Our Latest Articles

This week I was having a discussion with a client about vocal weakness. Many people who come to me for voice coaching suffer from similar complaints of their voice feeling weak/not strong enough, though these are often in different arenas.

Some are professional performers who experience vocal decline in power/tone. Others require their voice for speaking and communicating within their job and notice it cannot deliver what they are looking for. Many are in choirs or sing for pleasure, and they’ve noticed their voice change for the worse over some period of time, and they want to remedy it.

Traits of a weak/weaker voice

The exact traits of a weak voice are fairly idenitifiable for most, e.g.
– lighter or thinner timbre,
– excessive breathiness,
– instability in the tone,
– quiet speaking or singing volume, etc.

However, we need to put this in greater context, in that all voices are unique and different. Even WITH training and maximum vocal development, some voices will be lighter and quieter than others and others will be louder and weightier than others (and some will be in-between). Some voices when trained perfectly will have more breathiness in their tone, others will have less/none. We perceive this as vocal weakness when these traits seem EXCESSIVE.

But what factors can cause this? Continue reading “What causes weak voices?”

I’ve talked before about the worst voice I’ve ever worked with, but recently I’ve been thinking about the better voices I’ve worked with. I wanted to write about the “best” voices I’ve ever worked with, but realised that’s not a helpful definition. So instead I wanted to discuss the singer with the biggest range I’ve ever encountered.

Many years ago…

About 10 years ago, I was working with the singers of a boy band. They were all about 19/20 years old, and all really good singers. Each had their own thing they did well, and each contributed something the other couldn’t.

Now, when we do an initial consultation, we do an assessment on a singer’s voice. From there, I can explain what is going well, what is not going so well, and what we need to do to improve their voice. I will then often go into a lip bubble or other equivalent warm-up if the singer’s voice permits.

With one of the singers, our first session had an assessment that was fairly normal. We identified some issues he had, and we went into a warm-up from there. And when we did the warmup, his voice kept going up without issue. And up… and up…

His voice kept going up to such an insane degree, we ended up at D6. For those who don’t know, that’s above soprano high C. Most female singers would kill to be able to get up there with the ease this GUY was able to get up there. It was bonkers. Continue reading “The Biggest Range I’ve Ever Worked With”

An email subscriber sent me a question last year about advice for keeping their voice clear for singing. I’ve also seen a lot of people finding my website searching for exactly the same reasons. Hence, I thought it was worth covering my thoughts on it this week.

Most of you will have some idea of what I mean by “keeping your voice clear” for singing, but before we dive in, there’s some background info you’re going to need.

Some context

Mucus is the primary issue we face as singers for keeping our voices clear for singing. It’s what primarily clogs up our throat, voice and sinuses, and makes our voice feel claggy and horrible. But here’s the thing: mucus is something our body generates to protect us.

Consider this: Here is a cross-sectional view of the vocal folds.

See that outer layer? That outer epithelial layer is essential a lining of mucus to protect the inner layers of the vocal folds from damage. It’s mucus that is MEANT to be there. When that gets stripped away or irritated, the body will generate more mucus to continue protecting the vocal folds.

Mucus is something our body generates to protect itself.

Snot in our nose, post nasal drip from our nasal cavity and sinuses, etc is all intended to capture germs and microbes and enable your body to discharge them. Without that, we’d get very ill indeed. Mucus in the nose, throat or vocal folds is generated to lubricate and protect us from germs or irritation that could wreak more havoc than just feeling a bit gunky.

So mucus itself is not an issue… it’s EXCESS mucus that we desire to minimise. But we also need to be cautious about trying to clear it aggressively (e.g. excess coughing/hacking), as that will only exacerbate the issues.

My protocol for dealing with mucus/gunk on the voice

Now that we’ve got the background, let’s talk about some things I find very helpful for keeping my voice as clear as possible. Most of these are prevention rather than cure, as by the time we actually need to shift it, it’s usually too late to dramatically improve things with a sinus spray, lozenge, or staying off caffeine.

1. Drink lots of water
The more hydrated your body is, the thinner and easier to shift the mucus is. So drink lots of water. That way, whether the mucus is essential for protecting your body or not, it should shift more easily.

You can also leverage the heat of drinks to your advantage. Cold drinks are good for soothing the voice, and hot drinks are good for shifting mucus. But be aware, as cold drinks can also make mucus seem more stubborn to shift, and hot drinks can also aggravate your throat if too hot – the challenge is to deploy the tools you need as and when you need them. Continue reading “Keeping your voice clear for singing”

I came across this video from content creator Rick Beato this week. In it, he plays some clips of AI generated songs, where the AI had been tasked to copy and recreate the style of a famous artist.

