Singing With Emotion

Some of my advertising says, "Learn to sing with emotion." Some people respond to that ad by saying that if you have to learn to sing with emotion, then you're faking it. This misunderstanding could have a lot of factors, one of which might be the phrasing. I changed the phrasing on my website to "Learn to emote with your voice." That's probably a better description of what I teach. This post explains how vocal lessons help you express your true emotions.

Learning to sing with emotion does not mean jamming fake emotions into a sterile processor. (That's what techno is for—just joking). It means learning how to express your honest emotions so they sound good on the microphone.

Feeling emotions and expressing emotions are two separate things.

Sometimes, when a person sings, you can hear they're on pitch, but the performance seems flat for some reason. Other times, you'll listen to performances where the singing moves you like it hijacked your nervous system. The difference comes from how the vocalist transforms emotion into sound. By improving vocal technique, singers can relate more emotion to the audience in ways that let them feel it. 

Your emotions are real.

Everyone has emotions. Some people can express them easily, some need a little help. But, just because someone struggles to express their emotions doesn't mean they don't have them and feel them strongly. You already feel—no need to fake that. 

Your emotions are yours.

I have a growth mindset. People can learn to do almost anything with enough time and focus. However, I'm not sure you can teach adults what emotions to feel. You can teach lots of ways to pretend you feel a certain way. That's basically acting. But, at your core, you will always have deep-rooted emotions that play a part in driving who you are. That's what the audience wants to connect to.

How you naturally express yourself may not relay the sound for maximum impact.

Most people learn to express emotions as children. Genetics and environment impact how we learn to express our emotions, including speaking, shouting, and screaming. Some fortunate people also learn singing as an emotional expression.

Most people don't get to choose their own upbringing. We enter adulthood with whatever speech and emotional patterns we developed growing up. That means we have different accents and different sounds we make when we feel a specific emotion.

Some of those sound better than others in a musical context. But, since a big part of those sounds came from mimicking people around you, you can expand your ability to express yourself by doing the same thing with singers who sound a way you like.

Some people naturally sing with more resonance.

Singing with emotion requires resonance. Some languages and accents emphasize sounds that resonate well, and others don't. Areas where such languages or accents are common tend to produce more singers. But people of all different backgrounds can sing. Some may just find they have more work to do than others.

Resonance carries emotion through the sound.

Singing with resonance makes the difference between the audience hearing you and the audience feeling you. A voice with more resonance will bring more vibration. That vibration delivers a richer and clearer sound to the audience, especially through a microphone. The audience can also feel the sound vibrations. The more resonance you can create before the sound leaves your body, the better you can express your emotions and relay them to the audience.

Resonance is different from volume.

Resonance does not mean volume. You can achieve a lot of volume by screaming and shouting, but those don't necessarily resonate well. You can also get a lot of resonance in a quiet sound.

Resonance happens when the sound waves coming from your vocal cords reverberate through your body as you sing. That reverberation essentially packs more vibration into the sound, enriching it. If you think of volume as the reach of the sound, resonance is more like the density of the sound.

Learning good vocal technique can help you maximize your resonance.

Vocal resonance is the key to singing with emotion. Getting good vocal resonance gives a full, rich, and clear sound. Most of my vocal teaching comes down to giving people the knowledge and guidance to develop the mechanics of getting and maintaining good vocal resonance across an endless range of pitches, phonetics, and tones.

Learning to sing with emotion means developing the ability to use resonance to connect your real emotions to the audience.

When you sing with emotion, it starts with the emotion. Try to hone in on what a song makes you feel and what compels you to sing it. Those feelings should lead you to the sounds you need to make to express those feelings.

Using learnable vocal techniques, you can ensure those sounds have the resonance needed to make an impact on the audience. You can make them feel what you feel through the sound waves. That's when singers really connect with the crowd.

Old singing habits take work to overcome, especially when induced with emotion.

Whether you realize it or not, you already vocalize your emotions. Some of those neural pathways develop when we're infants. That means you have a default setting for what sounds will happen when you feel a certain way. Some of those default sounds may have good vocal resonance, while others might not.

