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So, when it comes to the psychology of singing, we have the emotionally over-sensitive camp, and the emotionally insensitive camp.

I’ve already highlighted that we need a balance, so where does the balance lie?

Here’s my take:

The problem with the over-sensitive camp is that it takes responsibility away from the singer, and stuff doesn’t get done – right?

And the problem with the insensitive camp is that it’s not respectful of how emotions affect our voices – right?

So here’s my advice and where I think the balance lies:

Be respectful of the fact that your emotions affect your voice… and sing anyway.

If you fall prey to the whole ‘my emotions hold the key, so I gotta solve them’ camp mentality, then you will go round and round and round in circles trying to fix an issue that may not even have an answer! And all the while you’re not actually singing, let alone enjoy singing and getting better at it.

If you fall prey to the whole ‘my emotions are my weakness, gotta ignore them’ you’ll end up just as frustrated… or worse, not even ENJOY singing because you’ve taken the joy out of it! Don’t do either of these things.

Respect and appreciate your emotions are always going to be a part of your voice… AND SING ANYWAY!

How do you do this?

Simple – set aside 20 minutes every other day or even just once a week just to sing through your favourite songs in their entirety.

Don’t second guess yourself while you’re doing it, don’t stop yourself, just keep going. Don’t try to work out whether you sound awful, or better or worse than last time, just do it, and enjoy it.

What?! Why should I do this? Why do you think I should ignore trying to figure out the ‘why’ behind my emotional state?

Because I don’t think worrying about the why will ACTUALLY benefit you in the long wrong (plenty of studies out there on the misapplication of worry). Like my blog article on the Quickest Route to Your Goal, I think there is a far quicker and more practically applied route to enjoying singing and unlocking the clamp that your emotions have on your voice. And I’ve got science to back me up! (that’s right! actual science!).

Scientific studies are plastered all over our newspaper and news sites week after week about the physical benefits of singing on our minds, how it releases endorphins that make us feel good (the same way exercise does), how it reinforces new neural pathways in our brains and can even rewire the brain. This stuff happens whether you want it to or not – it’s a biological response to the act of singing (in particular singing in groups).

So if you’re feeling down, and you start singing, you’ll release endorphins and feel better. If you do this regularly you’ll start to reinforce this behaviour in your mind and body and associate singing with feeling good. Speaking from my own experience, this can really alter your whole outlook on life and result in you being mentally empowered to actually change the circumstances that you earlier believed were holding you back from singing.

Just. Sing.

The take-home message I want you to absorb is this: just sing.

Stop over-analysing why the mess you find yourself in today is affecting your ability to hit that particular high note with power and clarity. Stop second guessing yourself or thinking that you’ve got to fix your life to fix your voice. It’s a tension we all have to live with. If we want to be better singers we need to take control of our voices, and simultaneously have fun with them.

Respect the fact that your emotions affect your voice… and sing anyway.

RETURN TO PART 1

Many people ask me about the psychology of singing…

…in particular they ask about the psychology of singing by way of posing the question: ‘do you think your emotions affect your ability to sing?’

The answer is obviously yes, and there’s virtually no-one who’d disagree with this. There’s also lots of content out there on the internet that discusses the nature of the emotional battle. But in true Mark Graham fashion, I want more than just a discussion out of it. I want to know what the ‘take-home message’ is from all this discussion about the psychology of singing… and I rarely see a discussion about it that I feel gives a single useable conclusion for singers to take home and use in an effective way to help them with their voices.

This blog post is not intended to be definitive on this topic, but to share a little bit about my own views on this and to hopefully give some helpful pointers for those who perhaps feel their emotions are to blame for their voices not doing what they want them to do.

Q: Are our voices affected by our emotions? A: yes!

Why? Simple.

Wait. No. Ridiculously complicated.

To the point that I think it is fruitless to answer the ‘why’ – because you can’t. And you can spend more time arsing about over the why, than actually fixing the issue in the first place. What I’m going to address is why this question is a colossal waste of time and asking it and trying to ‘solve it’ is not the best use of your time or energy.

