I’ve talked before about how some songs are more helpful for the voice, and some songs are less helpful for the voice.

A semi-regular discussion I have with clients is closely related: certain songs don’t just test your voice — they actively teach you about great singing.

Start Simple

When people first learn piano or guitar, they often want to play popular songs — basic three- or four-chord material they can jam along to. That’s helpful for getting started, but it’s usually more about establishing basic competency than understanding the inner workings of music.

As people become more established, they often choose more challenging pieces. The common mistake is pursuing challenge for its own sake, faster, harder, more intense, more complex — without recognising often these songs are just about “MORE”, rather than making you a truly better singer/musician.

By contrast, some pieces appear simple on the surface, but hide complex mechanics underneath. The challenge is covert, not overt. Learning songs like this teaches you why music is written the way it is, and what subtle functions you must observe for it to work. The more skilled the composer, the more advanced musical concepts you get to experience “from the inside”.

The Same Is True for Voice

When I first started singing, I didn’t have much range. I was restricted in what I could sing, so I worked my way up through the material I enjoyed at the time: U2, Sting, Jimi Hendrix, John Mayer, and so on.

Nearly 20 years on, I’m not limited by range in the same way. I can attempt much more demanding material by more advanced singers — for example: Stevie Wonder and Ellis Hall.

Here’s the key issue: some songs ask a very narrow question of your voice, repeatedly. A song like Where The Streets Have No Name (and plenty of similar repertoire) largely comes down to one requirement: can you repeatedly jump from a D4 to an A4 with conviction? If you can do that one move, you can sing the song. If you can’t, the song is basically inaccessible.

This is one reason singers get so frustrated when trying to sing favourite songs too early. Their technical competence isn’t high enough, their musicality isn’t high enough, and the songs they want to sing often demand one specific “voice move” with a binary success/fail outcome. That move can sound impressive in that context, but it doesn’t necessarily develop broad, transferable skill.

Over time, I realised that the songs which developed my voice the most weren’t necessarily the most famous or “impressive” on paper — but the ones that demanded multiple blended vocal skills simultaneously.

The Songs That Taught Me the Most

For Your Love — Stevie Wonder

This is not the greatest song in the world. Stevie used it as a vehicle to demonstrate his range and work on his voice. But the way the verses and choruses make different demands on you provides tremendous insight into what good singing should feel like.

The verses demand fluidity and depth in the lower range, but you also must be able to climax with strength on the highest notes of the verses (around F#4 in the first male bridge, in the main). Then you must be able to ascend into the second bridge with ease, which requires a wholly different feel — yet you must make those approaches blend.

From there, the song steps up key by key, testing congruency and continuity across your range. It becomes progressively more climactic — you can’t bail out or go light at any point. It builds stamina within good technique, or you don’t make it.

They Won’t Go When I Go — Stevie Wonder vs George Michael

If For Your Love is overtly hard, They Won’t Go When I Go is the covert one. You have to make many of the same “voice moves” as For Your Love, but the emphasis sits lower — especially in the verses — while still requiring you to climb into a similar range for the climaxes.

On top of that, you have to move repeatedly between the first and second bridge and sound climactic without over-muscling. It’s all the challenge of For Your Love, at pace — and you have to make it sound smooth and easy.

George Michael performed his version down one semitone. That single change significantly alters the demands of the melody. The climactic notes sit differently across the bridges and produce a different overall feel in the voice.

In part, this reflects a limitation and an intelligent stylistic choice. George’s “second bridge” area (around A4) was not his most refined zone. If you go through his catalogue and note the ranges he tends to climax in, you’ll often find that he anchors major top notes around Ab4 — avoiding the need to live in that higher bridge territory. When he does sing above that, he often goes lighter, creating a stylistic flip for those notes (you can hear this in songs like Kissing a Fool, as well as in this performance).

This isn’t a criticism — it’s a perfect demonstration of how elite singers make intelligent technical choices around their strengths. And it means this song has a lot to teach in both keys: the original, and the semitone-down adaptation.

If you’re struggling with certain songs (whether on the simpler end or the harder end), and want to figure these out in your own voice, you can book in to work with me via the button below.

For those who may remember, I broke my foot over Christmas. I rolled over my ankle – didn’t even fall down – but a VERY loud crack was audible, like thick bamboo being snapped. And the rest is history.

It’s been about 3 weeks since the original injury. As a result of being a husband, father, and business owner, I’ve got a lot of responsibilities I HAVE to deal with in the week. As a self employed person there is no sick pay, there’s no “emergency cover”, and no immediate family to help me out.

Consequently, as soon as the initial swelling started to go down, I had to get onto the rehabilitation.

Recovery

Now I’ve had MANY injuries and setbacks over the years, so in a weird way, I actually enjoy the day-to-day project of getting my body working again. In many respects, it reflects the nature of both building a great singing voice, and then maintaining it in the face of colds, chest infections, laryngitis etc.

I wrote an article years ago about the things I’d learned from taking up yoga – the body awareness, the nature of it as a regular practice, etc. This week, I thought I’d explain four things I’ve started to learn from dealing with this broken foot, and how I really do see that mirrored in voice training and singing.

1. Range of motion

Even the morning after the injury, I started gently checking the range of motion of my foot. Not shoving it to its extremes and pushing past pain, but cautiously exploring what I could do, what I couldn’t, and what the implications of the damage might be.

