Category: Learning to Sing

Start Your Singing Journey with Expert Guidance

Learning to sing isn’t just about hitting the right notes—it’s about building technique, confidence, and vocal health from the ground up. In this section, you’ll find beginner-friendly articles that cover everything from finding your natural voice and improving tone to structuring your practice sessions. Whether you’re just starting out or picking up where someone else left off, these guides will help you sing smarter—and stronger.

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What Causes Weak Voices? Common Reasons Your Voice Sounds Weak

What Causes Weak Voices? Common Reasons Your Voice Sounds Weak


Short answer: a “weak” voice is usually caused by a mix of under‑use/deconditioning, overuse or strain, inefficient technique, and/or temporary health factors (illness, reflux, allergies), sometimes compounded by age‑related change, hormones/medication and fatigue or stress.

I see this across singers and heavy voice users alike: power and tone drop, notes feel unstable, and the voice tires quickly. The goal isn’t a quick hack—it’s identifying which of the causes apply to you and then rebuilding strength and efficiency with targeted training.

  • Deconditioning/under‑use: muscles lose strength and coordination without regular, directed training.
  • Overuse/strain: speaking or singing too loud/long without support leads to fatigue and loss of power.
  • Inefficient technique: breath/valve timing, anchoring and resonance not working together.
  • Health factors: colds, allergies, reflux, dehydration, poor sleep; sometimes thyroid or meds.
  • Age‑related change: tissue and hormonal shifts can reduce stability without specific counter‑training.
  • Stress & load management: high demand days with no recovery plan weaken output over time.

Below I explain how each factor weakens the voice, the signs to look for, and what a focused coaching plan does to restore strength and clarity.

Traits of a Weak or Weaker Voice

The exact traits of a weak voice are fairly identifiable for most, e.g.

  • lighter or thinner timbre
  • excessive breathiness
  • instability in the tone
  • quiet speaking or singing volume

However, we need to put this in greater context, in that all voices are unique and different. Even with training and maximum vocal development, some voices will be lighter and quieter than others and others will be louder and weightier than others (and some will be in-between). Some voices when trained perfectly will have more breathiness in their tone, others will have less/none. We perceive this as vocal weakness when these traits seem excessive.

What Causes A Weak Voice?

Age

I have written countless times about how voices are meant to peak in their 50s, but this only holds true if people are working on their voice and training it to handle this. In reality, most people don’t look after their voices, and as their body becomes less supple and robust with age (compared with youth) wear and tear is more easily acquired, and takes longer to recover from.

Older voices tend to lose muscle (when not built or maintained), and can lead to vocal ‘wobble’ in the voice. This is where there is insufficient muscle or muscle tone to maintain a stable tone in the voice. This is usually most overt in female choral singers over age 50/60. As the voice becomes weightier with age, such singers desire to sound more choral, so resort to a lighter and lighter sound to side-step the increased weight in their voice. Men tend to notice the bottom end of their voice seep away, and end up with a drier scratchier version of what they once had.

In both cases this is a decrease in muscle tone, and an increase in vocal weakness. In reality, good vocal control involves integrating the bottom range into the top range, and learning to navigate that with no perceiveable switch. This gets harder to solve the later one comes to train their voice. Hence, age is one of the biggest challenges people can face in terms of keeping their voice sounding even and strong.

Damage

This can be acute or chronic. Sometimes people suffer from more serious incidents like nodules, granulomas, etc, but it can be as simple as speaking excessively on a voice that is losing its muscle tone (per my point about age).

If there is swelling, wear/tear, abnormality in the vocal fold tissue or other parts of the voice, often people will be able to speak but something will not sound right. Some men or women who smoke or drink, suffer from acid reflux, etc can have a noticeable raspy sounding voice much of the time. There is a precipitating injury (however mild), but the act of constantly speaking keeps wearing down the voice, making the issue worse and denying the body a chance to recover. Singers coming off a cold often don’t give themselves enough time to recover and end up limping on with a weak voice for many months.

