Mark JW Graham: Singing Lessons Nottingham
Mark is the Midlands' leading Certified Voice Coach, providing professional singing lessons in Nottingham. Mark is known for getting BIG results in voices, fast. – 0115 871 7660 || [email protected]
Master Your Voice with Structured Singing Practice Strategies
Your growth as a singer depends on HOW you practice, not just how much. This section shares expert-backed strategies and techniques to help you get the most out of every rehearsal session. Covering topics like warm-up routines, effective repetition, goal setting, and vocal maintenance, these articles guide you to build a practice system that drives consistent improvement and vocal health.
Artificial intelligence has rapidly expanded into the world of music education, offering digital alternatives to traditional singing lessons. But how do AI singing apps compare to working with a real vocal coach? Below, we weigh the pros and cons in a side-by-side comparison to help you understand which is best for your voice.
Continue reading “Can I learn to sing using an AI vocal coach?”
Happy New Year!
I was thinking this week about what to share with you, and someone asked me “do you do New Year’s Resolutions?”.
This got me thinking that many of you may be wholly on-board with the New Year’s resolutions pattern, and others may merely like some suggestions on what to focus on in a new year.
So here are three simple things I suggest that you focus on this year to hear progress with your voice. None of these are complicated, in fact, in many respects it’s about doing less and working smarter. Continue reading “Three Singing Tips for Results in 2025”
I came across this video recently. It’s from an interview with author and investor, Morgan Housel.
There’s lots of good advice and insight within the video, but there’s one minute that I think is absolute gold – not just for investors, but also for singers. I’ve time-stamped it for the most relevant minute, but here’s a paraphrased transcript for you:
“My strategy is to be average, but for an above average period of time. Not only will it achieve the goals that I have, but over a long period of time it will put me in the top 10%. Continue reading “Being Average for Above-Average Length of Time = Results”
Last time I wrote about how some songs are more favourable than others to sing. I also mentioned the three I suggest the most for clients to help begin to figure their voice out.
I’ve also written previously about unsingable songs. But this time I thought it might be helpful to give some examples of songs that may well be singable, but are really not that helpful for developing and figuring out your voice.
One way to categorise such songs are as wide-range songs, narrow-range songs, and sudden range-jump songs.
Now, I have clients who sing this song, and sing it well… but I also meet a lot of singers who attempt this way too early in their development, and to say they butcher it is an understatement. Continue reading “The Least Helpful Songs for Working on Your Voice”
When people first start, we have to start building their voice from the ground up. This is true no matter how long someone has been singing, or how advanced the material they want to sing happens to be.
Once we have a reasonable technical foundation laid down, we can start to deploy that newly built facility on song.
One of the hardest things to grasp is that not all songs are equally favourable for the voice. Three songs could have the same notes and same range, but the nature of the melody is such that one may feel exceptionally easy to sing, another a bit more difficult, and another may seem impossible. I’m sure you may have even experienced this ponderance first hand…
“This song goes EXACTLY as high as this other song which I’m doing so well on, yet I feel like I’m killing myself trying to sing it… what on earth is going on?”
How easy/hard a note in song is depends on many things: what was the note before, what was the note after, how fast or slow is the piece, how intense are you singing, how staccato or legato is the piece, etc.
It means that some melodies are extremely favourable for the voice, and others less so. It then follows that there are some songs that are amazingly favourable for the voice, and provide a fun playground to start to build your voice and figure out how it works.
With that in mind, I’m going to share the THREE songs I suggest most often, for male singers and for female singers: Continue reading “Three Great Songs to Figure Out Your Voice”
This week I wanted to talk about what it takes to build a voice to have for life. Clients of all ages ask about this, and so I thought it was worth going into a few fundamental precepts that I think are relevant to voices at all stages.
If you want to build a voice for life, then have a read of the following tips:
Sadly, time travel hasn’t been invented yet. So we can’t go back in time and tell our younger self to start doing things right or more correctly. But if the best time to start was yesterday, then the second best time is today.
Working on our voice a little every day is incredibly potent. Not just because this is like doing a little exercise everyday (which is inherently good for us), but because it means our practice keeps pace with how our voices change over time.
When I get to start work with voices around age 19/20, it’s relatively easy to get them on track, and as such it’s easier to then to keep them on track.
Why? Put simply, there’s not a lifetime of bad habits to unpick, simply because they aren’t old enough to have built up or ingrained such habits. Their voice is also as light as it will ever be, so the weight of the voice is as workable as it can ever be. This makes it much easier to corral it into a better way of operating than when the voice ages.
As voices age, things get darker, weightier and fuller sounding. This process is slow and gradual. Hence, if I can start working with a voice when they are younger and train them appropriately to work on their voice well most everyday, their practice routine will naturally keep pace and adjust WITH the gradual changes… rather than fighting against them. Continue reading “How to build a voice for life”
In a book I’ve recommended before, author and table tennis champion Matthew Syed tells this story about how to practice consistently.
In his early years of training, Syed was fortunate enough to study with a Chinese table tennis champion who moved to his area. Despite Syed’s already fairly high level, the coach required him to learn and refine a particularly simple serve.
