Tone Comes Last
Let Yourself Sound A Little Worse As You Get Much Better
Many people who struggle to improve their vocals do so because they fail to allow themselves the leeway required to learn. They shy away from any strange-sounding tone or unfamiliar feel. In most cases, these are the very things they need to learn to improve.
Learning to sing takes time. The initial tones you learn to make introduce you to a new technique. They represent just a fraction of the final tone of your singing voice that will develop after you have the muscle control and technical abilities to craft it. Keep working and have patience.
As you learn those abilities, you will likely sound worse before you sound better. However, if you stick with the program, the feel and strength will come. Eventually you’ll move through notes and tones with confidence and control. This post explains different stages in the vocal learning process and what to expect as you progress.
Singing is exercise.
The first step to developing control is understanding how to get different sounds out of your instrument. And since your instrument is your body, that means moving the muscles that shape the sound. Learning to move muscles takes exercise.
We start with warmups.
As any coach will tell you, you need to warm up your muscles before working out to reduce the risk of injury and maximize performance. Singing is no different. I teach my students warmup exercises before anything else.
Warmup exercises get you moving the muscles that shape the interior of your instrument without straining your vocal chords or the cold muscles. Once you have the muscles moving, you can start to feel how they affect the resonance of your voice and hear the resulting sound change.
For some students, manipulating muscles on the interior of the body is an entirely new concept, or they’ve simply never thought about moving the interior musculature of the face. So, even this first step can unlock new parts of your voice. However, until you can control it, you may think it sounds “bad”.
Since you just discovered the muscles that open that part of the sound, they likely have little strength or dexterity. The warmups, along with other exercises, help you develop that strength and control.
Breaking Old Habits
Part of building up your strength and control may include breaking old habits. Vocal habits form, often subconsciously, as you learn to speak. Those habits may be tied to your tone. Breaking them may temporarily lead to a worse tone as you develop new techniques.
Don’t shy away from a new technique just because it sounds bad as you learn to do it. Almost no one sounds good while learning a new instrument. That’s part of the challenge. Keep up the routine, and eventually you’ll harness all the resonance benefits of the new technique while still getting the rich tones you likely want. That will take some time because you have to get your muscles strong enough and flexible enough to make that happen.
As you learn to control your instrument, you’ll also need to map it.
Mapping Your Instrument
Using a new technique can change what feels or sounds “right” to you before you start.
While monitoring your sound is important, it can be deceptive. You cannot hear yourself from the inside the same way you sound from the outside. Your internal resonance from generating the sound will always interfere with how you hear yourself from the inside. That’s why when you hear a recording of yourself, you sound different from what you expected. It’s also why professional singers have either in-ear monitoring or a floor monitor pointed back at them.
However, a monitor is just what its name indicates, a tool for monitoring your vocals to ensure nothing goes wrong. To keep your vocals on track before something goes wrong, you’ll need to learn to sing by feel.
Vocals as an instrument has no frets or keys. You must use your internal muscles to play the instrument. You can’t look at it and count frets or keys. You HAVE to learn to play it by feel. So, as you learn a new technique, you will need to learn how to feel your sound in new locations or using different parts of your resonance chamber than what you might be used to.
Once you can manipulate the muscles that shape your vocal chamber, you’ll need to deliberately concentrate on creating a mental map of the interior feel of your instrument and matching it to the external sound of your instrument.
Recording, monitoring, and instructor feedback are vital during this process. Instructor feedback will guide you to parts of the resonance chamber you may have ignored before and keep you on track with the new technique and away from bad habits. Recording and monitoring will reinforce that feedback so you can begin to diagnose issues on your own.
After you make the mental connection of the feel to the sound, hearing yourself back on recording won’t surprise you as much because you start mentally projecting how it will sound based on how it feels.
Improve agility and strength.
With continuous work, you can improve your vocal control, power, and even range.
After you map how your voice feels using the new techniques, you’ll know more clearly where your strengths and weaknesses lie. With that knowledge, we can work to address any areas that need improvement by expanding on the warmup exercises to target your specific needs.
With better muscle control, you can create more tone and move between them more easily.
Develop your desired tone.
Once you have a better command of the feel and control of your instrument, you can sing in multiple different tones with consistency. You can work on improving whichever tones you like at that point.
As part of our lessons, I will recommend songs to expand your vocal capabilities. We can work on expanding and improving your voice for versatility or hone in on a specific sound for a performance. Both options can help you improve, but they require different types of work, so having a clear objective about the goals of each lesson helps keep things on track.
Additional Notes
Your voice develops piece by piece. Don’t judge yourself on an unfinished product.
Developing control comes fastest with regular, daily work.
Learning to sing takes time. Some days it can be harder to feel than others. Don’t get discouraged by one or even a few bad days.
Trust the warmups to help you find your technique, especially on the days that feel harder.
Thanks for reading. Be sure to like and subscribe to get more insights about vocal training and get notified about my next post about how almost anyone can improve their vocal technique.
