Here’s something I think about a lot: when it comes to singers first starting out, why is it that some people seem to sound better than others off the bat?
We’ve all met singers who have never worked on their voice, not tried singing for very long, but they sound seemingly decent without any training or real work.
To be clear, hard work beats talent every time, but I’m talking about before anyone has tried to do any work on their voice – why do some people appear to sound better out of the gate?
A lot of you reading this (myself included) may well have found ourselves at the opposite end of the spectrum when we first started, despite trying our hardest to improve. Some of us may feel we started at one end and moved towards the other as time wore on.
Over the years I’ve noticed this trend, along with a few others that seem intertwined with this topic, and I’ve reached a few conclusions on this topic. While I can’t scientifically prove all of the following hypotheses, I thought I’d share a few of my thoughts on this.
1. Genetic lottery
I remember hearing a story years ago, when a number of singers went to have their voices examined with a camera down their throat. Now, there’s a particular component of the vocal tract that is heavily responsible for making the physics of singing feel much easier. The narrower this particular length of the vocal tract is, the easier transitioning from low to high is, and the more effortless it can feel to traverse one’s voice. It just makes the physics of singing MUCH easier and more efficient. The reverse is also true.
One particular singer had such a narrowness in this portion of their vocal tract that the scope could barely see past it to the larynx! This person was LUDICROUSLY advantaged physiologically, such that they found singing incredibly natural and easy from day one. So even without any training whatsoever, some singers are at a distinct advantage over others in terms of their physiological makeup… but see point 4 before you want to curse them too much.
2. Some people’s vocal tone and aesthetic is more in vogue than others
Consider the physique of actors and models we see in magazines and on television today. Now, if you’ve ever seen models/actors from the 80s, or the 60s, or even the 40s, consider how the leading actors/models look very different compared to those from different decades.
The kind of aesthetic someone needs to land a career today, would likely mean they would not be first pick or even get a look in in another decade.
The point is, aesthetics change a LOT over the years. Combine this with the inherent genetic component that determines a lot about our tonal signature, sometimes what we THINK is a great sounding singer is really just an on-trend singer, and that waxes and wanes.
At the moment, very masculine sounding women and very effeminate sounding men are in vogue. So if you don’t fall within that ballpark as a man/woman, then you are less likely to be heard as favourably as someone who is… but that changes every few years.
So don’t beat yourself up if you’re not in vogue right now, but also don’t let your ego get too inflated if you just happen to be on trend right now either. Things change.
3. What we hear in our head
One of the hardest things to get your brain around is that you are the ONLY person in the world who doesn’t hear your voice the way everyone else does. You hear it from inside your head, and therefore sounds quite different to how it sounds in the real world. This makes it difficult to exactly gauge how you sound out front when in the act of singing.
Here’s something I suspect but can never prove: I think that for some people, what they hear in their head is very closely representative of how they actually sound outside their own head. What they hear in their head is therefore very close to what everyone else hears. Whereas for others I think what they hear in their head is much more divergent, so they’ve got their work cut out to try and map the “inside of their head” sound to the “real world” sound of their voice.
Now there’s no way to measure what someone ‘feels’ inside their head, and compare it to someone else’s. However, I’ve worked with over a thousand voices at this point in my career, and I notice that some people seem to be very tuned-in to how their voice sounds out front, and others hear something VERY different to how they actually sound. Obviously, the more representative what someone hears inside their head is of their singing, the easier it should be to monitor and influence their vocal output.
4. Some people’s sound peaks for a particular a period of time
Today, we see a lot of celebrity singers get a great sound at 18, a mediocre second album in their early 20s, vocal problems in their late 20s, and then we never hear from them again.
Whereas in the operatic world, you won’t get any traction until your early 40s, maybe even late 30s at the earliest. There’s a lot of training and vocal work in this world we can’t ignore for the purposes of the topic above, but bear with me.
The point is that, per the aesthetics point above, some people look a bit odd when they are young, but grow into their features as they get older. Others are stunning when they are younger but don’t seem to carry it off so well as they get older. Just because someone may seem “on it” at one stage in their life, does not mean that they will carry it off as they move through life. Again, things change.
With training, we can build our voices to only keep getting better with age and develop to match our preferred musical genre and aesthetic. However, without any training, sometimes it’s just a particular confluence of factors that mean someone’s voice (per the genetic lottery) meshes well with current aesthetics (per whatever is in vogue) such that they get a lot of attention at that moment in time. But as they age, as the accepted vocal aesthetics evolve, they find they are not recognised to the same degree.
To finish off
Some of these are established and known in science and the vocal world. Others of these are conjecture. I’ve got still more thoughts on this topic, but I’ll leave it there for now.
With training, we can accomplish a lot. Hard work beats talent every time. If you feel you don’t sound good right now, then seek out and further good training for yourself. If you feel you do sound good now, then be grateful but don’t sit on your laurels. Train your voice to keep pace with it as it slowly changes, and so you can deliver great sound even as the world changes also.