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

September 24, 2016July 5, 2025

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!).

September 12, 2016July 5, 2025

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!

August 18, 2016July 5, 2025

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.

June 30, 2016July 6, 2025

Rival Sons Burn Down Los Angeles – Live Performance

Hey folks

Here’s one of my favourite bands. They are a proper old school hard rock band called ‘Rival Sons’. I’ve blogged about them before, but this is to illustrate a particular point.

Watch the video below. It’s essentially just recorded “in the room”. There is some mixing that has gone on (as evidenced by the comments on the Youtube page), but it is essentially just recorded straight to disk.

What’s so impressive about that? LISTEN to it. Listen to how tight the whole performance is. Note and timing perfect. It’s incredibly close to the album version.

Why should you find that amazing? Very few bands are capable of delivering what they do on albums in the real world. There’s almost always shortcuts taken in the studio to make the album sound cool, but that aren’t replicable live.

THIS (in my opinion) is a really high standard of live performance, and if you are a live performer, you would do well to aspire to THAT level of professionalism.

But even if you’re not performing live (well, even if you are!) above all, enjoy the track!

March 23, 2016July 6, 2025

Muscle Memory and Singing

Muscle memory is a big topic, and we’ll only be scratching the surface of it here today, specifically in relation to practice and vocal development.

Those of you who know me, know I tend to ask a lot of questions. Ever since I was a kid I would ask questions about things. I always wanted to know how things worked, what certain things were, and why things were the way they were.

I think that the power of the last question – why things are the way they are – is something that still fascinates me to this day. Things rarely happen for no reason. They might happen for reasons that are unclear to us, but they are rarely without causation.

There is a GREAT book on why things happen in the way that they do, called ‘Freakonomics’, and is a fabulous book on incentives and understanding the way people think and behave. It really sharpened and renewed my desire to understand the ‘why’ behind situations, as it is amazing what information you can glean when you always look to answer the question ‘why’.

So what’s the ‘why’ on my mind?

Something has come up a lot in the last few years is in relation to students that I work with. In particular, that there is a discernible difference between those that have lessons once a week (or more!) and those who have them once a fortnight (or less frequently)…

Once upon a time, I advised new students to have the first 3-5 lessons weekly so we can have the most impact on their voice, and then they are welcome to move to fortnightly lessons, as the convenience of fortnightly lessons works well for many. I still advise something similar…

But I noticed something. I noticed a HUGE difference between those who had lessons EVERY week without fail, and those who had them fortnightly without fail. Surely the difference is that those who have them weekly are twice as good as those who have them fortnightly? They have them twice as often, so they get twice as good… right?

WRONG

They were three, four, five times better. Sometimes even more so. The difference of having weekly lessons compounded their progress such that their development vastly outstripped the progress of those who were having lessons fortnightly. That’s even over those who were practicing diligently between fortnightly lessons.

This experience actually resulted in me completely re-engineering the way I run lessons, and the general recommendations I make when people start out working with me. The muscle memory these singers were creating was/is rock solid, and was developed incredibly quickly.

The majority of my clients do practice regularly, as you can hear the constant development in their voice lesson to lesson… however, those who have lessons weekly are dramatically overtaking those who have lessons less frequently. That’s not to say there are not big improvements across the board, but there is a substantial difference in quality of rate of development in the voices of those who are in weekly.

This is a combination of having regular contact time to work on and tweak the weekly exercise workouts for the student, and also because of the discipline that is clearly evident in those who make the time for weekly lessons.

So what’s your point here Mark?

My point is not to beat people up for not being in as often as once a week. My point is not to make people feel bad for not practicing as often as they feel they should. At the end of the day, everyone is different, and we don’t all have the time to work on our voices weekly with a teacher.

My point, if I am making any point at all, is that if you care deeply about something – such as your vocal development – then making regular weekly time for it is essential to develop that necessary muscle memory. I have seen bigger improvements in 3 months with some students who are in weekly, than I have in 12 months with those who are in less frequently. Again, that is not to say those who are in less frequently are not seeing big improvements, but we are seeing ENORMOUS improvements in those weekly students who commit the time in and out of lessons. It’s startling what that regular contact time can create in your voice.

