Today we’re going to talk about what happens in a voice lesson.

A voice lesson can generally be broken up into 4 parts. This is whether you have a, half hour lesson, 45-minute lesson, or 60-minute lesson. Of course, all of the links are going to depend on how long the lesson actually is.

Part 1 – Checking in with your teacher

The first part of your lesson is checking in with your teacher. This is the part where we are saying the “heys”, “how are yous”, ”what have you been working on”, etc. I usually use this as a time to check in with my students on how much they’ve been practicing. I also answer any lingering questions that have come up for them in their practice sessions from the past week. Once we’ve kind of gotten that done, we move into our vocal warmup section and technique section of the lesson.

Part 2 – Vocal warm-up and techniques

In this section, your tutor is going to give you warm-ups and exercises, spoken, breathing, singing to really get your voice functioning in the way that you wanted to. This is often the time of the lesson where your teacher will introduce new technique ideas to you, or review old ones. And we usually try to keep it super relevant to whatever you’re working on. If we know that you have a song that has really high notes in it, we’re going to bring you up really high into your register. We’re going to get your whole range working for the next section of the lesson.

Part 3 – Working on a chosen song

Once you’re warmed up, your voice is working. We really move you into working on your song. Now sometimes I’ll have the students request like, Hey, I don’t really want to work on a song today. Can we just keep focusing on technique and warmups? The answer is always going to be yes because that’s really the bread and butter of learning your lessons. Really learning how to sing like you. The song is where we take all of that wonderful technique and exercises that we’ve learned. And really have time to apply it to a song or an Aria, whatever it is that you are currently working on.

In my voice lessons, I have a very collaborative song choice process with my singers. Oftentimes I’ll ask them what they’re interested in. If they already have a list of songs that they’d like to work on with me, and if they do, we kind of go through those songs and determine which would be the best choice for them.

If you’re thinking about starting voice lessons or you’re having a lesson soon, I’d recommend just coming with a list of songs that you really like to sing. That way your voice teacher has something to work with whether if you choose one of the songs that are on your list or your voice teacher will use that list as an inspiration. Your teacher can also recommend songs to you. It works really well to bring that to a lesson as you continue to study that you continue to keep a list.

All my students usually get to a point where they’re like “Ah, I can’t think of any new songs” but the truth is that you’ve been thinking of songs all along. It’s just that when you’re in the moment of “I need to pick a new song”, sometimes you can forget the songs that you’ve been wanting to work on. We usually work on that song before the majority of the remaining portion. If my students is learning a song, we’ll go through it piece by piece. If we’ve been working on a song for a while, I’ll have them do a run through and then kind of give them some notes on specific parts and then maybe work on the more challenging parts. It’s really great to have a song that works so that you like it and also works for your voice.

Part 4 – Wrap up Session

We then move into kind of the wrap-up session of the lesson. This is usually only a couple of minutes, but it kind of ties off the lesson in a nice way where we cover a couple of the main points with the things that we talked about. You can ask any remaining questions that maybe came up during the lesson for you. You can also set some goals for the following week.

I know some of my goal oriented students really liked to say, “Okay, what are my goals for this week?”. Some of my more relaxed students, I kind of just give them like an overarching idea of what to focus on for the next week. And then we say, see you later and you’re off on your own for your practicing the next week. I think that is one other point I want to make about why lessons are so helpful for people is not just what happens during the lesson, but also that your voice teacher is constantly giving you things to work on for the following week or the following two weeks whether you have weekly or bi-weekly lessons.

Additionally, it gives you an amount of accountability that really is hard to achieve on your own. I have students that have been studying with me for a while and they say that the reason that they keep coming back is not only to continue their vocal journey, but also to continue to have that accountability of checking in with somebody, really remembering that this is a priority for them to continue working on their singing and to just kind of have that weekly time, weekly power out to huddle with somebody else who supports them in their artistry.

So I hope this answers some of your questions about what actually happens in a voice lesson. If you have any other questions, I’d love to answer them. If you’d like to schedule a trial with one of our voice teachers at Singing with Lauren, I would love for you to head over to https://www.singingwithlauren.com/contact/. There’s a dropdown menu that you can say you’re interested in voice lessons. You can tell me a little bit about yourself and your availability. I will then reach back out to you ASAP to get you scheduled on a trial lesson.

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