Vocal Problems and Vocal Technique Troubleshooting

This guide explores common vocal problems and vocal technique troubleshooting need to deal with when their voice feels weak, tired, or unreliable. If your voice seems to have changed with age, illness, or overuse, these articles will help you understand what is happening and what you can realistically do about it.

Everything here is written from the perspective of a working vocal coach, so the focus is always on practical cause–and–effect and what you can change in your day-to-day singing.

Why voices become weak, tired or inconsistent
How age, illness and habits affect vocal strength
Technical causes of strain, shouting and instability
Practical troubleshooting for everyday singing

Editor’s Picks

Start with these core articles if your voice feels weak, inconsistent, or harder to use than it used to be:

What causes weak voices?
– Why some voices lack strength, and which causes are actually changeable.
My voice seems to have got worse as I’ve got older
– How ageing, habits, and training history affect the way a voice develops over time.
How different illnesses affect the voice
– What colds, COVID, reflux and other health issues really do to your sound.
How loud should I be singing?
– Understanding intensity so you’re not quietly straining or loudly shouting.
Shouting masquerading as singing
– Why “just pushing harder” often makes things worse, not better.
What happens to our voices in each decade
– How our voices change, when, and the physiological reasons why this happens.

If you’re interested in learning more about vocal technique, you can read more about our own vocal technique approach, or you can also browse our vocal technique article cluster.

When you’re ready for targeted help

If your voice has become weak, unreliable or harder to control for a while, it can be hard to deal with vocal problems and vocal technique troubleshooting by yourself. I work one–to–one with singers who want clear, practical steps to rebuild strength and stability.

November 26, 2025November 30, 2025

Singing Confidence: How to get confident in your singing

I was teaching someone this week and the topic of singing confidence came up. There are several articles on my site pertaining to confidence in singing, but I don’t think I’ve talked specifically about this topic of gaining confidence in one’s singing.

Do you relate to this experience?

For some, they’ve never felt confident in their singing. For other singers, they remember being more confident in their singing and their voice. They remember being able to just open their mouth, and a strong, solid, dependable sound came out. Singing was something they enjoyed, looked forward to, and the more they did it, the more confidence it gave them.

But often something shifts as we get older. We start to notice little slips here and there. That vocal tone we were once proud of doesn’t seem to sound quite right – but we’re not sure whether it’s that:

our voice has changed;
we are hearing our voice differently;
our ability to command our voice has changed/suffered; or
some or all of the above.

So when we open our mouth, we are never 100% sure what’s going to come out. It could be good, could be GREAT… but it could also be bad, or even awful.

Worse still, the voice doesn’t behave the same way as we go through a session of singing. Maybe it starts out great, then it deteriorates. Perhaps it starts out a bit rocky and we expect it to improve, but it’s 50/50 whether it ever does.

A lack of certainty = madness

The fundamental issue at play here, is a lack of certainty over the sound our voice will make when we go to sing.

How can you EVER feel confident, if it’s like a flipping a coin every time you go to sing? Worse still, if it feels like it’s 20 sided dice every time you open your mouth – any one of 2-20 different outcomes could occur.

It is 100% impossible to feel comfortable with your singing and your voice under this framework.

The Fallacious Appeal to Emotion

Now at this point, a lot of people want to talk about ‘confidence’ as a by-product of how one feels about their voice. And if we could only make someone FEEL better about their voice, then all would be well.

Firstly, yes, we absolutely need to ensure someone has positive feelings about their voice. But this is NOT achievable in isolation.

Our feelings are variable day to day. How I feel about my voice massively varies day to day. If I’ve not slept well, if I’ve been getting over an illness, if I’m just generally feeling down, all of that will affect how I feel about my voice.

Yet, my voice always performs, and I always have a dispassionate certainty that my voice will be able to do what it needs to do.

That is real confidence, and it is NOT steeped in emotion. It may overlap with emotion, and good feelings about your voice may flow from that objective certainty. But that certainty of outcome is not driven by how you feel – it’s the other way around. How you feel about your voice should be driven by the certainty you have in how your voice will perform.

Easier said than done, so here is the framework we have to follow.

An alternate framework (the only one that works)

Consistency > Certainty > Confidence

Here’s the logic…

The only way to be confident about your voice, is to be 99% certain of what is going to come out of your mouth before you open it to sing.
99% = 99 times out of 100, you know what the outcome will be. That means you need to have put in at least 100 reps of something in your voice, and found 99 reps come out much the same way.
The only way to acquire that level of certainty, is to train your voice in a very predictable consistent manner day to day, in order to iron out that level of consistency and dependability in your voice.
In training in this way, you become so used to the outcome, you become almost blasé about what will happen – you’ve done it so many times you’re basically certain it will happen as before.
THAT’S the kind of confidence we are trying to acquire.

To acquire a consistent voice (that begets certainty), we have to train CONSISTENTLY. This means training the voice in a range that is manageable, to settle it down so it is stress free. That means no hail Mary’s, no pushing for just one more note beyond where you’re comfortable.

