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]
Discover the Foundations of Great Vocal Technique
Great singing starts with great vocal technique. This section explores the key skills every singer needs — including breath control, resonance, vocal strength, tone, and efficiency.
Whether you’re aiming to sing with more power, reduce strain, or simply understand how your voice works, the articles below offer clear, expert guidance built on years of hands-on teaching.
Start with the topic that resonates with you, or explore the full series to deepen your technical foundation and unlock your voice’s full potential.
Explore how to build a stronger, healthier voice through proven techniques and expert advice. Whether you’re working on range, tone, or control, these hand-picked articles will walk you through every major vocal challenge.
Here’s a summary of what all the search engines say are THE top 5 questions about singing lessons that people like you want answers to:
A typical singing lesson encompasses:
Each lesson is tailored to the individual’s goals and vocal range. For a deeper dive, explore What Happens in a Singing Lesson.
One of the biggest (fallacious) objections I have encountered against formal voice training, is that it is formulaic and limits artistry. This objection is one I tend not to hear too much these days, but I used to.
Usually it was overly set-in-their-ways artists/aspiring artists, and they’d want my help, but they would be unwilling to change anything about what they were doing.
They would want more range and power, but they’d be unwilling to adjust their present approach. They’d want me to solve the vocal fatigue and damage they were encountering, but they would be unwilling to change even one iota in what they were doing.
I’m sure you can see why this is a foolish path to take. In the words of Henry Ford, “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.”
Humour me though. For a moment, let’s argue their corner. The way vocal technique works is that it accepts there is a particular way the voice is meant to work. The vocal folds and vocal tract have an optimal way of working, and this is the same for all voices, glossing over minute variations between different voices.
Surely then, this would mean that as we train our voices, then trained voices should end up all sounding the same as each other? If we train voices to all work “that one way“, then all voices would sound start to sound identical? If this were the case, then it would stand to reason that one would want to avoid formal vocal training to avoid this overly homogenised result? Continue reading “How Voice Training Reveals Your Artistry”
I have had these two videos saved for many years, and I revisit them every so often.
1. Kaufmann
The first features tenor Jonas Kaufmann and conductor Anthony Pappano. Kaufmann is arguably the premier operatic tenor in the world today. In this excerpt, Pappano covers what the mixed voice is, and how one has to move across bridges/passagi in order to traverse the male tenor voice from low to high.
What I want to draw attention to is how incredible Kaufmann’s vocal control is. He can rise and fall on almost any note, low or high, and make it enormously dramatic or whisper quiet… even moving from one to another on the same note. It really is stupendous, as you’ll hear.
Moreover, I want you to notice just how complex this transition is, and how most of the singers’ orientation towards what they are doing is internal and experiential. There’s no frets to watch, piano keys to press, etc, you’ve got to play this instrument of the voice entirely by feel and by ear. This is what makes it so challenging to sing well, and to sing well means to make it sounds like it’s no challenge at all – one hell of an illusion!
2. Pavarotti
Speaking of taking a lifetime to master, this second clip features the wonderful Luciano Pavarotti.
In this very short clip, Pavarotti very succinctly describes and demonstrates the difference between merely hitting a high note, and sculpting it into something truly magnificent. This also represents a key difference between not just levels of singers, but the aesthetic requirement that opera places on singers.
Do you note his parting comment? That such a simple sound, that he makes sound so effortless, took him 20+ years to master. Even at the shorter end of the timescale, he said “it may take you 10 years to make a sound like that”.
People vastly underestimate just how skilled top-flight singers are, and what it takes to craft a beautiful and lasting vocal sound. I hope these two clips with such giants (at least in the classical realm) gives you some idea of the work great singers undertake and what they aspire to create.
If this is something you’d like to start to discover for yourself, I’d love to work with you. You can book yourself in via my booking form right here.
Last time we looked at rock singers who, even post- 70 years old, and still rocking as hard as they did back in the day.
This week, I thought it would be worth showing some singers that maybe aren’t faring so well with age.
We are all human, and all prone to mistakes. Every singer singing live knows there are better gigs than others, and voices can do better some days and worse on other days. The primary reason for sharing these live clips (and all of them are live) are to show just how unforgiving age can be if your technique isn’t good enough.
As we age, things change with our voice. With a well-trained voice we should peak in late 40s/early 50s… but the very same physiological changes that enable that peak in trained voices, are the very things that can derail voices without the right training. Even with voices doing 90% of things right, that 10% wrong can still be too much to keep delivering a high demand style of singing, like rock.
