Various Posts

In voice research done on singers to determine vocal function while singing, it is IMPERATIVE that the singing being studied be excellent. It is IMPERATIVE that it represent market standard sounds and that the examples reflect those of others who are out in the world working as singers in any given style.

If I am researching opera singers and the people I select as my subjects sing in the local church choir in a small town, or sing in the university choir as undergrad students, they may get paid, as that is what we usually use as criteria for “professional”, but that doesn’t mean that their level of ability reflects that of  the singers at the Met, La Scala, Covent Garden or at the Bolshoi. If I have subjects who have had leads in a local musical or the community theater production and get some kind of pay for their time, does that mean they sound like the people on Broadway or in the West End or in Sydney? Maybe, but maybe not.

Singers with 20, 25, 30 or more years of life experience in any one style, who have worked in large venues in front of audiences paying a lot of money for their tickets, represent “professional” singers and would be both worthy and valuable subjects for voice science study.

Sadly, no one is checking the quality of the vocal examples used in voice research anywhere in the world. We are left to the judgement of the individuals doing the study and their discernment of market expectations in terms of evaluating the sung examples. That is not new.

It has been my experience over the decades since the late 1970s when I first became exposed to voice science that a large percentage of the research on singing is done on college students and faculty and those who perform in small venues in local area theaters or concert halls. There is no one to scrutinize the sounds themselves. Research is evaluated in peer review journals based on the statistics alone. It is based on what is on the page as written word or numbers.

Is this a good thing? What do you think?

If you read research that says “this person was belting” or “we found that this belt was not TA dominant” you need to HEAR the sound in order to decide if the person drawing the conclusion was able to tell one sound from another, based entirely ON THE MARKETPLACE. Otherwise, the “research” is very skewed, it isn’t helpful or even accurate.

Be very careful out there, folks, with what you read and how it is presented. If you can’t hear the sounds as they were made by the subjects, no matter what the research presents, be suspicious. If it don’t sound the way it ought to sound, it ain’t no good. Period.

“Scooping”. Terrible habit. Bad news. Students have to learn to stop this, unless, of course, they sing some “popular” styles in which case maybe some of this is “allowed”.

Oh, please.

So much nonsense in voice teacher world about this “interesting topic”. Think of “coming down” onto the pitch from “above”. (That’s a good, standard idea.) Think of doing a stronger legato, using the vowels accurately and then add the consonants. (Really!) Better breath support and different placement (always a suggestion). Hello? People!

Pitch is controlled by the length and tension of the vocal folds and the amount of air moving across them while making sound. The pitch accuracy, however, is also controlled by the shape made in the vocal tract. You tune the tube to the pitch and the volume. It’s a flexible tube and the register response at the level of the folds, coupled with the frequency, affects what we hear as “the note”. Intonation accuracy, whether gradual or abrupt, arrives on its own when the overall skill level of a vocalist increases.

In most students who have little skill, sliding into pitches is to be expected. When other parameters are stronger, the scooping will go away by itself when it is necessary for it to go away (in music such as Bach, Handel and Mozart). However, in case you haven’t listened recently, in order to be stylistically correct, bel canto and verismo repertoire both require controlled sliding from note to note, albeit with only very slight adjustments so as not to be conspicuous or obvious. If an artist is singing jazz, rock, pop, R&B, gospel or other CCM styles, “scooping” is the order of the day. It’s called STYLE.

If you don’t know how it is that we get accurate pitch response (and it seems that many singing teachers do not know) then how are you going to “correct” the behavior without dragging in other things that have nothing to do with the “problem”? And, if you have a student who sings any CCM material at all, sliding into pitches from both above and below is often necessary.

It is quite possible to learn to be very pitch accurate at rapid speeds and be able to slide a lot or a little, as desired, but only after you have acquired a range of vocal and physical skills. Breathing and “placement” or “resonance strategies” are not the “answer”. They might (or might not) be helpful tools along the way, but bringing in your classical mindset, chastising young students who “scoop” into pitches, belies ignorance of vocal function on the part of not the student but the teacher.

 

It can be very easy to be seduced by words. People are every day and look at our world!

Currently, the buzz words in the voice profession are changing. We are talking about functional training now. It’s suddenly cool.

There is as well a great deal of talk about reflux and about harmonic to formant tuning/ratio. Also very cool.

Still, what do these words actually mean? If you read this blog you know I am always only interested in APPLICATION. It’s the practical application of the information that is useful. Practical application. Without it, information is just words, and we have a lot of them already.

