Afraid to Sing?
March 10, 2025
There’s a taboo on singing poorly (or feeling that you’re not so good). That’s a shame because most people can learn to sing better.
Afraid of making a mistake when making music? You're not alone. The problem with mistakes and making music is that you often only have one chance to get it right. But, is perfection really important? Or are you allowed to make mistakes in music?
Tonight is the night. You’re giving a concert. You’ve studied the music for three months and know it almost inside out. Almost, because there’s one part that keeps going wrong. The first three times it went wrong in practice, you could still forgive yourself, but the fourth time you began to punish yourself: “It must go well now, Johan (your, according to you, ten thousand times better co-singer) could do it in the last rehearsal, so I should be able to do it too. It’s not even hard…”
You practice the few bars. Every time it goes wrong, you come up with a new reason why it should have gone well. As the icing on the cake, the conductor says at the next rehearsal: “Guys, you really need to study that part better at home.”
Before you reach the section at the concert, your stomach starts to flutter: here it comes! During a few bars of rest, you practiced it again because a colleague said it helped. Ten seconds later it’s over and you’ve made the mistake anyway. When people ask afterward how it went, you say: yeah, okay, but I made the mistake again. The feeling about the concert is dominated by the mistake you made.
The problem with making mistakes in music is that you often only have one chance to do it right. If you paint a painting and make a mistake, you can correct it by painting over it. You can even start over if you wish. Afterward, you can still exhibit or sell the painting without anyone seeing you made that mistake.
I notice that in the art world, mistakes are handled very differently. Viewers enjoy it when their favorite YouTube artist shows all the mistakes that occur during the creative process. They are motivated to start themselves. After all, it doesn’t matter if you make mistakes. Of course, there is occasionally a “*** What have I done now? I’ve messed it up.” but that almost immediately turns into: “How can I fix it now? What can I make out of my mistake?”
Luckily, there are no longer many teachers who stop a student at every note to say what needs improvement. I’ve never had such a teacher myself. Yet, I’ve often heard comments like:
In this way, we are trained to always want to do it perfectly during practice sessions too, while sometimes it’s good to just let the happy accidents be, especially if a piece doesn’t have to be performed.
In music education, more emphasis can be placed on ‘happy accidents’. Happy accidents during practice are not really a problem, but actually beneficial. By trying, you learn. It doesn’t even have to be a big deal to make a mistake ten times before attempting to correct it, as long as you keep believing that you can correct the mistake.
Correcting mistakes can take a lot of time, and sometimes during practice or in a lesson, it’s better to focus on the musical development of the larger parts that are already going well.
This doesn’t mean a teacher should never point out mistakes. If a student doesn’t realize they’re making a mistake, a teacher can indicate this. If the student knows themselves, they often know very well whether this is something that should be addressed in the music lesson. Sometimes it goes well right away, and sometimes the teacher needs to provide extra guidance and study opportunities to correct the mistake.
As soon as irritation arises from the student or the teacher that things are not going well, the chance decreases that the student learns to correct the mistake in the lesson. If this situation arises, it is better to say together: “We are stopping for now, it is not bad that it is still going wrong, we will continue later.”
If something has not improved at all after playing it ten times in a row, it does not mean you won’t be able to do it, but it probably does mean that you are completely saturated and frustrated for that day.
A too strong focus on your mistakes makes you develop tunnel vision and makes the mistake bigger than necessary. It’s like painting a portrait and then not finding one of the eyes quite right. You change more and more about the eye, but at the same time make it bigger. You can no longer un-see it now. Everything is just about the eye, even at the concert.
There is, within the music world, the mentality of “You must practice something until you can no longer do it wrong. If you devote enough time to it, you can’t do it wrong anymore.” That is simply not true. You can always play something correctly and still make a mistake during the concert. Who hasn’t had that experience? You can study something endlessly, eventually master it, and still make a mistake at a concert. You can mentally go over the toughest bars shortly beforehand, and when push comes to shove, still make a mistake.
The more afraid you become of the mistake, the more likely you are to make it. I myself suffer greatly from this. I have studied myself to exhaustion on a piece that I had long mastered, but which I doubted being certain about. It went wrong during the dress rehearsal. In the two concerts thereafter, it went wrong again. It seemed as if I hadn’t tried my best. Because of that, I felt really bad and went back to practicing it every time it went wrong.
After the second concert, I realized it wasn’t working. I didn’t look at it for a week. During the next four concerts, I didn’t go over it before the concert or in between. It went well four times.
You can do everything to prevent messing up as long as you don’t lose sight of the bigger picture and remember that making music involves sometimes making a mistake. I am convinced that you can then practice, attend lessons, and give concerts with a much better feeling (and probably fewer mistakes as a result).
A while ago I wrongly promised a man that he could participate in a promotion where he would receive €20. He was not eligible for it. (I had one task… to go over the promotional terms with him…)
I found out two weeks after I had spoken to him. Luckily, I could still track down who he was and I called him back to rectify my mistake. I stammered: “I promised you something two weeks ago and it is not correct. You will not receive €20.” Some people would go ballistic (The Bank has lied, they are all greedy). But the gentleman said: “Oh, it doesn’t matter, I am a member of the Club of It Doesn’t Matter”.
Years earlier he had accidentally bumped into a woman and said “Sorry”. She turned out to be a member of the Club of It Doesn’t Matter. It is a club with no maximum number of members and no fees. Anyone who wants to can join. I was allowed to join by the gentleman. Their motto: we worry or get angry about so many things that go wrong, but actually, they don’t care.
In my orchestra, a girl who studied cello at the conservatory came to see if she wanted to be our leader. We were all amateur cellists and it was one of the first rehearsals. Wrong notes were flying all around. One of us played a ‘b’ instead of a ‘b-flat’. Suddenly, someone hissed ‘b-flat, B-FLAT!’. What was this? The new girl might have thought the b-cellist hadn’t realized it should actually be a b-flat.
In response to later mistakes by various section members, she would turn around, so she could look at the person who made the mistake with irritation or just mention the note it should have been. After the rehearsal, we were tense from the wrong-note stress and ended up laughing very hard because of it. She came up to us and asked, “How do you deal with wrong notes?”
We looked at the ground (because we couldn’t stop laughing) and mumbled “Uh, well, uh, we don’t really have a strategy for that.”
Now I think it might have been good if we DID have a strategy for it, just not hers.
She never came back, much to the relief of both sides.
There’s a taboo on singing poorly (or feeling that you’re not so good). That’s a shame because most people can learn to sing better.
In this article, I give four reasons why you might feel a strained sensation in your voice. In other words: why you are probably too relaxed in your body, causing too much tension on your delicate vocal cords. The first two are physical and the last two are psychological. They reinforce each other.