As you develop your singing technique through vocal training, you'll be able to get more and more of your sounds to resonate. We will work a lot on mechanics, ensuring you can make the movements that let the sound do what it needs to do. Check out my previous post, Singing Is Exercise, for more on this.

Once you have good mechanics, we start mapping your voice so you know your instrument. This process includes rerouting all emotional expression through the new mechanics to the resonance chamber, where the sound waves reverberate and gain density. This rerouting takes a lot of repetitive practice to ensure the emotion follows the correct route on demand.

For example, you've made the same sound all of your life to express the feeling of sadness. Now we need to change that sound to a different place so it resonates. It will take some time before the new route feels right physically. And, even after it does, those old habits of expression can creep back in from time to time as you focus on other parts of development. The stronger the emotion, the stronger the pull to the old habits.

This process can make some people feel vulnerable as they get that deep into their own processes. Eventually, the new routes will feel like the defaults, but the original routes will still always feel a little comfortable. This makes keeping your vocal technique tuned up imperative. Also, part of the reason vocalists warm-up is to get a good feel for all those routes before they take the stage.

Accessing Real Emotions in Uninspiring Songs

In some cases, singers must sing songs they don't connect to. I used to perform in a band that played at weddings. I had to sing so many boring or cheesy songs people requested. But I was paid to show up and do the job, so I had to bring it. Besides, when you perform regularly, you quickly realize that you still want to sound as good as possible, even if you don't dig the song.

If you find yourself in this position, don't just try to fake it. Take a little time to find a way to connect to the song. If you don't like the lyrics, look for something in the music that moves you. If you hate the beat, try to relate to the lyrics. You might even come up with your own interpretation of what the lyrics mean and connect to that.

You can also recontextualize your relationship to the song. Try singing it while thinking about different people, pets, or places. You may find new emotional connections to the song.

If all else fails, turn it into a song that gives the band a feeling of camaraderie as you all play it together with joyous spite.

Develop the emotional expression in your voice through vocal lessons.

Take your vocals to the next level with vocal lessons and training. I can help you develop your ability to impact the audience with your voice. The first consultation is free, and I'm happy to answer any of your questions. Schedule a free consultation!

Thanks for reading. If you liked this, please check out my previous posts. Also, please follow, like, and subscribe, and all that social media sauce. That way, you won't miss my next post about how tone comes last and how you usually have to get a little worse to get a lot better.

Thanks again.

Singing Is Exercise

In my previous posts, I mentioned how singing is exercise. I don't mean that it's similar to exercise. I mean that it actually IS exercise. This post will explain how singing is a workout and why that's good.

The Nature of Sound

Producing sound requires a source of vibration. All acoustic instruments work this way, including the voice. A guitar sound requires a string vibration. A drum sound requires a drumhead vibration. A clarinet sound requires a reed vibration. For vocals, the sound comes from vibration in the vocal cords. You can FEEL these sound vibrations as well as hear them. That means the world of music lives much closer to the world of physics than many people may think.

Sound is physical.

Sound vibrations are a physical reaction. In music, that reaction may come from air flowing over a flat surface or the impact of a stick, pick, or finger. Because all sound comes from a physical action, we can use physical means to create the sounds we want.

Sound resonates.

When sound resonates, the vibrations, or waves, that create the sound bounce off of hard surfaces, sometimes creating additional sounds. Resonance creates echoes and can have huge effects on our perception of sound.

Physical shapes affect resonance.

The rigidity and shape of the surfaces that soundwaves impact will directly affect the resonance produced. More rigid surfaces reflect more sound and cause greater resonance. Softer surfaces absorb more sound and, therefore, reduce resonance. This resonance effect is why singing in the shower sounds louder than screaming into a pillow.

The shapes created by the surfaces also affect the sound. Tube, cone, and funnel shapes act as natural amplifiers, generating more and more resonance as the sound bounces through. That's why brass and woodwind instruments have that shape.

Other shapes can dissipate or muffle resonance, reducing the volume of the sound. You can see this concept in on-stage sound baffling or the pyramid shapes that cover sound-reducing wall foam.