March 23, 2016July 6, 2025

Worship Leader Vocal Training – How NOT to kill your voice and those of the congregation

I’ve written a few articles that cover how the voice is built in a particular way, as well as worship leader vocal training. As a result of the way the voice is built, putting songs in certain keys can really wreak havoc on the correct operation of the voice. It’s therefore important to put songs in a key that, aside from actually sounding good, are not killing people’s voices.

Now, the majority of artists or performers (whether professional or amateur) outside of the church or corporate singing (e.g. choirs) don’t have to worry about the keys of their songs causing other people to strain or hurt their voices. They put the song wherever they like, and people usually just listen, or mumble along or shout out their favourite lines. No big deal. However, within certain contexts, there are people whose roles mean that their key choice is forced on those around them…

Worship Leaders

One of the biggest problems I’ve encountered with students coming to me from a background of being a worship leader, or from singing in church, is heavily ingrained bad habits. These bad habits are reinforced by hours and hours of singing songs in keys that is not appropriate for their voice, or those around them.

There are bridges in the voices, passageways (if used correctly) that connect different parts of the voices together. Singing right on a bridge or one note either side of it is harder than singing in the ‘island’ between these bridges. This means, if you can sing a song where the top notes are ‘on’ one of your bridges, it will always be easier to sing and sound better if you sing the song in a key where the top notes are placed ‘away’ from your bridges.

For the average singer, particularly males, it is possible-to-probable that they have not learned to move through their first bridge yet, and so you cannot put the song in a key where the notes are higher than first bridge (E4) and expect them to find that easy or even doable… yet worship leaders worldwide insist on placing songs in keys where the top note IS E4 or just slightly higher. I have regularly played with in bands with worship leaders who insist this is where their voice sounds best and that the song ‘lacks something’ if it is not put in this key. They themselves pull, strain and push to get to those notes, and expect the same of the congregation. Except that they have a microphone and PA behind them, the congregants do not.

Moving a song away from one of your bridges can help with singability and tonal quality no end. For example, if there is a song with a single top note of E4 in the key of E, simply moving it to the key of D places that single top note away from the bridge to D4. Or in another example, where the top note is a repeated or sustained top note, making it a C#4 or a C4 can make things soooo much easier for everyone.

This kind of approach makes songs much easier to sing and will actually make the worship leader AND congregation sound better, as the voice is more in balance and in less of a strained condition.

Not convinced? We’ve only looked at the issue of bridges affecting male singers. Let’s look at female singers.

Double or Quits

Many female singers find that they simply cannot sing men’s parts in the original octave, but also struggle to sing it in the octave above. They often revert to a harmony line, which allows them to sing somewhere in between the original octave and the upper one.

This is because if a top note is E4, the octave above is E5, which is right on their second bridge. This is tough. Even changing the key to make the top note D5 is still tough just because the higher you go, the more of a teetering tower of cards the voice can become without a decent level of vocal training. In such scenarios, placing the top note on a C#, C or B is recommended for women.

For the equivalent octave for men, this can sometimes feel a touch low, so I generally recommend D, C# or C as the top note. You can see there is a good deal of overlap there.

What’s wrong with harmony?

Absolutely nothing, but if people are having to change what they’re singing because the key isn’t sustainable for them, then I would argue the key is poorly chosen for corporate singing. I mentioned that female singers often revert to a harmony so as not to struggle with the melody. A harmony is just another melody that complements the original melody. It often closely mirrors the original melody.

What female singers learn to do is sing a harmony that sits more or less halfway between where two octaves of the melody would sit, i.e. if the top note is an E4 / E5 (depending on the octave), females often revert to around B4 to make it singable. This tells us a lot about the comfort zone of the female voice, and we would do well to take that into consideration.

So what do I suggest?

