Tips for singing/playing

[KaPowaFie]

I've always had a tough time being able to sing and play something at the same time. I usually play piano and now am getting into playing a ukelele but the issue is the same for me. If I think too much about how I play I forget the words and vice versa. How can I become better at or learn how to do both simultaneously...its really challenging.

 

[merlin666]

Usually you strum to accompany the singing. So start with keeping the strumming very simple - just one downstrum per beat and practice until it is automatic and you don't need to pay attention. For left hand simplicity find a song that has only one or two easy chords. So once you have automated the playing and coordination of left and right hand then start singing along when you can put all focus on the melody and words.

 

[DuckyI]

The key thing to remember is that there is an element of 'autopilot' to doing two things simultaneously. Over time as you get better, you start to build up more freedom in either or both of the two activities but that is built on a foundation of deep familiarity.

Learn both parts separately until they are second nature, i.e. without having to concentrate and without mistakes. If you are new to the ukulele you can expect this to take a little while. Then, slow the tempo down and start by combining them.

 

[KohanMike]

I tell anyone in my group when they say they have a hard time singing and playing, to be sure they keep a very steady rhythm, not to strum to lyrics. The tempo of the playing is a very separate thing from singing the lyrics. That's what's meant by being 'in the pocket' keeping the playing tempo very steady, then add the lyrics.

 

[EDW]

Great comments above, especially about doing it separately. As mentioned, just strum a single chord at the down beat or the chord change. Once you can do that and your fingers know the patterns, just hum or sing the melody with no words. Practice singing the melody alone. Read the lyrics alone in time and with the correct rhythm, with or without pitches. As stated, only when each is second nature, try putting it together and remember to do it slowly. There is no point practicing fast and sloppy. Work for accuracy. It does take time, but stick with simple strumming until it is comfortable.

Good luck and most important---have fun!

 

[ploverwing]

Once you can do that and your fingers know the patterns, just hum or sing the melody with no words

That's about my speed!

 

[Charles Guy]

After a couple of years now I am still waiting for that Ah Ha (no, not take me on) moment when I find my pocket and can play and sing at the same time.

Great advice in above responses to help you from those in the know.

You Can Do It!

 

[TimWilson]

This is my 2024 journey. I've become almost decent strumming, but that's not my goal. I want to play AND sing, and at a certain point, that's what you gotta practice.

I promise: it'll be bad at first. This isn't natural. But neither is reading. There's no instinct. Nobody's born with an aptitude for it. It's a skill that you build, and it's excruciating at first.

Baking's not natural. Neither is photography. Bicycling. Video editing. Typing. Carpentry. Optometry. Gardening. You could make a list of a hundred other skills that have nothing to do with anything that comes naturally to anyone, because they're not natural. You learn them. Slooooowly.

(More often than not, with a human guiding you in person. Can you imagine trying to learn to ride a bike from YouTube?)

So even if somebody says that singing is natural, I'll gently disagree (while conceding that it has some natural elements). Even if it were, it's not natural to sing specific words at specific times while playing an instrument. Nobody has any natural advantages here. You just have to take the steps...and while walking is sort of natural, nobody learns it fast. This is harder than walking. It will take more time to learn!

The great thing about singing is that you can do it any time. So do it! I sing while I'm cooking, making the bed, driving, you name it. I'm working on a couple of songs, so I have a super short playlist with those few tracks in it, and sing 'em over and over.

Let me emphasize that I'm terrible. I've also come to believe that the worse you are at singing, the more important it is to sing. Not for how you sound -- you'll probably get better, but ultimately that's beside the point -- but for what it does for your body maybe a little bit of soul too...but I'm not kidding about the health benefits. Look it up!

(Again wanting to underscore that the worse you are at it, the more benefit you'll receive, regardless if you ever let anyone else hear you, or if you do it while you play. Singing will change you. No kidding, look it up!)

