Category: Voice Science Explained

Unlock the Science Behind Your Singing Voice

Dive into the mechanics of vocal production—from vocal fold vibration and resonance to acoustic formants and register shifts. This section demystifies how your voice works using clear, accessible explanations. These are all rooted in science and teaching experience. Whether you’re exploring vocal registers, or learning how sound is shaped in your body, these articles blend theory and practice to help you sing smarter.

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How to become a singing teacher & what it takes

We went to a friends’ birthday party on Saturday and got chatting with someone about how to become a singing teacher.

What happened was, I struck up a conversation with someone my wife went to university with, and we were talking about what she did for a living. She then confessed she really doesn’t enjoy it that much, and is looking for a change. When I asked what she was thinking of doing, they said something along the lines of the following: Continue reading “How to become a singing teacher & what it takes”

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30 second tip: Let the larynx rest

This should only take you 2-3 minutes to read, and only about 10-30 seconds to apply each time you use it.

What’s the problem?

When you’re singing a song and you get to that difficult passage/line, you ever noticed how it’s sometimes harder than doing that difficult passage just by itself? Or perhaps you are trying to practice that difficult passage by itself repeatedly, and the first 2-3 times are decent, but then it feels like it’s getting worse no matter what we try? We’ve all experienced this and it’s frustrating as all heck – we’re on a roll then we lose the flow, and it feels like it keeps slipping away despite repeated attempts to regain it. What gives?

Why does this happen?

No matter how skilled you are as a singer, the longer you are singing without rest (rest as short as even 10-30 seconds), the more the larynx will continue to rise, whether obviously or gradually/imperceptibly. This happens as a result of continued vocal use without a break. This compromises ease of singing, no matter what your level of technique.

The simple solution…

Give yourself 10-30 seconds rest at that point. Try to JUST rest – don’t fill that rest with speaking, singing, coughing, or even drinking excessively (a few sips will suffice).

All things being equal you should find this returns you to a better state for attempting that challenging passage. By letting the larynx (and voice as a whole) rest for even just 10-30 seconds between sets of attempts to practice a line can make the world of difference. Rest will naturally allow and encourage your larynx to drop naturally. A quick yawn can help encourage a descent of the larynx as well. Don’t just keep hammering the line, let your voice rest and as soon as you feel yourself departing from the easier state, rest it up again. If you find 30 seconds isn’t enough, give it longer – experiment!

Give it a shot next time you’re tackling a tricky passage!

Learn More: Related Articles

If you’d like to learn more about what good vocal function involves, check out these related articles:
Pursue vocal function BEFORE sound, every time
What makes a song “feel” high?
Tongue Tension: How to spot it and fix it
5 Reasons Sleep Helps Boost Your Singing
A Key to Great Singing: Hyper-function vs Relaxation

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Five Famous Singers with Vocal Problems

From Nodules and Granulomas, to Haemorrhages, and Surgery Complications

This week I thought it would be interesting to look at the kind of issues that can befall singers who neglect their vocal health, nodules and otherwise. Now some of the following are due to particularly hazardous vocal technique (or lack thereof). However, even with half-decent or great technique, if you over-use your voice and give yourself inadequate rest you can encounter similar issues.

John Mayer – Granuloma

A few years ago John Mayer had to cancel an extensive tour to undergo surgery for a granuloma.

John Mayer is a self-taught singer, and if you watch interviews with him at Berklee College of Music he talks about the search to find a great ‘base’ tone for his voice. Sadly, this tone (as cool as it is) is not a healthy form of phonation full stop, let alone for extended periods. Granuloma is a swelling/inflammation of the cartilage at the back of the vocal cords, whereas nodules occur on the cords themselves (see below). However the growth of this inflamed tissue can interfere with vocal function and cause a great deal of pain and dysphonia (i.e. can’t pitch correctly).

In my opinion, from a technical perspective John Mayer has always been way too light with his chest voice. I’m talking purely technically and NOT stylistically. This results in a LOT of excess air passing over the vocal cords (which you can hear in almost every song). Functionally speaking, this results in insufficient stability throughout his voice, which then leads to strain at the top of his (chest) voice when he tries to gun it on the higher notes.