Worship leaders – if you get comments of ‘that was tough to sing’, if you find your own voice is shot after just a few songs, if you find that people drop out for the high notes or women are reverting to harmonies out of comfort, then you are killing people’s voices, including your own. Find better keys for your keys and you will find that people become far less distracted by the discomfort in their own throat during a worship time, and you’ll ALSO start getting a LOT more compliments on how good you sound.

March 23, 2016July 20, 2025

It All Starts And Ends With Chest Voice

It All Starts and Ends with Chest Voice

One of the things that is often overlooked by singers is the importance of chest voice — the bottom end of the voice. It’s the place under-confident beginners tend to hide in, and the thing more advanced singers think they’ve “got sorted”… only to run away from it in every song chasing high notes.

I know what you’re thinking: “Yea yea yea Mark, we GET that chest voice matters.” Well, hold that thought — there’s more to it than we’ve covered so far.

So critical is the role of chest voice in full and total vocal development that it’s not overstating it to say:

“It all starts and ends with chest voice.”

OK Mark, that’s a little dramatic.

Maybe. But the concept is huge — and rather than squeeze it into a single post, we’re breaking it down into three core aspects:

Sonically
Technically
Psychologically

By the end of this, you should understand why chest voice shouldn’t be neglected — and how it’s the key to unlocking great tone across your whole range.

1. It All Starts and Ends with Chest Voice… Sonically

We are all “experienced” at hearing voices. Since birth, we’ve been listening to people speak — and where do people speak from? Their chest voice.

This creates a powerful unconscious sonic benchmark. We instinctively know what a normal, grounded voice sounds like. So when someone sings with tone that diverges from this benchmark — whether too light, too shouty, or simply disconnected — it stands out. It sounds off, even if we can’t articulate why.

When a singer hits high notes that still sound like their chest voice, the audience feels a natural continuity. It’s not about staying in chest voice the whole time — it’s about preserving its tonal integrity as you move through your range.

Congruency, consistency, uniformity. We’re hardwired to seek it. High notes excite us, but chest voice grounds them.

Once you depart from the true tonal quality of your natural chest voice — you lose quality, tonal connection, and the connection with your audience. The high notes mean nothing without that foundation.

2. It All Starts and Ends with Chest Voice… Technically

Sonically, chest voice sets the tone. But technically — how do we maintain that tone as we move higher?

In chest voice, the vocal cords are thicker and shorter — controlled mainly by the thyroarytenoid (TA) muscle. The sound we hear is, to a large extent, shaped by this contraction.

If a singer could maintain the same balance of co-ordination from chest voice as they ascend, the audience wouldn’t detect any shift. That continuity comes from preserving the same muscular function — primarily the TA muscle’s engagement — even as other mechanisms adjust to help navigate pitch.

Of course, taking full chest voice up is difficult — it can lead to strain if overdone. That’s where concepts like contraction and release come in. The goal isn’t to drag chest up but to preserve its integrity in coordination — even as resonance and effort adjust.

When you hear a singer hit powerful high notes that still sound effortless and consistent — you’re hearing a well-managed chest-dominant function, carried upward with finesse.

Everything good you hear in a voice can be traced back to this technical balance.

3. It All Starts and Ends with Chest Voice… Psychologically

This one’s less talked about. We focus so much on how things sound or work mechanically — but the psychological side matters just as much.

Put simply: if something feels weird, fragile or disconnected to you while singing, you won’t want to do it. You’ll avoid it, subtly or overtly — even if it technically “works.”

The goal is to train your voice so that when you sing high, it still feels like your voice. Not a dramatic gear shift. Not a different identity. Just an extension of the same instrument you use to speak and emote every day.

That internal consistency — how it feels in your head and body — is what gives you confidence and makes technique sustainable.

Conclusion

When done right, your upper range becomes a natural part of your voice. It’s not a trick. It’s not something you “switch into.” It’s just your voice — top to bottom — connected and consistent.

But none of that is possible without first anchoring it all in chest voice. If your chest voice isn’t solid, nothing else can really fall into place.

If you’d like to experience this shift for yourself, book a session using the button below. I’d love to help you build a voice that works — not just in sound, but in feel, function, and freedom.