The two biggest things I've learned for ME are:

-- Slow down. There's no law that says you have to keep up with professional musicians. My self-inflicted agony is that I'm taking on a lot of Beatles, all of whom started as very young children, and spent their late teens and early 20s on stage for 16 hours a day, hopped up on amphetamines.

It's crazy to imagine, but by the time anybody outside of Liverpool or Hamburg had ever heard of them, they'd put in more hours on stage than freakin' Sinatra.

I haven't put in that many hours. It's okay for me to need to go more slowly.

-- Simplify the playing. I don't enjoy ukulele arrangements that shave off all the riffs, so I've always chosen to challenge myself with these. I work on walkdowns and intros rather than scales..

...but I can't currently do much of that kind of thing and sing just yet. So I'm dropping out the riffs, and paying more attention to timing.

There's a temptation to try to line up strums and changes with vocal phrases, but that not always right. Maybe the changes come on the off beat. One song I'm working on now changes chords after each vocal phrase during the verse, and about half and half in the chorus, with either changing at the beginning or on the up.

It totally works, but you have to stay on your toes. You can't settle into one pocket, because there are two and a half of them.

So that's the third thing, maybe. You may not know the song as well as you think you do. This can be humbling, as I've been singing along with some of these for 50 or 60 years. But it's different when you're doing the singing and playing yourself.

And yeah, if you've been playing and singing for years, maybe it's easy for you by now, certainly easier than it is for me, or at least easier than it was when you started.

So find a way to listen to the song a LOT. Sing it out LOUD, a LOT. Find your favorite parts, and nail those even if the rest goes wrong. Those waypoints will keep you on the path.

My bottom line is, if it's easy, I'm kinda not interested in it. The challenge makes it worth the effort.

Your mileage will vary, but there are definitely miles! Lots of 'em!

 

[ubulele]

When I was first getting used to playing and singing at the same time, I began by memorizing the words completely. Then I analyzed the chords, so I knew what the underlying harmony structure was. Then I began practicing the chords, singing as I played from the start, but going very slowly. Singing provides additional cues that help me remember the chords, and I'm effectively just adding incrementally rather than trying to mash together two competences I learned completely in isolation.

 

[Oldscruggsfan]

Wow! I needed this same guidance. Why didn’t I ask? Thank you all.

 

[rcblu2]

Lots of great stuff already said, but I thought I would share a little of my journey. I’m a non-musician who picked up uke 9 months ago. Quickly I realized how much singing messed up my playing so I would do a single down strum per chord at first. Let it Be by the Beatles was my first song I could sing with this simple strum. I built from there. As I mastered the island strum it became easier to sing and play. I listen to new songs multiple times trying to sing along. Next I play along humming/singing if I can. I practice pretty much every night. I pick songs my wife likes so as to not drive her crazy and sing/play at her. I allow myself to make mistakes and mumble words for parts I don’t know well. For the songs I have been practicing for months, I have noticed that I can now experiment on the fly while singing and change my singing timing...Coming in later and catching up. Sometimes it seems to work well other times it doesn’t. But since I know both parts so well at this point I have a new freedom to experiment. Ah…more fun.

Keep working it. It will develop.

 

[UkingViking]

I dont remember having this problem. Perhaps trying to learn some guitar 20 years ago got it out of the system.

But just to make it more difficult, I will throw in a idea: why not try to do THREE things at once?
The third being keeping tempo, either tapping your feet our bouncing a bit back and forth.

When confronted with a chord lyrics sheet, I always find that I need to stop and figure out exactly when the chords change and when the lyrics start. Often the chords change on 1 or 3. Sometimes half a measure before on the up stroke.
Sometimes the lyrics pause and start at 2 or something.

Try singing while tapping your feet to figure out the lyrics, and how long the silence between lines are.
Try strumming while tapping your feet.
Then try to combine.

Is this bonkers?

 

[Jan D]

I dont remember having this problem. Perhaps trying to learn some guitar 20 years ago got it out of the system.

