Whether you realize it or not, your voice has only 7-10 seconds to make a strong first impression. Within this brief window, listeners often decide whether they find your voice likable enough to continue listening or not. Knowing how to make your voice sound better is imperative to your success as a singer. So let’s dive in and learn how to make your current voice better!
However, we don’t just want to ‘sound better’ or ‘sing correctly’. We want you to be compelling. Interesting. Not boring!
What Makes a Voice “Good?”
While everyone has vocal folds (also called vocal cords), your singing voice is as unique as your fingerprints, due to the individual characteristics of your vocal tract, which is the throat, mouth, nasal cavities, and space above the vocal folds.
The ‘vocal tract’ will vary in size and shape for each person, directly influencing the voice’s pitch, timbre, and resonance. What makes YOU “good”, will determine on how YOU care for YOUR voice and the work you do to improve your capabilities.
Freddie Mercury, Steve Perry, Luciano Pavarotti, Whitney Houston, Celine Dion, Ella Fitzgerald, Elvis, Bono, Ellie Goulding, Dolly Parton and countless others are known for their incredible control, range, and ability to draw people into their world with their voices.
Each singer has a unique style and different set of listeners, yet all are considered exceptional in their craft. Their voice became their art as they devoted their time, energy, and life, to become the best they could be.
Now, you may have no aspirations to be one of the greats like them, but with a little help after reading this article your voice is going to sound a lot better as you begin to put these few things into practice.
Style vs Technique
Throughout the years of teaching, we’ve heard silly statements like, “Brett Manning teaches something called ‘style’…he doesn’t teach technique anymore.”
First time we heard this, Brett chuckled and said, “Shhhh… don’t tell my students. Some of them will be mad, because I’ve not taught them any style just yet”.
You see, style and technique are closer than you might think. Here’s a great way of looking at what Voice Lessons might look like:
Teaching- Think of this in terms of building and coordinating your singing voice, strengthening your vocal cords; applying the uniqueness of your speaking voice into your overall voice quality. Your vocal coach—with an intense understanding of diagnosing your voice and prescribing the correct vocal exercises—should be striving to improve your vocal range, relieve vocal strain (using the correct throat muscles), giving you the best vocal warmups for your voice type, preparing you for the most effective practice sessions, breathing techniques to maximize breath control and a pleasing tone quality.
Coaching- Voice coaching involves keeping your technique in tact and building a mental/psychological strength to your music. A good voice needs to be understood in relationship to the right song. When we coach, essentially, we’re helping the singer make good decisions on ‘how’ to sing their song. A bad stylistic or technical choice can ruin a performance. Coaching is for a voice that is ready to be heard on the live stage, in a recording studio, or even improving your speaking voice, so that you have a consistent speaking tone, in case you’re seeking a perfect business voice. The professional voice should be engaging, entertaining and interesting, whether you’re singing or speaking.
Consequently, technique is finding your best voice. Style is is making your singing interesting.
Improving Your Vocal Control
We had a client compare their voice to playing Russian Roulette, uncertain when it might fail. If you feel the same, it’s a challenging situation. Developing vocal technique is crucial to gaining control and consistency in your voice.
Just as you train your body, your vocal cords need conditioning. They vibrate, stretch, compress, and adjust in various ways, requiring different vocal exercises to build muscle memory and strength. It’s like preparing your body for physical feats; you wouldn’t expect to run a marathon or lift heavy weights without first conditioning with smaller tasks like jogging or lifting lighter weights.
Begin by integrating vocal warm-ups into your routine before singing. As Brett Manning likes to say, “You sing how you warm up.” Without warming up your vocal registers and going through exercises that prepare you for higher notes, your voice won’t perform those high notes effectively in the song you’re trying to sing.
Through our programs like Singing Success 360 and Mastering Mix, you’ll have an abundance of systematic vocal training exercises to use at home and build technique in your voice that’s been proven to work by our celebrity clients.
Timbre
Timbre—pronounced ‘timber’—is a term used in music to describe the unique quality or “color” of a sound. Your speaking voice and your singing voice, should have enough distinction that you could call family or friends from a blocked number, and they would, or at least should, recognize you immediately.
Your voice sounds like YOU. Because, like a thumb print, you have a voice print. In fact, this may be a little uncomfortable to realize, but governments can hear who is talking and run it through a speech pattern analysis, and compare it to a database of MILLIONS of voices, and know who it is that is talking.
