#1: You become what you practice. There are two sides to this: If you practice bad habits or practice good habits, you can be sure that they will become part of your technique. Mamma Howell’s take on this was, “Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.” I’ll reference this rule frequently.
#2: Your two possible outcomes when executing an exercise are radical success or catastrophic failure. If you constantly practice compromising, you will have a compromised technique. Old habits only die when they fail and our brains are forced to find new solutions. See thought #1. This also ties into thought #8 below (Send clear, positive thoughts to your instrument). Each exercise should serve a specific purpose, and you should be able to state what you are trying to accomplish. If you cannot (and if your teacher cannot give you that information), consider simpler exercises… or a new teacher!
#3: Practice your messa di voce (gradual crescendo and decrescendo on a single pitch) every day throughout your entire range. This will be one of the hardest exercises you do and it is absolutely vital to cultivating a consistent and dependable technique. The decrescendo will be especially hard at first. Stick with it! The ability to sing quietly, crescendo, and decrescendo without compromising the rest of your technique is one of the major skills (along with clear declamation of text and consistent intonation and amplitude) that separate the singing wheat from the singing chaff.
#4: Practice slow and fast. Try this: Hold your hand up, palm to the sky. Slowly close your fingers into a fist. Notice that there is a stuttering, ratchet-like, un-smooth quality to the motion. Now do it quickly, and notice that the same motion is smooth. The muscles of the hand, like the muscles that make up the larynx, consist of many short bundles of muscle fibers. When they move slowly you notice the ‘hand off’ from one to the next. When you move quickly, they act in a more smooth and coordinated fashion. Do the same with your vocal exercises. Slow then fast. Up a half-step. Slow then fast, etc…
#5: Don’t just sing major scales and arpeggios. Work minor, diminished, and augmented patterns into your exercises. Those harmonies are in the music you sing, right? See thought #1
# 6: Smile when you breathe in. This isn’t some sort of “brighten up your vowels” trick, and I am absolutely not suggesting any type of held position! Doing exercises by yourself can be very boring and depressing. Worst of all, you can get distracted along the way and stop thinking about what you are trying to accomplish. A gentle smile from time to time reminds you that you are in the present moment and doing something positive and specific. See thought #1. Smile! This leads to…
#7: Send clear, positive thoughts to your instrument. Do not focus on what you want to remove from your technique when you practice. Example: Do not think, “Back of my tongue, don’t tense up.” Instead think, “My tongue is going to be relaxed, loose, and rest gently towards the front of my mouth.” The body is really good at doing exactly what we tell it to do. When we think in the language 0f avoiding negative habits, we actually give energy to those habits. See thought #1.
#8: Take radical responsibility for your own issues. Do not say the word “it” when describing your technical shortcomings, “It doesn’t work, It’s tightening up, etc…” Say “I.” “I am telling my [insert body part] to tense up.” When you take responsibility for that fact that no one else is sending the command to be tense, you stand a chance of figuring out what faulty command you are actually sending. You can even practice compassion for the poor technique. “Dear [insert body part], I know that you are doing exactly what I am telling you to do and working inefficiently for a reason. This is most likely because you are trying to protect me from something that I am just beginning to become aware of my fear of. Thank you for trying to help me protect myself. You can rest now, and I’m going to try something different for a bit.” Seriously, this works.
#9: You have issues with the back of your tongue. Ok, I haven’t heard you sing, but 95% of you out there are pushing down on your larynx with the back of your tongue. Get an anatomy book and look at how long the tongue is (spoiler alert: it is really long). Practice simple exercises with your tongue in a strange place (gently placed to the left or right, or curled up in the front). Notice when your tongue wants to pull back. With your tongue in a more neutral position, sing without pulling back. This one improvement will fix a majority of your technical issues.
#10: Practice non-attachment/your voice is not an expression of your soul. With practice you may develop an instrument capable of expressing something your soul feels, but you are going to have to make some amazingly ugly and non-musical sounds to develop that solid technique. You conduct your sound through bone and tissue, while your listeners conduct the same sound waves through air. When the sound in the air is beautiful, it is often harsh and ugly in your head. When it sounds beautiful in your head, chances are that it sounds anywhere from dull to manipulated in the air. It sucks, but you cannot listen to yourself when you sing, and you cannot attach meaning to the sound of your own voice as you hear it.
#11: Get excited about practicing! Make little signs like, “February is sing a clear [a] vowel month.” Hang them up around your house and in your practice space. Imagine that you are taking an independent study in singing with a released tongue. Naming your challenges keeps your attention focused on them. See thought #1.
#12: Practice with a metronome. Singers can be rhythmically… what is the word… oh right, LAME. Don’t be a stereotype. Singing in time is a completely learnable skill if you practice regularly with a metronome. Do what my high school drumline called the “box ten” exercise: Sing the difficult phrase at a slow tempo. Increase the tempo by ten metronome marks and sing it again. Decrease it by five and sing it again. Increase by ten, decrease by five, etc… If you have a sense of your conductor’s tempo, practice slightly faster and slightly slower tempi as well. Learn the difference between 118 and 120 beats per minute. Pretty soon you will be able to sing your music with rhythmic accuracy at any tempo. If you don’t have a metronome, spend $20 and buy a Korg MA-30. It is tiny, the metronome function has all sorts of subdivision options, and the built in chromatic tuner allows you to set A anywhere from 413-420 or 438-445.
#13: Sleep is very important. I cannot emphasize this enough. Sleep is not only when your body repairs damage (say from vibrating your vocal folds against each another several hundred times a second for an hour or more), but also when the brain assimilates new information and patterns learned during the day. The more sleep you get the better you will be at singing, the faster your technique will improve, and the easier it will be to memorize music.
-Ian Howell is a countertenor based in Boston, Massachusetts. He regularly performs as a concert and operatic soloist all across North America and writes from time to time. He was educated at Yale and Capital Universities, sang with Chanticleer from 2000-04, and is currently a Doctor of Musical Arts student at the New England Conservatory of Music.
source: http://blog.counterpointspublishing.com/2011/06/vocal-technique-how-to-best-practice-practicing-singing/