More serious injuries, e.g. trauma from giving birth, neck injury, vocal trauma from singing, can also be a factor. The biggest issue I’ve seen is people not fully recovering before getting back to doing what they were doing before, especially worrisome if the behaviour they were engaging in before was responsible for such damage.

Lack of Vocal Development

I am trying to avoid the use of the word ‘training’ here, quite simply because I try not to think about my voice when I am speaking. Similarly so when singing. Our goal with vocal coaching is to build a voice that is (well, yes, trained… but that is) vocally developed such that it does not suffer from the above issues, whether or not we are deeply thinking about it. When a voice can move evenly from the bottom to the top and back again, with no breaks, flips or switches, we tend not to suffer from such issues.

Why would this be? The act of doing the training instils in the body not just the correct technique, but a physical aversion to doing something it knows is a bad idea. I can tell when I’m at a pub and I’m speaking slightly too loud – how? Because it feels wrong. I have used my voice enough through training such that I know when I’m overstepping the mark. I know when an environment is not conducive to me being heard, so I avoid trying to be heard over volumes I cannot compete with. This is a by-product of training, but it’s a state of vocal development that keeps voices functioning well at any age.

Improper Deployment of Their Voice

This overlaps with my previous point, which is centred around not trying to deploy your voice in a way it cannot perform.

For example, if you have a lighter voice, your voice will be quieter but also less deep than other voices. Trying to compete with deeper voices in the frequency that deeper voices dominate in is a waste of time. You won’t sound right, you’ll sound quiet, and it’ll be exhausting. Repeatedly doing this also wears the voice down and introduces weakness/instability into the voice.

Instead, we have to build voices so that they can operate well in whatever range they work best in. The richness and fullness in one’s voice comes from building it and using it well, rather than trying to compete with others at what their voices do well. This is not something I can advise on without working with and building someone’s voice to a reasonable degree, and by then, the vocal development tends to do all the heavy lifting for me/the voice user.

There’s many examples I could give, but I hope this gives you a sense of why voices can find themselves becoming weak and sounding as such.

Conclusion

The answer to all of this is point 3. If we can instil a level of vocal development in someone’s instrument and body, they will tend to do more of the good things, avoid more of the bad things, and have some physiological awareness of inevitable changes that could otherwise derail their voice.

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How hard should it feel to sing well?

Here’s a question for you: How hard should singing feel?

Particularly when working on our voices, having some idea of the hallmarks of “doing it right” would be helpful. How difficult should it feel to do? Should it feel really physically difficult? Or when we get better, should it feel devoid of effort? If it’s somewhere in between, how can we tell?

It’s a tricky one, that’s for certain. I certainly can’t give you a perfect and definitive answer. Nevertheless, I’ve got a few illustrations that may help you explore the complexity of answering this question.

Learning to drive

Take learning to drive and to park a car. If you have to keep doing 17-point turns and endure repeated attempts to get your car into the space, that is typically a sign that you are not yet efficient or competent at that specific skill. Hitting the cars next to you is also a bad sign.

As we get better, we might find we can do it in just a few turns, or a few attempts. After years of driving, many find they can swing the car into tighter and tighter spaces from weirder and weirder angles, in one smooth move.

The hallmarks of “doing it right” with driving are fairly obvious from the outside and also as the driver. The metrics are visual and physical. We can tell that we got the car in the space, we can visually see it’s aligned, we can count how many attempts it took, etc. We can even recall whether or not we heard any scraping sounds as we parked up!

Consider our question
Is it physically hard to maneuver a car like this? Continue reading “How hard should it feel to sing well?”

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What Yoga Taught Me About Voice

Before we begin, I must make clear, I am in no way an expert on yoga. I’m not proficient enough at said art to advise or teach someone, so if you’re hoping for advice on positions, you’re out of luck.

However, from years of sports, voice discipline and martial arts, I have relatively good body awareness. From the nature of training voice as well, the “learning experience” is something I spend a lot of time immersed in, and I’m used to trying to find more efficient ways of doing things, especially through repetition.

