Can You Teach Yourself To Sing?
In this blog post I share with you the answer to a common question: ‘Can you teach yourself to sing?’. It might surprise you to find out that it is not so much a black-and-white issue but more of a ‘percentage’ issue. Keep on reading to find out the pros and cons between the different ways of teaching yourself to sing!
Can you teach yourself to sing? Video transcript (adapted to suit blog post format)
If you’ve been trying to learn to sing by yourself and you haven’t got the results you wanted, this video is for you.
My name is Jorgelina. I’m a vocal coach, a singer, and a songwriter.
In this video, I’m going to explain why is it harder to sing by yourself, why you might not have been getting the results you want, and the difference between learning to sing with a teacher, with an online course, and with YouTube videos.
What are the challenges when trying to teach yourself to sing?
Why is it hard to sing by yourself or why are you not getting the results you want? is very simple, really. When you learn to sing, you learn to sing from internal muscles, and learning to sing at an efficient level, requires you to change some established habits. When you’re trying to learn to sing by imitating other singers, you are going to be using a not-very efficient way of sounding generally, more often than not. So learning to sing really involves learning some new habits and learning different habits takes time and presence. It’s not just about imitating but it’s a lot about sensing. Sometimes to change habits you need a guide. It’s really hard to figure it out by yourself sometimes but it is not impossible.
And sometimes it actually might be better for you. What do I mean by this?
Learning to sing solely from private lessons
Going to point number two, let’s talk about the difference between the different ways to learn singing by yourself. Now the first one is, not learning by yourself, but learning with a teacher. But of course, when you have a teacher, you are also doing a big part of the work.
Because the teacher can’t practice for you, right? the responsibility of the teacher is to guide you and to help you recognize some established habits and change them from other habits. But, of course, you have a big part of the work which is practicing to establish those new habits. When you learn singing with a teacher, they can tell you where to start and what your best path is. Guide you through steps that are going to make it easier and faster for you to learn. So, best case scenario, yes, you learn with a singer, you come to weekly lessons, but the reality is that sometimes that is not a possibility, either because of financial matters or because you just don’t have a local teacher that can help you.
Or maybe if you to a teacher and you just don’t resonate with the teacher, or the teacher has a method that is not good for your voice.
Learning to sing from online courses
An intermediate point is to do an online course. Or a live course. Now in these courses, the less personalized the training is, the more you have to put yourself into the work. This is important.
Now online courses are an intermediate point between learning from just YouTube videos and learning exclusively from a teacher. There are many good things about online courses. For example, they are generally organized into levels. You are going to know where to start and they guide you. So online courses are really good for specific purposes. But of course, you have to be, self-motivated to practice. It’s not just about doing the course, and absorbing the information, but of course, you need to practice it.
Even if you have an online course, you have to build a daily routine to make it happen, to train your instrument.
Talking about online courses, I have some super exciting news! And it has to be with my first online course that I’m going to be releasing very soon. Now this course is going to be available in a few weeks, but I have a super discounted and amazing offer for my email list that is going to get access to the course much sooner than the rest and at a very very discounted price.
So if you are interested go ahead and subscribe to my email list. I’m not going to talk a lot now about what the course is about because I’m going to be releasing that information next week.
But it’s just a teaser, it’s going to be full of information and it’s going to have a component of feedback as well, which is what, as I said before, helps you progress a little bit faster.
Learning to sing from YouTube videos
Lastly… Teaching yourself to sing from YouTube videos. Is it possible? Yes. but for that to be possible and successful, it’s much better if you already have a foundation.
When I get students that come from trying to learn from YouTube I often find that it does more harm than good when you don’t have any foundation in singing. Because when someone decides to start learning to sing they usually people don’t Google ‘How to do boring slides’! They Google ‘how to belt’ or ‘how to sing high notes’.
That’s not where you start. That’s not what you start doing when you start learning to sing. It’s a little bit like trying to learn ballet, and just expecting to be doing triple pirouettes in the first lesson. It doesn’t happen, it takes quite a few years of bar work and things like that. Of course, there is a lot of information there, which is great, but it’s not in order. So the hard thing is that you have to be your main guide yourself, and when you don’t have a minimal foundation of singing training it’s really hard to know where to start (hint: not with belting!).
It’s much better if you already have a little foundation, even if it is just the beginning, and can have a much more accurate idea of where to continue because if your body is not prepared to do complex things, you’re not going to be able to do them – at least not healthily and sustainably. You are going to be able to attempt to do it from muscles that are not designed for and that can potentially damage your voice and not give you results, therefore… frustration!
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I help people to develop their voice and singing from a holistic approach. I teach vocal lessons in person in Auckland, NZ, and online. Also stay tuned for my new online singing programs!❤️
My greatest passion has always been the voice, music and energy arts.
My personal and artistic journey has led me to understand that the voice and the body are fully connected, and that includes not only the physical body but also the mental, emotional and spiritual body.
Through holistic vocal training you not only learn to become a great singer while taking care of your voice, but you also improve your mental and physical wellbeing❤️
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