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Five Things I USED To Think, That I Now DON’T

Here’s a slightly controversial blog post, and one where I’ll be honest about things I used to think that now I don’t… which means… *gasp* I got stuff wrong!

None of these are straight-forward, so do read the explanation of each to understand the principles I’m talking about.

1. You don’t have to have a great voice to be a great coach

The lines are a little blurrier on this one, but when I first started, I had a LOT of knowledge and could elicit great results through my teaching as a result, but my voice needed more work in and of itself. When I discussed it with other coaches, they too agreed that it was more important that we knew the relevant stuff and could explain it (think great football coaches who aren’t top flight footballers themselves)… I now really do NOT agree with this. Whilst I think you don’t (or may even not have the capacity to be) a premier singer/performer, as a coach, the better your voice is put together and progressing, the more infinitely capable you are of both a) eliciting the necessary response from students, and b) demonstrating the target at each stage of teaching.

Our voices as coaches are our greatest assets, and I realise now I was being too lenient on my understanding and ability in this regard. Please understand that I do not just mean “sounds great when singing”, as many have gifted voice that sound fabulous off-the-bat, but we are talking about a voice that can demonstrate within the range and keys of the student, and navigate through the difficult parts to enable a student to do the same. This is more than just sounding good in and of yourself. And I realise now how wrong I was to think that then.

2. Great singers can’t teach you to sing

For the most part, great singers do NOT equal great coaches. There are many ‘doers’ who do not understand how it is they do what they do, and so cannot elicit that response from those who might wish to follow in their footsteps.

HOWEVER! That is not true in all cases. Many have, through a combination of guided tutelage and self exploration, found a methodology for what they do that can be taught or at least interpreted by others around them. Pavarotti, for example, was excellent at his articulation of what the bridges/passaggi felt like and what was necessary to navigate them, as well as his understanding of tone and vowels. His understanding was not always completely scientific or fully-fledged in it’s own right, but he was not merely a great singer. While I think to call him a coach would be a little bit of a stretch, his explanations and articulations are undoubtedly accurate in many regards, and so can help singers improve and develop.

Still further, with more research I have found that many great singers who have the vocal robustness (and have figured out their voices well, often after periods of vocal issues) to continue well into their 40s/50s would be able to provide great insight into how to enable great feats of vocalism, but instead they keep singing rather than explain how they do what they do to others to pass it on – this is an oft-lamented issue in the vocal world.

As such, while I do still consider that able singers rarely become great coaches, it is not a completely true statement to say that great singers cannot teach you to sing. They may have their limitations in cases, but I realise now I was being far too harsh and making sweeping generalisations here.

3. Range is the key determining factor of skill and ability

So I knew that range was not the ONLY factor, but from day-one, I always harboured the view that RANGE was how we determined ability. The higher you could sing, the more technical you were. I realise now that this was a fruitless and ultimately purely quantitative measure, i.e. you can measure range. Whereas great singing is not a quantitative effort, but a QUALITATIVE one, i.e. how GOOD does someone sound? Range and climaxes come into this, certainly, but to reduce the equation for vocal quality to be determined in the main but how HIGH someone would sing is madness. More often than not people seek high notes at the expense of vocal quality, robbing themselves of quality, instead of giving themselves more through enhanced range (as my incorrect original thoughts would indicate it should).

“Half the range, double the quality” is a phrase said to me by more than one coach, and I now truly take this to heart. We listen to great singers who sound good… THAT is the only factor that matters. Many things go into this, but ultimately we will happily listen to a singer who sings with half the range of another but with double the quality. We may come away impressed in an Olympic sense with a crazy high note, but it’s the album of the quality singer we buy, and the gig we go to of the singer who focuses on quality over their range.

What’s even better than this, is that when you focus on quality in the building of the voice, range is a wonderful by-product, but the range should NEVER be at the expense of vocal quality. I got this wrong (Oh man, did I get this wrong…)

4. You can learn to sing from audio lessons

Right, confession, before I was a voice coach, I went and bought a certain online singing course by a well-known online voice coach. Honestly? It caused more harm than good. I honestly thought I could save on not having to pay for regular lessons by buying pre-recorded audio sessions from an online coach.

What I realise now (in light of the above), that if quality is our ultimate end, then we NEED that feedback and guidance from a skilled coach in person… this is a non-negotiable factor. We NEED this, all of us, if we want to improve.

On paper, all the tools look the same. From lip bubbles, to long scales, five tone scales, etc, but the issue is – we need the sound to be just so on each exercise, otherwise it does NOTHING beneficial. We MAY be making the right sound, but there’s no way to know. Think of it like trying to go to the gym and do the exercises with perfect form, but blindfolded. How could you tell? You can’t see inside your throat or your voice, so how can you know you’re getting it right? The answer is, you can’t.

