Mark JW Graham: Singing Lessons Nottingham
Mark is the Midlands' leading Certified Voice Coach, providing professional singing lessons in Nottingham. Mark is known for getting BIG results in voices, fast. – 0115 871 7660 || [email protected]
Artificial intelligence has rapidly expanded into the world of music education, offering digital alternatives to traditional singing lessons. But how do AI singing apps compare to working with a real vocal coach? Below, we weigh the pros and cons in a side-by-side comparison to help you understand which is best for your voice.
Continue reading “Can I learn to sing using an AI vocal coach?”
If you have ever tried singing your favourite songs, you’ve probably recognised that some are harder than others. You may have even found that some have near identical range, and yet some feel utterly unachievable. Why should this be?
I regularly speak with clients about such songs they find difficult to sing. Comments come up like:
“I’m fine until the bridge/chorus/outro, then I’m knackered”
“It doesn’t seem particularly high, but I seem to struggle to hit the same notes I can in other songs”
“I can’t seem to find a key that makes this song singable – what’s going on?”
These are all common complaints I hear about people trying to sing some songs. In particular, certain songs and certain genres seem to hold much harder melodies for people to sing.
As it happens, there are mechanical and musical reasons for why certain melodies and intervals are harder to sing than others. There are characteristics that, once you learn what they are, you can scan for when listening to songs. Moreover, the more of these melodic characteristics a song possesses, the harder the song inherently becomes.
I’ve got ten traits in mind. Some of these are “voice moves”, tricky things to ask your voice to do, and others relate to general hallmarks of what makes songs easier/harder to sing.
I’ll discuss each briefly so you can grasp why these characteristics make songs tricky. There are many others I can think of, but we’ll start here for you.
0. Key too high/too low/wrong for you
I go on so much about key choice, so I’m going to be brief here. If you are trying to sing a song in the wrong key for you – too high, too low, etc – the song will always be difficult so sing. The following points are to cover attributes within songs themselves, assuming that key choice isn’t an issue. Continue reading “What Makes Certain Songs Hard to Sing”
There’s a quote attributed (incorrectly) to Albert Einstein:
While Einstein appears not to have been the one to coin this phrase, and while this quote can often be misapplied, the underlying sentiment is an important one when it comes to getting the best out of your voice.
When we sing songs we are judging both our version of the song, but also our voice. Which means that if the song doesn’t best suit our voice, we will forever be disappointed in what we can do.
Perfect song choice is so case-by-case that it’s hard to give generalised advice, so I won’t try to. However, almost any song can be adjusted to work better in someone’s particular voice. Often the difference between sounding awful, decent, or even great, is just down to key choice. Even subtle key change can radically transform how the song feels to sing.
But a key that’s too high/too low (often by even just one semitone), will often leave us disheartened and frustrated by how “off” our voices feel and sound. This is especially true for those who sing in bands, where key choice is imposed upon them. And very often in bands, other musicians simply don’t appreciate how critically important key choice is can be. Continue reading “Sounding your best: Optimising songs for your voice”
DISCLAIMER: This article is not simply going to be another example of an old man yelling at a cloud.
It’s also not going to be a discussion around me staring into the middle distance and yearning for the “good ol’ days“.
There is an epidemic of shouting masquerading as singing, at least to my mind and my ear. And today I want to talk about why.
Over the years
To begin with, I’ve lost count of the number of events where every singer was just yelling their guts out. I’ve even seen singers step away from the microphone to show how loudly they can bellow their lyrics – it’s part of their performance piece. I’ve seen performers get gigs for not much more reason than they can belt notes louder than their peers. I’ve even been singing as part of a group, where when someone starts yelling their part, people think that equates to a more emotional performance.
What exactly is causing this? And what are the highest quality singers actually doing that sets them apart from some that might be accused of yelling?
Before we judge such singers too harshly…
… are there reasons behind why many resort to yelling? Are there tripwires that cause some singers to miss out on the path to higher quality?
I’m not for a second looking to justify or exonerate bad singing, but I also want to be clear that the voice has its complications. It would therefore be remiss to not discuss some of the physiological factors at play in this trend. Continue reading “Shouting Masquerading As Singing: Reasons why so many singers are just yelling”
I was having a conversation with a client recently about riffing: what it is, why it’s useful, and why it seems difficult to many.