Most of these are from modern singers/rappers like Drake, but some of these include an AI generated version of Kurt Cobain singing Chris Cornell’s ‘Black Hole Sun’. Beato closes the video by sharing his thoughts on the commercial direction AI generated music is going to take the music industry. Have a listen and see what you think:

What do you think?

I’m still distilling my own thoughts on AI in music, but one thing does spring to mind with the modern music examples. Namely, that the fact the AI could copy the modern music so closely but be less convincing with the other examples. To me, this touches on the the formulaic, often indistinct and (frankly) dehumanised nature of a lot of modern music.

Consider this: in music of years gone by – even as recent as the 2000s – rhythm and tempo would vary. Chords would be voiced differently or with different intensity as the song progressed. Sometimes notes would be played sung ever so slightly out of perfect tuning, but would sound consonant with the piece as a whole. These things occur because musicians are only human.

In contrast, modern music is increasingly ‘locked to the grid’, i.e. the tempo is mathematically locked in and perfect. It never wavers. The drum beats land in exactly the same place every time. The tone and timbre never fluctuates. Every note is autotuned/heavily tuned to be perfectly pitched. Nothing pitched will lie off the piano keyboard. Vocals all echo what the last number one hit did, rather than tread new ground. Artists are turning increasingly to computers and software to either generate these notes, or iron out the portions that were generated by real musicians.

Caveat: To be clear, I am not trying to say modern music is worse than older music – you can make that aesthetic judgment for yourself, and if you like a lot of that music, feel free to enjoy it.

What I AM saying, is that modern music and the way it is produced, has ironed out so much of the human elements that make music actual art (making it distinct from just being a commodity/product) and we are already turning to computers to make our current crop of number one tracks, that it stands to reason an AI would be able to synthetically generate a convincing facsimile of such dehumanised art. Virtually none of the components that make art a human endeavour seem to remain in modern commercial music… so why would you need a human to do it? Other to maybe give the AI some modest direction?

Truthfully, I don’t know where it’s all going

All of the above are just my musings on the human elements (that in my opinion cannot be put ‘in the box’) vs the dehumanised elements that now populate increasing amounts of commercially produced music. Maybe, the more convincingly an AI can generate a piece of music that harkens to a particular artist, the less human/artful that original artist’s style actually is in the first place.

Food for thought, and I’d welcome yours.

The last 3 weeks have been horrific. A sore throat started at the beginning of my holiday, and just kept ramping up and ramping up, until I needed an anaesthetic spray just to numb the pain in order to sleep! Cue a trip to the doctors and antibiotics for a tonsillitis-like illness, and I’m finally coming out the other side.

I do not wish illness on anyone

So please know, I do not enjoy being ill and I do not wish it on anyone, whether it’s very severe or a mild cold. But the reality is, every one of us will get ill from time to time. Those of you who have worked with me for a while will know I am no exception. My voice is pretty robust, but every so often, I’ll get hit by something more severe that knocks my voice into an unusable state. From then it will take time to recover physically then rebuild the voice.

And THIS period of recovering and rebuilding is something I absolutely love to go through. That might seem a little masochistic but here are the reasons why:

1) Your tolerance for error is MUCH smaller

Many stronger and more experienced singers get away with a fair amount when they are healthy. What I mean by this is that they are doing things that would be detrimental in weaker voices, or running their voice to the edge when they sing, and it’s only their relatively good health and fortunate physical robustness that prevents them slipping into a vocal hole and struggling to get out again.

But when we get sick, we lose that edge. We lose the bandwidth that allowed us to get away with so much, and we have to rely on our muscle memory… this is supremely revealing. It shows us what we REALLY can do and can’t do. When we get sick, we’ll really expose when we’re actually forcing notes, because we just won’t be able to make it happen. But perhaps you’ll find notes you were worried you were forcing are actually fine.

You simply don’t get this window into how accurate you’re actually being until you have your tolerance/bandwidth for error taken away through ill health. When you are recovering and rebuilding your voice, this is a perfect time to cautiously go through your voice and see what works and what doesn’t. Continue reading “What I love about getting sick”

Happy Easter!

If you’re anything like me, you’ll have been trying your best not to tuck into your Easter eggs early. Normally for big holidays I just send a well wishing email to all my subscribers, but a few people had commented to me that they think chocolate is bad for your voice.

But is chocolate bad for your voice?

As in all things, the real answer is “it depends“. There are certainly worse things to eat/drink for good singing, e.g. copious amounts of alcohol, anything dry and sticky like peanut butter/porridge, or anything that might give you reflux like spicy foods/curry.

Some people will know that when they eat chocolate, they notice their voice tends to feel mucous-y and gunky. Maybe not to an extreme degree, but enough that when trying to sing the gunk seems to get in the way. Continue reading “Easter Classic: Is chocolate bad for your voice?”