Learning to Sing || Expert Vocal Coach Advice

August 22, 2015July 6, 2025

Singing Secrets: Forget everything you thought you knew…

OK, a little bit sensationalist, but it got your attention!

One of the things that I think underpins being a good teacher, is NOT trying to teach people… (bear with me), but trying to change lynchpins in the way people think. If you just try to teach them something new without challenging underlying preconceptions, you are just building on a foundation that isn’t necessarily strong enough to take the layers you are about to lay down.

With this in mind, today’s post is going to cover three different secrets of singing that I want every singer to at least reconsider in the light of the following info. Some things you will be doing you may want to stop doing, other things you won’t be doing that you may want to start doing… and some things will just be plain different to the way you normally think of things.

Recently I was asked what the most helpful things that I’ve learnt about my voice over the years are and so I thought I would share the top three… They all end up linking together – used together these singing secrets can help your vocal health as well as your vocal development.

SOMETHING YOU NEED TO DO MORE

REST. FOR GOODNESS SAKE, REST.

It is crucially important that singers regularly rest their voices. If your voice is tired or feeling rough, then for goodness sake rest. If you continue to use it without giving it adequate rest, you could end up causing more damage to your vocal cords which would then take much longer to heal than if you’d just rested it in the first place.

And by resting your voice I don’t just mean “not singing for a day”. I mean actually taking a day where you don’t talk (or at least keep talking down to an absolute minimum) on those days when your voice is feeling tired or run down. This gives your vocal cords a real chance to properly recover as you aren’t using them constantly.

The consequences of not getting adequate rest for your voice can be severe. For example, just look at the vocal problems of Megan Trainor, or the even more severe health issues Sam Smith is currently facing. Rest your voice. For goodness sake, rest it!

SOMETHING YOU SHOULD REVISIT

Understand exercises that work for your voice NOW (i.e. get stuck into quality coaching)

I know I’ve blogged on why I love lip bubbles before (you can read it here) and – quite frankly – I love them. This is because they work for my voice! Heck, they work for almost every voice. Whether my voice is feeling tired or on top of the world lip bubbles are an exercise that I *know* I can depend on – I know exactly what they’ll feel like in my voice and if it’s something that will actually be helpful for my voice.

Many self-taught singers or those who try searching the internet for the “silver bullet” exercise (CLUE: there isn’t one!) develop their own pet regimen of exercises… but they need to be the RIGHT ones prescribed for your voice, not just ones you’ve read about. There is no one size fits all approach. Everyone needs bespoke exercises tailored for their voices… otherwise those pet regimens really are not guaranteed to be getting your voice where it needs to be, or at the very least are not up to date with where your voice is today.

When you work regularly with a knowledgeable coach (and I still get regular lessons myself with Master Teachers and others) you start to find a few exercises that REALLY warm-up, connect and co-ordinate your voice to do what you need it to do. These will change and develop over time. The better you understand and know which exercises work for your voice the more effective your practice sessions and lessons will be, particularly when you are short on time.

SOMETHING YOU SHOULD DO LESS

Not coughing habitually

This is something that it took me quite a long time to learn! You know those times where your throat is a little bit phlegmy? Not the prettiest picture, but we all have those days. The issue this often causes is that we then start to cough excessively to clear the throat… and we are capable of throwing a lot more force and pressure at our vocal cords than our vocal cords are capable of withstanding. In short, this is a recipe for damaging our vocal cords.

In a nutshell, when we cough to clear our vocal cords, we can often strip them of the mucous that they are MEANT to have (for protection purposes). This leads to the cords getting dry and sore. But then the body just sends more mucous to the cords to resume protection, which we then cough away as we think it’s getting in the way… and the cycle continues.

Do you get the picture? Habitual coughing, however light, can very easily lead to a vicious cycle of simultaneously dry and phlegmy throats.