Your voice is just a sound your body makes.

The goal of singing is to get your voice to make the sounds you want it to on demand. As mentioned above, that sound originates when air causes vibrations in your larynx as it blows by your vocal cords. You can develop some control over the flexibility of your vocal cords, which can affect how your voice sounds. You can develop even more control over how that sound resonates through your body, directly impacting the sound of your singing voice.

The shapes inside your body also affect resonance.

As described above, the surfaces and shapes that sound impacts can strongly affect the sound's resonance. That remains true within the tiny chambers of your body. Try making a buzzy humming sound in your mouth, then make a buzzy humming sound in your nose. If you can do that, you will notice they each have a distinct sound and feel.

If you struggled to get your hum to move from your mouth to your nose, don't worry. We will cover this in our first lesson.

You can change the shapes inside your body with muscle control.

You have many small chambers inside your head. Your sinuses run through cavities in your skull. You can use the small muscles in your head to direct the sound into these cavities, where they will amplify your resonance.

You can also use the muscle that makes up the walls of these chambers to change the shape and rigidity of the chamber, which gives you the ability to craft your tone and control pitch.

Using your muscles to get the desired sounds takes feeling, control, and strength.

While I talk a lot about muscles, please note that a singing workout is closer to yoga than powerlifting. You strengthen your singing muscles to hold and control shapes with solid finesse and enduring control, not to flex like the Hulk.

The muscles that create and shape the resonance chambers in your head need the strength to remain in place while air and sound waves blast past them.

You develop the muscle control you need through exercise.

Like getting better at any skill or sport, improving your singing takes regular exercise. To develop the strength your singing muscles need and your ability to feel and control them requires spending time working them out. They need to be stretched and flexed into the desired shapes so often that you can do it on command across a wide variety of tones and pitches.

Much of my vocal coaching focuses on guiding you through these exercises like a personal trainer would guide you through a workout at a gym.

Vocal training mirrors athletics training. We will have warm-ups before every practice and performance. These warm-ups prepare your vocal muscles for a workout while they also help you reaffirm your feel and control, giving you the confidence you need to perform your best and continue improving. We will also have more intensive exercises to expand your range or target specific weak points in your progress. A vocal performance can feel similar to an athletic performance. As someone who has experienced both, I can tell you that—show day feels almost exactly like game day.

Vocal warmups and exercises also work on another huge aspect that sports and singing have in common: cardio.

Air fuels singing.

Much like woodwind instruments, vocals require a steady air supply to generate sound. Managing your air supply is a big part of vocals. Air management includes learning when and how to breathe for optimal vocals, developing a strong resonance chamber to get the most out of the air you use, and maintaining strong lungs to give you the most air possible.

Developing stronger, larger, and more efficient lungs also requires exercise.

Vocal exercises can help you learn how to control your breathing through more conscious use of your diaphragm, the muscle that controls your lungs and your breathing. Vocal coaching will help you strengthen your diaphragm and gain more control over the force of your breathing.

Along with vocal exercises, most cardiovascular workouts that get you breathing heavily will help strengthen your lungs and can improve your vocal stamina.

Just as training helps athletes get better, it also helps singers improve.

Physical training improves muscle strength, flexibility, agility, and durability. This principle applies regardless of which muscles you target. So, while powerlifters and long-distance runners need two extremely different types of skills, training helps them both improve. Singing works the same way, it just has a different goal.

Instead of trying to be the strongest or the fastest, singers try to master control over the sounds they make with their voices. This is still a physical goal that takes regular training of all the muscles that make that control happen.

Proper training also prevents injury and setbacks.

Along with the performance benefits, training with the proper guidance can help you keep your muscles limber and strong, which can help prevent injuries that can delay or derail your progress.

Vocalists attempting to improve without coaching often develop bad habits. Those bad habits can lead to poor technique which can limit progress and even injuries to the vocal cords. Bad habits will inhibit your progress further because you will need to fight them and break them as you develop your new technique.

