Many of my voice clients have had past vocal coaching with other singing teachers before ever starting singing lessons with me. But I’ve noticed over the years that there’s certain things that most singing teachers get WRONG about teaching voice.
In terms of starting with other coaches, this is fairly normal. Like with any subject worth learning, we start with someone accessible, then we move forward to coaches appropriate to our improving level over time.
And what happens is, as I receive these more serious and technically advancing clients who have moved through various coaches, I gain some insight as to the good and bad attributes of the other coaches out there.
In this article, I wanted to talk about the slightly contentious topic of: what (I think) a lot of vocal coaches and singing teachers generally get wrong about vocal coaching, and the reasons why.
1. They don’t understand how the voice works
This is by far the biggest issue I come across. I would estimate that 60% of voice teachers I encounter simply do not understand how the voice works, at least not to a sufficient degree that they could effectively teach it as an instrument.
How can you spot these coaches? Often such teachers are strong singers in their own right, or they may have a good stage presence that nets them gigs/performances. But they lack any specific knowledge about how the voice works or how to elicit real change and improvement in their clients’ voices.
If you don’t know which component of the voice is responsible for which vocal characteristic (and which exercises are responsible for developing and culturing those qualities), you’re on a hiding to nowhere.
I regularly see or hear of people teaching things that do literally nothing for the voice. Worse still, I see people advising “technique” or key choices that are inclining singers towards vocal damage. This is generally well-intentioned, but ultimately ill-informed.
To train a voice, one needs sufficient understanding of the voice and how it works in order to build it well.
We don’t necessarily need voice degrees in vocal physiology to perform high level vocal coaching. However, one’s understanding can’t be so vague (or absent!) that one can’t answer basic questions about why something sounds a certain way when a student asks.
2. They ONLY possess academic knowledge of how the voice works
This might seem counter-intuitive given my first point, but this is actually a legitimate growing problem in the vocal coaching world.
Many singing teachers initially fall foul of point 1, and then come to the admirable realisation that they are missing something. They then wisely attempt to plug a gap in their knowledge by attending courses, studying more, etc. Of course, I 100% commend this attitude.
However, what is now appearing is a sub-group of vocal coaches who know plenty about how the voice works and the latest science… and that’s about it.
Some even come from a purely academic background with no real singing experience/ability. I’m often surprised by how many set about purely academic development with great fervour and effort, yet attribute little-to-no work into application of this in their own vocal ability.
Deep scientific knowledge of the latest studies is all well and good. Having countless diplomas and a list of speaking engagements are clearly very impressive. However, if that doesn’t translate to making someone sing better – either themselves or a client – what on earth is the point??
Knowledge for knowledge’s sake will inevitably pull one in all directions and fundamentally get students nowhere. This is especially true when we’re talking about a “doing” activity like singing. The rubber simply has to meet the road.
3. They simply try to polish whatever is there
It’s shocking how many people I have met and work/worked with who describe their last teacher(s) lessons as consisting of the following: “We just did a few warmups then sang songs for the whole lesson, and they gave me some tips“.
The goal of a good vocal coach should be to build a voice from the ground up. For those with either a lack of knowledge (as per point 1), or only academic knowledge (as per point 2), many teachers simply try to “polish whatever is there“.
If a singer has come to a teacher for help, the goal of the teacher is not just to get them to force out a couple of extra high notes, or make them louder, or more stylised, etc. Their goal should be to build a singer’s voice from the ground up. They should be aiming to culture the singer AND the voice into a complete performer and instrument.
We need exercises that work with where a student is at to:
a) build their technical facility, then…
b) show them how to take that new facility into song.
4. They are teaching you to manually operate your voice using a variety of disparate techniques
Most teachers who have some knowledge or singing ability will have their own little collections of approaches for specific areas in the voice, i.e. “tips and tricks“. From their perspective.
With such teachers, every part of the voice will (allegedly) have its own little arcane ruleset that’s often incongruent with every other part of the voice, e.g. “when up there, push it harder, open your mouth super-wide“, or “try and flip for the high notes, it’ll be easier“, “get more nasally there”, or other such bizarre instructions.
(SIDENOTE: If you want to read about the more insane singing instructions I’ve heard about, you can read some of those here)
This just becomes a smörgåsbord of incongruent instructions for the singer. Such an incongruent amalgam of rules typically lead to a very broken and inconsistent overall range in a singer’s voice, and general confusion on the part of the singer.
When it comes to building a voice, we don’t want approachES – as in plural – we want a single unified approach that blends all parts of the voice together so that it’s even from top to bottom, with no breaks, flips, breaks or switches. Sure, there might be moments where we need to introduce a singer to a new part of their range in a less finished way, but we must be moving toward a smooth seam-less voice.
This philosophy to building a voice makes the voice far more like a well-built piano, where we can play whatever notes we want, as and when we want (assuming we’ve built it sufficiently).
5. Lack of empathy
This is something I think about a lot.
When each of us is looking for guidance on singing songs, whether technical or artistic in nature, we need someone that can empathise with what we are trying to achieve. I don’t just mean intellectually, and I don’t just mean emotionally – I mean “empathy” in a total sense.
However, many coaches are lacking in this dimension. Sometimes it may be a more obvious lack of emotional empathy with a singer, but in this case I’m talking about something more fundamental and far less obvious.
The issue is this: if a purported coach is not a singer, has a substantially different voice (or even a less capable voice than a given singer), or has no experience with singing even a related type of material/a particular range, such a teacher will have a severely impaired grasp of what the singer in question is going through.
My own experience
I say this as someone who spent many years studying with female vocal coaches, or lighter voiced male coaches, who simply did not understand what the more typical male voice had to experience to build their voice. The extra weight in the bottom end of the voice, the challenge in getting out of the bottom and into the top, to do so in a smooth way. None of them grasped it, as it all came so much easier to their voices.
The lack of understanding and lack of empathy meant they gave directions trying to configure my voice in a way that it was ultimately not built to do, as if it was a lighter voice than it was. It wasn’t till I started working with coaches with more experience working with my weight of voice that the cogs started to mesh fully.
It is this lack of empathy in the actual doing, at the level a singer needs to be doing it, that is hidden from view as being fundamentally unhelpful. But if they have never personally experienced each stop along the journey of technical and artistic development that they are trying to take the singer on, it’s not much more than an encouraging facade.
Even with the required teaching tools, a lack of personal experience in that area means it’s much like trying to describe road directions along roads which they themselves have never travelled.
A good vocal coach needs to have sufficient experience with coaching AND singing that they can grasp not just what the singer in question needs to do, but how it should feel to the singer to achieve that end. This is not just good personal coaching on an emotional level, but utterly critical on a technical level also.
Conclusion
This are just some of the things I’ve picked up as critical things for effective vocal coaching that often seem to be missing to one degree or another. This is not written with any one coach in mind, but rather makes a point of crystallising my thoughts on some of the critical components to good vocal coaching.