Dear singers,

How's your voice these days?

Are you singing well?

Are you improving?

I mean, if I were to grade my own singing, I would say my high register is more consistent than it was before, and I'm learning music pretty quickly, but my [i] vowels are really lacking resonance and onsets in middle voice are fuzzy.

What's that, like a B+?

An 82%?

There are just so many elements of singing that it's hard to quantify success.

Even with deliberate practice, (focused practice that strategically attacks problem areas rather than relying on passive repetition) it's hard to know if practice is creating results.

I have read so many books about skill improvement and learning and have always noticed that researchers study athletes much more frequently than musicians, and I think it's for this exact reason.

The study that is cited in almost every article and book about deliberate practice is one in which two groups of basketball players were asked to track their success at free throws.

The control group just took shots over and over.

The other group was asked to state their technical intention for each shot, report its success, and adjust the intention for the next repetition.

For example, "On this shot, I'm going to start the motion from my legs. . . . Ok, I had much more power that time but my aim was inaccurate. This time, I'm going to focus on my follow-through . . . "

Unsurprisingly, the result of this deliberate practice was more points.

But researchers weren't assigning different points for shots that bounced off the backboard or rolled around the rim - if the ball went through the basket, it was success, and deliberate practice led to more success.

Voilà!

In singing, there's no simple point system.

If you try to engage support and get a louder but more strident sound, is that a point?

If you're trying to increase your range and you're able to squeak out five differently ugly high C's, is THAT a point?

It definitely doesn't feel like one.

So, given the immense number of variables and subtleties involved in singing, is deliberate practice even useful for us?

Well, here are three thoughts on evaluating your own singing:

First, you don't have to work on everything at once.

I wrote about this at length in my hubcaps letter, but it's ok to focus on just one thing and let everything else fall apart temporarily.

That specific focus might allow you to see more clearly what's working for a particular problem.

Second, it might be unnecessary to quantify your improvement in the first place.

I recently heard that official U.S. barbecue competitions are scored on a scale of 1-9 but you can't receive a 3 or 4.

Only 1, 2, or 5-9.

This made me laugh out loud because it's so hilariously arbitrary and totally nonsensical.

And it also made me feel a little better about my own inability to accurately score my improvement (or decline!) in singing.

I might not know if it's a 6 or an 8, but I can definitely tell if brisket tastes good or not.

And in singing, I might need to let go of scoring and go with my instinct - am I sounding better?

Yep, I am.

Finally, here's another helpful idea I just came across in Noa Kageyama's Bulletproof Musician blog:

When we are looking for improvement in a specific area that is very slow to develop, we can actually use our discomfort itself as a measure of growth.

Sight-reading is a great area for this approach.

No matter how you slice it, sight-reading is uncomfortable, and it takes ages to get better results.

But you can't improve without working at the edge of your current ability level.

So, awkward as it feels, it can help to score yourself on how much time you're willing to spend in discomfort working on it.

Now, please note that this is not a method I would use for physical/technical issues.

More painful squeezing won't help the high range!

But areas that require mental discomfort, like sight-reading, intervals, solfège, language pronunciation, and rhythm work are all really well suited to discomfort tracking.

So good luck this week, and rest assured that you don't have to improve in every area all at once, or know exactly how much you've improved, or feel totally comfortable the whole time.

If you're practicing, you get a 10 from me!

(Or is it a 9?)

Yours in discomfort,

Laura