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.