What Does a Light Voice Sound Like?
When people come for an initial consultation, we conduct a full assessment of their voice. Do they have a heavy voice, a light voice, or something in between? It’s like an MOT for their voice — identifying what’s good, what’s OK, and what needs work.
But even before the assessment, I’m listening to the timbre and weight of their voice while they speak. I want to hear what their voice naturally sounds like, without interference. From there, I can more accurately figure out how to help build their voice.
What Affects Vocal Weight?
Their size, age, sex, and specific physiology all contribute to whether a voice is light or weighty.
A weighty voice tends to result from greater vocal fold muscle, a large or low-sitting larynx, a longer neck, and sometimes a bigger body. Voices often get weightier with age, until much later in life when muscle atrophy or structural changes reverse this trend.
A lighter voice often presents with the opposite traits: smaller body stature, younger age, and less vocal mass. These voices tend to be more agile and nimble, with greater top-end range but less presence at the bottom. They may work harder to project power, whereas heavier voices may need to cultivate flexibility.
Examples of Light Voices
1. Bruno Mars
Listen to the opening seconds of this clip:
Bruno Mars speaking and singing
His speaking voice is light, almost feminine. His singing voice sits in the same register — high and agile. The power comes from energy and style, not depth or heaviness.
2. Jonah Nilsson
Jonah, from the Swedish band Dirty Loops, has an exceptionally high singing voice:
Now listen to his speaking voice here:
Jonah Nilsson speaking breakdown
The vocal weight and pitch lie similarly to Bruno Mars — not identical, but clearly in the same territory.
3. Juan Diego Flórez
Watch this interview to hear his natural voice:
Then listen to him singing:
His vocal instrument is much lighter than most — bright, agile, and highly refined, but lacking the heavier resonance of weightier voices.
Conclusion
Hopefully, these examples help you recognise the core qualities of a lighter voice. In the next post, we’ll explore weightier voices and how they compare. Understanding both ends of the spectrum will help you hear where your own voice lies along that range.
Most of you who exercise regularly will notice your fitness drops if you don’t exercise or don’t practice for a while. If you take a month off from running or cycling, you’ll notice that your cardiovascular facility will feel less responsive as you return to doing it. Those of you who do the gym and lift weights will also notice that things don’t feel the same with time off. It’s a different sensation, but it has similarities. But what about our voices? What happens to our voices when we don’t practice for a little while? How far off the mark can we end up? Fortunately, the voice isn’t as dependent on cardio as running, and it isn’t as dependent on muscular development as lifting weights. There are certainly muscles involved. There is contraction required, and there is air and cardiovascular ability involved. However, none of these things are as extreme as running or lifting weights. With vocal training and development, it is far more to do with the fine motor control and co-ordination between all those factors than it is to do with any single one. Continue reading “What happens when you don’t practice for a while?” I often talk about tessitura, and how we can increase range and develop comfort over that range to cultivate a new tessitura. This is possible for both male and female voices, but there are definite differences between the male and female instruments that are worth talking about. In particular, many women who join choirs, or want to sign in a band/music group, often end up singing as a nominal bass, or believe themselves to be an alto. There are still further women who believe they have no bottom end to their voice and sing in a soprano range, but it is often very thin and wispy. Let’s talk about the three chief differences between training the male and female instruments, and why this makes such a difference in how it feels to be a male or female singer. We’ve talked about chest voice extensively. Briefly, it is the lowest register of any voice. In normal healthy voices, it is typically the range that most people speak in. As such, when you imagine a friend’s voice in your head, the quality you are likely hearing is their chest voice. Everyone’s chest voice is unique in timbre, and evolves as they mature in age. I’ve talked about that extensively here and here. Continue reading “Changing an Alto into a Soprano” Look, we’ve all been there. We all want to sing higher notes. We notice that if we can get to note X, X+1 seems somewhat achievable if we just force it a little bit more. Just hit it a bit harder. I’ve done it, you’ve done it, it happens. But this approach is not harmless nor is it zero cost. It’s a very bad habit to get into, let alone an approach to singing that one learns to rely on. In more extreme cases it can cause damage to voices. We are capable of delivering far more air pressure to our vocal folds than they are capable of withstanding. I was chatting with a client this week about the problem with forcing notes out, especially under the adrenalin of performing live. It is undoubtedly a big and emotionally charged area, so I wanted to cover a few of the aspects of it here. If you find yourself blasting out higher notes, at least in part to try and make sure you make the notes, you should read on. To sing low notes the vocal folds need to contract and shorten, to sing high notes the vocal folds need to stretch and thin. The larynx which houses