When learning a new piece it’s good to practise in a similar way to the exercises you’ve been using here to establish your Better Voice technique. That way, whenever you practise you will both develop your technique and ensure you are always using it.

The same system is also helpful for working on pieces you learnt in your pre-Better Voice days. When a piece is familiar it’s all too easy for old habits to creep in and technique to go out the window!

The sequence below can be adapted to fit the time available, but ideally you’ll need a good 10 minutes.

• Pick a phrase from the piece that is nicely placed mid-range and avoids large intervals or other tricky corners.
• Hum the phrase at pitch a few times using your preferred hum (mmmm or nnnn) and then the other hum, concentrating on a good well-focused tone and smooth unbroken transitions between notes. Don’t try to force anything: allow the tone to develop as your voice starts to warm up.
• Repeat the process with the phrase at gradually higher and lower pitches, so you are covering more of your range, but nothing too extreme.
• When you feel ready, move on to vocalising the phrase at different pitches with a maa or naa on each note, keeping the unbroken legato line throughout.
• If you need to re-focus the tone in places, replace the relevant maa or naa with a hum to get you back on track.
• Once the tone is secure, introduce some words. Pick one or more of the friendly phrases (Many many men, Many many women, Why o why o why, New moon), and with the phrase from your piece at its written pitch, sketch in the words in a slurred way at first, gradually making the consonants clearer.
• Finally, start to work on the phrase at pitch with the correct lyrics. Again concentrate on the vowels initially and just sketch some gentle consonants, then gradually make the words clearer.
• If necessary, as an intermediate step replace any ‘unfriendly’ consonants in the lyrics that cause you to lose tone with friendly ones (e.g. sing ‘majion’ for ‘passion’).
• When you have made some progress with the words, start to think about how you can best interpret the phrase in terms of tempo, volume and emotion. Perform to an imaginary audience to get used to how you and your voice will feel when the audience is real. 

By working on different phrases in this way you can gradually start to stitch the whole piece together. It will work best if you:

• Give yourself confidence by starting with the easy phrases and working up to the trickier ones that will take more practice to master.
• Use the same practice sequence given above for individual intervals or small groups of notes that are especially tricky or near the extremes of your range.