I’ve done that multiple times a day every day since then. Drawing circles with the feet, pointing toes, bringing feet to 90°, comparing it side by side with the healthy foot, etc.

The vocal equivalent of this is simple: voices don’t need to be slammed hard every day, but going through a full range of motion (i.e. literal range) with your voice most days is REMARKABLY helpful. It’s a little bit like “use it or lose it”.

2. Rest AND exercise

Recovery always lives in the tension between rest and use. We cannot WILL our way back to health, and we cannot exercise our way out of an injury or vocal problem. But equally, we cannot merely REST our way out of one either.

What’s required is a measured balance: checking in with your body every day, but NOT pushing it as hard as it will go. That is how we re-injure ourselves.

Which raises the obvious question: how do we know how far we can go? That leads us to point three.

3. Test the diagnosis daily

Any diagnosis is really a working hypothesis. The only way to refine it is through careful, low-risk testing over time.

Here’s the tricky thing. The fracture clinic said my foot was broken and I’d need to be in a rocker boot for 3–5 weeks. However, I’ve been able to walk without pain in secure footwear well before that.

A friend who is a consultant surgeon saw me walking in week two, and he commented: “That is not possible even on a hairline fracture – you should be in noticeable pain.”

This does not mean my foot is or is not broken. It simply means that the exact prognosis for any given individual is TRULY individual.

Some people with a given issue take a long time to regain function. Others take less time. Some encounter repeated setbacks. Others experience relatively plain sailing.

The point is this: whatever the current hypothesis is, do gentle exploratory check-ins to test it. You’re not trying to break the hypothesis (or yourself), but you ARE trying to refine your understanding of what you’re actually dealing with.

This sits between two unhelpful extremes: blindly accepting what you’ve been told and resting excessively, or ploughing on as if nothing is wrong.

4. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure

I’ve been going to the gym 2–3 times a week for just under a decade. I’m confident that the reason I didn’t go down when I broke my foot – and the reason I’m recovering faster than the original prognosis – is largely down to this.

Lifting weights doesn’t just strengthen muscles. It improves tendon function and tension, increases resilience, supports proprioception, and aids recovery – even in the face of the ravaging effects of getting older.

That long-term preparation makes a significant difference when something does go wrong.

The same principle applies to the voice. Far too many people get in touch for vocal help AFTER the problem has started – by which point there are often deeply ingrained habits and vocal weakness from a lack of good foundational training.

Maintenance matters. I see my PT every week, and often there’s nothing to report. But because he knows what my “normal” is, if something does crop up – a broken foot, back pain, or minor twinges – he can act immediately and appropriately.

The same is true for voice work.

Conclusion

All injuries take time. From previous broken bones, I expect to feel lingering effects from this one for many months, perhaps even years.

That said, I’m already back to around 95% of what I was doing before by applying the same principles throughout: daily feedback, restraint rather than force, and long-term preparation before problems arise.

These are the same protocols and preventative measures I apply to my own voice and to my clients’ voices.

If this resonates with you and you’re not already working with me, you’re very welcome to book in via the link below.

Vowel Substitution in Singing: A Practical Guide

Most discussions of vowel substitution in singing are either too abstract to grasp, or too narrow to be applied in real situations. This article aims to bridge that gap with simple explanations, concrete examples, and a clear sense of why vowel substitution in singing is a helpful tool, but a terrible thing to make your master.

Why Vowels Matter in Singing

When we sing, the vocal folds create pitch. But what listeners actually hear as words and vowels comes from the shape of the vocal tract, which filters sound through formants (resonant frequencies).

If the vocal tract isn’t shaped as intended, the vowel that comes out may not be the one the singer thinks they are producing.

For example:

• Many singers try to sing the word “no”, aiming for an “oh” vowel.
• But in practice, the vowel can drift to “uh” or even “ah”, making the note sound wide, unstable, or uneven.

This mismatch between intended vowel and actual vowel is extremely common. There’s a great many reasons this can occur, but we don’t need to worry about every possible reason for the purposes of this article.

Because it’s notoriously hard to hear vowel corruption in your own voice, singers often remain unaware of it. After all, if we could all self-regulate perfect vowels when we sing, we’d all have near-perfect singing voices!

With good vocal training, we work to introduce the voice to precisely maintain the correct vocal tract posture to ensure the vowel remains pure and congruent from bottom to top. This takes time, and is beyond the scope of this article.

But even with correct vocal training, when we come to sing a song, we may find the vowels of certain words can slip to some degree. This can be due to a lack of training, intensity, or a given word having a slightly different efficient vocal tract shape than what the singer is used to delivering.

That’s where vowel substitution comes in.

What Is Vowel Substitution?

Think of a singer’s vowel as a rifle shot at a target. We want the vowels they sing to be perfectly on-target, hitting the bullseye dead-centre.

But if the aim veers 20° to the right at times, a quick fix is to deliberately aim 20° to the left for those tricky moments. The correction isn’t a “true aim,” but it will help land the bullet in the centre.

A vowel substitution works in a similar way. It’s a carefully chosen manual intervention that artificially corrects for the poor aim. By choosing a slightly different vowel than the written one, we can temporarily steer the voice toward balance and even tone.

Continue reading “Vowel Substitution in Singing: How to Fix Tricky Notes”