I just came back from a voice conference in which the topic of “cross-training” for singers was presented. The  cross-training was in belt, classical and mix. I was thrilled to see the paper in the program. Sadly, when it was given, the audio examples of “belt” were not belt. The researchers, based on their own limited experiences, assumed that the singers they had access to were belters because they were working (at theme parks, in small venues). Those of us in attendance at the conference who work in London, New York and even in the medical community, did not think the belt examples were actually representative of what the market would call belting. Therefore, almost everything they presented in the paper, which was based on the premise that they were comparing belt to mix to classical, was skewed. Who there knew that? Only the singing teachers working in the music industry (probably less than 5 people out of about 125 attendees), or medical professionals who treated high level working singers.

There are no guidelines in voice research regarding acoustic vocal behavior in terms of baseline acceptability. You could set up research equipment in your house, decide that you know what belting is, compare it to some other sound you say is “not belting” and then evaluate your data. If you were intelligent, familiar with writing scientific papers and could present a reasonable argument, you might find that your paper gets published, WITHOUT PEER REVIEW OF THE ACTUAL SOUNDS. Only the stats would be reviewed. This has always struck me as being amazing. But it is the way it is.

Then, after your research got published, you could present it, and yourself, as an expert on “comparative methods” of vocal production and those who were new to the topic or naive about it might read your paper and think it wonderful. Even though what you actually sang in any of your examples would never have gotten you a job in the music industry anywhere.

This is not, sadly, fiction. It has been happening every day since voice research started and now, since contemporary commercial music is accepted more every day as a viable topic for scientific investigation, and since there is increasing interest in “non-classical” singing production, the amount of information coming down the pike is increasing every day. Without hearing what is being researched and without having the auditory quality of the research sounds evaluated by those who work in the music marketplace as to the authenticity of the examples, however, there is absolutely no way to determine if the sounds being investigated are professionally valid.

BE CAREFUL. Do not read voice research papers and accept what you see on the page. You have to HEAR the sounds and you have to know in your mind what the music industry wants to hear at a high professional level when you evaluate them. In opera, in music theater, or in rock, you have to know what the sounds need to be before you say, “yes, these sounds are representative of the real world, and they should be studied, so we can learn about them”. If you don’t understand this, (and many people do not) you don’t. If you do, and you believe that this is a valid argument, I would like to hear from you.

There are many people in the world who don’t know that they don’t know — about something. All of us start out as innocent babes who have no “intellectual knowledge”. That only comes later.

If you consciously choose to develop a specific area of interest, and you are persistent and motivated, you can end up learning a great deal and have both broad and deep knowledge (think wisdom), grounded in application in any particular field. Even if you end up specializing in a particular area, it is always best if you know as much as possible about the bigger picture first. A  student has to go to medical school to learn the basic information first. Then, she can specialize. Same with a lawyer.

It is possible to teach yourself to play an instrument or to sing and, at least in some styles, to end up being quite good. If you then go on to have a professional career, you might have little conscious  knowledge about what you are doing while still being able to do it. That’s paradoxical, but it happens. I have heard, although I don’t know if it’s true, that Luciano Pavarotti did not read music. I also heard that Irving Berlin could only play piano in the key of C. Maybe neither of these things were so about those individuals but similar things might be true of others. I have encountered totally self-taught professional singers who are very successful and who have gone on to teach. I am always surprised by that. When you start to teach, what are you going to teach? Only what you do or what you think you do. We all know what that’s like!

There is no harm in not knowing something that others like you are expected to know, if, and only if, you have someone around you to pick up the slack. If you have a parent, a manager, an agent or anyone else who can “help you out” you can manage just fine. Lack of conscious knowledge forces you to be dependent on someone other than yourself whether you want to be or not. It leaves you open to manipulation and even embarrassment. I once heard that Frank Sinatra worked with Nelson Riddle because Riddle did all his arrangements, and that Frank did not really know how to improvise and was comfortable only with Riddle. Even if it isn’t true of Ole Blue Eyes, however, it could be true of someone else. It’s not a great scenario for any artist.

As long as we have to contend with people in singing who don’t know that they don’t know, (and there are so many ways to “not know” in this profession), we will have trouble with establishing norms, standards and reasonable expectations. An education in singing that covers any and all kinds of singers and singing, from many different eras, composers, styles doesn’t yet exist in a formal sense at any college. If that were what all voice students got first, and if they understood vocal function first, before they began taking private singing lessons, our entire vocal world might be different. There would be fewer people who “don’t know that they don’t know” and that would be good for everyone.