He also constantly flips between a light insufficiently stable (but regularly strained) chest co-ordination and his artistic use of falsetto. This kind of vocal habit can really wreak havoc on a voice. This is because the cords are constantly being strained and excessively taut one second, then being suddenly let go of like letting go of an elastic band the next. Such a constant flip-flopping can create a lot of wear on the voice and the connective tissues. Add into that an intensive gigging schedule and you’ve got a recipe for vocal disaster.

Adele & Sam Smith – vocal cord haemorrhage

A haemorrhage is a particularly unpleasant issue. It’s where the tissue of the vocal cords themselves rupture and bleed all over themselves. This also creates swelling, much like any other cut in the human body.

In Adele’s case, you can hear the amount of sheer pressure she uses when she sings. In fact, if you listen to her recorded version of ‘Rolling in the Deep’ you can hear her voice trembling to try and hold onto that very first high note in the chorus. This is indicative of a singer using significantly excessive amounts of air pressure to generate their sound and trying to retain that chest-like sound as high as possible. Sam Smith has vocal habits/behaviour a little closer to that of John Mayer.

Singing in a kind of ‘crafted yelling’ co-ordination or repeatedly cranking up the volume without adequate technique or rest periods in between is remarkably bad for the voice. I can’t even begin to describe how damaging it is, even for short periods of time, let alone entire concerts night after night. Continued misuse and OVER-use of the voice in this way is what resulted in this damage to her voice.

Michael Buble – nodules

A year or so ago, Michael Buble announced he had to cancel at least part of his tour to have vocal cord surgery to remove nodules. Nodules are like blisters/callouses on your vocal cords. These generally occur as a soft localised swelling on one cord initially, then hardening to a hard nodule (like a blister), and often result in a matching nodule on the opposite cord as the initiating nodule rubs against the other vocal cord during phonation. Soft nodules can occur quite regularly with even loud shouting at events, football matches, concerts etc, and so are not uncommon per se (though we should try to avoid even these). However, prolonged singing on nodules or adema (swelling) is what tends to lead to hard nodules.

Now while Michael Buble is not perfect technically, he doesn’t sing in ridiculous keys. He also doesn’t sing with dramatically excessive volume, nor does he experiment with vocal distortion. He is relatively clean when he sings and doesn’t jam his voice as hard as it will go as often as he can. In short, he’s not perfect, but he is a great example of what can happen when even as a singer with half-decent technique. Over-singing (gigs night after night!) can just create that level of wear in the voice. Gigging every night with inadequate rest can still lead to serious vocal issues.

Julie Andrews – Nodules, then surgery complications

Julie Andrews is an unusual case. She went in to have nodules removed, but the surgeon allegedly botched the operation. This resulted in a piece of her vocal cords no longer being there or being available in the way it once was. My recollection from conversations with other coaches was that the surgeon slipped during the operation, but I cannot find a reliable source to corroborate this. In any case, surgery is a serious route to go down, and the consequences never leave the voice the same again. Once nodules reach the hardened stage, they must be removed surgically, whereas soft nodules (the ones that are “merely” a localised swelling) can reduce with rest and corrective exercises.

The Upshot is…

You only get one voice – be smart about how you use it and look after it.

If you’re straining, stop doing it. If you’re repeatedly straining, DEFINITELY stop doing it. Whether you’re being too heavy and aggressive (like Adele previously), or light and flipping to falsetto (like John Mayer), or even whether your technique is reasonably together but you’re singing without adequate rest (like Michael Buble), you have GOT to respect the inherent requirements of how the voice is meant to work and how it’s meant to recover.

Learn More: Related Articles

If you want to learn more about vocal health and voice issues, you may enjoy the following articles:
Shouting masquerading as singing: Why so many singers are just yelling
Why vocal problems so regularly derail careers, permanently
Vocal Health Issues
My Singing Voice Hurts: 5 Habits for Vocal Health
Vocal Longevity: The Icarus Effect
Why do I keep losing my voice: Overuse, Misuse and Abuse
The Seriousness of Vocal Fold Nodules

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Vocal Longevity: The Icarus Effect

At the time of writing this article, I had one particular client who gigged regularly down in London. One of the issues they raised was that they feel that longevity and robustness is a serious problem for them. If they were doing a recording session, they felt they could deliver a handful of good takes and then the voice would just get weaker from that point on. If they were doing a string of gigs, they may even feel like they need months off to recover from them.

