The Vocal Challenges Facing Different Voice Types: A Complete Guide
When it comes to understanding your voice, it’s easy to get caught up in surface-level metrics: your vocal range, how high or low you can sing, or what genres seem best suited to your voice. But these markers are only meaningful after training—and they can all change with the right guidance. Instead, there’s one deeper trait that underpins many of the vocal challenges singers face: the weight of the voice.
In this guide, we’ll explore:
- The unique vocal challenges faced by weightier voices
- The corresponding issues that lighter voices encounter
- How both types can sometimes fall into traps usually associated with the other
Weightier Voices: What Their Vocal Challenges Are
Many singers focus on range or genre fit, but the true starting point is something more foundational—the weight of the voice. This is a cluster of traits, but primarily includes:
- The pitch of your speaking voice (higher or lower)
- The resonance of your speaking voice (amount of low vs high frequencies)
These give an impression of the voice’s natural muscularity and resonance profile.
Three Challenges of Weightier Voices
1. It’s more physical work to sing well
Weightier voices often have thicker vocal folds or generate more low-frequency resonance—or both. Hitting notes with power is often easier, but getting to those notes is much harder. Vocal folds in these voices must contract more firmly, making singing more physically demanding.
2. They are prone to yelling
Thicker vocal folds send a wider frequency spectrum into the vocal tract. This increases acoustic pressure, which can disrupt vowel shaping. Less experienced singers often end up yelling to relieve the pressure, sacrificing tone and technique. Additionally, lower resonant frequencies require more space in the throat to accommodate high notes properly. Without that space, the sound may feel tight or thin.
3. Weightier voices tend to need to be louder
These voices often resist being sung quietly. Operating below their natural volume threshold can lead to tension or a jammed-up feeling. It’s not about singing loudly all the time, but about maintaining enough vocal energy for optimal function.
Note: Lighter voices can experience similar issues—but for completely different reasons. Diagnosis should be based on how your speaking voice sounds, not just how it feels when singing.
Book a session with me if you’re facing these challenges and want tailored help.
Lighter Voices: What They Struggle With
Lighter voices are the inverse of weightier ones. They often have:
- Less vocal fold muscularity (leading to higher speaking pitch and brighter tone)
- Less low-frequency resonance (often due to smaller vocal tracts)
Think of it like a small-bodied acoustic guitar strung with thin strings: it’s bright, strident, and quieter.
Three Challenges of Lighter Voices
1. It’s harder to get a bigger sound
High notes come more easily, but adding power is more difficult. With less fold mass, there’s less potential for strong contraction—yet identifying and building on what is available is crucial.
2. They are prone to sounding strident or weak
Thinner folds produce fewer, brighter frequencies. While this reduces pressure on the vocal tract, it can also make the voice sound too thin or piercing. Singers may overcompensate by yelling to sound stronger, which distorts tone and tires the voice.
3. Lighter voices tend to need to be quieter
These voices function better at lower volumes. Pushing past a certain loudness can make them jam up or become strident. Power comes not from force, but from focus and resonant shaping.
Again: don’t assume you’re a lighter voice type based on these symptoms alone. Listen to your speaking voice to assess the true weight of your voice.
Book a session with me if you’re a lighter singer facing these obstacles.
When Lighter and Weightier Voices Behave the Same
So, what happens when lighter voices sound like weightier ones—or the reverse?
Singers Are More Than Their Instruments
While the challenges above are based on mechanics, singers are problem-solvers. They often try to fix vocal issues through their own adjustments, which can backfire.
Volume Adjustments
- A weightier voice trying to quieten itself might sound thin and weak—like a light voice.
- A lighter voice trying to bulk up may over-sing and run into the same vowel shaping issues as a weightier voice.
Range Adjustments
- Weightier voices struggling with high notes might lighten up to reach them, leading to thin or overly wide vowels.
- Lighter voices trying to sound fuller on low notes may over-muscle, giving a forced and dark tone.
Conclusion
The primary challenges of each voice type are clear, but singers often develop secondary issues by adopting techniques suited to the opposite voice type. These self-imposed adjustments can mask your natural strengths and make your voice feel foreign.
Fortunately, these issues are solvable. The key is understanding your voice’s core identity—and working with it, not against it.
Book a session with me if you’d like help unlocking your natural sound.
Can you learn to sing if you are tone deaf?
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”. Can you learn to sing if you 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 see or 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?
If someone’s inability to hear the difference between certain notes is like colour blindness, then the ability to hit certain notes is more like dyspraxia.
This is a condition where someone’s ability to finely control their body in space, throw or catch a ball, or judge spatial distance accurately, etc, is not especially good or well co-ordinated.
The important thing is that this is a co-ordination issue, NOT a functional obstruction. People with dyspraxia start off with less inherent fine motor control. As co-ordination is a learnable skill, this is good news! Such skills are improved through specific, targeted practice.
Exercises designed to breed better neurological and motor control of their bodies are prescribed, and they become much like anyone else. In many cases, they become more skilled than people who always found it easy to co-ordinate (and who never had to learn), because now the ex-dyspraxics are equipped with the tools to improve, and they know how to dial in increasing amounts of fine motor control in their bodies.
So, it’s down to motor control?
For the most part, yes. Good singing, good tone, fine control over pitch, stamina in singing are all traits of a voice that is functioning well and correctly. Good singing (and pitching) is a by-product of well co-ordinated vocal function.