Most of us who are artists have the idea that talent (that indefinable something that allows us to be really good at an activity without much effort) is important. If you look around, though, it seems less true than it was in the past that this ingredient is crucial to having a career. I can think of quite a few people who can barely sing who are raking in big dollars.

The main reason for this is what you would expect — greed. Corporate Kingdoms are built on what sells. (Those profit margins are important). The people running things in the entertainment industry are mostly men. Many of them are “business men” who do not, themselves, claim to be artistic or even knowledgeable about the arts. Some of them learn on the job, but not all. They tend to invest in things because they “like them” and if they have enough money, that is often enough to give them the power to make artistic decisions based on nothing but their own taste or lack thereof.

If you take a look at our NYC network TV stations, the actors who have leads in many of the shows look so much alike in the various series that it can be hard to tell them apart. Even the news broadcasters (especially the women) could be cover models on Glamour or Vogue. The pop singing stars are all attractive people and many of them go into fashion, fragrance, or cosmetics as a “side line”. Think of all the “celebrity perfumes”. What, we could ask, does that have to do with being talented as a singer or actress? Only money, folks, only money. Back in the 60s, Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles weren’t peddling perfumes and clothing lines. Before that, no one was buying Dinah Shore’s wrinkle cream or Frank Sinatra’s brand of shoes. “Merchandizing” hadn’t yet been invented.

It’s not that there are no talented people out there or that all the “beautiful people” aren’t talented, it’s just that a “corporate mentality” isn’t interested in anything too outside the box. Too risky. Everything is “trending”. If it’s popular, then it’s good. If it’s what everyone else is doing, then others should do that same thing, too.  : [

The other side of this little observation is to note that sometimes people get chosen to do things for reasons that do not make sense but are expedient.

Decades ago, I  had to play the piano while singing for a local TV station in upstate NY. The crew had arrived “on location” of a jazz festival at which I was to sing with a band. I was alone at the venue, waiting for others to arrive. I am hardly a good pianist, let alone a jazz pianist, but the TV news people wanted footage for the evening program and I knew the event needed the publicity, so I talked it up and then sat at the piano, pulled out my sheet music, played for myself while I sang, and tried to look super confident. It was absolutely embarrassing, but I got through the song and the 20 seconds that made it on air that night was a good thing. Certainly, anyone who knew jazz would have asked, “Where in the world did they get her?” and been justified in their incredulity, but there I was! It would have been far worse, though, if I had had any delusions that I should have been there playing for myself and singing. I least I knew better. Sadly, some people don’t.

Those of us who teach must recognize talent when we find it. Talent has to matter. We must also be brave enough to kindly counsel those who are not talented but think they are to “look deeper” and reevaluate their opinion. We can’t determine what goes on out there in the entertainment industry, plus and minus, but we can certainly give individuals who are naturally gifted a boost and guide those with lesser capacities to work hard and develop until they become more skilled.

 

My colleague, Jamie Leonhart, is a wonderful singer/songwriter, and has written many interesting and unique tunes. One of my favorites is “Control Freak”. It captures that phrase so well. Go to her website, take a listen…..and buy the song! (www.jamieleonhart.com)

I have been accused of being a control freak. It’s not a nice experience having that label dumped on you, particularly when it is behind your back. It’s true about me, however, and I own that. When your own name is on something and others are involved in what you do, you need some kind of quality control. Corporations pay thousands of dollars for quality control. That’s why no matter what MacDonald’s you go to, it’s the same. The quality of the product they deliver is highly controlled. In business, if you don’t do that, you don’t have much of a reputation for providing consistently good services.

It’s daunting to know that people resist holding to high level quality delivery of services and see others who pay attention to quality in their work as being suspect. Oh, her! She’s such a control freak. Micro-manages everything! 

I absolutely care about Somatic Voicework™. I care that it be a healing modality. I care that the teachers using Somatic Voicework™ sing well (without technical problems and with auditory accuracy). I care that Somatic Voicework™ stand for truthful scientific and vocal health information and for pedagogy that is grounded in the music industry and makes sense. I care that Somatic Voicework™ be open, flexible, and have room for personal expression. I don’t like the idea of “clones” as teachers. I care that Somatic Voicework™ be taken seriously in the vocal community because its premises and principles will stand up to scrutiny, because it is the simplest modality out there and because many people report success in using it when they teach and sing. Those who criticize me because they don’t like me are entitled to do so, but those who criticize the work, particularly only by hearsay, do so without due investigation. That’s unfair and amounts only to gossip.