Instead, try swallowing whenever you want to cough, and/or take a swig of water. I used to cough all the time – even when I didn’t really need to. It’s really hard to break that habit, but once you start to do so, your voice feels a LOT better for it. Not coughing habitually means that your cords won’t get as inflamed and you just might find that the effects of things like sore throats, colds or throat infections can hang around for less time because of this.

That about wraps it up!
So there you have it – three things that I think really challenge how most people approach their voice. that I’ve learnt over my time of being a vocal coach and receiving coaching on my own voice. I hope you find these vocal tips helpful and if you’ve got any questions feel free to get in touch!

August 29, 2014July 6, 2025

How Long Does It Take To Learn To Sing Well?

I often get asked ‘How Long Does it Take To Learn To Sing Well?’… the answer is not just simply ‘how long is a piece of string?’, but it is dependent on your goals and many other factors.

So rather than answer the question of ‘how long does it take to learn to sing well’, I want to talk about how long it takes to become exceptional at something. I want to do this to cast light on how long it takes to learn to do anything, but also to help readers realise it’s a long process to become truly great at something.

Time waits for no man…

In today’s culture, we are often confronted by *successful* people around the world aged 21 or under. Having titles like ‘The Top 100 Most Influential Teens’ on magazines doesn’t help with this. Seeing ‘The Top 10 Richest Under-21s’, or how the pop-chart is populated by people who are all under the age of 25 or even 21 depending which week you are talking about, really doesn’t help with this.

And I think this is a fundamentally flawed world-view, because it propagates the cultural lie that the prime age for achieving success is somewhere between 18-25… and that if you miss *success* or critical acclaim in that period of your life, you have failed. If you haven’t learned to do something to an exceptionally high standard by the time you are 26, you may as well give up.

This is a flawed world-view, and fundamentally untrue.

How can I say this? I refer to exhibit A…

Da Vinci

Leonardo Da Vinci is one of THE defining men of the last millennium. He is credited with countless paintings, inventions, great artworks and had one of the greatest minds not just of his generation, but of the last 1000 years. He truly was what is known as a ‘polymath’, someone who is exceptionally clever to the point of genius, and to be such a genius across multiple disciplines.

Now, for the gut punch. Da Vinci was not known by the world for ANY level of success until he was 46. That’s right. 46. Not 40. Not 30. Not 20. Not 18. Forty. Freaking. Six.

Bear in mind that people regularly died of illness and disease by the time they were 40 at the time Da Vinci was alive, so to not have accomplished anything of note by the time you were 30 could easily have been interpreted as a sign of *nothing will ever happen for me*, and in a far more severe way than we could ever comprehend in the Western world today where we regularly live to 70 years old and then some.

If you fancy an interesting read, go and find a biography of Da Vinci – you will be ASTOUNDED by how much of a failure in terms of critical acclaim he was for much of his life.

This is also consistent with another bit of information that is worth discussing…

The 10,000 hour rule

In multiple books, there is referenced something called the 10,000 hour rule. Without going into extreme depth on this, what this means is that experts in their field are generally found to have become experts by spending a minimum of 10,000 hours of focused practice on their chosen discipline. Studies in specific areas known to be truly difficult have found that there is no-one who becomes known as an expert in a given area who managed to get there without spending that requisite time focusing their mind on that task. Violinists, chess players, songwriters (namely, the Beatles) all got there through an incredible amount of hard work.

Let’s do the maths on that…

5 hours a day for a year, accounting for holidays, sick days etc, generally equates to about 1000 hours of workable time per year. That means to acquire 10,000 hours of focused practice, one should generally expect to spend about 10 years on a given task to be considered an expert in their ability. Obviously, if you work to spend more hours on a task, you will get there quicker, but it must be quality practice.

Either way, we are talking about YEARS of focus and determination to get to that level. Not ‘6 months and I STILL haven’t been successful’, or ‘2 years and I STILL haven’t got a record deal’… we are talking YEARS. In Da Vinci’s case, we are talking DECADES of dedication to his chosen craft (or crafts, even).

