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]
Build Vocal Confidence and Master Stage Performance
Great singing and vocal confidence is largely based in solid vocal technique— this is what enables you to trust your voice under pressure.
This section explores how to perform with confidence, overcome stage anxiety, and develop the mindset needed to sing freely in front of others. Whether you’re preparing for a gig, audition, or recording, these articles will help you strengthen both your technical reliability and your psychological readiness.
Great singing requires more than technique — it takes belief, resilience, and a mindset geared toward growth. These hand-picked articles explore the emotional, mental, and professional side of vocal development.
This article forms part of our advanced vocal techniques collection. Click here to dive deeper.
I think a lot about the learning process, and the creative process. While there is heavy overlap between the two processes, they are not exactly the same.
Nevertheless, people often want to rush both. They want to push as hard they can, like it’s all metric driven, like it’s a profit and loss chart in a high-pressure sales room…
“OK, we have to acquire one new note a week, because by the end of the year I’ll have more range than any singer ever”
“This song feels comfortable, so I can’t be pushing myself, gotta find something that finds my limits again”
“If I can’t nail this song in one attempt, I’m a total failure”
Yet we have all thought along such lines at some point or another. We may never have articulated such things in so many words, but we’ve all FELT that way about progress.
That progress has to be measurable, quantifiable, dissectible. And that measurable progress needs to be constant and even day to day, week to week, year to year. Slow downs, setbacks, or worse, variable performance is not acceptable.
Learning and the creative process really isn’t like that. With such a mindset, frustration and burnout is an inevitability. Continue reading “Jason Alexander on the learning and creative process”
I go to a reasonable number of music events. I listen to a wide variety of different performers, at different skill levels.
What astounds me, is how often a crowd goes wild for something that is really not that great, and remains silent for music that is out of this world.
To be clear, I’m not talking about my own taste. It’s cross-genre, and not primarily about music I like. It’s the stark contrast between people who have clearly spent years crafting an exquisite sound, versus those who are just screaming loudly from a platform, and the disparity between how those are often received.
With that in mind, I want to share a short story from this article:
“Joshua Bell is one of the world’s great virtuosos, and one of the biggest names in classical music.
“And in 2007 he did some anonymous busking, as a little social experiment to see what might happen.
“It was 7.51am on Friday 12 January 2007, in the middle of the morning rush hour, when baseball-capped Bell opened his violin case and started playing, just inside L’Enfant Plaza Metro entrance in the busy centre of Washington DC. Watch what happened below:
I send one email a week, at 6pm on a Sunday, to those on my subscriber list. I only send one so as not to bombard people with more emails than we already get. If you’re not already subscribed, you can sign up via the vocal prospectus signup at the bottom of this page.
Come Friday/Saturday of each week, I look back on what has come up in client sessions and what has been on my mind, and send something out that is highly relevant to that specific week. Most of the time it’s a fresh article, and sometimes it’s one I’ve revised to bring up to date.
At the end of each year, I look back and see which articles grabbed people’s attention more than any others. Maybe there was something in the zeitgeist that year that meant everyone was thinking along the same lines, but sometimes it’s just because they are eternally relevant questions.
These are the five most read articles from my website for 2023. It’s fairly obvious why some of these are on people’s minds! Have a scan of the headlines for yourself, and dive into whatever grabs you!
1) Why some voices sound better than others?
2) Four singers that changed my life
3) Unsingable songs: Why there are some songs you’ll NEVER sound good on
4) If I could go back in time and tell my younger self THREE things…
5) What most voice teachers get wrong about singing
If any of these have piqued your interest and you’d like to discover more about your voice for yourself, you can book in your first session via my booking form right here.
I love Christmas carols, and this week I’ve been listening to different versions of the song ‘O Holy Night’.
Now, if you’ve ever had to sing this song, you’ll know it’s a tricky one. There’s more ways to butcher it than to do it justice.
When you hear the same song sung by different people, you can start to get a better understanding of the demands of the song itself. In turn, you can also start to hear how different singers leverage their vocal abilities across a given song.
This is being sung in Eb. This places the top notes, the “money notes” on a G, and they both take a Bb for later climaxes. Note that both of these singers in their prime could take notes MUCH higher than this, and yet they have opted for this key – why? Because it gets the melody to lay across the voice in a very favourable way. The G is a critical note for any great tenor, and the Bb is a lovely but not back-breaking option to have.
Continue reading “Same Song, Three Different Singers”
This is a concept I talk about with clients a fair bit, especially as they start to carve out their own artistic style and identity. That is, that artistry requires choice.
Whether we are writing a song, covering a song, reinterpreting a song, we have to make decisions as to how we will do certain things.
OK, let’s say you’re wanting to create a version of your favourite song. This might be to perform, record, or just for fun. Let’s say that you have free reign to do whatever you want to it, to change as much as you want, as little as you want, or maybe change nothing at all.
What choices do we have available to us?
Well, we could change some of the chords. Do I use this chord, or that chord? How fast should I move through the chords? For those who don’t accompany themselves this isn’t strictly applicable, but it’s still a valid choice.
We could also choose whether to jettison a verse in a song we like that always seemed a bit superfluous. Or we can choose to repeat a section we like, a section that we think the original didn’t linger on enough.
Maybe there’s an alternate melody or some style/riffs we can include that we feel enhance the song.
But for some people, changing ANYTHING from the original feels entirely wrong to them. That their goal should be to give the most accurate recreation of the original song possible. Continue reading “Artistry Requires Choices”
A topic that often comes up in sessions is how there seems to be fewer and fewer great songs or great singers today than there were in years gone by. How much of this reveals personal preference rather than objective reality is another topic entirely. Nevertheless, when the topic of great singers comes up, I go back through my memory banks and I’m struck by just how many great singers there are if I take the time to consider it.
Moreover, often the great singers that we mention are the more bombastic or riff-tastic singers that show off what they can do. But once I peel back a few more layers of memory, I start to remember all the forgotten voices. Not truly forgotten, but just a little obscured by bigger names. So I thought it worth pulling out a few of these easily forgotten singers of yesteryear and sharing them with you.
I’ve picked songs from three women and three men. While all singers have their flaws, every single one of these singers has an incredible mix, able to move so so smoothly from the bottom of their range to the top, and express themselves with emotion and excellence.
While style and song preference may be subjective, I think we wouldn’t be struggling for great singers today if more people immersed themselves in the music of singers like these.
Karen Carpenter
Last week, I came across this video by the keys player of the band ‘The Doors’, Ray Manzarek.
Manzarek talks about the composition process for one of their iconic tracks, ‘Riders on the Storm’. And it really struck a chord with me, for a few reasons, but primarily around the topic of creativity.
Now if you’ve ever played in a band, you’ll recognise this process, and it’s a beautiful one to be part of.
This story is one of creativity without a strict set of rules and guidelines. It’s not about ticking the boxes to get a song into the top 40, or to play off similar sounds that have been used successfully by other acts in the last year. Heck, they even decide to include clips of actual thunder in the track, simply because it serves the purpose of setting the mood for a song about a lone rider in a storm. Continue reading “Composition & Creativity: How music used to be made”