This performer’s age is relatively young, so it’s not an age related issue. They can hit all the notes they are trying to hit. They are also not overly aggressive with their singing, if anything they are slightly light with their voice. And they are not alone in this struggle – I regularly get experienced singers in suffering the same issues.

So what’s going on?

Many singers suffer from these issues to one extent or another, and it is increasingly common with younger singers. This is for reasons I’m going to explain. The best illustration I can give, is the Greek tragedy of Icarus.

The Icarus Effect

In Greek mythology, Icarus was the son of Daedalus, a craftsman who was imprisoned with his son. Daedalus built them each a set of wings made of feathers and wax to enable them to escape and to fly out of their prison.

During the flight, Icarus was amazed at what he could do with his wings and flew up high, far too close to the sun for far too long. This was despite warnings from his father. The prolonged exposure to heat from the sun melted the wax holding the feathers in place. Icarus’s wings fell apart, and he plummeted to his death.

The issue with many singers of any age is that they over-estimate their ability.

This is especially true with those gifted with a half decent instrument, but often a trap that hobbyists fall into. They keep running their voice into the red, biting off more than they can chew, until… well… they can’t do it anymore.

To be clear, I’m not talking about just merely hitting the notes – I’m talking about something several dimensions deeper than that.

– What does it take to hit a reasonably high note just ONCE in a song? Probably challenging but doable.
– What does it take to sing a final chorus where the whole melody is relatively high? Hmmm, tiring, but manageable.
– What about if the whole song sits in that range? Oh… that’s getting really exhausting.
– What about if you’ve got a whole set of songs that sits in that range? Errrrrr….
– What if you have got multiple gigs a week, with a whole set of songs in that range? Uh-oh.

But THIS is exactly what many singers do. They realise they can sing a high note once, maybe several times, then suddenly everything becomes about shoehorning every song into that area of their voice, without addressing how LONG they can sustain that kind of demand of their voice.

The issue is NOT how high someone can sing.

I’ve met untrained singers with great initial aptitude for higher notes all the time. The issue is NOT even how often they can sing those high notes. If there is a portion of the song that is lower that the singer can retreat to for comfort and ease between climaxes, then repeated high notes are really not too exhausting.

Why Icarus ACTUALLY fell…

Icarus didn’t just fall because of how close he flow to the sun, he met his fate because of how LONG he spent that close to the sun. It’s the duration at a particular level of exposure that we’re talking about.

If a singer insists on placing songs in keys where EVERY note requires application of effort, even if it’s only a tiny amount, the resulting vocal condition places the demand squarely in the court of how LONG can they spend hitting those high notes… i.e. how long can they spend in the sun without their wings melting.

THIS is an altogether different parameter to measure your singing ability against. It is absolutely possible to spend a long time in those places (correctly!), but it’s an ability that takes a long time to develop and control.

Truth be told, most OVER-estimate their ability in this regard. Most tend to be able to hit a note without strain a few times in practice, or look back on a gig and think “wow, I was NAILING the high notes at that gig”, and they become convinced they’re able to sing well there. I see this time and time again.

Some examples

In the opera world, Pavarotti talked about how challenging it is to keep singing those high notes and how the body naturally finds it harder to keep the system perfect the longer you are “up there’. You can read about this in the book ‘Great Singers on Great Singing’ by Jerome Hines.

In the pop world, you can look up Bruno Mars bootlegs on YouTube where the man with the biggest and most consistent live range of the early 21st century places songs just around his first bridge, or even just in chest voice.

The Take-Home Message
If you are a singer who is repeatedly facing vocal health and longevity issues in relation to periods of singing, it is very likely you are flying too close to the sun, hence my advice to you will be the same as to the client I had the other day.

Take your songs down several keys. Assess yourself AND your set-lists and the songs you sing. Your primary goal is to sound GOOD – don’t compromise on that. If you can’t sprint a whole marathon, if you can’t lift maximum weights in the gym with no rest, then you can’t sing every song at the tippy-top of your range – you will wreck yourself.

