In my video where I discuss how to memorize new music, I said it takes me 7 days. I don’t want you to think that I’m spending all day, every day, every waking hour trying to get these new songs in my head. I typically spend maybe an hour a day on a new piece. A lot of that practice is passive. The active practice is maybe 15 to 20 minutes a day on a new piece. Just one song. Because if you overwork it, it’s just like cooking food. It’s mushy and you still want it to have texture and color and so you can’t overcook it. So just 15 minutes a day and leave it alone. But if you do a little bit every single day, when you need to perform it, it’s great. In the active part of practice I am slowly in the beginning working on the pitches, making sure that I am singing the exact melody perfectly. Making sure that I have all of the words perfectly. If there’s choreography, making sure that I have all of the steps perfectly. Slowly taking my time. And in that 15 to 20 minutes, however much I can get done, that’s how much I can get done. And I don’t always start the beginning over and over again, because then the beginning is great and the end is mess. The first time I practice it very slowly, I’m just doing the beginning. If it’s a long song I’m just doing the beginning. Then the next time I practice I’m just doing the middle and I might review the beginning and I might do the middle, but I’m really working on the middle. And then the third time I’m working on the piece, I’m really working on the end. I might touch on the first two sections, but I’m really concentrating my time on the end. So then like the fourth time I hit the song, I’m doing the whole song through in a medium tempo. And I’m just keeping it there. Then the fifth and sixth time I’m doing it in time. 
But all the while I’m also doing the passive part of practice, the listening and the visualizing. Now with the listening: I’m cooking, I’m cleaning, I’m playing with my kids, I’m doing some work on my computer, I am driving my kids to various places, I’m, you know, relaxing doing what have you, but I’m passively absorbing the piece of music in time. Just like when you learn a song from a radio, you didn’t spend time practicing it, but the radio stations have played it a million times so it’s stuck inside your head. So that’s a part of practice. It’s passive, but it is practice. And the other half of the passive practice is visualizing. That’s also done in time. That’s not slowed down, that’s in time. You’re visualizing the final performance: in full costume, you’re visualizing your entrance, your reaction to the crowd applauding, you’re visualizing your initial stance and the song stance, all the way through until the end everything is perfect, everything is wonderful, the crowd goes bananas and you exit stage. I tend to do my visualizations before I go to bed and first thing when I wake up in the morning. While I’m putting on my makeup, if I’m not, if I’m not listening I’m visualizing. Like if I’m in a doctor’s office and I’ve left my headphones, I’m visualizing my performance. Because it doesn’t take any physical effort you can do that for several hours. This really takes focus even though it’s passive practice, you still concentrating and you’re still giving it the mental energy necessary. Now, I wouldn’t do the visualization while I’m chopping fruits and vegetables for dinner, because you’re liable to chop a finger off if you’re doing it properly. But in things where you’re not doing anything else, but you don’t have your music available to listen to, visualizing the performance is excellent. Because also this puts you in a good state of mind that you’re going to play over and over and over again the best case scenario. You’re not going to visualize you’re tripping on some new high heels, you’re not going to visualize your dress falling down, you’re not going to visualize all the crazy things that could possibly happen. You’re going to visualize your moment to shine. 
So to recap, there’s two types of practicing. Active, where you start off very slowly working on the various parts of the melody, then you add the lyrics, then you add any movement, and then you bring it up to tempo. Making sure that you get all those notes right, all those words right before you go in to changing the tempo. Then the second half of practice, the passive part of practice can happen all day long. This is a mental exercise where you’re just listening and absorbing the music. And you are, and if you’re not able to listen to the music, you’re visualizing your final performance. And while you’re listening, the moments that you’re actively engaged in the listening process, you’re visualizing your performance. So, I hope these tips can help you with your next song.

***

“Learn to Sing with Omega”  has singing lessons about diction and warming up, music lessons about scales and chords, and professional tips and tricks about health and beauty.  Learn every thing you need to be a better singer.  Sing higher, sing lower, sing louder and sing longer with Omega Bone, the authentic American voice.