the vocal folds has an upper half and lower half. These are made to tilt relative to one another (via laryngeal musculature) to achieve the length and corresponding pitch change. All our pitch control needs to happen at the larynx/vocal fold level, and in a relaxed manner rather than under pressure. However, a common thing I notice is singers “giving it more welly” when performing live, in order to achieve the pitch. Continue reading “What happens when you force your way to the higher notes?” Over the years I’ve noticed that some singers seem to progress much faster than others. Sometimes this is down to the variations between individuals bodies/voices, and their practice routine. But often I’ve noticed this is down to the kind of material they spend most of their time singing and the bad vocal habits these encourage. All genres have idiosyncrasies that generate bad habits, if left unchecked. Whether it’s rock, musical theatre, indie, RnB, etc, all these genres make certain demands of singers and their voices. This in turn starts to create bad habits that usually become invisible to the singer, but are eminently obvious as soon as we look beneath the surface. Sometimes these habits are horrendous, sometimes they are oh-so-subtle, but in most cases they have become near enough invisible to the singer, so they don’t even realise they are doing it. In such cases, the habit has become background noise. It interferes with their ability to control their instrument, yet they cannot see the wood for the trees. The habits can become invisible The automatic nature of in-built habits mean one simply can’t hear it when they are manipulating the sound, or when a change in approach occurs in the beginning/middle/end of a phrase. Furthermore, it is then very hard to manually override that behaviour, even when one “knows” they should be doing things differently. It can often feel like beating your head off a brick wall. Phrases like “I’m finding it hard to commit to that note” or “I’m struggling to NOT do what I was doing before” are very common responses to hearing these issues. Here are some examples of common habit groupings that different genre singers tend to acquire over the years: In this article I talk about the reasons for why so many singers either yell or flip in order to achieve higher notes. Neither strategy is optimal or healthy long-term for singers (nor does it sound particularly good), but certain genres will “self-select” which approach is musically most appropriate/least offensive for certain singers. In the main, less vocally skilled singers often choose to yell higher notes when singing in genres that require more intense sounds. This involves opening the vocal tract extremely wide like a megaphone, to attempt to not lose perceived power on the top. For example, rock singers are well known for yelling top notes. Certain indie-pop bands and their singers do similar things, though often to a lesser extent than rock. HINT: When you see veins pop on the neck, head thrown back and/or mouth open very wide, that’s a very strong visual indicator of people selecting this approach. Some attempting gospel music or more intense soul sounds will often do likewise at the upper end of their range. Musical theatre is another one that is problematic for just yelling top notes. The perception of what constitutes a good ‘belt’ has shifted a lot over the decades, to the point that more modern musical theatre performances sound exceedingly yell-y on the top end. However, this is often far more disguised than in rock/indie-pop, simply because the bulk of musical theatre songs are so much more lyrical and spoken, plus a strong vibrato. As such singers, still have to craft their “yelling” a little more than alternative genres. If you have sung a lot in these genres, it may feel hard to control your instrument at the top end. The automatic desire that has been built-in as invisible habit will mean you have a propensity to widen enormously as you reach higher notes. Instead, we’ve got to slowly show your instrument that it doesn’t need to resort to that emergency strategy, that there’s a better way… but it does take time to chip away at that habit/muscle memory to make the new approach our new automatic reflex. As per example 1, the inherent difficulty in singing means people will often revert to yelling or flipping to make higher notes. RnB, hip-hop, lighter pop, all involve stylistic lighter, almost falsetto sounding high notes on the top end. E.g. Justin Timberlake, Pharrell, D’Angelo. The yelling approach tends not to be a pleasing sound for this genre. Ergo, singers in this genre tend to go the opposite way. When things get more intense at the upper end of their voice, they resort to singing very softly/lightly. This is generally to avoid discomfort AND to deliver a sound more appropriate to the genre. This is certainly a less damaging strategy in the long run, but for men especially, it is a fairly emasculating way to sing everything. These singers tend to realise they are being light, but this colours their view of what “heavier” singing is. As such, they often struggle to increase the intensity in their voice in a controlled way, as their body’s automatic reaction is to lighten up. Jekyll/Hyde The challenge is to exert control over one’s instrument so that intense sounds and lighter sounds are connected through a similar approach. Singers who have both of these habits often find it very hard to not flip-flop between them, and that middle ground of controlled intensity can feel very elusive. There have always been singers that sound a bit odd or that are less intelligible, e.g. Janis Joplin, Kurt Cobain, etc. But since singers like Amy Winehouse, Duffy, Adele, plus