The Two Camps

There are often two ‘camps’ that singers, musicians, and singing teachers fall into:

1) The Emotionally Over-sensitive
We all know these sorts of singers or this teacher. They are the ones who say you’ve just got to ‘feel’ everything. It’s not your fault you can’t sing at the moment – it’s because your boyfriend/girlfriend left you, it’s because things are tough at work, it’s because it’s raining and you feel down – emotions affect your voice and that’s why you can’t sing at the moment.’ I also encounter students who are having a particularly tough time at the moment and they feel this is affecting their singing ability.

Regardless of the how or why, those in this camp pseudo-psycho-analyse EVERYTHING to pin why their voice isn’t behaving just so on something (something I’ve been guilty of in the past). While I’ve already acknowledged I think that emotions affect our voices and how we sing, I think that this polarised view is way too extreme.

The issue as I see it with the over-sensitive camp, is that stuff never ACTUALLY gets done.

There’s always another excuse hiding under the duvet waiting to take us down when we deal with the last big issue. I’m not disputing that sometimes some of us are in some really rubbish situations (believe me I’ve been in some bad situations myself, suffering from prolonged severe clinical depression on more than one occasion) and that this can affect your voice.

However, at it’s core, the underlying mentality of this camp is (in my opinion) fundamentally broken and unuseable for singers – why?

Because it’s core mantra is ‘you can’t do anything about it, you can’t help it’ – it takes responsibility for own voices out of our hands and says it’s all down to just chance and how you’re feeling. The mantra of this group is practically leads to the conclusion that you need a perfect life to be able to sing unhindered.

This is not only wrong, but I believe it’s a lie.

The Emotionally In-sensitive
There are fewer of these ones about, but they still exist. They are the ones who get cross with other singers for missing notes or forgetting lyrics, because, after all the voice is an instrument like any other – they should just be able to do these things on demand. Typically, these sorts of people are either not dedicated singers themselves, or are teachers so focused on technique for the sake of technique they cannot (or fail to) empathise with the struggles of singers (something I’ve been guilty of in the past as well).

Now, as a singing teacher (and – dare I say it! – a bloke!) I would say I fall ever so slightly on the side of being emotionally insensitive. However this extreme is also wrong and totally disrespectful of how much more the vocal instrument is affected by emotions.

The issue as I see it with this camp, is that it is not respectful of how the emotions affect the voice

Like the first camp, I think that this second camp is also a fundamentally broken mentality to have. By being bullish and harsh with singers who are perhaps struggling, even ourselves, we are ignorant of the obvious fact that how a singer is feeling will affect their voice. Shout at a singer and get them worked up (this can even be yourself), and I can guarantee the resultant anger or sadness will manifest in their voice.

Try and drill that emotional response out of a singer and you end up with a flat performance. While emotions can wreak havoc on our voices, it is the simultaneously the biggest benefit to a singer – our emotions and use of that in our voice allows us to connect with our voices on a far more instinctual level when singing a song than playing any other instrument. On top of this, our emotions allow us to connect far more powerfully with listeners than any other instrument.

To neuter the emotional element of singing by repeatedly instructing someone/yourself to ‘get over it, leave your emotional baggage at the door’ over and over will either break a singer, or leave them devoid of emotion in their singing. Both bad scenarios!

OK, we’ve got two extremes – so where’s the balance?

Let us send you part two so you can find out for yourself. Rest assured your email is secure, and we will never give your email to anyone.

 

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If you find your voice inconsistent one day to the next…

I wanted to talk about this topic given how many bugs are going round at the moment, just to help you understand why these things can affect our voices so significantly.

I’ve talked before about students who find their voice inconsistent from day to day. When I get enquiries this is also a common theme that comes up in such enquiries – “I find my voice inconsistent one day to the next, one minute it’s fine, the next it’s all croaky, the next it’s all phlegmy…

What’s going on?