All voices are welcome: Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Baritone and Bass.
All Styles are welcome: blues, classical, jazz, dance, disco, funk,   gospel, rock, r&b, spiritual, and theater

Welcome to omegabone.com. In this video I’ll be discussing how I learn new music. Thank you for joining me. I currently have a jazz trio and I am looking for some more things to get into. Every time you join a new group that means that you have to either write new material or learn other material. Here in Germany cover bands are very, very, very popular. Last year I was in a Mothers Finest cover band, and Mothers Finest is a interracial rock band from Georgia and they were hot in the 70’s.  They weren’t big in the United States, but they were huge in Germany. They made an album, a live concert album at the Rockpalast and that still sells today.  If you want to see some people rocking out, you need to check them out. They are an awesome band. But anyway, so to join that I joined a cover band, a Mothers Finest cover band called Another Mother. And it was short lived in that they didn’t want to perform, they just wanted to play in the basement. Every time there was an opportunity to perform someone would say oh well, and anyway. So I learned 2 hours’ worth of music for them just for them not to perform. I will not do that again. I will only work with professional bands from here on out. But anyway, that leads me to my point today. When I take a piece of music, I listen to it and listen to it, it takes me a week to learn a new song, but in that week I can learn maybe 10 to 15 songs.  In a month I can learn maybe 30 songs in a month. I can have them memorized down with steps and really understanding them. I have my journal here and I have at the top “luck favors the prepared” and the second quote is “Go! Confront the problem! Fight! Win!” That’s from The Incredibles, the little super designer, she wrote, she said that to Holly Hunter’s character the mother superhero when she didn’t know where her husband was.  This kind of just tells me that if I want something I have to go get it. She wanted her husband and, you know, she was kind of cowering at the designers house and the designer was like enough of this, you know, go get it. Anyway, so this is me going to get it. 
Here is Baby Love, and these little markers here kind of identify the form for me so that when we rehearse I can quickly look down oh there’s the, I know I have to go back to the purple star, I know that I’ve missed at this point, so I have all my notes in here. When I go through this I can sing with the band exactly as the record plays. And if they perform their part exactly right, I can do my part exactly right and we sound perfect. Yeah when that happens right. But anyway, so I would recommend writing the lyrics down, not just copying them from the internet and having the piece of paper, but the whole act of writing it down helps me to put it into my muscle memory by writing it down. If I write it down 3 times, the first time I’m writing it I’m transcribing the song. Syllables, full on syllables. Let me see if I have an example of… This is Truth Going To Set You Free, this is in pencil I don’t know how well you can see that 🎶singing🎶 Right, so but because I wrote it down like that, I knew exactly what it sounded like. Just boom, because I have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, I know I had to sing 5 oh’s before I go into the Yeah. 

The first time I’m writing it down I’m transcribing it. Whatever I hear on the record, that’s exactly what I write. Whoever I’m transcribing, whichever voice I’m transcribing. Then the second time I write it, I’m copying it so that it’s neat. And so I don’t do this in this book, I do this on a separate piece of paper that I throw away, it’s kind of like homework. The third time I write it it’s from memory. And I probably do that at the end of the week. The beginning of the, like if the week is 7 days right, on the first day of the week I’m listening. The second day of the week I do the transcription. The third day of the week I’m practicing with my transcription. The fourth day of the week I’m copying my transcription. The fifth day of the week I’m practicing with my transcription. The sixth day or the seventh day I’m writing it from memory. 

