Comment by pclmulqdq | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pclmulqdq | Hacker News Reader

I have been learning classical singing (opera, oratorios, etc) with no previous voice training. I think I am fine, and I can get low-paying gigs, but nothing big. I also did the process of becoming an ok composer a while ago (a few public performances of my work, etc), and the same advice applies.

I do have significant musical training and experience. The prior music training does help, but it mostly just helps me figure out when something is wrong, not how to fix it.

I have three tips:

1. Find a teacher or group you click with. Music instruction is 1:1 because it doesn't scale well, but visual arts you can do with a studio. A teacher will really help since most forms of art are subjective enough that you may not know what you are doing well or poorly and that feedback is very valuable.

2. Do your art every day, even for 15-30 min. Inspiration starts with doing, not the other way around.

3. Try to be better than you were yesterday. Practice things you are bad at, and consciously do projects to improve yourself. There is no competition here except with yourself yesterday.

A final one:

IMO the notion of "talent" for the arts is just how people cope with the fact that the best and brightest in that field did more work than them. I had several friends who were "talented" pianists growing up, several of whom are concert artists now. All of them worked their asses off 5-6 hours a day to become "talented." It took me a while longer, but I eventually became a "talented" harpsichord player in my early 20s. Go at your own pace and don't give up and you will also eventually be "talented."

I spent 3 years taking voice lessons with a few different teachers and I was really surprised just how little progress I made, even with regular practice. I'm very curious about your experience learning to sing. How long did it take you? What was your starting point?

I found the whole thing to be a real head scratcher, to the point that I find it hard to imagine learning to sing is even possible (obviously it is, but what is actually going on in the process?).

Here's my starting point: I sang in choruses for a few years as a child and I also generally like to sing stuff. I also did a lot of theory and ear training, which involved sight-singing contrived exercises. I am also a pretty good pianist/harpsichordist and an ok composer/arranger. I have also spent some time tuning harpsichords professionally. So I started with the ability to read music fluently and a really good ear (relative pitch only, but better at hearing exact intervals than many people with perfect pitch).

That is all to say that I don't have to learn many "musicianship" skills during the process, I vaguely knew that vowels are important, and I have a pretty good idea of how to generically practice music (and as a former pianist, I have a very high tolerance for things most singing teachers call "boring"). I will also say that aside from piano, I have done a lot of things that need fine motor control in the past, and that seems to extend to your face muscles.

That means that my voice teacher and I can focus mostly on vocal technique and honing my ear to listen to my own voice (which is surprisingly hard). I also picked a teacher who was a locally-well-known soloist, and she was a very good fit because she herself focuses a lot on the biomechanics of singing.

I have been working for a year and have a decent tone (several times louder than when I started, too) and a decent voice quality with vibrato if I focus on it. Vocal placement, "support," and other similar things are not unconscious for me but I can control them. I can also sing several arias and art songs at a decent quality. I am still working a lot on agility, pronunciation and exact vowel sounds, picking the right ways to produce sounds, and working on controlling my tongue and my abs/diaphragm to produce a good tone that is expressive and can pierce an orchestra.

FWIW I have heard that if you switch voice teachers a lot, it's actually bad for your voice because teaching methods are so "fluffy." Also, I have never done this, but I am sort of convinced that developing a good pop voice is probably as hard as developing a classical voice. In contrast, learning to play keys for a band is supposedly much easier than classical piano of the same level.

>IMO the notion of "talent" for the arts is just how people cope with the fact that the best and brightest in that field did more work than them.

Maybe the notion of “hard work” is just an attempt by talented people to justify their winning the genetic lottery to themselves and to appear humble?

Nowadays, success in the classical music industry very often depends on looks and conventional physical attractiveness. Here, too, luck is more important than hard work.

> Nowadays, success in the classical music industry very often depends on looks and conventional physical attractiveness. Here, too, luck is more important than hard work.

Really? My sister was a professional violist for a while and did all her auditions behind a screen. There are lots of efforts taken to remove biases of exactly the type you are citing from your career path.

Several soloists I know are relatively ugly people, but everyone who is a serious musician is in pretty good shape. Playing concert music is a light-to-moderate full-body workout, and doing that for 5 hours a day takes stamina. They usually also have clothing that fits them perfectly and they will often use some makeup to fix blemishes. So if you're just looking at a soloist on stage or on a video recording, that is about as attractive as the person you are seeing will possibly look, and they are selected from a pool of people that work out about as much as a full-time yoga instructor.

An example that stands out to me here is Yuja Wang, who is known for wearing very short dresses on stage. This happened much to the consternation of conductors and orchestras, and may have actually hurt her early career. She was more than good enough to overcome that, though, and I can't say that it was a bad marketing tactic for attracting youtube views.

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