If you want to sound good and feel good when you sing (without your voice cracking on you or feeling fatigue & soreness in your throat, etc.), you need habits that will take you there… and it all starts with the right morning routines!
There is definitively one most important thing in your vocal training and one most important thing in your involvement on your worship team. Nothing else comes close. If you get just one thing right, it should be this. If you miss this one thing, everything else falls short.
Growing up, I loved theme parks… especially the big ones with so many different types of rollercoasters. The upside-down ones. The stand-up ones. The lying-down ones (technically called “bobsled coasters”… who knew?!). The floorless ones. The best part? The element of surprise. Even when you KNOW the big drop is coming, or you’re about to go upside down, or it’s suddenly going to accelerate… STILL… it’s exciting every time!
There are so many amazing songs to choose from for our Easter services… but what makes them EPIC can also make them a bit (or more than a bit?!) challenging to sing! High notes, low notes, octave jumps, wordy lyrics, songs that cover a huge amount of range… it’s enough to make our rehearsal times downright intimidating! So try out these 9 strategies as you practice—and hopefully you’ll experience more success (and less stress!) as you sing!
It’s the middle of rehearsal, and the music is sounding, um—chaotic… loud… just all-around muddy, and… you have no clue what to do to fix it! Ever been there? Have you found yourself asking… “How come my team of reasonably-skilled musicians always seems to sound messy when they play together?” Join the club! The good news is: there’s a surprisingly simple—but radically effective—principle you can apply that’s guaranteed to make your team sound a whole lot better. Sound too good to be true? Trust me—it’s not… so let’s dive in!
As worshippers, there are many ways to be influential and effective for the Kingdom of God. In order to make this a reality in our own lives, we need to understand the “why” behind our worship. But before we dig any further into the why, we must know “what” worship is and what it isn’t.
This month, I watched some of my own lessons back, as well as lessons that I co-taught with my coaching students, and it was so enlightening to watch from a why is this working (or not working!) and what could we do better perspective! As I watched, I jotted down some strategies that I saw working well—and I wanted to share them with you, as I know that many of you, even if you’re not in the coaching program, already teach lessons or have an active role in giving feedback to other singers on your worship team… or maybe you have a desire to teach private voice lessons in the future! Or maybe you’ve taken voice lessons and you’re curious about what makes a lesson successful (or not!).
Feeling a tickle in your throat? Have an important service or vocal performance coming up? It can be downright stressful when you need your voice to be there for you… and it’s feeling like it might not be! So here are my top vocal remedies and tips for combatting alllllll the bugs out there and keeping your voice in tip-top shape.