When I was in my early 30s, I was studying with a wonderful voice teacher in Milwaukee. During one of my lessons I was really struggling to release my death grip on my larynx and sing on my breath. She kept asking me to find more connection to my breath and less tension in my larynx.
I understood what she was asking for. At least intellectually. But I could not figure out how to make it happen. No matter what she said, I just couldn’t do it differently.
Finally, in a moment of frustration, I told her:
“Connie, I’m a waffle person. I want precise amounts of syrup and butter in every single square. You keep asking me to be a pancake person. I don’t know how to be sloppy like that! I can’t let the syrup and butter go everywhere!”
And somehow, pancakes and waffles gave us a language for something we had been struggling to communicate through technical terminology. I still remember this lesson vividly over a decade later, because it was so crucial in my own development as a singer. It helped me understand myself in a way I had never fully been able to articulate before.
The Waffle Person
Waffle people like precision.
We want the butter distributed properly. We want the syrup in every square. We want to understand exactly what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and how to reproduce it the next time.
In music, this can be an enormous strength. Waffle people tend to analyze carefully. We notice details. We practice deliberately. We want to understand how our technique works rather than simply hoping for the best.
But there’s a trap hidden inside all those neat little squares.
Sometimes precision becomes an attempt to control everything.
We start monitoring every note, every breath, every finger, every vowel, every rhythmic subdivision. We try to manufacture the perfect result by managing all of its individual components.
And eventually, we become so busy controlling the music that we have trouble actually making music.
The Pancake Person
Pancake people have a different instinct.
Put the butter on. Pour the syrup. Let it spread.
That doesn’t mean they don’t care about technique or accuracy. And it certainly doesn’t mean they’re sloppy.
It means they’re more comfortable allowing a process to unfold without controlling every tiny part of it.
Musically, that can look like trusting a phrase instead of micromanaging every note. Feeling the pulse instead of calculating every beat. Allowing the breath to move instead of trying to position every muscle involved in producing a sound.
There is an ease to it—a willingness to let the skills you’ve practiced work together as a whole.
That’s fluency.
Precision and Fluency
The goal, of course, isn’t to decide that pancakes are good and waffles are bad.
We need both.
Precision helps us build skills. It lets us identify problems, understand technique, and practice intelligently.
But fluency requires something else: the ability to stop consciously controlling every individual component and allow those skills to integrate. It’s big picture thinking, and allowing the entire body to be within your awareness.
Think about speaking. You aren’t consciously choosing where to place your tongue for every consonant while telling a friend a story. You learned those movements carefully once, but fluency means they now work together in service of something larger.
Music asks us to develop that same kind of trust.
Practice may sometimes require us to become very waffle-like: isolate, examine, adjust, repeat.
But eventually, we have to pour the syrup.
Why Pancakes Helped Me Understand Singing
Nothing about pancakes or waffles is technically related to singing. But sometimes a good metaphor (or in this case, a breakfast food), is what we need to make sense of what’s happening and what we’re struggling with.
Because learning music isn’t only about accumulating more precise instructions. Sometimes progress happens when we find a completely different way to understand what we’re trying to do.
So the next time you find yourself trying to control every detail of your playing or singing, ask yourself:
Is this a moment for waffles—or is it time to let the syrup spread?
