Beating stage fright is one of the most individual practices I regularly teach. The process varies from person to person because the roots of it are sunk into our individual life experiences. This is where two terms are important.

Performance Anxiety

That is the term that is more commonly used...

Vowels phonate.

This is by definition:

1 to provide (a sound source, and hence the pitch) for a given voiced continuant or vowel, through rapid, periodic glottal action.

2 to vocalize

Vowels are literally what carry the tune when we sing. Yes, we need consonants in order to understand what...

But thankfully, we can manage them, or at least aspects of them.

1. Sleep/Fatigue

I often refer to this as an insidious effect. I, for one, did not used to think about it very much, and mostly discounted feeling tired as just being an excuse. The more we learn about sleep the more we seem to find...

When you quit, you really have lost at that point.

Facing defeats, real or perceived, can be hard though. It can seem as if that audition, or that part was THE ONLY PART EVER!!!! Having not gotten it, one might think that they've come to the end of the road. From one perspective, you have. That...

Let's get straight to it, shall we?

You have to learn to count beats in music.

There, I said it. Disagree? Leave a comment below.

Now, let's be clear here, I didn't say you have to learn all the numbers and names of the subdivisions, though it would help. You just have to count, or perhaps...

There’s one thing that’s harder to practice than anything else. Master it, and everything that you’re working for becomes more possible. Fail to understand it, and your struggle can be magnified to the point that you give up.

We might think that it’s something fundamental,...

BLUF

Bottom Line Up Front

I'm not sure where this phrase originates, but musicians have been doing it for as long as I can remember. It's a way to make sure that when we finally come to the end of our piece or song, we're not caught by surprise.

It really isn't any more complicated than that, but...

One of the things that I’d like to do in my newsletters is branch out a little bit more than I generally do on the YouTube channel. This week, since there’s been quite a lot of talk in the RVC about audio interfaces, I thought I would break this down a little bit and offer some...