Now you don’t have to do this, but this is what works for me. This helps me to memorize new songs. And if I have a show where there’s some choreography, I will write the entire show including the steps. On 1, 2, 3, 4, you know, for 3 measures I’m doing step toe touches, I’m doing, not that I can do toe touches, but you know, whatever my movement is I write that down in the transcription. Then there’s an interlude, there’s a costume change, then there’s the next song, and then I’m doing X, Y and Z. Enter on this side of the stage, enter on that side of the stage. Whatever I have to do it’s all written down for that number. If the number has 3 songs in it I have to write down all the words, all the interludes, all the steps, and if I write them down 3 times I have it. You know, it’s very important to write things down. I hope these tips help you to learn your next piece of music. Thank you for joining me.

"Learn to Sing with Omega"  has singing lessons, music lessons, and professional tips and tricks.  Learn every thing you need to be a better singer.  Sing higher, sing lower, sing louder and sing longer.

Omega Bone, with an authentic American voice, traveled the world, delivering dazzling performances in Jazz, Musical Theater, Gospel, Soul and Classical music.

All voices are welcome: Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Baritone and Bass.
All Styles are welcome: blues, classical, jazz, dance, disco, funk,   gospel, rock, r&b, spiritual, and theater

Now besides the obvious of eating a variety of foods, fruits, vegetables, proteins of various sorts, and dairy, it’s also important to drink lots of water and get lots of rest, and to limit the amount of bad things that you put into your body. All drugs: including caffeine, alcohol, unnecessary prescription medications, processed sugars from candy, soda, fruit drinks, not fruit juice which is pressed liquid from fruit, but drinks that have sugar added. You want to stay away from all of those. Of course it’s difficult to absolutely cut all of them out because when you go out with your friends you might have a glass of wine, when you go out with your kids to a birthday party you might have only soda to drink. In those cases go ahead and enjoy, but definitely limit those things. Those are “sometime foods, not everyday foods” like we tell our kids. 
Now something that is very important is to keep your hands clean. I’m constantly washing my hands. I’m not obsessive compulsive, but definitely I wash my hands a lot. When I was a music teacher in Los Angeles I had 100 children in a choir, and I saw 7 classes of 25 children every day. So over the week, I saw thousands of children and I didn’t get sick because I wash my hands. And when I can’t get to a sink like when I’m traveling or when I was in between classes, I would take some white vinegar, spritz my hands, rub them together and then take a Wet-Nap and wipe off the dirt. The difference between using soap and water and anti-bacterial solutions or vinegar in this case, is that you have the running water to rinse the dirt off. If you just use the anti-bacterial solutions or vinegar, you leave clean dirt on your hands and that’s not as effective. You’ve got to get the dirt off. I prefer vinegar to the alcohol based products because alcohol dries your skin out and if you can get your hands clean without that, why not do that?
This morning I was feeling a little bit sick. I felt a little tickle in the back of my throat. First thing I took a pill that’s got a mix of Golden Seal, Echinacea and Cayenne pepper. Awesome. And it’s gone. Like I don’t, I’m not going to get sick. I took one yesterday morning because I felt the tickle, I felt it again today, and I’ll probably take another one tonight being that I had taken one today. Probably I should have took one last night, but I forgot. Golden Seal and Echinacea works wonders for me, and then I found the tablet that also has the pepper, you  know like when you have spicy food from like China or India, you know, they have lots and lots and lots of spice in their food and your nose just runs. You’re enjoying the food but like you have to keep tissue with you to blotch your nose because it’s just, it’s running. And so Cayenne pepper is good for helping to loosen that as well. But you definitely don’t want the cold to start so taking preventative measures: washing your hands, if you feel a tickle taking the Golden Seal Echinacea, but that necessarily work for everyone so you’ll need to talk to your pharmacist or your health professional if you have any adverse reactions to something like that. Mucus is our way of carrying germs and things out of our body. So go ahead and blow your nose and get it all out, cough it all up, but try not to clear your throat because when you clear your throat you’re, you’re slamming your vocal folds together and that’s not good because then your vocal folds say, oh no I need help, help, help, and then your body produces more mucus. The better thing to do is to swallow, let it pass through, drink water