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!