Vowel Substitution in Singing: A Practical Guide

Most discussions of vowel substitution in singing are either too abstract to grasp, or too narrow to be applied in real situations. This article aims to bridge that gap with simple explanations, concrete examples, and a clear sense of why vowel substitution in singing is a helpful tool, but a terrible thing to make your master.

Why Vowels Matter in Singing

When we sing, the vocal folds create pitch. But what listeners actually hear as words and vowels comes from the shape of the vocal tract, which filters sound through formants (resonant frequencies).

If the vocal tract isn’t shaped as intended, the vowel that comes out may not be the one the singer thinks they are producing.

For example:

• Many singers try to sing the word “no”, aiming for an “oh” vowel.
• But in practice, the vowel can drift to “uh” or even “ah”, making the note sound wide, unstable, or uneven.

This mismatch between intended vowel and actual vowel is extremely common. There’s a great many reasons this can occur, but we don’t need to worry about every possible reason for the purposes of this article.

Because it’s notoriously hard to hear vowel corruption in your own voice, singers often remain unaware of it. After all, if we could all self-regulate perfect vowels when we sing, we’d all have near-perfect singing voices!

With good vocal training, we work to introduce the voice to precisely maintain the correct vocal tract posture to ensure the vowel remains pure and congruent from bottom to top. This takes time, and is beyond the scope of this article.

But even with correct vocal training, when we come to sing a song, we may find the vowels of certain words can slip to some degree. This can be due to a lack of training, intensity, or a given word having a slightly different efficient vocal tract shape than what the singer is used to delivering.

That’s where vowel substitution comes in.

What Is Vowel Substitution?

Think of a singer’s vowel as a rifle shot at a target. We want the vowels they sing to be perfectly on-target, hitting the bullseye dead-centre.

But if the aim veers 20° to the right at times, a quick fix is to deliberately aim 20° to the left for those tricky moments. The correction isn’t a “true aim,” but it will help land the bullet in the centre.

A vowel substitution works in a similar way. It’s a carefully chosen manual intervention that artificially corrects for the poor aim. By choosing a slightly different vowel than the written one, we can temporarily steer the voice toward balance and even tone.

Example: Stevie Wonder’s Lately

In Stevie Wonder’s song Lately, the lyric goes:
“I’m a man of many wishes.”

A common problem is the word “many.” On the “eh” vowel, singers often spread too wide, producing a splatted sound.

The solution? Replace the “eh” with a narrower vowel such as “ih.”

• Instead of “many wishes,” try singing “minny wishes.”

The effect is immediate: the tone evens out, the vowel doesn’t splat, and the phrase flows smoothly. This is vowel substitution at work—a quick, mechanical adjustment that compensates for an unhelpful default.

Substitutions Must Be Precise

The rifle-range analogy shows why substitutions must be tailored:

• If someone’s vowel is only a few degrees off, a huge correction will sound unnatural.
• If their vowel is already stable, no substitution is needed at all.

That’s why vowel substitution is singer-specific and word-specific. There is no “one size fits all.”

Moreover, sometimes I can deploy a ‘perfect’ vowel modification… and it doesn’t work in a given singers voice. Other times a singer can be wildly out, but just me demonstrating what the correct sound for that word SHOULD be, will adjust them to do it correctly – no artificial vowel substitution needed.

It really is on a case-by-case basis, singer by singer, word by word. We need to listen to a singer sing the song, assess the accuracy and quality in their singing, prescribe a suitable solution to whatever issue is facing them, then review if we can improve that solution. This takes time and skill. This means, there isn’t an encyclopaedia of “correct” vowel modifications I can give to you – it doesn’t work like that.

This brings us to the final point I want to make about vowel subs

The End Goal: Elimination, Not Dependence

It’s important to remember that vowel substitution is a tool, not a permanent strategy.

We don’t want a singer locked into always saying “mini” instead of “many.” That would be a ridiculous end goal. Singers would forever be stuck meditating on a collection of nonsense words. Not a tenable long-term solution for great and enjoyable singing.

Rather, the aim is to use the vowel substitution long enough for the singer’s body to learn the correct coordination.

Once that sensation is ingrained, the artificiality of the substitution can be progressively dropped, and the original vowel will come out naturally and evenly.

Over time, singers who work with substitutions then develop a sharper awareness of vowels in general. They start to notice where lines can be refined, which helps them sing with smoother phrasing across their entire repertoire – without having to introduce such overt manual interventions.

Conclusion

Vowel substitutions are useful tools, but make terrible masters.

They provide quick spot fixes when a vowel splats or spreads, helping a singer feel and hear a better result immediately.

But their true value lies in training the voice to find the correct vowel shape without needing the crutch. Used wisely, they are stepping stones toward a more even, resonant, and effortless sound—one where vowels flow smoothly and lyrics remain natural.

If this is something you’d like to experience in your voice first hand, I’d love to start working with you on your voice today.