and let it flush out the other end instead of coming up this way. Another thing is to drink warm tea with honey. Now this isn’t going to cure your cold, it’s just going to coat your throat so that your vocal folds don’t feel like they need to have more protection because the honey will coat everything very nicely. And you don’t want to put too much lemon because that will strip the mucus, but you do want some lemon because of the vitamin C and it will cut excess mucus if you don’t have too much. I would recommend against using antihistamines for the same reason I spoke of regarding lemon that antihistamines dry up mucus membranes. But you need the, you need some mucus for your vocal folds to vibrate. And if you use antihistamine, that’s going to suck that all up and you’re going to have dry spots and it’s not going to function properly. 
So if you allow yourself to get sick, what you have to do is hydrate. Drink, drink, drink, drink, drink, drink, drink as much water as you can to flush the germs out of your system. You might want to add some fresh squeezed orange juice to the water, you don’t want to drink straight orange juice because that causes more mucus because it strips away, the citrus strips away your natural mucus and then your body produces more mucus to compensate. But watered down, you know like just a squeeze of lemon or orange in your water is a nice, you get the vitamin C, you get the nice flavor, but you don’t have the dehydrating effect of the citrus. Or you can add cranberry which helps to clean your system as well, or even celery if you would like something a little spicier. Now, if you feel that your throat is sore, you might want to use a saltwater concoction. Pour some salt in some warm water and not so much that salt collects in the glass, just enough so that the water, the salt is suspended within the water and then gargle with that. That will help to strip some of the mucus. Also if you inhale steam (get a pot of water, put a towel over your head, inhale the steam), that will help to loosen the congestion in your nose and in your throat, and then drinking lots of water will help to push it down through your system.
Now, if you’re sick and you have to perform that same day, it’s very important that you warm up so slowly. Just, just super, super slow. Don’t worry about the music, don’t worry about the pitches, don’t worry about the tempo, rhythm, don’t worry about anything. Just start off with a 🎶humming🎶 Just a low hum. 🎶humming🎶 Wherever your voice goes, that’s where you let it go. 🎶humming🎶 Then you can start going into the 10 minute routine to build your bottom, to build your top, to build your middle. I would do the buzz for maybe a half hour. Then I would add the syllables and do that for another half hour. Then maybe for another hour I would slowly buzz some of the songs that I have to do for the show. Not the hardest songs, but definitely the easier songs that have the smallest range. Buzz through those, get that sensation going, and then maybe just before the show start buzzing the harder songs with the longest, with the widest range, with the fastest tempos, or and the slowest tempos because those are very difficult to do as well if you’re sick because your lung capacity is taxed. So slowly warm up throughout the whole day. If you end up warming up 8 hours before a show, by the time your show comes you’re going to be confident that you can sing through the cold. Now, if you have a chest cold, take your butt to bed and call it a day. But if it’s just in your head you can always work through that. But a chest cold you have to just rest and drink lots of fluids and get better. So don’t ever let a cold fall down into your chest. If it gets here, go and get in bed because if it gets in here you’re out of luck. There’s nothing you can do because breath is life, life is music. So if you don’t have the life, you don’t have the music. I hope you found some of these tips on being a healthy singer helpful. ​
“Learn to Sing with Omega”  has singing lessons about diction and warming up, music lessons about scales and chords, and professional tips and tricks about health and beauty.  Learn every thing you need to be a better singer.  Sing higher, sing lower, sing louder and sing longer with Omega Bone, the authentic American voice.

All voices are welcome: Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Baritone and Bass.
All Styles are welcome: blues, classical, jazz, dance, disco, funk,   gospel, rock, r&b, spiritual, and theater

Eating a light breakfast is a great way to start the day. 

I used 400g Unsweetened Canned Pineapples and 350g Mixed Berries. I boil a batch of eggs once a week and keep them in the refrigerator.


“Learn to Sing with Omega”  has singing lessons about diction and warming up, music lessons about scales and chords, and professional tips and tricks about health and beauty.  Learn every thing you need to be a better singer.  Sing higher, sing lower, sing louder and sing longer with Omega Bone, the authentic American voice.