For the ease of discussion let’s say that anything that extends the melody beyond the original for dramatic/musical effect is a ‘riff’, and that riffing is therefore the act of extending the melody in such a way.
I’d say that most singers want to get better at riffs/riffing, but that they find it hard to do. I’d also say that a lot of singers who think they are good at riffing are not as good as they think they are, and typically repeat the same old basic tricks over and over. But why is it hard to do? And could it be made easier?
The simple answer is yes, but there’s some important logic and understanding behind that answer. Let’s break it down. Continue reading “Learning to Riff: Why most people find it hard & why it can be easier than you think”
Many of my voice clients have had past coaching before ever starting with me.
This is fairly normal. Like with any subject worth learning, we start with someone accessible, then we move forward to coaches appropriate to our improving level over time.
As I receive these more serious and technically advancing clients who have moved through various coaches, I get some insight as to the good and bad attributes of the other coaches out there.
In this article, I wanted to talk about the slightly contentious topic of: what (I think) a lot of vocal coaches and singing teachers generally get wrong about vocal coaching, and the reasons why.
This is by far the biggest issue I come across. I would estimate that 60% of voice teachers I encounter simply do not understand how the voice works, at least not to a sufficient degree that they could effectively teach it as an instrument.
How can you spot these coaches? Often such teachers are strong singers in their own right, or they may have a good stage presence that nets them gigs/performances. But they lack any specific knowledge about how the voice works or how to elicit real change and improvement in their clients’ voices.
If you don’t know which component of the voice is responsible for which vocal characteristic (and which exercises are responsible for developing and culturing those qualities), you’re on a hiding to nowhere.
I regularly see or hear of people teaching things that do literally nothing for the voice. Worse still, I see people advising “technique” or key choices that are inclining singers towards vocal damage. This is generally well-intentioned, but ultimately ill-informed.
To train a voice, one needs sufficient understanding of the voice and how it works in order to build it well.
We don’t necessarily need voice degrees in vocal physiology to perform high level vocal coaching. However, one’s understanding can’t be so vague (or absent!) that one can’t answer basic questions about why something sounds a certain way when a student asks.
This might seem counter-intuitive given my first point, but this is actually a legitimate growing problem in the vocal coaching world.
Many singing teachers initially fall foul of point 1, and then come to the admirable realisation that they are missing something. They then wisely attempt to plug a gap in their knowledge by attending courses, studying more, etc. Of course, I 100% commend this attitude.
However, what is now appearing is a sub-group of vocal coaches who know plenty about how the voice works and the latest science… and that’s about it.
Some even come from a purely academic background with no real singing experience/ability. I’m often surprised by how many set about purely academic development with great fervour and effort, yet attribute little-to-no work into application of this in their own vocal ability.
Deep scientific knowledge of the latest studies is all well and good. Having countless diplomas and a list of speaking engagements are clearly very impressive. However, if that doesn’t translate to making someone sing better – either themselves or a client – what on earth is the point??
Knowledge for knowledge’s sake will inevitably pull one in all directions and fundamentally get students nowhere. This is especially true when we’re talking about a “doing” activity like singing. The rubber simply has to meet the road.
It’s shocking how many people I have met and work/worked with who describe their last teacher(s) lessons as consisting of the following: “We just did a few warmups then sang songs for the whole lesson, and they gave me some tips“.
The goal of a good vocal coach should be to build a voice from the ground up. For those with either a lack of knowledge (as per point 1), or only academic knowledge (as per point 2), many teachers simply try to “polish whatever is there“.
If a singer has come to a teacher for help, the goal of the teacher is not just to get them to force out a couple of extra high notes, or make them louder, or more stylised, etc. Their goal should be to build a singer’s voice from the ground up. They should be aiming to culture the singer AND the voice into a complete performer and instrument.
We need exercises that work with where a student is at to:
a) build their technical facility, then…
b) show them how to take that new facility into song.
Most teachers who have some knowledge or singing ability will have their own little collections of approaches for specific areas in the voice, i.e. “tips and tricks“. From their perspective.