male singers like Passenger, or the lead singer of Kings of Leon, mangled vocal sounds have (in my opinion) never been more in-vogue. In the pursuit of being recognised as having a “unique sound“, singers are increasingly choosing to mangle the proverbial **** out of words. For some, it’s almost a spasmodic approach to singing lyrics, just to make it sound ‘different’. Acoustic singer-songwriters are notorious for this, especially as they are trying to make ‘one voice and a guitar’ sound distinctive and different from others. Certain modern RnB, soul and indie singers do similarly. Such singers drift so far from what their voice ACTUALLY sounds like, it becomes the vocal equivalent of body dysmorphia. They cannot recognise that they don’t sound like themselves, and that is hard to unpick. We need to reintroduce themselves to their own voice, but also to teach them how to develop consistency and control over their voice. We are not just starting from scratch, but trying to unpick the randomised and erratic approach they typically adopt. In short, every genre breeds habits to one degree or another. That’s what voice exercises are for. To build the voice to have a solid home-base, such that the inevitable demands of songs don’t derail our voices or knock them into a cocked hat. So don’t worry, it’s not just you. And, yes, while it can be difficult or frustrating, it is far from hopeless! 99% of people start in one of these groupings, to one degree or another. There’s a rare 1% doing a lot right, with whom we can just crack on, but that isn’t the case for the majority. We all have things to learn and things to unpick. Half the battle is knowing that we have an issue, and keeping a keen eye out for it as we develop our voices. If that’s something you’d like to look at fixing in your own voice, you can book in a session with me via our booking form. I like whisky. But I didn’t always like whisky. In fact, I thought it tasted pretty damn foul for most of my life. It’s only been in the last few years that I’ve got into that whole world. What’s interesting about whisky, is that it takes YEARS to even get a “first draft”. After getting a first draft, to improve it you need to learn what worked and what didn’t, to identify which elements need tweaking and which need to be kept the same. Each further iteration adds years more to the process. As such, when you see a successful whisky distillery that has been running for any length of time, there’s often centuries of hidden experience behind even just a single whisky recipe. Established distilleries have often run for hundreds of years, with more modern recipes building on the expertise garnered by the generations who went before. Much time has been spent on distilling recipes and methods, multiple drafts spanning multiple years, exploring dead-ends only to move on to more successful avenues, etc. All of this, just to produce even one specific whisky. There is a proverb that echoes the sentiment behind such a time-spanning endeavour: “A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit.” With that in mind, consider what has happened to music, art, and everything else over the last few decades. Continue reading “The Constant Pursuit of Musical Novelty is Eroding Standards” In our syllabus, I give a very basic overview of what we are trying to achieve with training a voice. The third step can be loosely described as clustering vowels. What follows is a brief preamble to outline this process in the context of voice, to lead you in to a very helpful video on understanding this from a brilliant video producer called Tom Scott. Broadly speaking, what we are trying to do is shade each vowel that we need to sing to be more similar than different. Each vowel still needs to be intelligible as recognisable as itself, but most of the time people sing vowels in a way where each is excessively divergent/different from one another. This results in overall inefficiency in singing, makes singing more difficult, and also restricts the level of smoothness one can rise to in their singing. Continue reading “Clustering Vowels: When singing feels almost TOO easy” I regularly have conversations with clients and singers about vocal robustness, i.e. being able to sing for long periods, and for sustained touring schedules. I’ve written numerous articles on the primary causes why people lose their voice on a regular basis, through overuse, misuse, and abuse. I’ve got a full listing of related articles at the footer of this article. A lot of people see vocal robustness as something wholly separate to vocal technique. Robustness is somehow “just one of those things“, and technique is something separate, primarily determining range, tone, ability to riff, etc. However, they are not at all separate. Vocal robustness is inherently a by-product of good technique, and here’s why… Continue reading “Vocal Technique and Vocal Robustness”What happens when you don’t practice for a while?
The Good News
Changing an Alto into a Soprano
1. The Bottom End
What happens when you force your way to the higher notes?
How we acquire range and power
The Bad Vocal Habits that Different Genres Foster in Singers
1. ‘Yellers’
2. Flippers
Some singers have a bit of a Jekyll and Hyde thing going on, and do both yelling and flipping, just at different points. Just because a singer can yell OR flip in the upper part of their range doesn’t mean they don’t have these issues – it generally means they have both. 3. Manglers
Conclusion: It’s not just you
The Constant Pursuit of Musical Novelty is Eroding Standards
A proverb worth remembering
Clustering Vowels: When singing feels almost TOO easy
What does ‘clustering vowels’ involve?
Vocal Technique and Vocal Robustness