Is Singing a Talent or a Skill?

It’s a little bit of both. There has to be some innate musical ability there. There has to be some sort of connection between what the ears hear, and what the brain translates and tells the larynx to do. Generally, if someone can speak well, they can sing well. It’s down to their interpretation of pitch–how they can hear pitch and reproduce it.

That’s built into some people more than others, just like playing basketball or some other instrument. Someone picks up a guitar and it’s their thing. They wouldn’t be a great drummer. For some reason that instrument just appeals to their brain. All of it can be developed, it’s just how far it can be developed.

It doesn’t matter how many years I practice, I will never be a major league baseball athlete. I’m not built that way. It’s just not part of who I am.

I get this a lot: “I have a lot of passion for it.” Well, passion isn’t enough. It’s good, but you can love the dream and it doesn’t have to love you back. Your best may never be good enough. And that’s a sad thing to tell somebody.

We’ve got a lot of people out there who have little or no training who are fantastic artists because there is some innate quality in them that just appeals to others. You could say, technically, they’re not an amazing Singer. Mariah Carey is a “technically” amazing Singer, but some people don’t like her voice. All the acrobatics don’t really impress them.

Then you have someone like Adele, who’s not as technically trained as Mariah Carey. But there’s something organic, something visceral in her voice that makes you want to listen over and over again. It has nothing to do with vocal exercises and scales. There’s just something about the way she sings a song that draws you in. That’s something that’s built into somebody. You can’t train that into somebody. If they have that ability, you can train that ability more. But it has to already be there to some degree.

In my 15 years of teaching, I’ve only ever turned one person down and said, “This isn’t for you,” because they just didn’t have it. They had absolutely no innate musical ability. None at all. They were attempting to write songs and I was like, “Have you ever actually heard music? Because that’s not how it’s structured and that’s not how it works.”

They wanted it so badly but it just wasn’t in them. And that’s the only person I’ve ever told, “Singing isn’t really for you.” Everyone else I’ve told, “You have something there, we can develop that.”

So there has to be something there that can be trained, and then how much that grows is dependent on many factors. The ability to be open-minded and train a lot. To do the work. To do the process. Do they have something to offer? There’s not a lot of music that’s unique today, but do they have something to say? That has to come through in the song.

You can have all the technical ability in the world, but if you can’t communicate, if you can’t sell that song to somebody else … it doesn’t matter how many hours you train a day or how many years you put in if nobody wants to buy what you’re selling. And that’s most people. There are only so many people at the very top. You can be just under the top, but even that’s a very selective amount of people. That’s the unfortunate part.

The odds are stacked against you even more now than they used to be. There are so many more people doing it and the access is so much easier. You can just throw yourself on the internet and everyone can see you. So the market is flooded with a lot of very subpar people. You have to rise above the noise. You have to work really hard to do something that catches somebody’s eye.

So again, it has to be partly there and it can be trained. There’s always something there that can be developed. It’s just how far do you want to go? People have different levels. You may be able to achieve it, you may not. But you have to try.

As the uncle/mentor/surrogate grandfather that I never had said: “If you’re going to do this and you feel you really need to do this, you need to do this 100%.” There’s no 90%. Give it 100%. That’s what I tell all my students. You have to want to learn. Because I’m going to challenge you a lot.

Teens. Mid-teens. Before that, your voice is too unevolved and there are too many unknown factors.

Your voice changes as you go through puberty. The larynx physically grows and all that. Attention span is kind of limited under fourteen. Especially now. It’s really hard. I don’t take any students under fourteen. I tried, for hour-long lessons. Ten-year-olds who want to do thirty-minute-long lessons, that’s fine. That’s about the limit of their attention span before they’re thinking about what games they want to play.

Teens are where we start to understand that process of achievement. Especially if they play extracurricular sports and things like that. You understand the team gets better the more you practice and the more games you play. The more you do the thing. People have tried to bring me students at age seven and I’m like, just let them sing at home. Save your money.

Teens are the best time because their attention span is starting to get a little bit longer and they can think in more abstract terms. They’ve been through school long enough to know about processes and to know that it takes time to learn something and you don’t learn it right away. You don’t learn it overnight.

It’s also really good if they’re learning or have learned another instrument because they understand that process. You don’t immediately pick up your guitar and know how to play it. You have to learn to look at the book and move your fingers. Just like everything else, there’s a process involved. And it takes time because you’re learning a physical skill.

With a cognitive skill like learning math, it goes up exponentially. Whereas learning a physical skill, it goes in stages. You have a flatline for a while where you feel like you’re not really getting any better, and then you get this uptick in abilities where something you couldn’t do last week, now you can do. That’s physical.

A lot of people don’t understand that. Once they get on that plateau, they think they’re not gaining anything from the process. They don’t understand that their brain is figuring this all out in the background, then one day it goes, “I got it!” And then you get that uptick in ability.

You have to wait for that uptick. A lot of people lose interest when they plateau. You kind of have to love the plateau. Kids don’t really think in those terms until fourteen or fifteen.

