Author: Mark JW Graham

This week I wanted to talk about what it takes to build a voice to have for life. Clients of all ages ask about this, and so I thought it was worth going into a few fundamental precepts that I think are relevant to voices at all stages.

1. Start Young / As soon as you can

Sadly, time travel hasn’t been invented yet. So we can’t go back in time and tell our younger self to start doing things right or more correctly. But if the best time to start was yesterday, then the second best time is today.

Working on our voice a little every day is incredibly potent. Not just because this is like doing a little exercise everyday (which is inherently good for us), but because it means our practice keeps pace with how our voices change over time.

When I get to start work with voices around age 19/20, it’s relatively easy to get them on track, and as such it’s easier to then to keep them on track.

Why? Put simply, there’s not a lifetime of bad habits to unpick, simply because they aren’t old enough to have built up or ingrained such habits. Their voice is also as light as it will ever be, so the weight of the voice is as workable as it can ever be. This makes it much easier to corral it into a better way of operating than when the voice ages.

As voices age, things get darker, weightier and fuller sounding. This process is slow and gradual. Hence, if I can start working with a voice when they are younger and train them appropriately to work on their voice well most everyday, their practice routine will naturally keep pace and adjust WITH the gradual changes… rather than fighting against them. Continue reading “How to build a voice for life”

In part 1 and part 2, we talked about the challenges that weightier voices face, and the challenges that lighter voices face.

The thing is, singers with a light voice can end up expressing similar traits to weighty voices, and vice versa.

But why?

Why would it be that a light voice – which should generally find itself struggling with what was listed in part 2 – find itself struggling with the issues a weighty voice might face as listed in part 1? Or the reverse, with weighty voices expressing issues more typically associated with lighter voice issues?

Singers are people with personalities, not just instruments

When I listed all the mechanical issues that singers tend to encounter, they were EXCLUSIVELY mechanical issues. In short, a weightier voice typically has more muscularity, so left to it’s own devices, it will tend to over-muscle itself…

… but that ignores the singer entirely. And singers are very resourceful when it comes to trying to solve their problems. Continue reading “The Challenges Facing Different Voice Types: Part 3”

Let’s do a quick recap of what we covered in part 1:
There are many variables involved in gauging someone’s vocal ability, but a lot of these are misleading.

One particular qualitative characteristic I listen to when working with a singer, which applies to all singers of all ages, in all genres, at all stages of development – the weight of their voice.

The weight in someone’s voice is more of a cluster of several things, rather than one singular thing. There are many nuanced traits but the following two should give you some idea of what I’m looking for. It’s a combination of:
1) the pitch of their speaking voice (how low vs high someone tends to speak);
2) the resonance of their speaking voice (how much low vs high frequencies exist in their voice when they speak – this is correlated with, but independent of pitch)

We then covered the challenges this interaction creates for voices on the weightier end of the spectrum in part 1. In this part we’ll be covering how this manifests in lighter voices.

What’s the difference between weightier voices and lighter voices?

As a reminder, I’ve provided clips of what light voices sound like in this article, and what weighty voices sound like in this article. We’ll get a little more analytical here.

If weightier voices can have MORE muscularity to their vocal folds, and/or MORE lower frequency resonance to their speaking voice, then lighter voices are the opposite. Continue reading “The Challenges Facing Different Voice Types: Part 2”

When it comes to singers assessing their own voices, people obsess over many different things. They obsess especially about:
– voice type (e.g. soprano vs alto, tenor vs bass);
– what kind of range do they have;
– what genres is their voice better at/worse at;
– what are their highest notes, etc.

But this is like someone obsessing over and endlessly analysing how strong they think they are before they’ve ever set foot inside a gym.

These attributes are important, but are only really meaningfully assessed after a period of training. Some of these traits are also extremely negotiable with the right training. These are all helpful traits to listen out for and make a note of, but they are not permanent or static reference points.

With training, range will grow. Strength and power can also be enhanced, but some singers need more than others for their chosen genre, so this is (to some extent) negotiable. How high someone can sing may not be where they artistically choose to spend most of their time. This is what makes these traits somewhat useful, but often misleading.

There is ONE trait that doesn’t change enormously

There is, however, one particular qualitative characteristic I listen to when working with a singer. This applies to male and female singers of all ages, in all genres, at all stages of development.

That characteristic is the weight of their voice.

What is the ‘weight’ in someone’s voice?

Continue reading “The Challenges Facing Different Voice Types: Part 1”

I get a lot of clients come to me because they’ve been told they sing out of tune, or are not especially tuneful. Many of these believe they are “tone deaf”.

What is tone deafness?

True tone-deafness means a total inability to distinguish whether two notes are the same or different. I often test this with clients by playing two notes on the piano and asking if they can tell that they sound different. In 99.99% of cases, people respond they can obviously hear they are different. If you can tell that some notes are higher or lower than others – even if you can’t actually hit them – then you are not tone-deaf.

True tone-deafness is the aural equivalent of colour blindness. This means someone’s brain or body lacks the actual ability to actually see/hear certain things – it’s literally a physical or neurological issue that isn’t something that can be overcome with training.

Fortunately, for most people, that isn’t the case.

So if I’m not tone-deaf, what is the issue?

Continue reading “What causes people to sing out of tune?”

In a book I’ve recommended before, author and table tennis champion Matthew Syed tells this story.

Serving consistency

In his early years of training, Syed was fortunate enough to study with a Chinese table tennis champion who moved to his area. Despite Syed’s already fairly high level, the coach required him to learn and refine a particularly simple serve.

Syed could already do this serve, but he was required to learn it to such a level of consistency and precision, that it would ALWAYS come out the same way everytime. Such that when this serve was executed, the ping pong ball would land in exactly the same spot every time on each side of the table.

This was an IMMENSE amount of work. Syed was already quite precise across a plurality of different serves, but this required him to get incredibly precise, and to drill deeper into consistency than he ever had before.

But why?

The primary purpose of doing so was this:
– preparing a single serve that Syed could reliably deliver identically 99.9% of the time, meant they could reliably measure the results of even the tiniest change in his approach.

If he gripped the handle of the paddle even 3mm lower down, then they’ll see a change, and they’ll be able to measure the degree of that change. If he changes the angle of how he holds the paddle or even the ball, they can see what changes and by how much. This becomes a hugely valuable tool for further development and training.

But consider the reverse.
What if he had a serve that was (say) only 80% consistent? That would mean a 20% inherent variability in his execution. While still excellent, this means there’s no way to reliably tell if a change in output is a result of some intentional tweak, or if it was down to some randomness in his serve.

Even 80% consistency simply isn’t enough to improve skills and ability in a predictable manner.

This 100%/99.9% consistency enabled Syed to turbocharge his training. He had cultivated an intense fixation on breeding consistency into all his practice, AND because his ability to monitor every little thing he was doing had levelled up enormously.

Which brings us to how this can help you working on your voice…

Continue reading “How to practice consistently”