I highly recommend all aspiring vocalists get guided vocal coaching as soon as possible to prevent these bad habits from forming in the first place.

Get the coaching you need to develop your voice properly through vocal lessons.

Sign up for vocal lessons today. I have both online and in-person time slots available now.

As described above, vocal coaching works best when received with regularity, so I'm offering 4 vocal lessons for $100. Plus, the first consultation is always FREE. So, that's five sessions for just $100.

Strengthen your presence by amplifying your vocal control. Sign up now!

Thanks for reading. In my next post, I'll discuss singing with emotion and address the misconception that you either have it or you don't. Yes, singing with emotion can be learned. 

Find out how in the next post. Thanks again, and please like, subscribe, and or share to help me spread the word so more people get the opportunity to develop their voices.

How do online singing lessons work?

In my last post, I went over how singing lessons work in a general sense. This post will address some common questions and concerns I receive about online lessons. While face-to-face lessons have a few advantages, online lessons will still work for most people. The first step is to simulate the face-to-face environment as closely as possible through video chat.

Vocal Lessons Using Video Chat

I teach many of my lessons online via video chat. I also took many of my own lessons online when I learned to sing. They work nearly the same as face-to-face lessons.

The video and audio capabilities on most video chat or conferencing services have enough quality to relay enough detail that a skilled vocal coach can determine if a student executes the technique correctly.

The video conferencing allows me, as the vocal coach, to observe your technique and provide guidance that ensures you develop proper vocal habits.

Microphones Tell The Tale

Different vocal techniques hit microphones differently. That may seem obvious when you think about a traditional performing microphone, but you might not think about what that means for the small microphones in your electronics.

Beginners do not need to invest in professional-level audio equipment.

Most modern computers, smartphones, or other devices you might use to access the internet have a built-in microphone. Devices that have video chat capabilities almost certainly do. These small microphones also pick up and amplify the differences between vocal techniques. As an experienced vocals coach, I can hear those differences as they happen and help guide you to the sounds you want.

Most video conferencing platforms handle sound well enough to conduct voice lessons, but some sound better than others. Also, some platforms design their default sound settings to optimize video conferencing with several people. Such settings may clip and mute many sounds to give the main presenter more sound capacity.

In one-on-one vocal lessons, we want to hear all the nuances, not silence the noise like we would with multiple people on a call. So, you may need to adjust your sound settings to optimize your online vocal lessons.

Monitoring

Monitoring is helpful but not required for learning. 

Monitoring is the ability to hear your vocals through your ears from an outside source. When a performer wears headphones or a stage has speakers on the floor pointing at the stage, those are for monitoring. Your vocals sound different from the outside than they do from the inside. Monitoring will help you match the sounds you seek with the techniques needed to create them. 

You do not need any monitoring to start lessons.

You can start lessons without any extra equipment. As you get better, monitoring becomes more important. As you get into lessons and want to keep investing in your improvement, you can get an audio interface for your computer. That way, you can run a microphone and monitoring during video chat sessions.

I highly recommend a good monitoring setup for any live performances. 

Learning With Lag

While online vocal students will receive the same guidance and feedback as in-person students, they will face one challenge. Video chat often feels completely synchronized, but unfortunately, it still usually has some delay. This delay, called lag, disrupts the timing between teacher and student, which means we cannot play in time together.

The lag means that, for online students, instead of singing along with the exercises, we use a call/response approach. With this method, the student will listen to the teacher play or sing a melody and then repeat it. The call-and-response method works for most students without issue.

Lag also requires the student to play the track to sing along with when we work on a song. If I were to play the track, the lag would put us out of sync.

The call-and-response approach has the added benefit of working on your ear training while singing. I use some call-and-response during in-person lessons too.

Students who struggle with the call-and-response method can try singing along to pre-recorded melodic patterns they can play from another device. Then, they can try call-and-response again once the melodies become engrained in their memory.

Setup to Share Your Singing

As mentioned before, after some progress in developing your voice, you may want to upgrade your audio equipment. In addition to aiding with your monitoring, investing in a good audio interface can set you up to record your lessons.