You must pace yourself, and make sure you don’t spend too long “up there” taxing your voice.

Learn More: Related Articles

If you want to learn more about vocal health and voice issues, you may enjoy the following articles:
Shouting masquerading as singing: Why so many singers are just yelling
Why vocal problems so regularly derail careers, permanently
Famous Singers with Voice Problems
Vocal Health Issues
My Singing Voice Hurts: 5 Habits for Vocal Health
Why do I keep losing my voice: Overuse, Misuse and Abuse
The Seriousness of Vocal Fold Nodules

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Four Facts About Singing As You Get Older

So, bear with me here, our voices changing as we get older is completely normal, but we need to walk through a few things first.

Here’s something interesting you may not know.larynx

Fact #1

With proper training throughout adult life, the voice should actually be reaching it’s peak LATER in life (say, around 50) and NOT earlier in life (e.g. where most people start to struggle, around 25-30).

Why? Let’s explore this…

Fact #2

– The physiology of the larynx and the vocal apparatus changes over time. Ongoing training helps combat the negatives of these changes, and take advantage of benefits of getting older.

Wait… benefits? What benefits?

Fact #3

– As you get older, the larynx drops bit by bit. This imparts additional bottom end to your tone – relatively straightforward to grasp.

Fact #4

– The various cartilages in the larynx and vocal apparatus start to ossify… i.e. turn to bone.

That’s why things seem to get less agile and flexible as you get older in relation to singing – that’s because things DO become less flexible as you get older. That’s what makes this fourth fact particularly interesting. What this means is that the previously flexible cartilages that make up the housing of the vocal cords, that they are tensioned on and controlled by, start to harden and become stiffer and less flexible.

The first negative that comes along with this is that whilst you are young you may find you can sound great IN SPITE of great resistance in your singing, manipulation, etc, but as you get older, you’ll find things getter tougher and tougher, as if you are fighting your own voice to do the things you used to. People say this is just a reality of getting older, but actually correct technique from youth has the OPPOSITE effect, instead of negative it’s positive.

Rigidity is your friend

When the singing apparatus (i.e. your voice) becomes more rigid as a structure through the ossification process, the muscles are now acting on a physically much stronger structure than they were before. Provided singing is being done with correct technique and not just jamming the voice as hard is it will go (as is often the case and doable in youth), this extra rigidity makes things easier to achieve a more powerful and acoustically resonant tone.

Check this quote from leading voice scientist Ingo Titze – “certain age-related deteriorations may actually be beneficial to the larynx as a sound-producing instrument… We might speculate that a partially ossified laryngeal framework can better support the tension of the vocal folds because bone tends to deform less than cartilage under the same stress. Comparing the vocal folds to vibrating strings, it seems important to maintain rigid endpoints for tissue fibers to vibrate in simple predictable modes.”

And a further quote from an article within Link 2 provided below – “Although the voice itself remains stable, physiological changes do occur in middle age, most significantly ossification (hardening) of the laryngeal cartilages. In some individuals, these changes can actually improve the singing voice, since a more bony support framework in the larynx better supports the tension in the vocal folds. If you compare the voice to a piano, for instance, the strings in a piano are attached to solidly-anchored metal posts at each end. This allows the piano strings to stay in tune and make a predictable sound. At younger ages when flexible cartilage supports the vocal folds, there is a greater chance for unpredictability, but with stiffer, more bony supports, it is logical that the voice could perform more reliably.”

Conclusion
Getting older is a natural part of life, but in relation to singing, this is actually GOOD news, if you’re willing to invest in your voice of course. Don’t fight it, instead, work on your technique. To someone with ongoing technical growth, these changes are beneficial – to those who are just trying to repeat what they did in their youth, these changes are not beneficial. You’re just going to struggle and your voice is going to keep getting weaker and more of a beast to wrestle than a thing of great joy as it once was. The changes are going to happen all the same, it’s your choice whether they help you or hinder you.

If this has grabbed your attention and is particularly relevant to you, why not get in touch and explore what this means for your own voice?

You can get in touch and book your first session right here.

Link 1
Link 2
Link 3

Learn More: Related Articles

If you’d like to learn more about the voice and how it changes as it gets older, you may enjoy these related articles:
The perks of being an older singer
Why can’t I sing as high as I used to?
Vocal Tessitura
Maturing of Vocal Tone
How long does it take to train a voice?