The universities where my work is offered do so by choice. They do not have to invite me there. I did not “apply” to teach at any of them. In all cases, I was asked to come to their campuses. I work in cooperation with the universities’ policies and personnel.

I hide nothing about who I am and how I came to be where I am in my life. I take criticism in public on a, sadly, regular basis. I have colleagues who would knock me down at the first opportunity — some of whom have been failures in their own careers despite a great deal of formal education and life experience in the musical communities.

I appreciate the opportunity to share my work through the various programs where it has been and continues to be offered. I care very much that it be shared thoughtfully and with professionalism.  I care about my reputation. I care about my own ability to sing. I care about others who teach singing, regardless of whether or not they use my method, Somatic Voicework™. I care about the profession. If that makes me a control freak, then it does.

 

I have written here before about the classical singers who have large voices and powerful delivery who move over to “non-classical” styles (CCM) and think all that’s involved is “changing the vowels”. This blythe assumption sits under their teaching.

Without looking at the default of their own instruments (and they don’t know what a “default” would be in the first place) they miss a crucial ingredient — that others, particularly those whose voices are not at all like theirs, do not have the equipment nor the capacity to sing outside certain sound parameters without significant “re-tooling” of their basic vocal production. Those students whose voices are quite different in size and color end up manipulating their throats to get the desired sounds. This becomes a form of imitation and precludes the singer ever having an authentic delivery or honest emotional expression in any style whatsoever. That there are singers who live their entire lives believing that manipulation is the essence of vocal technique is really sad but it becomes horrifying when those people enter a school system and start teaching.

It is possible to sing freely and authentically in a variety of styles but doing so typically requires very good training, time, experimentation and a clear idea of the vocal and musical goals one is striving to achieve. The people who manage to do this are often self-taught and figure out what works for themselves. They may or may not have a clue about how to teach someone else to do this and that’s the problem. If one relies exclusively on resonance and breath support as the primary tools to change vocal production, success will be elusive unless you have natural capacity to sing with great variety in the first place.

Most successful professional classical voices end up with a blend, balance or modulated middle register where pitches smoothly adjust from one kind of production to another in order to facilitate both range and resonance. You can’t really have a mainstream career if you don’t figure out how to sing through your middle range unless you are very low bass or a very high, light soprano or counter tenor. If you are a dramatic tenor, soprano or mezzo, you have to have some “heft” in mid-range (chestiness) as part of getting through the repertoire you are expected to sing. THESE folks, and only these folks, can learn to get through CCM styles by changing vowels in mid-range. They can do a decent job when singing in styles outside of classical as long as they stick to mainstream “American Songbook” rep. Rock, pop, gospel, and hard driving country music, maybe not so much.

Woman with big voices like Rosa Ponselle, Eileen Farrell, Leontyne Price, Marilyn Horne and several others, have recorded “non-classical” songs very effectively, but their recordings were modest and stayed within easy to adjust parameters. Debra Voigt, Renee Fleming, Kiri TeKanawa and others in more recent times have tried to sing outside their musical and vocal comfort zones with less success, primarily because their register adjustments do not allow them to carry their chest-dominant production much beyond A or Bb above middle C, if that.  Years ago Placido Domingo sang with John Denver (“Perhaps Love”). Even though Domingo was able to scale his voice way back the vocal quality (resonance) of both voices in the same pitch range were not alike, although maybe the SLP (volume) was similar. If you don’t have ears to hear that Domingo did not modify his vowels and the vocal quality was completely different between the two tenors, then you don’t. This was a big divide and should not be mistaken for something else like — they have such different voices. Yes, well, maybe, but what they have MORE is different vocal production defaults that they could not deliberately change.

Further, if you are making up terms to describe what you do when you sing and teach, thinking that you have discovered something unique and special that no one else knows about or understands (happens every day), then you are dwelling on superfluous things that are valuable only to you and not helpful to anyone working in the music marketplace. There are five formants in the human throat and you can’t find something that easily falls outside of them if you are singing any sound found in most Western music.

