VOCAL COACHING REQUIREMENT RATIONALE


When the entity you perceive as “you” plays a guitar, you strike a string and it resonates, creating a sound. When “you” play a keyboard, you press a key and a digital signal send audio information through a cable to a speaker. But when “you” sing a note, the instrument is indistinguishable / inseparable from the performer, because you are the instrument.

Before applying for any vocal coaching, you absolutely must understand / respect / appreciate / acknowledge this undeniable universal truth: your instrument is you. 

This makes mistakes feel more personal and vulnerable, because it’s not an external piece of equipment that’s at fault when a weird sounds comes out. That’s a separate psychological component to overcome, and we’ll get to that later. But first and foremost, we have to address the current condition of the instrument itself: YOUR HEALTH!

If you are:

  1. Dehydrated

  2. Exhausted

  3. Depressed

  4. Allergy-ridden

  5. Experiencing acid reflux

  6. Screen-fatigued 

  7. Under-conditioned for cardio

You finna have a bad day in vox lessons, Fam! Singing requires maintenance of your SELF! This means you have to like…. move. And sweat. And elevate your heart rate / strenghten your breathing apparatus to condition your body for singing. This isn’t a matter of opinion; it’s a scientific fact, and as such it’s beyond contestation. Accept it now, or we’re just wasting time.

You have to like. Drink water and stuff. You gotta sleep right. You gotta maintain them mentals, Fam. You gotta keep your diet in check. And you gotta make yourself breathe hard a lil bit.


“But I eat fast food every day and I’m fine!”

YOUTH >>>> OLD GRAMPA STATUS: You can do whatever the hell you want NOW, but the older you get the less you get away with. You have to develop these healthy habits NOW so they’re easier to maintain / develop as you start to have to deal with the consequences of failing to adhere to them. 


THE NATURE OF INSTRUMENTS: 

Every instrument in the multiverse has:

(1) Power Source

(2) Vibrator

(3) Resonator 


From the examples above, let’s take a guitar:
The power source is your hand striking the string. The vibrating component is the string itself, and the resonator is the wooden body of an acoustic guitar, or the magnetic pickup of an electric.

For a piano, the power source is your hand pressing down on a key, which prompts a hammer to strike a string. The vibrating component is again a string inside the piano, and the resonator is the body of the piano.

For the human voice, the power source is your breathing mechanism - all the mucles involved in inspiration, including the diaphragm, sternocleidomastoid, scalenes, pec minor, serratus anterior, intercostals, obliques, transversus and rectus abdominis, and more. The vibrating component is your vocal folds, and the resonating component is a combination of the vocal tract, including your oral and nasal cavity.

You can’t use muscles you can’t feel, and you can’t feel muscles you don’t have. 

SO if your respiratory muscles are atrophied from extended disuse, you aren’t going to be able to activate them at all, let alone learn how to feel them —-> use them to sing properly. You’ll sing “underfunded” and without proper support, and will put unnecessary strain on your voice.

For this reason and all of the above, I personally refuse to teach any voice student who isn’t engaging in at least 30 minutes of cardio 3x / week. The unfortunate truth is that no amount of weekly 60-minute lessons - in a week that contains 10,080 minutes, over a year that contains 525,600 minutes - is going to have any meaningful impact if the instrument isn’t conditioned to operate at optimal capacity, and constantly maintained to perform and excel.

This isn’t bodyshaming - I literally don’t care what you look like. It’s just science, Fam.

But if you’re moving, we can def get grooving. <3