All voices are welcome: Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Baritone and Bass.
All Styles are welcome: blues, classical, jazz, dance, disco, funk,   gospel, rock, r&b, spiritual, and theater

Music by Wayne Shorter
Lyrics by Doug Carn

​There's no Poet beneath the skies;
A voice will never arise, 
that could sing of my love 
For my dear infant eyes.
Infant eyes, you are my all, 
Without your smile the stars would fall, 
And the moon would lose its glow, 
And the rivers would cease to flow.
I wish you could realize this love i have inside, 
A love that never dies, for my dear infant eyes.


Some day you will grow up, 
You'll grow up and have your problems,  
Little one you must try to be strong, 
For being strong is the one thing in the whole world that will save you
And always keep room in your heart for love
For love will teach you to care
And in caring you'll find the need for sharing
And through sharing you'll lead a happy life
A joyous life my dear, sweet child
May God be with you all the while
And go on your way working harder day by day 
Until your dreams, your dreams come true
​Make your dreams come true


Infant eyes, you are my all, 
Without your smile the stars would fall,
And the moon would lose its glow, 
And the rivers would cease to flow.
I wish you could realize this love i have inside, 
A love that never dies, for my dear infant eyes.

Music by Alex North
​Lyrics by Hy Zaret

Oh my love, my darling
I've hungered for your touch
A long lonely time.
And time goes by so slowly
And time can do so much.
Are you still mine?
I need your love,
I need your love
God speed your love to me.

Lonely rivers flow to the sea, to the sea,
To the open arms of the sea.
Lonely rivers sigh "wait for me, wait for me"
I'll be coming home,
Wait for me.

Oh my love, my darling
I've hungered for your touch
A long lonely time.
And time goes by so slowly
And time can do so much.
Are you still mine?
I need your love, I...
You know, I need your love
God speed your love to me,
​to me,
to me,
to me.

“Learn to Sing with Omega”  has singing lessons about diction and warming up, music lessons about scales and chords, and professional tips and tricks about health and beauty.  Learn every thing you need to be a better singer.  Sing higher, sing lower, sing louder and sing longer with Omega Bone, the authentic American voice.

All voices are welcome: Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Baritone and Bass.
All Styles are welcome: blues, classical, jazz, dance, disco, funk, gospel, rock, r&b, spiritual, and theater

Learn how to wear a head wrap with short hair. In this video I demonstrate my head wrap technique with a sarong with and without tassels .
​
“Learn to Sing with Omega”  has singing lessons about diction and warming up, music lessons about scales and chords, and professional tips and tricks about health and beauty.  Learn every thing you need to be a better singer.  Sing higher, sing lower, sing louder and sing longer with Omega Bone, the authentic American voice.

All voices are welcome: Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Baritone and Bass.
All Styles are welcome: blues, classical, jazz, dance, disco, funk,   gospel, rock, r&b, spiritual, and theater

Music by Henry Mancini,  
​Lyrics by Norman Gimbel

His gaze swept over me like a slow hot wind.
Some days it’s too warm to fight a slow hot wind.
There in the shade like a cool drink waiting,
He sat with slow fire in his eyes just waiting
​
Some days it’s too warm to fight a slow hot wind.

There in the shade like a cool drink waiting,
He sat with slow fire in his eyes just waiting
​
Some days it’s too warm to fight a slow hot wind.
A slow hot wind.
A slow hot wind.

“Learn to Sing with Omega”  has singing lessons about diction and warming up, music lessons about scales and chords, and professional tips and tricks about health and beauty.  Learn every thing you need to be a better singer.  Sing higher, sing lower, sing louder and sing longer with Omega Bone, the authentic American voice.

All voices are welcome: Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Baritone and Bass.
All Styles are welcome: blues, classical, jazz, dance, disco, funk, gospel, rock, r&b, spiritual, and theater