I have often wondered if professional singers ever days have where they just can’t sing. I have always enjoyed singing around the house but would never dare step outside that simply because I was never sure what was going to come out until I started singing. I would say 5% of the time I had a beautiful voice, 20% of the time a good voice and 75% of the time no singing voice at all. Can anyone relate to this? When I was younger the numbers were much better but still very inconsistent.
Not a professional of any sort, just someone who enjoys singing…
I took a voice class for a few semesters at the local community college, and our teacher (a former opera singer) repeatedly and continuously drilled the importance of using your core/stomach/diaphragmatic to sing “correctly”, producing the air and power from down below rather than over-exerting your vocal cords.
She really liked to show us this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3TwTb-T044
She also repeatedly warned us against singing like most modern pop stars, who sing “wrong” and sometimes suffer vocal nodules as a result and have to take breaks from their career for a few months at a stretch.
However, I still don’t really fully understand this, either mechanically — I can only sing like that maybe 5%-10% of the time, mostly by accident — or scientifically… there appears to be some debate about the old concepts of “chest voice” and “head voice”, etc.: Singing - Wikipedia
All I know is that sometimes, if I flex my core and buttocks just so, a different kind of sound comes out, which sounds louder and more annoying to me, but my teacher liked it more. (I dislike opera-sounding music in general, and prefer pop/rock/blues and your typical singer-songwriter kinda acoustic vocals, which aren’t necessarily “powerful” but way more relatable…). Shrug.
I’d love to hear from more knowledgeable and experienced singers too. This has always confused me.
Back in the '70s, I did duets of classic folk songs with another singer/guitarist, and I was floored by all the prepwork he did.
We were singing in the evening, but he spent the entire day in a regimen designed to open up his sinuses (Sudafed, hot showers), exercise his diaphragm, and pamper his vocal chords… I remember a lot of lemon and honey, but there were other comestibles as well.
And he did a good half hour of vocal exercises before we went on.
Coming from a rock background, I did no prep. Ran through the songs once, then just sang.
(Well enough.)
I was lucky I didn’t have an off day. He was assuring he wouldn’t.
Yes, we have days where the voice doesn’t work. It sucks. But while we tend to be protective of ourselves, viruses slip through the cracks, and a particularly intense performance schedule can require some rest to recover from.
My voice was a little rough on Monday after a marathon of Holy Week services (one of my jobs is in a church choir). Then yesterday I woke up with no voice at all; some sort of virus. Mild on the whole, but just settled in the right place. Today I’m mostly recovered.
Sometimes you have to just sing through the fog. You might need to find a sub, or if you’re on stage, send on the cover/understudy. And sometimes you just need to cancel.
Singing is a skill that involves both mental training and fine motor control of muscles that most people don’t really think about.
Discounting external stuff like getting sick or straining your voice, which I don’t think the OP is asking about, consistency is still the product of training and practice. It’s very reasonable that a person who sings infrequently will have highly variable performance quality. You won’t even have the same range from one day to the next.
Not to mention that you’ll often be trying to sing outside of your range, which will make you feel like you’re “bad” when in reality that’s not the case.
This is equivalent to saying, sometimes I can walk out onto a court and shoot a basketball into the net effortlessly, and other times I just can’t, and I don’t know why.
Pros train with voice teachers, and then they practice their training daily. Singing is a function of genetics, skills, and muscle tone (those are muscles that you sing with), as well as emotion and acting skills. In other words you have to apply yourself if you want to sing reliably.
Amateurs practice until they get it right.
Professionals practice until they can’t get it wrong.
well said.
Even I’m not going to swing at that soft lob.
I don’t know if it was serious or not, but I got a kick out of it. I sing my best when my heart is broken.