If there is ANY variability (ala the ‘coin flipping’ where you’re not sure what’s going to happen) in your day to day training, you are building that variability and uncertainty into your voice.

The ONLY way to cultivate a voice that ALWAYS behaves in a way that you can predict and trust, you must TRAIN in a range and a manner that your voice cannot go wrong.

Don’t stop yourself mid-exercise – complete each exercise, and assess how well it went. If it went awry several times – it’s not consistent enough to rely on, so you cannot expect certainty nor the resultant confidence.

And to get to 99% certainty, that’s 99 attempts out of 100 yielding an expected and predictable result – which means you need to put in 100 reps, minimum. There’s no escaping the body of work you need to put in to acquire this certainty. You can’t just will yourself into confidence.

Most people don’t train like this. They keep flinging their voice at songs, stopping and starting, abandoning repetitions and lines of songs midway, or even after the first note. This isn’t just a waste of time, you are TRAINING uncertainty into your voice.

Why the above framework delivers

As boring as this may seem, and as restrictive as this may appear, it’s necessary.

When you do this, you’ll remove any stress response in your voice over that controlled range.

As this stress response abates, your range will grow slightly. You’ll then iron out that new range with that same consistent approach, and your range will increase slightly again. Wash, rinse, repeat.

And throughout all of this, that initial range you’re working on and that new range you’re adding – you don’t notice that you’re singing higher, as it feels just as easy as the initial “boring” range you started with.

Conclusion: Practice to build certainty

All confidence lies in certainty of the outcome. If we lack consistency in our voice and our practice, certainty and confidence will always remain elusive.

If this all “sounds great” but you’re not sure how to deploy this in your own voice, you can start work with my by clicking the ‘Work with Mark’ button below.

April 25, 2025December 7, 2025

Beginner Singing Techniques

Beginner Singing Techniques: A Foundation for Your Voice

New to singing? This hub introduces the essential skills and mindset you need to start your vocal journey with beginner singing techniques. These articles will help you avoid common pitfalls, build confidence, and begin using your voice with clarity, control, and enjoyment.

1. Starting Your Vocal Journey

2. Building Early Technique

3. Confidence & Motivation for Beginners

4. Singing Volume

How Loud Should I Be Singing? – Discover the ideal vocal volume zone for most singers and why singing louder isn’t always better.
Sing louder without straining – three aspects that the pros understand.
Shouting vs Singing – Learn the difference between healthy projection and shouting, and how to avoid vocal tension.

5. Basic Vocal Health and Stamina

Why Do I Keep Losing My Voice? – Understand overuse, misuse, and how loud singing habits may be damaging your voice.
Vocal Health Issues – Strategies for maintaining a healthy, strong voice when singing frequently or loudly.
The Icarus Effect – A long-term view on building vocal stamina and volume safely over time.

6. Extending Range

Changing an alto into a soprano – how we can transform a low voice into a higher voice.
What is vocal tessitura? – Tessitura is MORE than just how high or low you can sing, but determines everything.
What kind of singer am I? – the difficulty in trying to classify your voice and range too early.

April 25, 2025February 1, 2026

Singer’s Mindset & Confidence Growth

The Singer’s Mindset: Confidence, Growth & Career Tips

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.

1. Building Confidence in Your Voice

2. Career, Motivation & Progress

March 16, 2025January 29, 2026

Jason Alexander on the learning and creative process

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”

Utter nonsense!

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”

August 4, 2024December 10, 2025

Genuine Validation is Hard to Find

I go to a reasonable number of music events. I listen to a wide variety of different performers, at different skill levels. And it’s led to some stark thoughts about genuine validation.

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.

Joshua Bell

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.”

“Over a period of 43 minutes, the violinist performed six classical pieces, two from Bach pieces, one Massenet, and one each from Schubert and Ponce.

“Out of 1,097 people that passed by Bell, 27 gave money, and only seven actually stopped and listened for any length of time.

“In total, Bell made $52.17 (£42.18). And this includes a $20 note from someone who recognised him.”

Bell is at the top of his game

Joshua Bell’s performances sell out premier concert halls, across the world, at ludicrously expensive prices. He does not want for lack of recognition, but in THAT specific circumstance, there was next to no validation of his skills. No one recognised who he was, let alone his talent, save for one passer-by.

In the same way, I think of all those performances I’ve been to. Where I’ve sat in a venue hearing a singer with an exquisite voice and musical skill, who has clearly worked hard to craft their sound and art, and people still talk over them. And at the same time, to hear other performers bellowing barely in tune notes, but who gets rounds of copious applause and a call for an encore.

Is this unfair? Is this a sign of lack of standards, or something else? Well, the article linked to above I think sums it up best.

It is what it is.

It’s a broader lesson in life that we all have to learn at some point. Sometimes people will appreciate what you do, and sometimes they won’t. A lack of applause doesn’t mean what you did was bad, any more than a round of applause means what you did was good. It cuts both ways.

A great voice is it’s own reward.

