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Everybody has deadlines and they can be quite stressful. Sometimes singers can be given very specific gigs a week or two before they’re supposed to perform. While there is no hack to insert the music and lyrics into your brain with a click of a button, there is a tried and true process that will make memorizing the material faster and easier.
1. Do the kitchen table work - This is when you sit down at the table and tediously go through each separate component of the music you’re learning. Do not try to take everything on all at once because the end result will be a lot of mistakes that need to be relearned and minor fixes that didn’t need to be there. I like to separate my work like this :
Rhythm - tap your foot or conduct yourself, but get this right without any hesitation before moving onto the next step.
Melody - layer the melody onto the rhythm. It doesn’t matter how you sound at this point in the process. You are just learning the correct pitches with the right rhythms. If you start messing up the rhythms, go back to the first step, and drill it again. It is important that you take your time on these first two steps because it will make the rest of the work so much easier.
When learning the melody, read my quick tips to help improve your singing every day!
Text pronunciation and translation - Whether you’re singing in a familiar language or not, doing the IPA and language translation is key to getting all of the text across to the audience. Once you talk through the text and understand the direct translation enough to get it in your body, layer it on top of the rhythm. Once you get the text and rhythm down, add in the melody.
Now you’re almost done, it's just finishing touches.
Text subtext - Go through the text once more and analyze it as if you were analyzing a poem.
What was the moment right before this? This could be anything from eating breakfast to a big fight with your lover. If you don’t know, make it up!
Who are you talking to? Maybe you’re talking to yourself, or your best friend, or maybe you are directly conferring with the audience (although this is unlikely in most cases).
How do you really feel? Go through and pick an action word/ verb for each phrase and section. This is what is known as subtext and it makes the piece interesting even if you are repeating the same lyric over and over again.
What is going on around you? This is your set and setting. It is the environment you’re singing in. It could be inside of a closet or on a meadow or at a dinner party, but it is almost never on the stage with an audience with you singing your song.
Song is one of the deepest expressions of the self, so think about what made you feel so deeply that you had to sing about it. Become the character singing this, not the person pretending to be the character that is singing.
Dynamics - This should come pretty naturally once you complete the previous step, but if there needs to be more work done, go through the score and highlight all of the dynamics
Dynamics are any markings in the music that describe how soft or loud you should be singing. They are notated with p for piano/softly and f for forte/loudly. If you see mp or mf it is in the middle of the loudness and if you see pp or ff it is extra quiet or extra loud.
There may also be markings that look like > and < which mean get gradually quieter and get gradually louder, respectively. These are the basic dynamic symbols that you will see in your music.
When you sing through the piece for the first time, over-exaggerate what's being asked of you. It is easier to tone down the dynamics than to increase them.
2. Write out the text - If all of this learning and studying wasn’t enough for you to memorize all of the text you are singing, write it out from memory. Make as many mistakes as you need, but go back and correct them until you can write down the text of the whole piece without any issues. For people with a photographic memory, this method is helpful because you can visualize the words coming to life the same way you wrote them.
3. Sing while doing chores - it has been proven that moving or doing anything mundane while trying to memorize something speeds up the process. I like to do the dishes while singing, but many people find that cleaning and doing laundry while going through their repertoire helps a lot. You could even just pace around the house or throw a tennis ball with somebody. Your body will start to associate what you are learning with something that it already knows to be a simple task.
4. Record YOURSELF - There are some benefits to listening to other people sing your repertoire; however, as singers, we mimic by nature and will probably start to take on the other singer’s musical choices which don’t usually suit our voices. Once you’ve learned the piece enough to sing through it for your own ears, record it and listen to it. This will help with memorization and improve your singing in general.
5. Practice, practice, practice - “Practice makes progress!” Drill the song until you know it if you were woken up in the middle of the night. Get the feeling of the music into your body so that it becomes muscle memory and so that you can focus on the emotion and expression in your performance. Practice as if you needed to perform the next day.
Now that you’re ready to perform, check out my helpful tips on tackling performance anxiety here! Happy Singing!