I now realise how hopelessly naive I was thinking that an audio lesson (hundreds of them as well!) could help me piece together my voice. It was nothing (in my opinion) but a marketing tool. So please, do yourself a favour, don’t buy any more online lessons – it’s not worth it.

5. Anyone can become a great singer/we all have what it takes

OK, let me clarify – I think anyone can become an AMAZING singer in their own right. Music is NOT a competition, and therefore it’s about quality (which we are all unique in). That said, when I say I now don’t believe that just anyone can become a great singer, I mean this is the more competitive/comparative element of it – e.g. Pavarotti is held up as the gold standard for opera singers in the last 100 years, Beyonce is held up as the gold standard for contemporary female RnB vocals in the last 20 years, Bruno Mars is held up as the gold standard for contemporary male RnB vocals in the last 10 years, etc.

But in each of their cases, lies a fascinating story, both in their innate physical attributes that enabled great singing, and in terms of their familial background that enabled rigorous training from a very young age to enable such peak performance.

As such, someone with lesser physical attributes (I mean in terms of how well their instrument is set up from birth) coming to learning singing at (say) 40, cannot possibly outshine someone like the abovementioned in this regard. It just isn’t possible. Sure, some people have great instruments hidden away from the world til a little later in life, but they will almost always have this kind of story attached to them.

What I mean to say is that we can all excel and be better versions of ourselves, but if we’re looking to occupy a place in history as a model of excellence with our voices, not everyone has what it takes… and that’s OK. If Bob Dylan or Tom Petty had compared themselves to Pavarotti and said ‘nah, I won’t bother’, the world would be a poorer place. I realise now I got this wrong, but I think it’s a beautiful point to be made off the back of this one.

That’s it for now folks. I hope you’ve enjoyed my mini-confession. Any questions or comments please do leave them below.

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Five Songs From This Week

Yet another instalment of the very popular ‘Five songs from this week’…

1. Rolling Down to Old Maui – The Longest Johns
One of my longer term students sings in an old folk group that sings a lot of sea shantys. This is one of their current songs and he’s working on this – reeeeally nice melody and lyrical content, have a listen.

2. Only You – Alison Moyet
Ahhh, who doesn’t love a bit of Moyet? With this particular singer, we take it a bit slower and treat it as a bit of a ballad, and it really sits beautifully in their voice.

3. Fallin – Alicia Keys
This student has worked really hard to get their vocals up to a level where they can attempt this kind of song. While we are leaving some of the riffs for now, the melody is still quite demanding even when stripped back.

4. Resurrecting – Elevation
I had a couple of church worship leaders in last week, and this was one of the songs that came up. It’s a great song lyrically for contemporary churches, but the key is a nightmare. That aside, have a listen!

5. This is the moment – Jekyll and Hyde
This was a recommendation of mine to another student who loves songs with content and meaning, and he’s taken to it rather well!

(and for an extra laugh… The Hoff takes a stab at it)

That’s it for this week folks!

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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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Donny Hathaway – A Song For You

This week I’ve been enjoying the wonderful tones of Donny Hathaway (not to be confused with Donnie Osmond!)

Listen to how incredibly smooooooth his voice and technique is. A lighter voice and singer certainly, but there’s depth and texture at every turn. He understood space and dynamics incredibly well despite having tonnes of facility with his instrument.

Do have a listen!

I work on this song with clients regularly. If you’re a fan of Donny and would love to develop your voice and singing aesthetic to do his material justice, feel free to book in for your first session.

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Five More Songs from the Last Week

I had a load of positive feedback last time I posted a feature on five songs from the last week, so here we are again with another instalment!

1. Salley Gardens
A solid folk tune, this was brought in this week by a fab student whose voice has REALLY come on in the last few months. There are many versions, but this is one that I quite enjoy!

2. Christina Perri – Jar of Hearts
This was brought in at the end of the week by a local performer. Whilst too high in the original key for their particular voice, this stuck in my head for the rest of the day.

3. Demi Lovato – Skyscraper
This is an oft-talked about song by students but only a few bring it in to work on. This particular song requires quite an attitude to deliver just right, even with technique being under your belt!

4. Sting – If I Ever Lose My Faith
I am a moderate fan of Sting. I really enjoy certain pieces but there’s a large number of tracks I just don’t gel with. This one crossed my ears again via a cover someone had done on Facebook, and when I mentioned it in front of a student later in the week they jumped on the chance to give it a whirl!

5. Matt Redman – 10,000 Reasons
I work with a fair few church singers and worship leaders (if you’re not sure what this job is, it’s a kind of band leader and functional lead singer for modern church congregations), and it so happens that this track is a fairly common song to hear at modern churches these day by a writer of MANY modern hymn classics. It’s got a somewhat tricky ascent in the chorus, and is tough to nail with quality (given the ballad speed it goes it) without just yelling (as many leaders tend to do!).

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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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