A couple of decades ago, my roommate Shirley didn’t like to deal with things she didn’t like to deal with. For some people that translates to pragmatism. For Shirley it translated to never-ending personal chaos. One day I watched her peel a parking ticket off her car and throw it away. I asked what (the hell) she was doing and found out ignoring parking violations was just a thing she did. Normally. Like, she got them fairly often. In my mild horror I told her, “If you ge

New students sometimes ask me to label their voices. They want me to tell them if they’re an alto or soprano, for instance. Being someone who teaches microphone-based genres, I’m reluctant to do that, for reasons I’ll explain. But sometimes somebody wants a singer to write down “what [they] are,” so it’s good to have a safe answer. The terms alto, soprano, bass, and tenor are choral designations, and even in the setting of your choir or acapella group you may become a diff

Most singers who begin voice lessons know they’re signing on for a process of growth and learning. But every once in awhile, I (along with every other voice teacher in the world) see a new student who wants us to just cut the bullshit and tell them how to do this singing thing. They must think we’re all secretly keeping that reliable WikiHow page, 5 Easy Steps to Awesome Singing, all to ourselves. It Looks So Easy When They Do It In any area of expertise, there are people who

A fellow voice teacher and I were talking about a quandary that all teachers of the arts face: whether or not to encourage students to pursue their art. It’s a tough one. A few weeks ago, I posted a blog about the Dunning-Kruger Effect, an effect whereby we are very confident that we’re very good at things we know little about. The arts depend on the Dunning-Kruger Effect. If newbie artists really knew: how really hard it is to be successful in the arts how little they really