Beware of teachers who are “classically trained” who claim to be able to teach you to sing in other styles if your own voice doesn’t match theirs in many parameters. Even if they sing CCM quite decently, that may not make any difference to you as a student. It ain’t just vowel sounds that need to adjust, folks. Nope.

 

Whether you like it or not, you will teach from your own skew (angle).

If you are a dramatic tenor, you will listen and feel through that filter. Especially if you have never sung anything outside dramatic tenor repertoire, you will teach everyone to be like you, whether you realize it or not, for quite some time, even if you don’t really think that’s the best way to teach. This will influence how you approach repertoire also.

Your students will follow your vocal example, even if you are not asking them to imitate you. If you manipulate your own sound to be more like theirs, they will model your manipulation, because that’s all they can do. Read that last sentence again. You are the model. Your sound is all they have to go by, along with your verbal description (which is dicey at best). Only after they have studied for a long time, with lots of people, can they sort out what you are doing from how you sound.

And, if you have a certain intuitive sense of “feeling” what a sound is doing in your student’s throat, but you do not yourself make the EXACT SAME SOUND functionally, your intuitive feeling could be misleading. In fact, it could be wrong. You have to make the exact same sound, doing the exact same vocal things, and even then it might feel different to you then it does to the person studying with you — EVEN IF IT IS FUNCTIONALLY THE SAME.

If you are laid back jazz singer with a moderate “mixy” sound, you will not breathe with the kind of “breath support hook-up” as will a classical singer with a big, robust voice. If you are a high belter, you will not sing with the kind of open ringing head register as a lyric soprano. If you are a country singer with lots of “twang” (the real kind, not the one used in Estill Training, which applies incorrectly to just about anything loud), then you will not understand “sing into the mask” because that is all you ever do or will have done. It might take some doing to learn how to sing “dark and back” for comparison in order to know that “mask” was your home. A fish finding out there is water.

NO ONE ever talks about this, writes about it or even, really, thinks about it. If you are a 6’4″ male who weighs 250 lbs how can you possible know what a 5′ 1″ female weighing 100 lbs feels? Could her voice be at all like yours? Could either of you teach the other?

Yes, functionally, a larynx is a larynx and function is function, BUT in application, everything is personal and subjective. When I am making a bright “forward” belty sound I won’t sound the same and probably do not feel the same as would a low alto with a substantial voice, even though we are executing the same vocal function. If you teach, “Do what I do by sounding the way I sound and feeling the way I feel”, without a clear understanding of how functional response  varies with each individual, you can get lost and cause your student significant trouble. Learning to hear function is the only way to sort this out. Learning to authentically make sounds other than the ones you typically make might be challenging, but it’s the only way to really become familiar with what’s happening in someone else.

When we disagree with each other based only on our own experiences, valid though they are, it is because we do not have a broad enough base upon which to evaluate our expectations. If you have only taught kids, or college students, or the local folks from church, or if you have only taught jazz vocalists like yourself, or opera singers like yourself and you suddenly find you are teaching people who are nothing like you, singing music you have never sung, then you have a skewed perception of what’s possible filtered through only your own experience. REMEMBER THAT!!!!

Pedagogy is about what works for the most people most of the time. Clearly, there cannot possibly a universally applicable “way” that suits all people all the time. The only thing that is humanly possible is that the method used applies to most people most of the time with allowances made for age, training levels, musical style, experience and vocal weight and color, and with the knowledge that these things are resting in a physical body of a certain shape and condition. If you do not know it, please investigate Somatic Voicework™. It comes close to this description.

Be careful about generalizations, folks. They never work.

I have said on this blog many times that the best teachers of anything physical are those who have done that activity. While I can try to imagine that it is possible to teach something you have never done, in the end I can never accept that picture as being valid. I do not believe that you can teach something physical just because you have been exposed to it for a very long time.  I cannot believe that this is ever the same as doing that activity yourself, successfully, for a long time. Only then do you really know how it feels, what it’s like and what has to happen while you are in the middle of doing it.

In singing, if all you have ever done is classical repertoire and you are asked to work with students who are performing a rock song, you might intellectually understand that it’s a different thing but how would you know the exact differences? How would you know what the appropriate boundaries are? How would you judge the amount of effort required to do a sound you have never made and have no idea of how to make even if you wanted to do so?