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Pavarotti on training your voice: What they don’t tell you about singing

Pavarotti’s Take on Vocal Training

Luciano Pavarotti famously said it took him six years to master his voice, even with natural ability. Here’s what we can learn from him:

  • Passaggio Mastery: Navigating register transitions takes time, especially in classical styles.
  • Persistence Pays Off: Pavarotti honed his craft with unwavering discipline over years.
  • Avoiding Shortcuts: Consistency beats gimmicks — real vocal progress demands commitment.

For more training insights, check out Jason Alexander on the creative process.

You can also read about Pavarotti’s early struggles in this retrospective from The Guardian.

This article forms part of our Pavarotti collection. Click here to dive deeper.

So one great singer said to another…

The bass Jerome Hines once interviewed the tenor Luciano Pavarotti on training your voice, and this was his response:

“Now this passaggio… is the transition from the upper middle voice to the high voice, and I know that students are interested in your approach since you have such a flawless passaggio; it is so smooth a change one is not aware of it”

Pavarotti replied:

“It took me six years of study… and one must be convinced of it’s importance from the first day… never change ideas. You know, the first five or six months it is very depressing because it does not come out right, and you become cyanotic, red in the face.

Then some students begin to think this approach is wrong, and they try the other way, but it will never bring them security of voice.”*

* – Extract from page 218 of Jerome Hines, “Great Singers on Great Singing” (click for the Amazon link)

Context: Pavarotti didn’t start voice training til he was 18/19. He also had a voice that could sail effortlessly up to an Eb5 even post puberty, and not a weak light sound, but a connected sound. Make no mistake, he was gifted with an instrument that makes singing easy and beautiful in a way that most of us couldn’t grasp… even before training.

AND EVEN THEN, he makes the above statement of how long it took to train his voice the correct way, of how FRUSTRATING it is was to train his voice properly, and how he saw (and perhaps related?) to those who doubt the process.

So what don’t you get told about singing?

Simply, you do not become a good to great singer in a handful of lessons, or even a year or two. It seems from various sources that it took Pavarotti a minimum of six years as he continued to develop his voice daily. Most crucially he was known to turn away roles he felt vocally not yet ready for.

This is even though his range (even pre-training!) was ALREADY covering every possible piece of repertoire he would ever be asked to sing. It’s not about range or just the “mere” ability to hit the notes, it was about security of voice and quality of tone, and he knew that.

Great and complete singers don’t just get “discovered” with zero to minimal training any more than polished and beautifully cut diamonds just get “found” in a coal mine – it takes work, even in the case of voices with great base materials like Pavarotti’s voice.

So remember: if it took the gifted but young Pavarotti a minimum of 6 years to train his voice properly, we MUST understand this. That true and full development of the voice takes concerted, intentional, focused effort sustained over a period of years to achieve the kind of voice you can throw whatever you like at.

If this is something you’d like to discover in your own voice, I’d love to start work with you. You can book yourself in via the booking button below.

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How to learn a song quickly

I was chatting with a few other teachers and some students recently about how to learn a song quickly and how I go about learning songs, as well as what the most effective method is.

Learning a song is a remarkably complex process. There’s the lyrics, the melody, the rhythm, the harmony, perhaps some ornamentation or some hidden complexities, and there’s the challenge of successfully putting all the components together, still sounding like you whilst still doing justice to the original piece (artistry). And that’s just if you’re wanting to SING the song… if you’re wanting to accompany yourself that can create a WHOLE raft of other issues.

For a moment, let’s park our discussion of the artistic. Let’s also not worry about whether we are trying to accompany ourselves on an instrument.

I’m talking about learning a song quickly (the technical) AND, at the same time), progressing towards the best tone you can deliver (the aesthetic). Interestingly, you CAN do both, if you know what you’re doing.

Here’s my process for assimilating a song.

INITIAL PRIMER


1) Find a version I like – The first step is obviously important to make sure you WANT to sing the song.