Before we talk about how you might be finding your voice inconsistent, let’s talk for a minute about another instrument I love – the guitar.

When I was playing guitar at university, I had it set up in such a way that it was super easy to play. This meant that the strings were very close to the fingerboard – literally only a few millimetres from the fingerboard.

When summer hit, the humidity jumped only a little, but it was enough to cause the wood to swell, the neck changed angle/shape, and this caused the guitar to be unplayable. The strings literally touched the fingerboard, all because the humidity changed a LITTLE overnight.

I would fix the set up one day, and the next it would change further still. All these changes from day to day even with a cut bit of dead wood.

Why does this happen?

Wood, even cut and dried wood, is an organic material, i.e. made from cells. It can absorb water/moisture and swell, and even slight material changes can change the way the instrument plays.

More than this, with acoustic guitars, they NEED to be of a sufficient moisture content not just to play right but to SOUND right. Too little water and they sound very dry and brittle. Too much water and they sound dead muted and heavy.

While I’m not as au fait with violins and classical instruments, I’m aware that a similar principle applies to the way the wood (as an organic material) changes shape and sound merely with moisture content in the air.

OK Mark, great, how about the voice?

So we’ve talked about how just one thing – like moisture – can affect something that is ‘technically’ stable, like a guitar or a violin. It’s dead material, yet because it is organic it still changes with moisture content in the air.

Your voice is an organic material, even more so than dead cut wood. So if dead material like cut wood can change that radically from day to day, how much MORE so would a living, breathing material like our vocal cords and bodies change day to day. If you’re slightly sick, your vocal cords can be slightly thicker and heavier, which means that it’s suddenly like playing a heavier instrument that you are normally used to playing.

If you’ve been drinking alcohol, even from the night before, you could be slightly dehydrated, which gives you an altogether different experience of using your vocal cords than normal.

If you’ve been singing lots recently, your vocal cords could even be a little fatigued, causing you to struggle to control them properly.

Sometimes, there is overproduction of mucus in your throat even though you’re not sick (e.g. allergies or change in weather). This can act like a heavy layer on your vocal cords and make your voice feel heavy too. What’s possibly even worse about excess mucus on your cords is how the mucus can shift about and leave your voice feeling lighter or heavier depending on the time of day and how the mucus is lying on your cords. Not only this, but we have an inbuilt desire to cough excessively to clear this mucus, which can be quite traumatic for the vocal cords – drying them out, causing them to swell, etc.

A bad night’s sleep can leave your voice slightly swollen and fatigued… yada yada…

The list just goes on and on.

There are dozens of factors that can affect your vocal cords, from your health, to the weather, to how hydrated you are, to how much sleep you’ve had, to how much singing you’ve been doing. Women, the hormone changes during your time of the month can (in some cases) cause swelling of your vocal cords and therefore make your voice feel very heavy or different at that time of the month.

With all these different factors, it suddenly becomes more obvious why people find their voice inconsistent from one day to the next. In fact, it’s somehow surprising that people even FIND their voice being consistent one day to the next. There are always subtle, sometimes imperceptible changes in our voices one day to the next, and often the factors are just significant enough to cause us to notice something is different.

At the end of the day…

The voice is an organic instrument with many more factors affecting how it feels and plays than any guitar or violin. It takes time and practice with your own voice to understand and appreciate how it’s feeling day to day, and to get your voice behaving well enough that you can cope with these days when you are feeling your voice is inconsistent and that you’ve been knocked off-balance.

Prompted by a discussion on Twitter with some worship leaders, I wanted to put together a short primer on WHY it’s so common for worship leaders to lose their voices, and how to avoid that… as well as making songs easier to sing for the congregation. Here are the top 3 tips to follow if you are a worship leader:

TIP #1: PUT SONGS IN HELPFUL KEYS

Don’t automatically go with the original key. Instead, do the following:

1 – Find the highest note of the song.

