1. You can't even see the trash.
I remember reading a book by Dana K. White a few years ago about how to declutter without making more of a mess, and she suggested just looking for trash as a first step.
It was a very charming and useful book, but I remember thinking, "I don't have trash all over the house!"
Ha!
I've been living happily in a dumpster for years, my friends.
I'm not a hoarder, but there are so many empty boxes, expired foods and medicines, torn sheets, and irreparable broken things just sitting around my house!
Or there were until I started looking for them and getting rid of them.
And if you want to declutter your singing, you have to look for the useless, broken stuff that is happening when you sing.
Record yourself.
I know, it's terrible, but do it.
And when you do, you'll see and hear so many things you haven't even noticed - wild vibrato on the last note of every phrase, lifting your chin when the pitch goes up, extraneous motion when you inhale!
This is the clutter of singing, and you're better off without it, but you can't even see it unless you look for it.
Trust me, it is better to know than not to know.
2. It happens in layers.
After the trash layer was removed, I started working on decluttering my "stuff."
This is what I thought decluttering would be before I started.
Toddler-sized shinguards, ice cream makers, you know what I mean.
But interestingly, now that I've got the trash layer and the first layer of stuff gone, I'm noticing more stuff that I think I'd rather get rid of than keep.
I got rid of the broken and ugly vases, but now that I think about it, that leaves me five vases, and do I really need more than, like, 2?
And so on and so forth.
There's so much stuff in my house that is "perfectly good" but it's not actually PERFECT.
So now the pants that fit but that I just don't like very much are going the way of the vases - out!
And once you're not doing all the obviously weird stuff with your singing, maybe you can check if there's another layer to declutter.
Maybe if you're keeping the tip of the tongue against the teeth more often these days, it's time to check out what's happening farther back in the tongue.
If you're not craning your chin forward anymore, maybe you can check out how the head and neck are balancing over the shoulders.
Keep peeling back those layers!
3. The progress is not linear.
It seems like I can remove five bags of trash from a room and it looks the same but then putting a stapler in a drawer moves it from my house to the outskirts of Martha Stewart territory.
No need to belabor this one - you can chip chip chip away at your technique for years and then one day you’ll think, “What if I moved my tongue 1/16th of an inch forward?” and suddenly you’re in the outskirts of Lawrence Brownlee territory.
Keep the faith!
4. There's some great stuff down here!
The most fun part is finding the old treasures.
The more I give away and discard the things I don't really want, the more I uncover the good stuff that's been here all along.
And it's true about singing, too - your natural voice is just right.
You may have thought you needed to add a bunch of stuff to it to make it ok, but a lot of that stuff is actually clutter, and once you pare it away and just give the voice enough support to really show its true nature, it will be terrific.
The very best singing you can do is the singing that sounds most like you.
So get to decluttering!
And in the spirit of giving away old stuff I've found that someone might find useful, here are a few of the pdf's I've created over the years as freebies.
The everyday voice care and how do I count it ones are fairly new, so if you subscribed a while ago, I hope these might be useful.
And if they're not, toss 'em!
Everyday Voice Care-5.pdf
Vowel Cheat Sheet.pdf
Interval Mnemonics Cheat Sheet-2.pdf
Key Signatures-2.pdf
How Do I Count It Handout.pdf
Big trashy hugs,
Laura