As such, a few things came to mind during yoga practice over the last few years or so that mirror my experience with voice training. Some of these I thought worth sharing:

1. Repetition and refinement

There are many positions in yoga. Some are referred to as their anglicised names like “cat-cow” or “child’s pose”, and others utilise the original sanskrit. There’s one pose I found particularly difficult at first: “downward facing dog”:

I am relatively strong, but very quickly I was shaking in the shoulders. I got a little stronger with repetition over the first handful of practice sessions, but I was clearly missing something. Whatever I was missing was something that simply repeating what I was doing wouldn’t work. As I kept practicing, I made tiny adjustments to my body position to try to find a less strenuous way of holding it. Then, I made one particular adjustment that enabled my skeleton to bear more of my weight. Suddenly, an equilibrium was reached, and the muscles stopped shaking.

The point is this: repetition and refinement go hand in hand. You can’t carve away the imperfection without repeatedly facing it. This requires embracing getting it wrong and improving through conscious repetition and refinement.

The same is true with voice, or anything for that matter. People think they can trick their voice to the top notes, or that once they’ve got the top notes, they’ve got them and they don’t need to do any further work. On the contrary, repetition and refinement will always pay dividends to those willing to put in the work. #

Whether that’s easier access, more power for less work, more stamina, repetition and refinement is critical. But what else follows from this? Continue reading “What Yoga Taught Me About Voice”

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There is no one size fits all vocal warmup routine

If you were to go onto Youtube right now, and search for “vocal warmup routine“, you will find hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of videos.

Many of these will contain similar exercises, but many of them will also contain conflicting advice. Such conflicts won’t be covered in this article.

The top video on Youtube (at time of writing) has racked up 22 million views. This is clearly a topic people want the answers to, and I totally understand this. In truth, I actually use very similar exercises to some of these videos, at least on paper.

So if people want good exercises to warmup their voice, and there’s enough similarity between what I’m doing and what these Youtubers are doing in the videos, why haven’t I put out a video on this?

Philosophically simple, technically more complex

As per the title of today’s article, it’s because there is no one size fits all vocal warmup routine (or vocal practice routine for that matter).

But why?

The problem philosophically is relatively simple: a generalised video does not take into the account the specific individuality and vocal requirements of any given singer. Such a general video also ignores the fundamental learning process that underpins any individual who is looking to acquire a technical skill.

Here’s what needs to happen

To deploy any exercise in someone’s voice, we need the following three elements (at least):

1) Select an appropriate exercise for a given singer, and teach the singer to do it correctly
2) Take that exercise over an appropriate range in their voice for a desired result
3) Develop their ability to have a constructive self-guided practice

Let’s go through each of these to clarify: Continue reading “There is no one size fits all vocal warmup routine”

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The Most Insane Teaching Instructions I’ve Ever Heard

Many of my clients have been through numerous coaches/teachers before they end up coming to me. This means I often get at least a little insight into the kinds insane teaching instructions that other vocal coaches, singing teachers, speech therapists, etc have asked my clients to do.

Recently, someone reminded me they’d had sessions with another coach. The face of disgust they pulled when they recalled those sessions made me ask them what they’d just remembered. When they told me, I honestly couldn’t believe what they’d been told to do.

This then reminded me of all the insane instructions I’ve heard that other instructors have given over the years. I thought I’d share a few of these (and my horror at such instructions), but more helpfully to discuss why someone might think this, and why such thinking is erroneous or unhelpful when it comes to building your voice.

1. “If you can’t hit the note, just croak it“

Continue reading “The Most Insane Teaching Instructions I’ve Ever Heard”

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Levelling Up: You can’t unhear that next level of quality

I like watches. I’ve always had an interest in taking things apart, understanding how they work, and learning about the history of how things develop.

One of the earliest non-fiction books I ever read in earnest was called Longitude. This is all about the man who invented the first accurate chronometer for use at sea, to help guide ships on long distance voyages.

As it happens, in the countryside area of Southwell near Nottingham, there is the British Horological Society. This has huge numbers of watches, clocks, chronometers, and all manner of time-keeping devices.