But just to make it more difficult, I will throw in a idea: why not try to do THREE things at once?
The third being keeping tempo, either tapping your feet our bouncing a bit back and forth.

When confronted with a chord lyrics sheet, I always find that I need to stop and figure out exactly when the chords change and when the lyrics start. Often the chords change on 1 or 3. Sometimes half a measure before on the up stroke.
Sometimes the lyrics pause and start at 2 or something.

Try singing while tapping your feet to figure out the lyrics, and how long the silence between lines are.
Try strumming while tapping your feet.
Then try to combine.

Is this bonkers?

Not if it works for you.

For what it’s worth, I never had this problem either. And, like you, I think it’s because I had already internalized the process of singing and strumming at the same time, thanks to a decade of playing guitar some 40+ years ago.

 

[UkingViking]

I must admit that I dont strictly practice the tapping thing I described before, except a little bit for passages where I am in doubt.
If remembering the lyrics is the problem, it will not help. But if the timing is tricky, it might.
When singing in the shower, I dont to think too much of timing. When singing accompanied, whether by yourself or others, that is suddenly much more important - and singing can seem harder.

 

[TimWilson]

I came across a 1970 interview with Linda Ronstadt from Country Song Roundup. She's famously said that she didn't care much for her voice before 1980 or so, but this is pretty blunt:

CSR: Have you any favorite records of your own? Do you have one song that you recorded that you dig more than anything else?​

​

Linda: I hate them all. I don't particularly care for the sound of my voice. I'm delighted when anybody likes it and I always try my best. I generally feel a song when I'm singing it but I just don't like to hear it back. With anything I sing there's always something that fell apart, either a track I didn't like or I didn't like some phrasing or some tone I got in my voice and it always brings me down so I try as hard as I can to avoid ever hearing myself sing.​

This is just by way of reminder that you're in good company if you can't stand to hear yourself sing. Linda couldn't either. But she's also the reminder that if you keep doing it, you'll get better at it, aside from the significant contributions to heart health, mental health, longevity, and more, even if you never sing and play at the same time.

(Seriously, sing for a longer, healthier life, even if nobody can hear you, even if you never play while you sing!)

I also came across a Geddy Lee (Rush) interview on "The Secrets of Playing While Singing" in Canadian Musician, which I can summarize as, "practice."

There were a number of times where I thought it was impossible and I could never pull it off, but for me it was always a matter of learning the bass parts first and learning them so well that I didn't have to think about them while I was singing. And then, you know, concentrating on the vocal part of things. If ever there was a conflict between what I was playing and what I was singing, I would slightly rearrange what I was playing to make it somehow easier for me to actually get the syncopation of the two together.​

​

This is even though he was a singer first -- especially lots of choir as a child -- before he ever picked up an instrument. Some of that may also be because of the unusual complexity of Rush's music, but I do think that it's worth noting that he wouldn't necessarily simplify his bass parts as much as rearrange them, to get them out of the way so that he could do what he wanted to vocally.

To apply it to ourselves, the same ukulele arrangement that you can play without singing MIGHT need some tweaking to allow you to sing at the same time. This is the one I've had to struggle with the most, because I really WANT to play all those little fiddly extras, and for my own enjoyment, I still do -- just not while I'm also singing. At least not yet! I'd love to be able to add them back in. As Geddy continues,

It's kind of like any physical activity or sports activity, you know: the more you do it, the more the muscle memory kind of takes over for you and suddenly just clicks into place. I've found on almost every rehearsal that I've ever done, ever, I reach a point of total frustration where I think, "I'm not going to be able to do this." Especially when we were doing stuff from albums like Hemispheres, where the musical parts are so complex. And yet, if I just keep banging away at it, eventually you just sort it out.​

​

So, two folks who are pretty famously good singers, perhaps even legendary singers in their own ways, are telling you that it's hard. You have to fight your feelings about your own voice, and you have to be willing to change how you play to accomodate your singing....but mostly you have to just do it.

