Recording Your Lessons: Do I Have To?

You’ve heard it before from your voice teacher...

“Feel free to record your lesson!” 😱

“I encourage you to record our session!” 😓

As vulnerable and anxiety-inducing as it is to record yourself during your voice lesson. I will do my best to convince you to do it regardless.

Here's a truth: most singers don't particularly enjoy listening to themselves in recording

Shocking, I know! Rarely do folks actively LOVE listening to themselves sing - especially in a lesson where we are learning, making mistakes, and being pushed out of our comfort zone. Even good singers sometimes struggle to listen to their own voice recordings. Learning to listen to ourselves is a skill to build and, if I may, a skill you absolutely should build for yourself.

So how should we go about listening to ourselves?

Our first task is to come to terms with the fact that what we hear in our own heads is not how other folks hear us. That’s a lot of cognitive dissonance to face. 

"That’s MY voice? That’s what I sound like?!"

It sure is! And it’s wonderful! And the faster you can move past that fact the quicker we can get to the good stuff. 

The benefits of listening to ourselves in a recording

As I tell all of my clients, singing is hard because we can’t see anything (for the most part). That leaves us with the sensations of singing and what we hear. But if you, the singer, aren’t accurately tracking what you actually sound like to a listener, then it’s difficult to make adjustments. How do we accurately hear what we sound like? You guessed it: by recording ourselves. 

If we’re trying to make adjustments, I always tell people to put themselves in the teachers’ shoes. As a teacher, my job is to listen objectively to the person in front of me. Yes, I have opinions; yes, I have preferences; after all, I’m human. However, my job is to be as objective as possible to make sure you are singing efficiently and how you want to sing. That’s what you need to do with yourself. Can you listen to yourself objectively? Can you listen with patience and grace? Can you be kind to yourself? The truth of the matter is that it might take you a bit of time to ENJOY listening to yourself. And that’s ok! The fastest way to get there, though, is by listening to yourself sing. A lot. And be as objective as you can. 

Here are a few guiding questions you can start asking yourself as you listen to your own recordings:

"What did I do well?"
"Am I singing efficiently?"
"Did I do what I set out to do stylistically?"
"Am I singing in tune?"

It’s much easier to make adjustments when we have something other than “I suck” or “YUCK” in our minds. 

The other aspect of this that I want to briefly mention is when we have our lesson, we have our teacher’s feedback and reminders in our ears AND it’s a good way to gauge your progress on an exercise or song. With your teacher’s feedback, you remember coordinations and goals much clearer, you push yourself further, and you are reminded of things that you forgot. You will also start to feel and hear improvements in particular moments. “I’ve sung through the recorded exercises 3 times now and I can hear and feel that it’s much easier than it was the first time.” 

Lastly, if you’ve got recordings of your lessons, you have tailor-made-to-you lessons wherever and whenever. You are building a compilation of exercises you love, AND you’ll get to hear your progress from last month, 6 months ago, last year.

Your best voice teacher is yourself!

The only temporary downside is having to move past listening to ourselves for the first few times. Speaking from experience, it’s HARD. But it’s valuable, and I guarantee it’ll make you a better and more thoughtful musician!