2) Listen to it 3 or 4 times without singing along with it or playing along with it.
The second time is important to do it uninterrupted. Give your brain the best chance to internalise the song and also not associate the song with the stress of getting bits wrong (this IS going to happen when learning songs so we don’t want to create that stress unnecessarily).

3) Listen to it 3 or 4 times whilst humming or singing gently along.
This is the next step, but make sure not to stop and start again, or try singing the bit you just heard but got wrong over anything bit. Let the song wash over you whilst you tentatively follow along.

4) Listen to it 3 or 4 times trying to sing gently along, but pause and rewind to figure out difficult bits.
Try to keep the flow going as much as possible, but make sure to stop and retrace your steps if you mess something up. The quality of tone and range is not important at this stage, but it IS a chance to check your work.

Now we’ve done that, it’s time for the next steps…

MAKE IT EASY TO SOUND GOOD AND SOUND LIKE YOU

Many great teachers have said to me “I’d rather have half the range, double the quality”. Many singers agree intellectually with this, but emotionally their ego gets in the way. But the truth is, this is sage advice – and we’ve got to go DOWN if we want to go UP.

4) LOWER THE KEY and practice the song til you can do the whole thing – I generally take it down to where the top notes are SUPER pedestrian. If you’re unaccustomed to this approach, whatever key you might initially take a song down to, you could probably take it down a key or two more. For female voices or lighter male voices this can often stick the lowest notes too low overall, but you can apply this process in reverse for just those portions of the song, or even change the melody to be workable even in that lowest key.

Once you’ve got this sounding good and like you (which is ludicrously easy to guarantee because of how much this should be sitting in your chest voice, the place where you speak), we can start to change the key.

NOTE: This is working with the assumption that you have some level of functional mix going on. If you try following the next instructions without a functional mix, you will just end up straining or struggling with your voice.

That caveat aside, the next step is:

5) Take the key up ONE semitone, and repeat the process – Yup, just one singular solitary semitone, and make sure it sounds EXACTLY the same as the key before. Any strain, volume increases/drops, vowel changes etc all need ironing out at the next key. Other than the intellectual knowledge that it’s a higher key, the sound of your voice when singing in this key should be indistinguishable from the one before it.

6) REPEAT – Take it up another semitone, and repeat the process. You must make sure that each time you change key it exactly matches the one before. Even the slightest deviation from the sound that was delivered previously will yield an undesirable runaway process in how good the voice sounds as we ascend. Be incredibly picky about whether it’s the same or not, your voice will sound all the better for it and you’ll develop a LOT quicker overall as a singer.

The first key or two shouldn’t take too long nor be too difficult to do in the first instance. But once you get maybe 2 keys or so higher than your original comfortable key, you’ll start to find the hard work begins. You’ll find it reeeally hard to keep the volume the same, you’ll find vowels start to slip, either getting wider or getting much narrower than you’d like. You’ll find it more energy-intensive to sustain and you’ll need more rest breaks. Assuming you’ve got a functional mix and are adjusting correcting, this is normal and to be expected.

WHY DOES THIS WORK?

What this does is the tone-matching we talked about in my earlier article. We are putting our voice solidly in our modal register (our chest voice) where we are recognisably ‘us’, and then making DAMN sure we don’t lose that as we ascend. Singers all too often and far too willingly sacrifice quality and ease of production JUST to say they’ve hit the note… what’s frustrating for me as a voice teacher is not the sound they got (hey, sometimes it DOES sound cool!) but the sound they DIDN’T get.

Eh? The sound they DIDN’T get?

Once you’ve heard a true powerful voice that’s been built bit by bit in the manner described above, you cannot UNHEAR it. It changes you. It’s an ENORMOUS sound, like getting hit in the head by a freight train, all because of the way the voice has been built… and yet it’s not killing the singer to sing in that way, nor has it compromised ease or consistency to achieve that sound. So when I hear a singer that even sounds good before this approach, it makes me sad to think I could’ve heard something even MORE impressive.

IMPORTANT RULE OF WHEN TO STOP

7) When you can’t keep the same tonality as the key before, you stop.

This tells you where you are technically with your voice and with the song. You should not care too deeply about where the original singer put the song. We all have different voices in different stages of development and with different attributes and attitudes.