 

[Ukecaster]

On a new song, I'll usually learn the chords first and get those rock solid, then add the vocals. If troublesome, I'll modify the chords to make it work. But, as many have said, just do it, and make it your own.

 

[Mark Suszko]

I don't know that my advice works for anyone but myself, but here goes... First, know the song intimately and that means you play it over and over on headphones as if the CIA is using the recording to break you for interrogation. Listen actively to the track, listen for just the drums, listen again to just the background singers, listen again for each instrument in the mix until you can identify all the parts that make the whole. Listen to just the backup singers and practice singing just their parts. By then you have the lyrics welded into your head as well as the beat.

I had a job for over thirty years that forced me to be on the road three to five days of the week, driving for hours, and I would keep myself awake and entertained by cranking the oldies stations and singing along to everything, full volume. It trained my breath control and lung power, it attuned my ear to listen for the chord changes and everything happening in the song, all the layers of it. Three decades of it also improved my range by an octave. And it teaches you to be fearless versus shy. Listening to different artists taught me how they handle phrasing, and if they are slaves to the beat or if they swing that beat a little bit, if they syncopate. Each time the same song came on, I'd listen closely for a different aspect of it, from just the drumming, to the horn section, to whatever. This maps the song into your head and makes you completely comfortable with it. When I had a song I particularly wanted to learn, I'd burn a looping CD for the van and play that for hours, driving up and back. Part of what holds a person back is a lack of confidence and repeating the song until it's in your DNA, can give you confidence. So can visualizing yourself performing it on a stage or at an open mic. Speaking of performing: you will have your best vocal performance from a standing position. Second-best but often adequate (and my preference) is sitting on a stool of proper height, where you can plant your feet well and hold your trunk straight to breathe and resonate from the diaphragm on up... The absolute worst place to play if you want to sing or practice singing, is sitting in an office or dining room chair or sunk into a couch with your lungs and core all curled up.

For me, the uke is as much a rhythmic accompaniment as it is tonal. I try to recreate the rhythm of the original with my strums, so I'm not slavishly hitting a metronomic 4/4; my pattern will vary on the fly for emphasis where I need it because typically you need components of both the bassline, drum pattern, and the lead lines to happen if the song is going to sound anything like the original.

This reminds me of a debate I get into from time to time with my play-mates about how faithful you want to be, or need to be, to the cover. For me a lot of the time I strive to match the cover very closely, because something about the original is what I love most about that. Sometimes you want to emulate the original because that's the audience's expectation as well; "give the people what they want". But it's also perfectly valid to make the song your own and de-construct it, if that's what feels right to you. Some of my favorite songs by pros are their covers of other pros. The problem comes when you're in a band and the players are not all approaching the song the same way; if I want to make it a very faithful-to-the- original version and the one next to me doesn't, we're going to have problems. On solo work, nobody cares; do it how you want.

A tool I use a lot is the paid version of Chordify.net. It gives me a moving chord display in time to the song in a style that works for me. It can automatically transpose up and down, which is great (except the original audio doesn't also pitch bend to match so that can throw your ear off sometimes) and it can play back for you in slower speeds which is awesome for more complex parts. It shows the dot pattern for the chords which I love. Transposing the song can also give it to you in much easier chord shapes than the original. If your song is a strain to sing, transpose it into your best range and see if that helps. This happened to me recently on a cover of "Fooled Around and Fell in Love". I can sing high, but not Mickey Thomas-high, so I brought it down a step or so. I like to play in A and Am because that gets me in the sweet spot of my vocal range.