The Slow Road

We are surrounded by a ‘fast-food’ culture. Where stuff happens fast, and NOW. People don’t like waiting for things. Even movies are now ‘on-demand’. Amazon offer guaranteed next day delivery. Food shops are 24/7.

I’m not saying that you need to spend 10,000 hours in to learn how to sing. You can become a good singer pretty quickly with the right work. But the better you want to be, the loftier your goals, the longer it takes. The reality is, the road to success in ANYTHING is slow going. There may be moments where you speed up, moments where you slow down, but there is no substitute for putting in the time.

For those of you feeling a bit down at the moment…

… maybe you feel like you are getting nowhere, take a moment. Consider how old you are. Consider how long you’ve been doing what you’ve been doing. Consider how focused you have been on the task. Then realise that the road IS MEANT to be slow. It’s never been fast. The idea that you can become an expert in something within 2 hours of trying it for the first time is a cultural lie that we are led to believe.

Lasting ability is worth pursuing, but it does take time. It comes slow. It takes time, dedication, constantly renewed focus, and – I would say – an inner peace that this is the way it must be. Take heart, and keep going!

July 11, 2014August 3, 2025

Lip Bubbles & Alternative Warmups

A lip bubble looks a bit like blowing a raspberry. But you also make a sound under it, and generally, we have our fingers in our cheeks to lift the weight of our cheeks off of our vibrating lips. Here’s a short video I put together explaining:
a) what lip bubbles are;
b) how to do them; and
c) alternatives if you’re finding them a bit tricky.

In all seriousness, the reason it’s a top favourite among vocal coaches the world over is because it is extremely effective.

Of all the tools in my arsenal, if I could only ever use ONE of them forever and ever, I would pick the lip bubble.

How does it work?

As explained in the video above, it is what we call a ‘semi-occluded’ exercise. What this means, is that we are partially blocking the flow of air. This acts like a secondary valve after your vocal cords. Your vocal cords are a first ‘valve’ for regulating air, and your lips form a second ‘valve’. They restrict but do not stop the flow of air. It’s not a painful restriction either (at least not when done right), we are just trying to impede/slow the flow of air.

This creates a column of pressured air between your lips and your larynx, i.e. less air is being permitted to escape the lips than is being pushed towards it, therefore there is a build-up of pressurised air behind the lips, and therefore we end up with a column of pressurised air between the lips and the vocal cords.

This causes the column of pressurised air to act downwards on the vocal cords and larynx, helping to keep the larynx a little more stable during operation. By repeatedly doing exercises with the lip bubble, and exposing the singer and the singer’s body to such laryngeal stability, this promotes stability in the muscle memory of the student. It also helps to warm-up the vocal cords and stimulate blood flow to the vocal cords in a low-impact manner. I’ve even heard some teachers liken this to a form of vocal massage, as the column of pressurised air almost massages the vocal cords during their vibration. This certainly seems to make sense to me, and Ingo Titze’s videos on the use of the straw to massage and flatten out the vocal cords certainly seems to corroborate such a statement.

Where do we use it?

We use it during a warmup, a cool-down, and often as a connective exercise in lessons, e.g. to help connect a student from one part of their voice to another, keeping additional stability, and keeping the voice operating well but in a lower-impact manner than perhaps they were doing before. In short, we use it EVERYWHERE!

Why I like it?

Other than the already mentioned functional benefits to the lip bubble, there is a key psychological reason I really like the lip bubble.

Often, when it comes to singing, students concentrate so much on ‘what happens if I fail?!?!’ that they actually DO fail… because they are so distracted and wound up about ‘being right’, that they can’t do ANYTHING differently to what they were doing before. This is a shame, but 100% just the result of being a flawed human being. We’re all the same!

HOWEVER! The lip bubble, by its very nature of being an odd exercise, removes them from their normal hearing of their voice, and so they stop TRYING to do certain things, because they have no idea what they SHOULD be doing. As such, this allows us as voice teachers to introduce the singer to a different way of utilising their vocal cords. We as trained voice teachers can also hear the singer’s instrument (to some extent) underneath the lip bubble, which helps guide us towards the exercises that can promote stability and that is balanced to their particular instrument, whereas with excess manipulation by some students/singers, it’s sometimes hard to cut through the layers of over-styling/manipulation.