2 – Does the song hit that high note repeatedly / require you to sustain the note?

IF YES – Then I want you to change the key of the song so that the highest note you found is no higher than a C4 or C#4 (that’s C or C# above middle C). Note, women would be singing the octave above (i.e. C5)

IF NO – Is that high note just ONE singular high note that you touch just once, then go nowhere near again?

If so, it’s OK to put the highest note you found as high a D4.

Why?
The reason for this is because of something called ‘vocal bridges’. These are passageways in the voice that singers need to learn to navigate to pass through to higher parts of their range. They are different for men and women. No matter how skilled a singer is, it is ALWAYS more difficult to sing a song right on or around a vocal bridge than it is to sing away from a bridge. Worship leaders often put songs in keys that are NOT in helpful places relative to singers’ bridges. Therefore, to put a song in a helpful key means changing key so as to place the highest note comfortably from a vocal bridge (or bridges).

Because the location of bridges are different for men and women, there’s not really an ideal key for congregational singing of a given song. Instead, all I’ve done with the above is give some guidelines that can help you find the optimal key for a) everyone to sing in b) not strain your voice.

If you observe these rules, your congregation will love you, and your voice will feel all the better for it.

NOTE: Men, if you are thinking ‘THAT’S TOO LOW!’ – no, it’s not. If you want put songs higher than that, they need to be MUCH higher to look after male and female voices equally. So if you want it to be higher, get some lessons and improve your own voice first.

ANOTHER NOTE: Women, if you are thinking ‘THAT’S TOO HIGH!’ – no, it’s not. Women’s voices are built to sing high, and if you are struggling to hit C5/D5, you NEED to see a good voice teacher.

TIP #2: SING IN A MANNER MORE COMPARABLE TO YOUR NORMAL SPEAKING VOICE

The way you speak on a day to day basis reflects the natural calibration of your voice. No need to be ashamed of it, but recognise that this is the natural state of your voice.

Yet, many singers try to bend their voices so far away from their natural calibration that they damage their voices. For example, there are many worship leaders who sing too loud or are intentionally breathy, or sing more nasally or incredibly light relative to the natural balance of their voice. It’s not that these are stylistically wrong, but excessive singing in a fashion that is out of kilter to the natural calibration of your voice can lead to strain, fatigue, voice loss, and in extreme cases, long term vocal damage.

It’s really hard to identify this by yourself, so my suggestion is to see a voice teacher that can help with this. Alternatively, record yourself speaking the lines of a song then singing them, and listen to volume and tonal differences between the two, and perhaps ask a friend or fellow musician to comment on the differences as well. Even then it’s hard to hear it, so my final tip is….

TIP #3: REALLY, GET SOME VOICE LESSONS…

Whatever you see yourself as – singer, guitarist, keyboardist, worship leader – if you’re using your voice, it’s a tool that you need to keep in shape to be used effectively. I’m not saying that the ONLY element to being a worship leader is being a great singer, or that you even need to BE a great singer, but you ONLY stand to better your own musicality, your team’s musicality, and musical options for supporting congregational worship by improving your voice with lessons. Put a little more bluntly, how many of you advocate that your team pursue excellence, practice, get better gear, etc, yet you rarely practice or seek to fix issues in your own voice? I know I was always very quick to get another guitar or bit of gear to ‘lead worship better’, even dropping a lot of cash on equipment, but somehow I would never see the same value in getting lessons… that was a while ago and a lot has changed since then!

Even one or two can help…
You don’t even need to have loads of lessons with a teacher, but even a handful with a good teacher can REALLY help fix ongoing issues with your voice and help you to better understand this instrument you no doubt use regularly to lead worship.

I’d strongly recommend seeking out an IVA teacher in your area. A number of us are Christians and on our own worship teams, so we really do understand the pressures facing worship leaders and backing singers out there, so know that you are not alone. Feel free to post a comment on here or drop me an email and I can point you in the direction of those I’m in touch with.