A high-quality audio setup will also help you sound your best if you broadcast your singing online or record tracks to share later. 

If you plan to share your singing online, get a microphone and an audio interface.

Beginners do not need to invest in professional-level audio equipment. Start your lessons with your standard setup, then upgrade as you improve. That way, when you're ready to show off your new vocal ability, you'll be ready to rock.

Thanks for reading. My next post will go into depth about how singing is exercise. Rock on!

Develop your voice!

Improve your singing voice without leaving the privacy of your home through online voice lessons. Wow your friends at the next karaoke outing or surprise that special someone with your own rendition of their favorite song. Schedule a free consultation to get started without any commitment. Let's talk about your voice and how I can help you reach your vocal goals.

Schedule a free consultation.

How can you learn to sing?

I often receive comments on my ads. Some commentators suggest that a person either can sing or a person cannot sing. They claim that people can’t learn to sing. This myth remains common despite many people improving their singing techniques. In fact, almost anyone can learn to improve their vocal skills. This post explains how steady work can improve your singing ability.

You learned to speak.

Almost anyone can learn to sing because nearly everyone learns to talk. Humans hear sounds from other humans and naturally try to repeat them in order to communicate and connect. That’s all singing is—using your body to create sounds in order to evoke an emotion or send a message. Just as you learned to make the sounds required for speech, you can learn to create the sounds needed for singing.

Some sounds resonate in a musical context better than others. That means some accents lend themselves better to vocal resonance than others. So, while almost everyone learns to speak, people who grew up speaking different languages or even the same language with different accents will have different adjustments to make when learning to sing. That difference may make the learning curve longer for some people than others because some people must fight their ingrained habits while others can lean into theirs. However, with practice, almost everyone can improve their vocal technique.

The more you improve your technique, the more control you will have over the sounds you make. Singing on pitch with a good tone and emotional expression requires control over your sound. That control comes from practicing your technique.

Your Voice as an Instrument

Every member of a band or performance group should learn to play their instrument the best they can. For vocalists, that instrument is our bodies. This has some pluses and minuses. On the plus side, you always have it with you and you don’t have to haul a lot of gear. On the downside, your health and lifestyle affect the condition of your instrument and you have to learn to play it by feel.

Unlike a piano with keys or a guitar with frets, your body doesn’t have visual indicators of where the pitch goes. Instead, you have to play it by feel, like a trombone. However, in most other ways, your voice is similar to a woodwind instrument like a clarinet or saxophone. Your vocal cords are like a reed. They vibrate to create the sound. The rest of the resonance comes from the length and shape of the space that sound has to resonate inside.

Singing requires developing the use of tiny muscles inside your head to manipulate the shape of the space where your voice resonates (yes, even on low notes).

Vocals are a unique instrument because you must feel and control the sound from within the instrument itself. The instrument is inside you and you are inside the instrument.

You can’t change everything, so work to change what you can.

While almost anyone can improve their vocal execution, you cannot change everything about your voice.

You cannot change your vocal chords. They are what they are. You can keep them healthy, hydrated, and limber, but they will make the sounds they make. Still, your vocal cords are only part of what makes you sound like you. Developing resonance in other areas can give you many tonal colors you can paint with your voice. Plus, sometimes better technique can open access to parts of your vocal cords you didn't use previously.

You cannot change the physical size of the internal cavities inside the bones in your skull. They will also influence how you sound. However, you can control the muscles that make up the walls of the sinuses inside the cavities in your skull. Using these muscles can extend, contract, and reshape the sinuses where the sound resonates. This gives you an enormous amount of control over how you shape your sound, including expanding your range, honing your pitch, and developing different tones.

You can control how much air you can use. Your lungs supply the air that creates and sustains your vocal sound. You can develop the strength of your diaphragm, the muscle that controls your breathing. Doing so gives you more stamina and more tonal options. You can also increase your lung capacity with cardio workouts.

If your vocal cords can make a sound, you can develop the strength with which you express that sound. That means no matter what your vocal cords make your voice sound like, you can get the most out of your resonance, control, and tone. The ability to carry a tune comes from that control. Your vocal cords will make you sound like you, but you can make what your voice sounds like appealing in the context of the rest of the music.