In short, I find that by giving them an exercise that is relatively easy to do, albeit bizarre, but that is totally unfamiliar, we bypass the singers natural tendency to want to overly control what is going on… and just let the process happen.

This is IMMENSELY useful in the process of vocal development, as it gives the student a new experience without having to be consciously made to do it (HINT: This is KEY to effective voice teaching, AND to long lasting vocal habits).

It can also be done in a relatively low-impact fashion, perfect for beginning students. It can be done with more intensity, over a wider range, and with more complexity, perfect for intermediate students. It can also be lengthened and altered or used with other exercises for more advanced students. It is what I would refer to as a ‘lenticular‘ exercise – something that is useable with every level of students, and every way is generally right, but that it can be used to greater effect in more complex and varied ways the more advanced a student becomes.

So not only can we use it as a warm-up, or a cool-down, or as a connective exercise, or a developmental exercise, but all of these, and everything in between.

The lip bubble is vastly underused by many singers, so get going with it.

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July 25, 2013July 6, 2025

How to get high notes? Is your volume knocking you off balance? Demonstration courtesy of Circa Survive

How to get high notes?

This is possibly THE most common question I get asked ‘Mark, how do I get to those high notes? can you make it easy for me?’

The answer is ‘I’ll show you’ and ‘yes’, but I want to talk a little about a common culprit and little known issue that often prevents students getting there.

The Issue is often ‘Volume’

So, I often get students come in who sing waaaaay too loud… I often get get students who sing too quietly, but far and away the most common issue is singing too loudly.

Now, it is not that singing loud in itself is a bad thing, but often when singers sing verrry loudly they are knocking themselves off balance. Let me explain…

The voice is a very complicated instrument, but at it’s heart it’s a wind instrument. The sound is generated by your vocal cords, which is stirred into motion by you blowing air through them.

If you play a wind instrument or know someone who plays a wind instrument, then you or they will know that all wind instruments require a certain amount of air to ‘get going’. It’s not about having LOTS of air, nor very little air, but a decent moderate amount of air makes it the easiest way to start learning to play an instrument.

Wind instruments players will also tell you how you CAN increase the amount of air/air pressure, but it requires an increase in skill as well to control the instrument, otherwise you can lose control of pitch or the tone.

The same is true of the voice. Once you leave that comfortable ‘moderate’ amount of air flow, at a comfortable volume level, it requires skill to keep the vocal cords behaving themselves with that increased pressure. At this point, other muscles surrounding the larynx go into ‘panic’ preservation mode, and tense up to protect the larynx and the delicate muscles within the larynx… unless the skill of the singer permits the vocal cords to maintain appropriate behaviour even under that extra pressure.

Here’s an example by a band called Circa Survive. Their lead singer Anthony Green sings pretty darn high, but sometimes sounds like he’s tearing his throat apart in this electric amped environment:

ELECTRIC SONG
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GAkOd6vOEQ

But in this acoustic enviroment, while he still strains, it is FAR less noticeable. By simply knocking his volume down 10-20%, he has verrry quickly entered that ‘optimal’ amount of air flow and suddenly the tension he is experiencing (and that we’re hearing) is far more manageable.

ACOUSTIC SONG

THIS is a prime example of where adding volume before the skill is there results in strain and tension. Now these guys are a great band, and I’m not trying to knock them, but the strain he is experiencing is visually and sonically evident throughout the first video.

So, if you’re finding it tough to maintain control, try knocking your volume down just 5-10%, maybe even 20% on those notes that are causing a problem, and see how that tension alleviates itself. It may not sound as strong to you, but that muscular co-ordination of your vocal cords is far more balanced… we can then build strength into that co-ordination so that it FEELS that easy, but SOUNDs absolutely massive.

It’s absolutely possible, just drop us a line to get booked in and we’ll show you how.