The 5-note scale isn’t a fix, it’s just hope
This started as a very normal chat between me and Gillyanne. You know the kind. You’re both mid-coffee, one of us mentions a vocal exercise, and suddenly you’re tumbling down the rabbit hole about diagnosis, register shifts, and why “just do a 5-note scale” is not a teaching strategy.
Here’s the conversation, pretty much as it happened.
JEREMY: “The 5-note scale! And people saying, oh, it solves legato, and it solves volume, and it solves this, and it solves that, and it solves gear changes. And I’m going, how the fuck does it solve gear changes? Because if you can’t do the gear change, what’s doing a 5-note scale going over the gear change gonna do for you, it doesn’t solve the gear change.”
And this is the bit that matters. Not the exercise. The thinking behind the exercise.
JEREMY: “We’ve been talking about this for more than a decade. Do you remember Webinar 3, What’s In A Warmup? The difference between something that warms your voice up and something that that tests your voice to tell you where it is that day. And something that warms your voice up is very rarely a musical pattern. Very rarely, it’s much more noises and sounds and all sorts of things like that, because once you’re singing musical patterns, you have to have your voice warmed up.”
GILLYANNE: “Yeah, if you’re going to do a Rossini dominant seventh, you’re going over an octave and a fifth. And if you don’t know how to manage those shifts, there’s likely to be either a register mechanism shift or an acoustic register shift across, particularly if it’s a female voice, and you need to know how to navigate those really, before you do it.”
It’s a problem a lot of singers have without realising what it is. They hit the pattern, they feel the wobble, crack, squeeze, flip, whatever their version is, and then they think, “I just need to practise it more.”
GILLYANNE: “Otherwise, you know the guide, the teacher, is reliant on you doing it over and over again until you stumble on it correctly.”
JEREMY: “What a waste of time. Yep. I mean, how’s that? How long is that going to take you, a week, a month, a year?”
And if we’re being blunt, this is where a lot of training still lives. Hope-based learning.
JEREMY: “If you get a targeted exercise that is not to do with the musical pattern, it’s to do with the technique of moving across those gear changes, then you can do it in 10 minutes.”
That line is the whole point. The exercise is not the point. The target is the point.
GILLYANNE: “And then the danger is as well, as a singer you’re not conscious of how you’re managing that particular issue. You don’t know what your strategy is, which means you’re not going to be able to generalise it, which means you’re always going to be dependent on your teacher for doing it in the song, potentially.”
Read that again if you teach.
If the student can’t name what they did, or repeat what they did, they didn’t learn it. They borrowed it.
GILLYANNE: “You could get to a point, you know, you’re having lessons for years and years, and you’re doing it over and over, that it becomes mechanical, it becomes part of neural pattern in your system. And so therefore you do it and you don’t need to think about it. And I think that is actually the old way of training people.”
JEREMY: “So you’re basically you’re doing over and over and over and over and over again, repetition, yeah, so that it goes into your unconscious muscle memory, and there’s no other way of doing it.”
GILLYANNE: “Which, again, in the modern world, is potentially dangerous because it means you’ve only got access to one genre as a singer, because, if you like, your whole biomechanical setup is coordinated towards that genre.”
That’s not a moral judgement. It’s just a reality check. If your training only builds one default coordination, you can get very good, and still be stuck.
GILLYANNE: “Not intrinsically a bad thing, but it’s problematic if you want to shift genre and be more flexible. And it’s definitely problematic if you’re a teacher.”
JEREMY: “Because you only have one way of fixing it, and that’s repeat this exercise. Go away for three months, repeat this exercise, and come back when you can do it. That’s not teaching.”
Then we hit the topic that triggered the whole rant.
A LIST OF EXERCISES IS NOT A DIAGNOSIS
JEREMY: “We know teachers want a list of exercises that they could just choose from. The difficulty with that is that you choose an exercise. You hear somebody, you choose an exercise for them to do. It doesn’t work in the way that you want it to do. And so you give them another one, and that doesn’t work, and you give them another one, and another one and another one.”
That moment where you’re cycling through your best hits, and nothing is landing. It’s not because you need a bigger list. It’s because you need a clearer question.
JEREMY: “And the difficulty with a list of exercises is that you haven’t done the diagnosis. You need to diagnose exactly what the problem is. Then you can go to your list and go, Okay, I’ve got an exercise here.”
And here’s the bit I wish every teacher heard early on.
JEREMY: “But there’s a by-product about diagnosing really accurately, which is you immediately know what the real technical / physiological / physical problem is. And you can make up an exercise on the spot that actually targets it.”
That’s what being good at exercises means. Not collecting them. Inventing them, because you can see what’s going on.
JEREMY: “It means that you get tremendously creative with your exercises, you can even use phrases from the song that they’re doing as an exercise.”
Then Gillyanne dropped in a story that, honestly, every experienced singer and teacher should sit with.
GILLYANNE: “You’re trying out different exercises. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with finding out which ones are already working for the student, because that tells you something about their abilities and their capacity, particularly if it’s a new student.”
Yes. Use what works. But do not stop there.
GILLYANNE: “But you could then be in danger of something that, for example, happened to me, which is I had a particular set of exercises that I did, and I did them to EE and OO, and I went and had a lesson with Vera Rosza, actually, because I was looking for a new teacher. And there I was, EEing and OOing, and she said, “Well, what about AH?” And I said, “Oh, I’m not very good at AH.” What the fuck?”
JEREMY: “And you were singing classical music! And you were not very good at AH, and you’re a soprano?”
GILLYANNE: “You know, in certain parts of my range, because that’s where I think some of the acoustic register things showed up. You see, they didn’t show up on the EE and the OO.”
This is the trap. You can warm up and practise inside the sounds that flatter your current coordination, and never bump into the real limitation.
GILLYANNE: “So there I was happily embedding the things that I could already do, and I did not have a strategy. And the people I’d been working with didn’t have a strategy either.”
If you teach, that last line is a gut check.
So what are we saying here?
- A warm-up is not the same thing as a diagnostic.
- A musical pattern is not automatically a technical solution.
- Repetition without strategy builds dependence, not skill.
- If you can diagnose accurately, you can target accurately.
- If you can target accurately, change happens faster.
- If you only practise what already works, you can miss the actual problem for years.
Want to find out more about deep vocal diagnosis and targeted exercise creation?
Have a with a conversation with Gillyanne yourself here and find out what steps you can take
That was fun. Let us know what you want us to talk about next!
cheers
Jeremy (and Dr Gillyanne)
PS The conversation that sparked all of this started on our New Year’s Day clearout when Gillyanne found a cassette tape of her singing a concert programme 44 years ago. She had never listened to it, and I had never heard it before.
My first comments were “that sounds exactly like you” (high praise from me) and “that C5-F5 area of your voice really sings”.
I also put my vocal coach ears on and started to listen to diagnose what was happening vocally, what was working and what wasn’t. Between us we diagnosed a problem Gillyanne had had, and created exercises to solve it in under 15 minutes.
Knowledge (and diagnosis and pinpoint accurate application) is power