It also means that any sound you can make, high or low, including what many would traditionally call falsetto, you can sing strongly with enough work.

What does it take to sing?

Singing requires the ability to control the sound coming out of your mouth. Some people do this more naturally than others, but most people can improve. Singing requires focus, practice, care for your body, and a degree of respiratory stamina. You can work on most of these aspects through vocal exercises and guided personal lessons.

The feedback a vocal coach can provide will help you avoid reinforcing bad habits that could lead to control issues, fatigue, or even damage to your vocal cords. If you want to learn to swim, get a swimming coach. If you want to learn to sing, get a singing coach.

Stick to the practice regimen. Developing your vocals takes time, repetition, and consistency. In many ways, if you don’t use it, you lose it.

Connect the emotional to the physical.

Developing your physical ability to control sounds expands your options for artistic expression. As a vocal performer, you emote through your sound. As you develop your voice, you may notice that you can do the exercises, but you revert to old habits when you go to perform. Usually, that happens because your brain still routes the physical expression of the emotion in the song to your old habits instead of your newly developed skills.

Even before we can form words, we use vocal expression to communicate our emotions. As we learn to speak, we mimic the sounds made by those around us. Our developing brains make connections between the emotional feelings and the physical expressions of those feelings. Unfortunately, those physical expressions don’t always develop into tones that sound the way you want them to musically.

Developing your vocal technique will help you make the sounds you want, but it will require time and lots of repetition to reroute those emotional expressions to the physical sounds you want to make when expressing them. That means, when you learn to sing, you don’t fake the emotion, you learn to express your real emotions in a way that matches the feeling you want to create musically.

Develop your voice!

Developing your voice takes some time and effort, but you can learn to sing. Get started by scheduling your free consultation.

In my next post, I explain how these lessons can work even online through video chat. Thanks for reading.

Introducing Singing Things: A Vocal Lessons Blog by John Dilley

Welcome! I’m John Dilley, your vocals coach. I created this blog to share my insights about singing with more people by providing some tips and answering some common questions. This first post gives a general overview of my philosophy on singing and teaching. This brief summary only scratches the surface. I will write more detailed posts about most of the topics this overview touches on. I listed some of the upcoming topics at the bottom of this post.

Singing Is a Skill

Singing is a physical skill you can improve through regular exercise. I learned it myself. And in over six years as a singing instructor, I have helped dozens of students develop better singing techniques.

Just as guitarists need to develop muscle strength and control to place their fingers on the fretboard with precision, vocalists need to build muscle strength and control to generate, feel, hold, and shift sounds with precise pitch and tone. This ability comes mainly from controlling airflow and creating space for the sound to resonate in places that help you sound your best.

Interior muscles control both the airflow and the shapes of the cavities inside your head where the sound needs to resonate. Like with most muscles, working out these muscles develops strength and dexterity, thus improving the two main aspects of singing.

Vocal Training

I often refer to myself as a vocals coach instead of a vocals teacher because I don’t use books or lesson plans. Instead, I guide you through weekly workouts for your vocals like a physical trainer. Then, I help you apply your new skills to the songs you want to sing.

Learning To Sing with Emotion And Expression

As your physical strength develops, you may discover that applying the emotion necessary for a performance that connects with the audience causes you to revert to your old habits. Many students run into this block. It may take some time to overcome, along with effort and a willingness to be vulnerable.

Once you can rout your emotional expression through a physical expression that resonates, the subtleties in your voice become more audible with less strain—so you explore and express even more nuanced emotional tones.

Schedule a Free Consultation

Come learn how to use your body as an instrument and express yourself to your full potential.

Schedule your appointment today!

Follow for more insights, including upcoming posts about the following topics.

• How can you learn to sing?

• How do online lessons work?

• Singing is exercise.

• Singing with emotion: Is learning to sing “faking it”?

• Tone Comes Last - Sound “bad” until you don’t.

• (Almost) Anyone can improve their singing.