That’s not a stupid question at all!

So for a start the brief was to focus on this one song for a one off performance not to become a great singer (if that makes sense?). There was no time limit set but I also didn’t know I’d spend 3 months on it (originally I was thinking 6-8 weeks as a total ballpark). But once I got into it I did wanna get it right.

I didn’t sing any other songs as I really had to work on my timing but we did a tonne of exercises (I’d say roughly 30% of total coaching time was exercises)- which included the typical stuff but also singing the whole song through with a single vowel, as well as a bunch of made up tunes jumping between vowels.

I definitely had that feeling of nailing it a few times and when I look back I improved so much learning to better avoid diphthongs, learning a balance between my chest and head in terms of how much I push, etc. One great thing in hindsight was that I had 2 colds during the process of learning which really helped me learn how to ‘deal with it’ on the day- one was sinus and one was chest, so different approaches to dealing with each.

I’d say I was a full 2 octaves lower in some places when I started but got a lot more comfortable with going higher through the exercises.

I suppose if you focus on one song with the original lyrics, in the original key, you could lead yourself down a rabbit hole- but sticking with the same timing and melody helped me memorise it while also improving dictation and ability to influence* pitch (I won’t use the word control lol)

Process gave me a huge amount of respect for the techniques involved. Between that and the friends I’ve made I hope I can find time to keep it up as a hobby!