One more tip for now: who says you have to learn the song in a linear fashion? That you have to start at the first note, and keep playing until you hit a clinker, stop, and go back? That can actually make your learning harder, if it trains you to repeat the mistakes, or get all nervous every time you hit the bridge or whatever. Stu Fuchs taught me that. Often I get "into" the song I'm learning by first working with a part of the chorus or maybe it's a bridge or pre-chorus part. Maybe it's a background pattern in the rhythm line, or some other detail, but I start in that part and then work back towards the front of the song or to the ending. If I hit a part I don't understand how to play, I break that down into super slo-mo and just work the finger pattern until it's familiar. For the sanity of your household, you should get a quiet electric uke and a plug-in headphone amp, so you can noodle away at the one part as long as you need to, without being served eviction papers.

I have to give a lot of credit to my friend Jim D'Ville for his excellent live and online courses on playing by ear and on understanding the emotional value of chords, how to intuit where you go to, from the chord you're on. When you can "feel" where the next chord should go in a song, your fingers are already there by the time your mouth is ready to form the sound. This feeling of having the fingers on autopilot gives me the bandwidth in my head to work on the lyrics and their delivery.

 

[rrobinso84]

I dont remember having this problem. Perhaps trying to learn some guitar 20 years ago got it out of the system.

But just to make it more difficult, I will throw in a idea: why not try to do THREE things at once?
The third being keeping tempo, either tapping your feet our bouncing a bit back and forth.

When confronted with a chord lyrics sheet, I always find that I need to stop and figure out exactly when the chords change and when the lyrics start. Often the chords change on 1 or 3. Sometimes half a measure before on the up stroke.
Sometimes the lyrics pause and start at 2 or something.

Try singing while tapping your feet to figure out the lyrics, and how long the silence between lines are.
Try strumming while tapping your feet.
Then try to combine.

Is this bonkers?

I'm right with you, Uking! I hate lead sheets, especially when the chords aren't placed exactly where they happen.

And I hate piano musical notation, especially when it is 100% accurate to the music, because then it looks so complex!

But without some kind of written way to document a song, where does that leave us?

 

[UkingViking]

I'm right with you, Uking! I hate lead sheets, especially when the chords aren't placed exactly where they happen.

And I hate piano musical notation, especially when it is 100% accurate to the music, because then it looks so complex!

But without some kind of written way to document a song, where does that leave us?

I talk about chord/lyrics sheets here, like you can easily find online.
To me a "lead sheet" has standard notation, but only for the melody - not a lot of extra notes only relevant for piano. And lead sheets have the chords and lyrics placed with respect to the standard notation, so the timing is clear. So for me, lead sheets are a fine written way to document a song . Off course they usually cost something. But song books labeled "fake books" often have them.

With chord/lyrics sheets I tend to listen a bit to the original song, trying to count measures. Then on the chord symbol line above the lyrics I add vertical bars where "musical bars" end. Put in some extra spaces in both lines until it looks intuitive. Then print. This helps me a lot.

 

[Mark Suszko]

This is maybe getting a little off-topic, but there are different styles for making the cheat sheets/chord sheets. The one I prefer puts the chord right above the spot where you intend to play it, and makes the font bold so it stands out more. If the chord has to happen before the lyric, you can offset the chord position, or add some spaces to the lyric sentence to get the alignment you want.
........... A.................E7
Happy Birth-day to you....

But that can take up a lot of room for a long song, and there's a lot of pressure to keep a cheat sheet to a single page, to reduce copying costs.

So some people make their cheat sheets like this instead, putting the chord right in the lyric line:

Happy (A) Birth-day to (E7) you....

That is not my favorite style because while it's more compact, it makes reading the lyric harder for me personally, and it also disturbs my rhythm a bit. I also like to put the chord dot pattern with the chord letter, especially if it's a less-common or tricky one. That's more work to lay out but I find less-experienced folks appreciate it.

A third way I've seen, | takes up a lot of room, | and it has each bar | delineated with actual vertical lines | so it makes four little boxes per bar | in 4/4 time. This I think is for the most rhythmically-impaired folks who can't count beats, but helps for instrumental passages. I dislike this style personally.

Use the style that works best for you.