I love teaching, partly because each and every student is unique. You never know what you’re going to get. Both kids and adults come with their own special joys that make them very different to work with. This is what I love about teaching music to kids. Kids are unpredictable Read more…
… And none of them are “It makes you smarter”! 1. Learning music is fun! I never have so much fun in the week as during music lessons. Demonstrating techniques in singing often involves doing really silly things, and this means lots of laughter. Once you get going, you can Read more…
If you, or one of your students is heading for Grade 5 theory, you’re probably dealing with the rather dull subject of enharmonic equivalents. Most of the existing resources on this topic are pretty uninspiring, rather like a page of maths questions that asks if 3+1 is the same as Read more…
Practicing is the most challenging part of every musician’s life. Whether we’ve been playing six months or sixty years, we all face days when we just don’t want to sit down and work, or if we do, we don’t want to do what we should be doing. We face many Read more…
One of the most challenging things about singing compared to playing an instrument is memorisation. Singers are expected to perform from memory in most situations, while instrumentalists are much more likely to have the music out in front of them. Certainly, for examinations, singers must sing from memory, but instrumentalists Read more…
One of my favourite kinds of warming up and technical exercises is tongue twisters. They’re great for warming up all of the muscles needed to form words when singing and help singers practice good diction and articulation (i.e. the ability to sing words so that the audience understands what they Read more…
One of the most important things you need to do when practicing singing is to warm up properly. Warming up is not quite the same as vocal exercises, although a good warm up routine will go from physical warm-ups to vocal exercises without feeling like the warm-up stops and the Read more…
I have recently rediscovered the childhood magic of the drinking straw. I don’t know what it is about this small, plastic thing that creates such joy, but I love ’em. Why have I rediscovered straws? Well, I have been looking for some new ideas for technical exercises, and I have Read more…
For every musician, practice is a problem. No matter how we write about it, talk about it or think about it, the only solution to the problem is to do it. However, there are lots of useful things that can help you get over that barrier that tries to prevent Read more…
It’s amazing how often I come across comments like this, which I recently read on a forum: Singing doesn’t count, as it doesn’t … require the same kind of practice as instruments do. There’s a bit of a myth that exists that singing, especially at a beginner level, doesn’t need Read more…