Therefore, the purpose of the following videos is to help those of you reading and listening to appreciate just how tough it is to keep delivering these high-demand songs into later years. It’s entirely doable (per my earlier article), but it’s important to note that even incredible voices can get derailed.
Whew! OK, now that the disclaimer is over, you may want to prepare yourselves to hear some less than stellar performances below. Continue reading “Rock singers who have lost it (perhaps)”
Someone asked me this week which rock singers from the 70s/80s are still doing well vocally. Great question, and also a great talking point!
There’s plenty of singers who sounded incredible back in their youth, who have no useable voice left now due to damage and abuse. I’m sure we can all think of some singers whose voices are totally shot.
There are singers now who weren’t perfect back in their youth but who are still somehow still able to keep going despite them vocally breaking all the rules. These singers generally have what we refer to as “vocal folds of steel”, where there is no reason they should still be singing when they are being so damaging and aggressive to their voices, and yet… they’re still going.
And then there’s singers who are intense and powerful, and they are still pretty on-the-money technically.
I’m going to cover three of my favourite singers in the latter two categories:
Sammy Hagar was one of the lead singer’s of Van Halen. He has one of the most insane rock voices I’ve ever heard… and he’s still going even now at 75 years old (same age as Stallone).
Here is one of Van Halen’s tracks from the 80s, ‘Why Can’t This Be Love?’, both from the album, then recorded in the studio on the Howard Stern show a few years ago.
Notice that the second track is slightly lower (by a whole tone) but he is still rocking it. It’s not like he’s singing it down the octave. He is still delivering the goods despite nearly 4 decades having elapsed. His technique is not perfect, but he is still doing enough right to keep going the way he is. Continue reading “Rock Singers Who Still Have It”
This story is going back a while, maybe 10-15 years ago. We had some friends round. One of those friends had some of their university friends visiting them, and they came along to our house as well.
One of those friends of friends heard that I was a voice coach, and they said “Oh, I’m a singer, I’ve just done my grade 8 vocals and got a distinction“.
Well of course, my curiosity was piqued! So I offered to run through a few exercises with them and see what we could do with their voice.
I started them off with the standard assessment… and what came out was diabolically bad.
It was all in tune, but it was the weakest thing I’ve heard come out of a “singer” even to this day.
It was so breathy and weak, I had to set the digital piano I teach from to the quietest setting to hear them. It was not much more than someone breathing out but with some semblance of pitch to it.
Their range was so impaired, they had less than an octave of range to their voice. At either extreme their voice became just fully disappeared into pure air and breath.
Put bluntly, there is no way that person could ever sing a song with what they were doing with their voice, let alone be heard by anyone else whilst doing it.
Quite! If grades actually mean anything at all, this doesn’t add up. How can someone with basically no useable singing voice have achieved a grade 8 in singing? I asked them to tell me about what singing they’d done previously. Continue reading “The Worst Voice I’ve Ever Heard”
A ‘heavy’ voice isn’t about weight — it’s about depth, richness, and power. Characteristics include:
Examples? Think Tim Storms or Gerald Finley, who embody this vocal type.
There’s also a fascinating discussion on Reddit about what ‘heavy’ means from multiple stylistic perspectives.
Recently, we looked at what a light voice sounds like. I promised we’d look at what heavier voices sound like, and that’s what today’s article is about.
More particularly, I want to talk about what heavy voices sound like, but also what heavy voices do NOT sound like.
NOTE:
With the clips in the light voice article, the differences are very overt as they lie at one extreme. With weightier voices, these differences can be less obvious to hear. In the following clips I’m not trying to claim these are the weightiest possible voices in the world, but to highlight qualities and characteristics that emerge as we move along the spectrum from lighter voices to weightier voices.
The weightier the voice, the more of these characteristics appear. Similarly, the lighter the voice becomes, the more these traits disappear and the characteristics you hear in the lighter voice article appear.
Once you grasp the extremes, the in-between stuff should be easier to grasp, or at least appreciate where these differences may lie. Now, on to our singers…
This gent holds the Guinness World Record for the lowest sung vocal note (it’s lower than the lowest note of a piano). Here’s an example of his singing:
And here is an example of his speaking voice:
Two things I want you to note: Continue reading “What does a ‘heavy’ voice sound like?”