I see many YouTube channels offering various singing scales for people to do to “make them a better singer.”
But does just singing skills make you a better singer?
There is no doubt that singing scales can help with our singing, but just singing scales is not at all what it’s made out to be unless you understand how to sing them correctly.
In fact, singing scales incorrectly can actually hurt your voice and embed bad habits.
Let me give you a quick example.
Let’s say I am a self proclaimed personal physical trainer.
And let’s say you are a little overweight and are looking to lose some weight and become stronger.
I then instruct you to run up and down the street five times.
You comply and do what I instruct you to do.
After a couple of days I tell you to run up and down the street seven times you agree and comply.
After about two weeks of this, do you feel yourself getting stronger and think to yourself “boy that personal trainer really knows what they are talking about.”
But after about a month or so I’ve been given the same instruction to run up and down the street do you realize you’re not really progressing at all. In fact your ankle starts to hurt, your knees feel a little fatigued. Your hip is starting to ache. And you are just not progressing anywhere’s near when you first started. Now apply this to singing scales.
You do the same skills over and over and at first it seems like a miracle and your voice is growing like a weed.
But in very short order, your voice starts to fatigue, you’re not getting the range you were hoping for, you are still pinching and squeezing when you go up to get to notes etc. etc.
You see, that personal trainer offered you very little information other than to get you to do a couple of scales that may have motivated you to sing, but really didn’t grow your voice at all. And in fact that was something you could’ve done easily on your own. In fact it’s really not much more than singing a song or something else that could provide a “little” extra stamina but not embed and create good quality habits to really grow your voice as a singer.
By the same token, if you do skills correctly and trained correctly with quality information you absolutely can strengthen and grow your voice significantly.
So when applying any information there are a few questions to ask yourself.
#1. Did that coach sing and demonstrate the scales well themselves?
#2. Did the coach instruct you step-by-step how that scale should be sung and how the vowel placements within the shaping of the vocal tract (your throat) should be applied?
#3. Did that vocal coach also demonstrate their own students doing this correctly to prove what they’re showing you is correct?
These three basic things are the key things you must use as a template before attempting any singing coaching of any kind.
At Ken Tamplin vocal Academy we have a slogan and that slogan is “the proof is in the singing”
