This is a question that usually comes from a singer who has never felt the need to take lessons or from those that have taken singing lessons but walked away with nothing useful. Yet regardless of where you are at on the singing spectrum there is still the nagging question about if you should. But what if you don’t think you have a problem? That very question tells you that getting educated might be useful somewhere down the road so that you do not develop problems that can lead to damage. Every singer wants to avoid such issues at all costs.

For any singer, no matter how good your voice is, it is imperative to learn what makes your singing right when it is right and wrong when it is wrong. If you don’t get the necessary education then that is what puts your voice at a much greater risk for damage somewhere down the road. If singing is your career of choice (or already is your career) then it’s best to get educated sooner rather than later to avoid having to take a year or two off to re-train and rehabilitate your voice. Armed with the know-how your chances for damage are next to none.

Trust me when I say bad habits sneak in slowly; very, very slowly. They will take you by surprise because one day, and seemingly out of the blue, you might notice that you don’t have the range you once had, that it’s getting harder to reach the higher notes without having to push or strain, that your voice starts to feels fatigued after singing just three songs, or that your throat hurts after singing just one.

Unbeknownst to you, because your voice lives inside of your body, it’s your body that tries to tell you when something is very wrong. When you feel strain and stress, the need to push and blow; manipulate your voice in every which way in attempts to achieve what you seek to sound like, then it is wrong. It’s that simple. If it’s easy, it’s right. If it’s hard, it’s wrong.

If you don’t pay attention to that once it starts and seek out the help of a skilled voice teacher, you may eventually have to stop singing for as long as it takes to re-train and rehabilitate your voice trying to get back what you once had (or an even better than expected one) but lost somewhere along the way due to your lack of knowledge and education.

There are also those singers who have taken lessons but have walked away with nothing useful gained from the few teachers they have tried. I had a couple of students who came to me feeling that way. Two of them had finally opted to take lessons for a couple of months with a famous teacher; a teacher to the stars. They were charged $450 per lessons hour. They were willing to pay that much because they felt certain that this teacher would be the one able to provide them with the ability to sing the way they wanted. But those lessons proved to be as useless as the others. So by the time they quit taking lessons with that famous teacher, they’d grown bone weary — jaded.

Then, through word of mouth, they heard about me, came for a lesson, and told me their story with having taken lessons with this last teacher and how nothing came of it. I asked them to demonstrate the exercises they’d been trying to learn so I could determine why they weren’t able to “get it”.

Upon listening, I immediately detected that each one of these men had a voice that hadn’t been readied for that work. They needed more development and I assured them that once they were ready, their money will not have gone to waste — that what that teacher had been trying to teach them they’d be able to sing.

I knew that I was their last stop, their last hope. And because of how discouraged they were, they were very resistant to my instructions. To help, I pointed out that they obviously still had hope. Otherwise, they would not have landed on my doorstep. Because I knew they still had some hope, I asked them to trust me, turn it over to me — even if it meant this was their last try. With that, they did.

Do Singing Lessons Work

When I knew each of those two men were ready, I asked each of them to take a seat at the piano and sing those vocal exercises that they’d worked so hard on with that very famous teacher they’d walked away from with no success.

Upon demonstrating the first vocal exercise, their eyes grew wide with excitement. They could do it! They could do all of them. They got the voice they’d been desperately seeking to get. And I got even more excited than they did because nothing is more rewarding as a teacher than knowing my job was a job well done; that my students are getting, or have gotten, what they came to me for.

How did I accomplish this? What both men needed was to start from scratch. I developed their chest voice and their head voice separately. I encouraged them to let the voice break and go back and forth through that section of their voice allowing it to flip back and forth between both registers and to get used to it; accept it for the time being. It didn’t mean forever. It meant exactly what I said, for the time being.