Minimum a year. You’re probably looking at two years. Again, because it’s a physical skill. It’s a physical skill you can’t see. Learning piano or guitar is a little bit different. You can actually see your hands moving and when you go to play a G chord, you know you’re going to get a G chord when you hit the strings because you see your fingers in the right place.

With the voice, it’s all invisible. So it’s a very weird instrument to train. It’s odd because you have to describe a sensation to people. “It feels like this. Do you feel it here? Do you feel it there?” And people feel proprioception–their proprietary perception of something might be different from how I feel it. If the sound you just made is correct, however you felt that: remember that. And just keep doing that.

I always tell people you’re looking at a year at least. If you take someone from bare-bones nothing, then that timeline will either expand or shrink depending on their innate ability. I’ve had people come to me who’ve never had a vocal lesson before and told them, “You’re actually a really good Singer.” They had no idea. I said, “You actually sound better than you think you do, and it’s not going to take as long as you think.” They just have to learn better.

I have people who come to me who’ve never had a vocal lesson, don’t seem that great, and who see pretty good improvement over a short amount of time.

More than people who had natural ability, but were resistant to learning to sing differently because they were always singing in this natural way without knowing what they were doing. Now they have to do it as a process and it’s kind of throwing their brain into disarray.

People who have been singing for a while or taken lessons before have built-in, predetermined ideas about how things should be done. Someone who’s a blank slate is a lot easier to teach.

But it’s always a year minimum. In the grand scheme of things that’s a short amount of time. For how long you’re going to be able to use that skill, taking a year to learn the basics is no time at all. It’s going to take you a year to learn to fly a plane. So give it time. It’s worth it in the end.

If you play an instrument, did you learn how to play your guitar amazingly in a short amount of time, or did it take a year to get fairly good at it? Same amount of time. Same brain process.

No more than one. I get that all the time. There’s science behind this. The human brain can only take concentrated thought processes, training like that, for 20–25 minutes. Then it starts to shut off. It doesn’t want to absorb any more information.

Grade School Teachers know this as well. That’s why they change the lesson plan about every 20 minutes within a period–because the kids’ brains can’t maintain a state of concentration for longer than 20 minutes. Singing is fine motor control. After about 20 minutes, your brain starts to go into gross motor control and it’s not doing the fine movements.

There’s a process called chunking where you learn things in little chunks; 15–20 minute chunks of time. I’ll tell my students, you can practice for an hour, but don’t do an hour in one shot. Break it up into little 15–20 minute sessions over the course of the day. So that you can really concentrate during that 15–20 minutes. Really dig in. Really concentrate.

Because if you’re going to do an hour, you can’t maintain that kind of level of concentration for an hour. But for 20 minutes, you can really focus on a couple of things and then leave it. Let your brain absorb it, work on it, and come back to that same thing or something else later in the day. Really concentrate for 15–20 minutes, then leave it alone. Another 15–20 minutes, really concentrate–next thing you know you’ve done an hour.

People think if they sit and do two to three hours, they’re going to get so much better so much faster. It doesn’t work that way with physical skills.

You can do that with a language, a cognitive skill. You can sit there for two hours and you’ll get better at it at the end of two hours. Physical skills though? Your brain can only absorb so much information in a short amount of time. So you have to chunk it into little bits. And then leave it alone for a day or two and come back to it.

That way your brain has time to absorb all that information and coalesce it and put the puzzle together. The longer you move away from the thing that you did, the more you remember it. Which is a weird thing.

They’ve actually done tests with this and studies where you give people a paragraph to learn, and then another group, and tell them to try to remember everything they can about that paragraph. The people they come back to it four days later remembered more than the people from two days later. It’s a weird part of our brain.

So I tell people, put a day in between. Or if you do something on one day, do something else on the day between. So on Monday and Wednesday do the same thing. On Tuesday and Thursday, do different things.

It’s just like what bodybuilders do. They train one muscle group on Monday, another muscle group on Tuesday, then come back to the first muscle group on Wednesday. So there’s that day of rest in between for the different muscle groups. Do that same thing with singing.

Sing on Friday. Take the weekend off. Let your brain relax because it needs that vacation. Come back on Monday and repeat the process. With those two days of rest, they [bodybuilders] do something else like swim or run. So just sing. No warm-up, no nothing; just sing. Do something musical. Play an instrument and do whatever you’re going to do. But do something else away from the training so your brain can get a break to absorb all of it.

This is part of the way I teach. I bring in some neuroscience and some of how our brains function to speed up the learning process. A lot of Teachers don’t go that route. They have the book that they teach out of. My thing is, adapt to the student, how they learn, how they absorb things, and the rate they want to learn at.

You can’t force them to learn faster than their brains want to learn. You can’t force an exercise on them if their brain isn’t ready for it. Switch gears and go to something else and maybe come back to it later on.

That’s what I do and I’ve always been interested in how our brains work and learn. So when I started to teach, I brought a lot of that information into it. I spoke to Neurosurgeons and Psychologists and people like that to understand how we learn.