Syed could already do this serve, but he was required to practice consistency and precision to such a level, that it would ALWAYS come out the same way everytime. Such that when this serve was executed, the ping pong ball would land in exactly the same spot every time on each side of the table.
This was an IMMENSE amount of work. Syed was already quite precise across a plurality of different serves, but this required him to get incredibly precise, and to drill deeper into consistency than he ever had before.
The primary purpose of doing so was this:
– preparing a single serve that Syed could reliably deliver identically 99.9% of the time, meant they could reliably measure the results of even the tiniest change in his approach.
If he gripped the handle of the paddle even 3mm lower down, then they’ll see a change, and they’ll be able to measure the degree of that change. If he changes the angle of how he holds the paddle or even the ball, they can see what changes and by how much. This becomes a hugely valuable tool for further development and training.
But consider the reverse.
What if he had a serve that was (say) only 80% consistent? That would mean a 20% inherent variability in his execution. While still excellent, this means there’s no way to reliably tell if a change in output is a result of some intentional tweak, or if it was down to some randomness in his serve.
Even 80% consistency simply isn’t enough to improve skills and ability in a predictable manner.
This 100%/99.9% consistency enabled Syed to turbocharge his training. He had cultivated an intense fixation on breeding consistency into all his practice, AND because his ability to monitor every little thing he was doing had levelled up enormously.
Which brings us to how this can help you working on your voice…
In a practice session of my own a while ago, I was cogitating on something I had been figuring out (mentioned in point 2 below).
It struck me how I wish I could have gone back in time to tell my younger self this. There’d be no guarantee my younger, more arrogant self would listen, but such is the folly of youth!
As I pondered this, I realised there were also a few other nuggets I wish I could have been given earlier in my singing career. And if every singer could take on board some of these, well, maybe their future voice in 10 years would be further ahead of where they would otherwise be.
So here are three, deceptively simple tips that I wish my younger self had been given:
Einstein (allegedly) referred to compound interest as the 8th wonder of the world. The stock market is a great illustration of this idea, where if you put a little away every month for a few decades earning a few percent interest, you will have a ludicrous pot waiting for you at the end of it. Vocal “compound interest” is the same. Daily, consistent and sustainable practice adds up.
Now, it must be said that I’ve always been a practice-a-holic. I have no problem sitting down to practice for hours with minimal interruptions. But is this always good? Or is it even necessary?
To some extent it is good, but remember, we are playing the long game. We need to see our voices as investments in their own right, and tailor our practice to what we can personally manage. This means we need to figure out a sustainable amount of practice day to day is the best option for everyone.
Even just 5-15 minutes can go a LONG way when deployed consistently. You don’t want to bite off more than you can chew (generating vocal damage or days we need to recover on). The key thing is that the practice “investment” gets done. The consistency is what will generate the results.
I almost called this “muscle vs resonance”. MANY singers and voice coaches (including my younger self) emphasise the importance of what is happening at the vocal fold level, e.g. generate even more muscular contraction of the vocal folds to generate more power.
People assume this muscular component is the dominant factor in getting a big sound. Well, it’s certainly a foundational component, but the more developed you become as a singer, the more important resonance becomes. This is critical in the higher ranges.
Resonance is a lot trickier to explain to people, because it’s not a mechanical thing (like the vocal folds vibrating), but it’s a by-product of your vocal tract forming a particular shape. This then enhances what your vocal folds are kicking out. And it takes a LONG time chipping away at this to develop and curate a big sound. No one exercise will unlock this, and it takes time. Hence the importance of point 1.
My point is, generating power only has its roots in what we can do muscularly. Past a certain point we need to cultivate resonance to make what would otherwise be a tiny sound, sound much much bigger.
Now THIS is a relatively advanced concept. The essence of it is as follows…
While there is no one else vocally quite like you in the world, there are already very similar sounding voices out there. They may not be identical, but they are similar enough that you can use them as a template. They have been gifted with similar instruments, and they have already figured out how your shared kind of instrument works.
By finding finding those singers and retracing their steps, we can work out how to get the best out of our own instruments faster. They’ve already done the heavy lifting, so we don’t need to grope around in the dark to figure out what may sound good.
Couple of caveats to mention:
1) At the start, your voice and your ear will be too undeveloped to accurately assess whose instrument you are similar to. Don’t worry about it. Start somewhere and adjust as you go.
2) As your voice develops, what is an appropriate vocal template will shift. This is also normal. We are looking for someone who’s voice is mirroring what we are presently experiencing, and that is going to adjust.
3) You are not trying to MIMIC that singer, but to learn their moves (a bit like dance moves) as it’s likely your voice will find those exact moves fairly easy to assimilate.
These things might seem remarkably simple in principle, or in the message of subtle caution, but the big results they’ve generated in my voice and client’s voices belie how simple they sound. Do take these on board and trust that they’ll pay off in the years to come.
If you’d like to explore some of these concepts in your own voice, you can book in a session with me using my booking form right here.