Why Learning to Sing Can Feel So Hard

Short Version: You’re building an instrument you can’t see or touch, while also learning to play it.

Long Version:
Singing feels natural — but mastering it is anything but. Here’s why developing vocal skill is uniquely challenging, even for otherwise talented musicians.

You have to build the instrument, and train it to respond precisely in real time, while having no access to its moving parts.

You can’t see it, touch it, or directly manipulate it. Moreover, the level of precision required is extreme. You need to coordinate several muscle systems, simultaneously and precisely, across a wide range of intensities.

Most people never need that kind of motor control in their daily life. That’s why it feels so alien at first.

1. Automatic Reactions

To make a simple vocal sound on pitch at full volume with strong tone and clear projection — without pushing, tightening or over-modifying — requires coordinated control of the chest wall, the abdominal wall, the diaphragm, the vocal folds, the false folds, the aryepiglottic sphincter, the tongue root, the middle tongue, the tip of the tongue, the jaw, the lips, the nasal passages, the soft palate, the hard palate, the larynx, and the pharynx — all at once.

And because you can’t physically see or touch the sound-making parts, you CANNOT manually direct yourself during the act of singing. It MUST be automatic. For most people, their automatic reactions are not helpful.

When we talk about “our singing instrument”, we are talking about our tongue, lips, teeth, larynx, lungs etc. And these all have other more important purposes. To chew, to swallow, to prevent food going into our lungs, to shout or speak/signal.

As a result of this, there’s a lot of neural patterns we need to cultivate for good singing that our body doesn’t yet understand. It gets confused and thinks we are trying to swallow, or chew, or it thinks we are about to be sick, etc, depending on the experience it is going through. Our body isn’t “dumb” per se, but it doesn’t know the difference between key neural motor patterns we need to establish for good singing, and the more base instincts and motor patterns we need for survival.

So not only do we need to discover and entrench new patterns into our body, we need to drive a wedge between these new patterns and the old ones, so that our body is never confused about what we are asking it to do. This takes time. And the higher we want to sing, the more panic responses our body can often generate.

2. Other instruments are more accessible

Let’s consider piano. If a complete novice wants to learn to play piano, they can get a keyboard and watch videos. Why does this work for piano and not singing? Because the novice can SEE their fingers – they’ve used their fingers for other tasks, and know how their fingers operate. We build generalised dexterity in our hands over time. Which means when we watch someone do something, we can try to approximate it, replicate it, and refine that movement.

But how do we do that for voice? Per the above, we can’t see the instrument. We can’t touch it, even the sensations we receive from our voice and throat are a little hard to interpret. Sometimes something feels fine, the next it feels sore. Other times we think we nailed a lyric, and the next we are strangling a cat.

Even if you COULD see your voice in action, because you didn’t spend every day of your life watching your vocal folds in actual (like you did your hands and fingers develop), you’ve got no real commonality to apply vocal control. You can’t will your vocal folds to get thicker, thinner, longer, shorter, etc. You can’t equate any of those factors to desired vocal tone or pitch, and so you can’t will your voice into a better state.

3. Building the voice at the same time as learning to play it

Let’s consider our novice again. If they have the money they can go and buy an amazing Steinway piano. The question of whether the piano sounds great or not is taken care of. You can ALWAYS buy your way into a better instrument. A skilled luthier/craftsman has already done the work of building a great instrument for you. All the work then goes in to learning how to play it.

But with singing? You have to BUILD the voice, AND learn to play it… and the two shuffle on together. You can’t have a bash at singing a song beyond your range, you have to build that range. But you also can’t guarantee that just because you have the range, that you can do it justice.

4. Most people who sing well often don’t know what they are doing

The reality is, a lot of singers we love listening to cannot explain how they do what they do. Like a lot of great athletes – sure, they train, but their genetics and fluke of birth gave them the platform to explore that training.

In the same way, a lot of singers and online singing gurus tell you what THEY do… but it bears no correlation to how YOUR voice is going to work, or how my voice is going to work. It’s like trying to learn how to train at the gym by listening to the world’s greatest athletes, the ones who won the genetic lottery and can eat junk food all day and maintain a six pack. It’s simply not helpful advice, or even applicable to the average person.

So we end up frustrated. We tried the vocal exercises of our favourite singers, and it just led to yet more confusion.

Conclusion

It’s not just a matter of “opening your mouth and singing.” That might work for speech. It’s not enough for singing — not if you want to sound clear, powerful, or controlled across range.

That’s why progress in singing often feels slow at first. It’s not because you’re untalented. It’s because the skill you’re trying to develop is more complex than any other musical discipline — and has almost no overlap with everyday movement patterns.

Outro:
If singing feels difficult, that’s because it genuinely is. But it’s also learnable — and with the right training, that complexity becomes control, expression, and artistry. If that’s something you’d like to explore, you can book in to work with me via the booking button below.