In one of the rooms, they have scaled-up models of components inside wrist-watches. Each of the models tracks the history of certain technological developments that levelled up watch making. Continue reading “Levelling Up: You can’t unhear that next level of quality”

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Why certain singing questions SEEM important, but aren’t

If any of you have studied anything to a high level, you’ll know just how deceptively complex almost any given subject can be. This seems self-evident for subjects like quantum physics, philosophy, economics, brain surgery, microcomputers, etc. Even their subject titles require some explanation to most lay-people, and almost every word used within that subject requires deep understanding and definitions to put everything together.

The Learning Paradigm

With such subjects, we enter into a mental paradigm where we accept that complete knowledge of all elements is not possible. This paradigm directs helps us appreciate the vastness and nuance of the subject, and directs our learning. It also typically keeps us humble and always open to further insight.

Viewing subjects in this way usually helps us see the multi-faceted nature of such subjects, and not to assume anything. This further helps us to grasp that we need to study from experts, undergo apprenticeships, and spend many years in training to acquire requisite skills to get our understanding right.

One key thing to note: in such subjects we accept that often what may initially seem like an obvious and sensible question to ask, may in fact reveal a thought process that shows one does not (and sometimes cannot!) fully grasp the nuances of the subject at hand. Continue reading “Why certain singing questions SEEM important, but aren’t”

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Why Trying to Teach Yourself to Sing Doesn’t Really work

Can You Teach Yourself to Sing?

I had a call with a prospective client the other week, and they asked whether it was possible for someone to teach themselves to sing. Now, whilst every single client I teach is technically “self-teaching” when they practise at home with our session recordings, whether singers can “DIY-build” their voice in isolation is something I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about… and also trying for myself, in fact.

Self-teaching is exactly how I started out. I used DVD courses, online lessons—even the early days of YouTube. Surely those avenues could work well for self-tuition, right?

Well, as I found out, self-building your voice doesn’t really work that way. In my opinion, this is for three primary reasons:

1. A Guitar or Piano Is a Finished Instrument—Your Voice Isn’t

When we learn a traditional instrument, even an inexpensive one, it’s already complete. A guitar has frets, strings, tuners. A piano has keys, hammers, and has likely been tuned before delivery.

But when we try to learn singing, the “instrument” is incomplete. The voice hasn’t been taught to transition through registers. Many people don’t even realise such registers exist, let alone how to coordinate them.

So when someone thinks they can self-teach voice the same way they taught themselves guitar, it’s a flawed comparison. The voice must be built and played at the same time. That’s a massive difference.

2. Building a Voice and Using a Voice Are Two Different Skillsets

Continuing the analogy: the person who builds a guitar (a luthier) is not necessarily the person who plays it. The same is true of singers and coaches.

When someone says they want to “DIY-build” their voice, they’re effectively saying they want to be both the instrument builder and the performer. That’s a huge undertaking. As a professional coach, I can tell you most people grossly underestimate the physics, physiology, acoustics, and psychology involved.

Even getting a grip on the basics requires a huge investment of time and study. It takes the skill of an experienced singer and coach to guide someone to the right coordination.

3. You’re the Only Person Who Doesn’t Hear Your Voice Accurately

We’ve all heard recordings of our own voices and thought, “That’s not how I sound.” That’s because we hear ourselves through a combination of air and bone conduction—and it’s misleading.

It takes a lot of time and experience to mentally override this distortion. Even then, it’s a trick your brain performs—not an accurate perception. That’s why it’s so hard to self-monitor your voice effectively. You need someone on the outside who can hear what you’re doing—and what you’re meant to be doing—to give targeted feedback and correction.

If You’re Serious About Your Voice, Get Help

Just like you wouldn’t DIY your own surgery or legal defence, you shouldn’t try to DIY your vocal development.

Find someone who knows what they’re doing. It will save you a huge amount of time, effort, and frustration. I’ve gone down that road, and I’ve worked with many others who tried to as well. It’s a cul-de-sac.

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