I well remember the big blow up in which I criticized two teachers who were presenting Broadway women composers to a large assembly of teachers by singing all the songs, even the belt songs, as if they were Schubert. When I pointed out that the songs should be done the way the composers intended I was told by one of the presenters, “Well, we know the students don’t sing them this way. The students know how to sing the correct sounds”. My response should have been, “Well, you should pay the students, since they are teaching you what those sounds are.” How would these “teachers” have known whether or not the students were making sounds that were healthy? The answer is obvious — they would not.

Would you like to study with a brain surgeon who had read about brain surgery in a book, watched a bunch of brain surgeons or maybe had studied foot surgery? Would you want to work on your golf game with someone who had never actually lifted a golf club but had read a lot of books about how to have a great swing and hung out a lot on golf courses? Or maybe he had a really lousy golf game but decided to teach anyway despite having fumbled around for a long time without much personal success. Would you study dance with a teacher who had never danced? Or acting with a teacher who did not have life experience acting in a wide variety of styles and performances? I surely hope not.

Still, our profession, that of teaching singing, tolerates more than almost any other, people who do not sing or sing badly teaching singing. It tolerates them for reasons I don’t understand. Many of them are very confident and can tell you (absolutely will tell you) how gifted they are as teachers and a lot of their students drink that Kool-Aid. The question becomes, “Why?” Why should anyone accept this sales job as an answer? It’s not mathematics or music theory which can be learned from a book. It’s SINGING.

There is such a thing as a naturally talented singer. There are people in this world who can simply sing very well, without muss, fuss or bother. They learn a few things about posture or breathing or vowels, and off they go to win contests and get jobs. Those people sing in a way that is properly coordinated, working effortlessly with the body, to produce vocal sound properly. If they go off and take lessons and then get famous, the teacher takes the credit and sometimes, gets a big reputation from that alone. Doesn’t mean they had a thing to do with it. The teacher just got lucky. I know some of those teachers.

No. The real teacher is someone who can take a person who thinks she cannot sing at all and help that person learn to sing well enough that singing becomes a regular part of her life. The real teacher is someone who can turn around a voice that has been mangled by lousy training and make it work properly. The real teacher is someone who can help a vocalist find a sound that is hers authentically. The real teacher can teach all kinds of students, with all kinds of backgrounds, goals, and levels of ability in all kinds of styles. The real teacher has lived with singing in her own throat and body and knows it from the inside out but also from the outside in. Both intellectual understanding and kinesthetic and auditory life experience.

You can’t learn to sing from reading a book, buying videos or attending one weekend workshop. You can’t learn to teach if you do not yourself make the sounds and make them well. While there are exceptions to this for valid reasons, if the circumstances are not justifiable (i.e., the person may have had a vocal injury due to surgery or other life experiences but was an excellent singer prior to that), then there is no reason why the techniques being taught should not have also been effective with the teacher’s own voice in the first place. Students, if the teacher sounds bad and doesn’t make sense, and if you can’t get clear instruction or you are confused, leave.  L E A V E.

 

I have never understood why some people are content to be “pretty good”, even at something they profess to be very serious about.

I know people who are doing professional musical things who will readily admit that they aren’t particularly good but who do nothing to improve their skills or abilities. They spend their free time traveling for fun, writing on topics unrelated to their work or participating in groups that ask for some kind of commitment in terms of time and energy that are also unrelated. I know people who claim to be “professional singers” who haven’t had a paying job in decades. I know people who are willing to stand up in front of an audience and sing regardless of whether or not they sound good. Maybe the fun of singing in front of others trumps common sense? Maybe they think they sound just fine? Maybe they think it doesn’t matter as long as they know the words and the music?

Even very musical people who should have the ears to hear sometimes don’t. People who have enormous amounts of musical expertise may be intellectually superior but that doesn’t make them terrific artists. I have met quite a few people over the decades who fell into a musical job because they had some training but sadly they did not also have the level of skills that should also have gone with it. Skill building in such a circumstance would not be a nicety, it would be a requirement. Of course, that means the person would have to have the desire and the sensibility to improve.

Why is it that some individuals think they are better than they are and some think they are not very good when in fact they are excellent? As a teacher I have encountered both kinds of singers and it’s quite difficult to get them to re-evaluate their opinions and they can’t work to change things until they do. Kind of a Catch-22.

Don’t go through life being “pretty good” at anything. Have the guts to really commit, learn to be absolutely excellent without qualification and don’t give up until you get there. You are worth what it takes to become a master. If you don’t know whether or not your skill set measures up to industry standards, find three working professionals, do your thing, and ask them for an honest evaluation. Pretty good is pretty useless.