With such teachers, every part of the voice will (allegedly) have its own little arcane ruleset that’s often incongruent with every other part of the voice, e.g. “when up there, push it harder, open your mouth super-wide“, or “try and flip for the high notes, it’ll be easier“, “get more nasally there”, or other such bizarre instructions.
(SIDENOTE: If you want to read about the more insane singing instructions I’ve heard about, you can read some of those here)
This just becomes a smörgåsbord of incongruent instructions for the singer. Such an incongruent amalgam of rules typically lead to a very broken and inconsistent overall range in a singer’s voice, and general confusion on the part of the singer.
When it comes to building a voice, we don’t want approachES – as in plural – we want a single unified approach that blends all parts of the voice together so that it’s even from top to bottom, with no breaks, flips, breaks or switches. Sure, there might be moments where we need to introduce a singer to a new part of their range in a less finished way, but we must be moving toward a smooth seam-less voice.
This philosophy to building a voice makes the voice far more like a well-built piano, where we can play whatever notes we want, as and when we want (assuming we’ve built it sufficiently).
This is something I think about a lot.
When each of us is looking for guidance on singing songs, whether technical or artistic in nature, we need someone that can empathise with what we are trying to achieve. I don’t just mean intellectually, and I don’t just mean emotionally – I mean “empathy” in a total sense.
However, many coaches are lacking in this dimension. Sometimes it may be a more obvious lack of emotional empathy with a singer, but in this case I’m talking about something more fundamental and far less obvious.
The issue is this: if a purported coach is not a singer, has a substantially different voice (or even a less capable voice than a given singer), or has no experience with singing even a related type of material/a particular range, such a teacher will have a severely impaired grasp of what the singer in question is going through.
I say this as someone who spent many years studying with female vocal coaches, or lighter voiced male coaches, who simply did not understand what the more typical male voice had to experience to build their voice. The extra weight in the bottom end of the voice, the challenge in getting out of the bottom and into the top, to do so in a smooth way. None of them grasped it, as it all came so much easier to their voices.
The lack of understanding and lack of empathy meant they gave directions trying to configure my voice in a way that it was ultimately not built to do, as if it was a lighter voice than it was. It wasn’t till I started working with coaches with more experience working with my weight of voice that the cogs started to mesh fully.
It is this lack of empathy in the actual doing, at the level a singer needs to be doing it, that is hidden from view as being fundamentally unhelpful. But if they have never personally experienced each stop along the journey of technical and artistic development that they are trying to take the singer on, it’s not much more than an encouraging facade.
Even with the required teaching tools, a lack of personal experience in that area means it’s much like trying to describe road directions along roads which they themselves have never travelled.
A good vocal coach needs to have sufficient experience with coaching AND singing that they can grasp not just what the singer in question needs to do, but how it should feel to the singer to achieve that end. This is not just good personal coaching on an emotional level, but utterly critical on a technical level also.
This are just some of the things I’ve picked up as critical things for effective vocal coaching that often seem to be missing to one degree or another. This is not written with any one coach in mind, but rather makes a point of crystallising my thoughts on some of the critical components to good vocal coaching.
We had a workshop yesterday, and one of the participants commented on how they had once been told by a singing teacher to “put the sound in *THIS* cavity” accompanied with a finger pointing to somewhere in the head. The main reason he brought this up was because of how unclear and confusing that language was, so I thought it was worth talking about descriptive vs prescriptive teaching.
If you’ve ever had a singing lesson, or looked online for singing videos, there’s no way you’ll have escaped the weirdness of such instructions. “Put it in the masque”, “make it brighter”, “the sound should open downwards not outwards”, “sing from the diaphragm”, “don’t sing from the throat”, “gain strength from your knees”, and other such gems. At least one of these statements I’d even agree with, in the sense that I also feel this when I sing, so they’re not “wrong” per se, they’re just not helpful. Continue reading “Descriptive vs Prescriptive Teaching”
Many students ask or wonder this when they first start with the technique and approach that we utilise in lessons. Just for a bit of context, often these kinds of singers are capable in their originals or own artistry, but it’s important to note that such singers are relatively fledgling in their vocal development. Continue reading “Do I have to sing in chest voice?”