What I do notice in the best singers, is their consistency and discipline in staying the course. In working on their craft day in, day out. Through the great gigs and the crappy gigs. Through the days when you feel your voice sounds atrocious, and through the days you feel your voice is on top of the world.

As I tell clients regularly, a great voice is it’s own reward.

If you keep working on it, and enjoying it for what it gives you, it will only keep getting better. If someone else appreciates it, so much the better. But keep the discipline and focus on bettering your voice, like Joshua Bell did with the violin to cultivate his incredible career, and don’t worry about that external validation, as it’s a fickle, fickle creature.

January 7, 2024December 16, 2025

The Most Read Articles of 2023

I send one email a week, at 6pm on a Sunday every week, 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

Want to learn more?

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.

October 29, 2023November 29, 2025

Vocal Myths: Voice Projection

Voice Projection – Why It’s Difficult and What You Can Do

I often receive messages from people having issues with their ‘voice projection’. One common instance is people who require their voice to be strong for their work. This week, I thought I’d talk about one such case so you can understand what they were battling with, and some constructive suggestions that can be made to improve their situation.

This particular voice user

They informed me that they were having trouble “projecting their voice” in a clear way that can be heard in a busy/loud environments, but also in group meetings/conversations.

They were looking for advice on whether there’s anything practical they could change or exercises they could do, or whether it’s something they were stuck with.

The reply I put together is something I realise that I’ve covered with clients in sessions, but not actually written down anywhere, so I thought I would relay the content of my reply here for you to read.

While this reply is centred around issues regarding being heard in work, the same logic applies if we are trying to be heard singing in bands/groups, or with other instruments.

Issues around “projection” and loud environments

The stated problem is multivariate, as such there is no short answer or simple solution. However, I’ll try to break it down as simply as I can, then provide some practical suggestions.

1) Some voices are quieter/louder than others

Just like some people’s physiological starting point predisposes them to be able to lift heavy in the gym, and others less so. Of course everyone can train to be stronger, but the physiological starting point is a big deal.

In the same way, certain voices’ physiological starting points are quieter, and others are louder. Everyone can train to improve the volume, quality, audibility and stamina in their voice, but some have louder/more easily heard starting points than others. This is just one factor.

2) “Projection” is a bit of a myth

There’s some weird cultural ideas about singing out there, and projection is one of them. There are absolutely certain qualities to great singers or orators where their voice seems to carry particularly well (which gets labelled as ‘projection’) but this is not an abstract concept or a switch that gets tripped. It’s a combination of trainable qualities, involving volume, intensity and specific frequencies in a given voice to name but a few.

Some voices have more of these qualities to begin with, some have less. This is why it’s not just about the volume of a given voice. Yes, these traits are absolutely trainable, but there’s no set of exercises or “trick” that switches these things on, especially in the casual voice user. It’s something we would look at in sessions, but it’s not something I can advise someone on without working with their voice.

3) The demands on your voice outstrips your vocal ability

Regardless of how loud/quiet your voice is, all issues like this are a result of the environments you are in outstripping your vocal ability. But you should know that even extremely loud voices encounter similar issues, simply because they are constantly asking more of their voice than it can deliver.

Through training my voice carries very well and is extremely audible in loud scenarios, but even my voice gets worn and fatigued in loud environments, e.g. loud pubs, swimming pools, sporting events, etc. Training your voice will undoubtedly improve it, but we need to recognise that some demands are too great for any voice to bear up under.

Without working with someone’s voice or being in their specific environments I cannot assess this fully, but I can give some preliminary suggestions to help voice users cope better.

Practical suggestions

1. Use electronic amplification in excessively loud environments – use amplification (e.g. loudhailer, speaker system) when you need to be heard in excessively loud environments. There is no point trying to compete with a room volume that you cannot win over.

2. Get close to individuals to speak whenever possible – in environments where you can get close to a given individual you need to communicate with, do so, thereby reducing the required volume to be heard.

3. Use your voice for less time when you cannot do the above / use hand signals where possible – By speaking less often and for less time, you reduce the duration you have to sustain it for, hence you can do so for longer.

4. Reduce vocal inflammation and damage – Once we accept that certain environments are going to cause some wear/tear no matter how well built your voice is, the best we can hope for is better recovery and minimise the damage. Hence, rest, sleep, plenty of water, reduced alcohol consumption, and some light rehab exercises can go a long way to mitigating the damage you cannot avoid.

Here’s a short video from one of the world’s leading voice researchers on something anyone can do to this.

Conclusion

The concept of projection while legitimate, is a bit of a red herring that people seek after. That if they “Just knew how to project”, then all their troubles would be over… when in reality it’s a bit of a constellation of things, and sometimes none of them make a substantive difference. Ultimately, there are limits to what a given person’s voice can handle in a given environment.

If you are personally finding yourself having issues with being heard and/or keeping your voice healthy after long days at work, certain loud environments, or maybe even your gigging schedule, rest assured it is entirely common but also very improvable with the right training. If you would like to book in a consultation to look at your voice and build a routine for your specific needs, you can do so via my booking form at www.markjwgraham.co.uk/booking.