The more precisely you can control and operate your voice, the better you will sound. Also, the more accurate your pitching will be. This then removes “how to hit the notes well” as a barrier to singing, and singers can focus on learning to “play their instrument well” within songs.
Then why am I often sharp or flat?
With less co-ordinated voices, there’s often a problem with the singer (essentially) randomly flinging their voice at whatever they are trying to sing rather than intentionally picking notes out. Of course, per the above, often such singers need to have their function improved before they’ll be able to do this, but nevertheless, there’s an operator error at play. There’s a lack of intentionality in selecting the notes to sing and executing them.
Now, assuming that a singer is not just randomly flinging their voice at notes, generally singers will either tend to lean towards always being sharp or always being flat. It’s rare that singers are sometimes flat AND sometimes sharp.
Too much contraction = Flat
To sing low notes the vocal folds need to contract and thicken — i.e. they need to get shorter. To sing high notes the vocal folds need to stretch and thin — i.e. they need to get longer.
If someone has an excessive amount of contraction, this functional issue means the vocal folds tend to remain too short as the singer tries to ascend to higher notes. This means the vocal folds never quite reach the correct longer length, and therefore end up pitching flat (under the note). This tends to be more of an issue with male singers or weightier-voiced female singers.
Too much stretch = Sharp
When there is too little contraction in the vocal folds we have the opposite problem. This means the stretching component over-lengthens the vocal folds, and singers tend to find themselves too sharp as the vocal folds can’t contract/shorten enough to reach the lowest notes. This tends to be more of an issue with female singers or lighter-voiced male singers.
Similarly at the very top end, the lengthening can get excessive and singers often end up hitting random notes which are much, much higher than intended. They may be happy they can hit those notes, but they generally sound very light and weak, and find they have very little control over that pitch change.
The more in-balance and functionally correct a voice is — i.e. not too much contraction/stretch, nor too little — the more these tuning issues tend to decrease in magnitude, eventually disappearing as a noticeable trait.
Remember, we all hit bum notes from time to time
I hope this satisfies you as to why some people find themselves flat/sharp, and how this is remedied. This is generally why people tend to think they are tone-deaf, but often are not. It’s also why we all tend to be sharp or flat as a tendency, and how training to improve our voices can address these issues.
Despite all this, I want to remind all of you reading this that it’s fairly normal to hit bum notes from time to time. We should obviously work to eliminate as many wrong notes, and such that any wrong notes are minimally out. But we do need to recognise the voice is an organic instrument, and as such can never be 100% perfect, 100% of the time.
Do you feel you struggle with these pitching issues? Want to learn to sing if you are tone-deaf?
If anything we’ve discussed above makes you feel like “YES! That’s me, I really struggle with being off pitch”, then this is something we can help with in sessions. It really is as simple as assessing your voice, identifying the functional issues that are affecting you, then prescribing appropriate exercises to address that functional imbalance. You should notice a difference within the first session, and even within the first week.
All my clients report dramatic changes in their voices between each session, but especially in relation to vocal tone and pitch control arising from the first few sessions.
To experience these benefits for yourself, please do book yourself in via my booking form right here. I look forward to helping you with your voice soon.
In a book I’ve recommended before, author and table tennis champion Matthew Syed tells this story about how to practice consistently.
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 practice consistency and precision to such a level, 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”
The topic of ‘falsetto’ comes up a lot in lessons. Questions like “what is it? when should I do it? SHOULD I do it? Where is it useful?”, etc.
I’ve had clients ask me whether I even like it when singers sing in falsetto, as I’ve often given the impression that I don’t. As such, I thought it worth covering here to clarify.
What exactly is falsetto?
Firstly, let’s be precise about what falsetto is, what it isn’t, and then we’ll get into the details on falsetto usage.
When singers sing in true falsetto, their vocal folds are no longer operating normally – or ‘modally’ – like they would when speaking. Continue reading “Why I don’t like falsetto”
If you’re reading this, you likely love singing. If you’re over 25-30, then you’ve likely noticed that your voice has changed as you’ve got older. If you’re under 25/30, then keep reading as this is relevant for you too.
What many singers start to find as they get older, is that their voice seems to suffer or even get worse as they get older. They find that things seem to hurt or feel unpleasant when they sing, and that these issues start to happen more often and more quickly whenever they start to sing.
Notes may feel way too heavy, way too light, raspy, lacking depth, or strained/strident when trying to sing material they used to take for granted.
Many singers may even feel like they can’t hit notes they used to be able to hit. Even then, if they can, then the tone is often weaker, wavering, or even a bit pitchy/out-of-tune.
What I’ve noticed…
This leads to many singers:
a) running themselves ragged trying to keep up with repertoire that (seems to be) slowly slipping away from them;
b) completely changing the material they’re singing; OR
c) giving up entirely.
It doesn’t have to be this way
There’s something really important I must stress: voices are actually meant to reach their peak in the late 40s/early 50s. And it is not meant to be a rapid downhill slope thereafter. Properly trained singers have incredibly voices in their 50s and beyond, but somehow the modern era makes us think it’s only younger voices that have it all going for them.
Voices reaching their peak in later life is especially true in classical and opera… but why? Continue reading “My voice seems to have got worse as I’ve got older”
