Vocal Practice can be viewed as everything you do to inform your vocal skills, knowledge and attitudes to performance.
Listening to music
Writing about music
Reading about music
Talking about music
Watching a performance
Visualising a performance
Preparing for a performance
Rehearsing for a performance
the list goes on...
Practice is most effective when there is a clear focus. This can be as simple as getting everything you can out of a warm up, or mastering one technical difficulty, or picking up on a goal from the last practice session.
One can think of practice as being in stages, starting with knowing and understanding the basic structures of a song. On this base you can layer your technical focus, interpretive focus and finally your expressive focus. Ticking off each stage as you go enables you to proceed to the next and avoid going around in circles repeatedly from one thing to another.
How does this impact on my practice?
In a practical sense, these ideas are closely linked to my practice as a working professional singer. A singer's repertoire is always increasing and it is imperative to develop efficient ways to learn and prepare songs for performance. Otherwise you will while away many, many hours that could be better spent on other things. In particular contexts such as studio session singing, learning songs quickly and accurately is imperative to getting a call back.
What can I do next?
In considering my OVERALL PRACTICE, I think there are a couple of areas that I could focus on in the next week. The two items on the list above that I do less than the others are:
watching a performance
visualising a performance (in this case, my own performance)
My goal for this week is to engage in these activities at least twice before next Wednesday.