THE REAL PAYOFFS

What I love about this process is it reveals the BEST of your voice throughout – why? Because it starts in your TRUE voice, your speaking voice, and goes from there. This process has an in-built safety to prevent you compromising on that.

What is ALSO brilliant about this process is that you will have made sure you sound good in EVERY key you visited (other than the last). Which means that you are comfortable singing in every key you visited.

This in turn means you are psychologically singing much closer to the concept of mix – the idea of the sound of your true voice everywhere, with no reach, strain, stress, or deviation in the correct vowels.

MY PERSONAL OPINION AND FINDINGS

In my experience, voices expand exponentially when they follow this approach. They learn songs ludicrously quickly, and their voices start to sound impossibly enormous in terms of their tone (even without being loud). Once you hear this, you can’t unhear it, but best of all, it helps you to learn songs quickly AND sound great on them at each stage.

That’s it for now folks. Any questions, just let me know!

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Creating a great Mix: Tone-matching

In the guitar world, tube amplifiers (the very first kind of amps for guitar that were ever created) have been the sought after tone machines for guitarists.

The issues with valve/tube amps are that they are heavy, too loud when delivering a great tone, require increasingly expensive maintenance, etc. As such, despite sounding great, with the advent of digital technology being so powerful now, people have long been trying to recreate the sound of tube amplifiers in digital products.

These are often referred to as ‘modellers’ as they are trying to recreate a working digital model of an existing amplifier. The advantage of this is that the devices are much smaller, work at any volume level, and virtually no maintenance costs.

Tone-matching

Nowadays there are products that can do live tone-matching with an existing tube amplifier.

What this entails is that the modelling system is hooked up to an existing amplifier and it runs various listening diagnostics to the amplifier to try and mimic the amp as closely as possible, in terms of tone, feel, etc.

This is super-important that the digital model not just sound the same as the original amp, but that the model FEELS the same as the original, as the closer all those factors are to the original, the less of a discrepancy there is in the digital model from the original amp… thus rather than creating something that elicits the response of “oh, that’s a convincing copy”… people are left completely unaware they are even listening to something other than the original – the tone-matched model and the original amp sound become essentially one and the same thing.

What has this got to do with singing?

We’ve talked a lot about chest voice in previous articles (because a solid established TRUE chest voice is of critical importance in building a voice). Now let’s consider this tone-matching analogy in guitar amps, but apply it to voice.

What guitarists are trying to do with modellers, is to take something that sounds a beautiful way NATURALLY, and try to emulate that in a domain that does NOT naturally sound that way. It takes time and repeated analysis, constant tweaks, to slowly get the tones to match.

The Voice is the Same

In the same way, once the true chest voice of a given singer is established in that singer, we have the “original” sound that we are looking to recreate everywhere in the voice. Our goal is therefore to tone-match that sound as we develop the functional ability to move through the rest of our voice and our bridges. Remember, we cannot drag ACTUAL chest voice up incredibly high. Attempting to do this is why so many people injure their voice. We have to do so with correct function first, then slowly tweak, like the guitar modeller example.

We develop functional ability to move through the voice first, but increasingly tone-match note by note from chest through the start of the bridge and upwards, making sure that each ascending note matches the one before it, both in terms of tone and feel (and certainly control of volume, though that takes time). If even one note is not matched to the extent given above, the consistency of the mix is lost.

The better the tone-match as we progress through the voice, the better the sound… AND the feel for everyone involved. For the singer, for the audience, for everyone. Once you can start to tone-match your upper register to your true chest voice, high notes stop SOUNDING or even feeling that high.

Of course the pitches being sung are still high in an absolute sense. But the lack of feeling like the singer is reaching, the evenness of timbre, the fact that the notes still sound like chest… these all mean we are psychologically primed to recognise the sound as chest. In turn, it therefore “feels” like those notes are in a comfortable range (as both singers and listeners).

This is huge

THIS is one key attribute of developing a great mix. Once the chest voice is established appropriately, tone-matching that quality throughout the range is what breeds a solid, powerful and expressive, mix. Few ever take the time to get that granular about their voice and any mix that may be established, but countless testimonials of my clients show that it is very possible and absolutely worth it.

If you’d like to book in and experience this vocal transformation for yourself, please do click the link below. I’d love to start work with you.

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