage out, your pelvis forward, but your knees unlocked, your shoulders back and down and your arms free. When you're in that position, work on your breathing. Think about keeping your ribs open when you breathe out, and using these abdominal muscles to control the airflow, so you breathe in and out, and in and out.
The last thing that you can do everyday is practice using this posture and this breath control when you speak. You can do this any time even if you're just buying coffee or saying hello to your wife. Think about speaking not from the throat, but with the same resonance and same breath control that you used in those breathing or posture exercises.
So, there you have three things that you can do very easily in your daily life. But if you have a spare five minutes and you want to do a little bit of a useful practice, there are two very easy and equally importantly quiet exercises that you can do. First are lip rolls.
Lip rolls are great because you need to do the same technical things you would if you were singing, but they're very quiet and very gentle. They work a bit like this. The other really useful thing you can do at home is to practice reading the text of your songs with the same sort of resonance and support that you would sing them.
So, for example, if I have to sing the line “Give to me the life I love,” I might read it like this, “Give to me the life I love, let the love go by me”. So you're singing right the way through each of those vowels and each of those consonants. It's a great way to practice that line because it's exactly the same way as you need to sing it. .