For singers, being able to do voice impressions (Brett can do countless…his Liam Neeson is scary good… particular set of skills anyone?) can increase the variations of in you timbre and keep you from being predictable and boring.
Clarity
Your own voice should have a personality to how you articulate, express on certain syllables, and your overall timing and phrasing. But without clarity in how you shape your words, and I’m not saying you have to speak and sing overly proper in ‘business voice’, but you should have a presence in every word you speak and sing.
Remember Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with Johnny Depp? A funny line in this flick, muttered by Depp was ‘Mumbler’! Every time this young spoiled little girl would talk, and he didn’t appreciate her words, he’d call out ‘mumbler’!
The fact is, a lot of people mumble. Some songs lost the value of their message, because—as our parents used to say whenever we’d play a rock song on the radio—”I can’t understand a word they’re saying”. They had a point. As a vocal coach for close to 35 years, I’ve coached singers through songs to make them heard with clarity and precision. Yet….remaining interesting through the right decision!
Support
Because there are 3 main mechanisms to the voice:
Respiratory- lungs, powered by the diaphragm
Vibratory- the initial starting of the voice through vocal cord vibration
Resonators- the space above the vocal cords shaped by particular approaches to vowels and styles of articulation
The SUPPORT part of the voice is through the strength of the diaphragm, which is quite naturally trained in runners, swimmers and other athletic activities.
Learning to breathe deeply, requires that your diaphragm—muscle located under the lungs in the shape of a half basketball, pulls downward and displaces the viscera (guts….or organs, to be less gross😀) forward and a little to the side.
In other words, when you inhale, your stomach should expand outward. When you exhale, your stomach should pull inward. Notice I said pull. Not push.
Take a deep breath, with your hand on you stomach? Your chest and upper rib cage should stay neutral. Your stomach should expand when you inhale. If this is tricky, you’re not alone. This is something a well-trained vocal coach, can quickly help to coordinate.
Personality and Impersonation
Good speakers are often very entertaining. They seek to put you directly into the story they are telling. If they are quoting someone with a British, Italian, German, Chinese, Southern, or New York accent or dialect, they will often attempt—sometimes successfully—to impersonate the voice of the person they are quoting. This means that they mimic their speaking pitch, shape of their mouth, and even impersonate their physical appearance, whenever possible.
Think how every U.S. president has had impersonators. That’s because (putting all politics aside for now), you have to be interesting. Comics and actors will always attempt to make jokes through impersonating the person they are teasing. And sometime….they are spot on and we’re impressed.
The ability to do this is drastically enhanced through voice training. You can direct your tone quality rapidly with some simple techniques.
Tips to Make Your Voice Sound Better
For singers, having a trustworthy and reputable voice coach, a great online singing course, or both, is of great advantage to excel…. however, you need to take control of your destiny and learn to wisely discern your own ability.
Record Your Voice and Listen to It
This may sound oblivious to some, but the benefit might shock you. There’s 2 immediate outcomes:
- Finding that you’re better than you thought you were— This actually happened with a student of mine. Although this was after recording in the studio with Brett Manning (yeah, he does production… a lot) as vocal producer, he was shocked at how good his voice really was.
- Finding that you’re not as good as you thought—THIS revelation is FAR more common and FAR more painful! But not nearly as painful as being embarrassed at an American idol audition, where the WHOLE WORLD mocks you for having the audacity to think you’re good enough to enter the most brutally difficult vocal competition in the world.
The thing that singers need to realize is, you have to know your strengths and weaknesses, in order to fix them!
Determine Voice Type
Once you hear yourself on any recording device—including your smart phone—and listen carefully to how well you stay on the key, the precision that you attack a particular note, the smoothness of your vocal trills and your vibrato, and the overall quality of your vocal sound, and whether you sound truly enjoyable or not, you can start making a list….and checking it twice. (Just trying to lighten the mood!)
Evaluate What You Do and Don’t Like about Your Voice
One thing common with all singers, is that your own voice sounds very different upon listening back. When you talk or sing, your inner ear lies to you. If you plug your ears and talk, you hear a muffled and and muddled—almost dulled—tone quality that helps you in the training process. But, it’s NOT what your audience hears. In fact, when people hear a monotone voice, a bland tone, or the opposite, a voice nasally produced, and tell you you sound that way, you may want to believe them.
This may cause you to be a little upset, because we NEVER sound like we think we’re going to sound. But, you can get with your vocal coach, and get a game plan to fix vocal issues.
When you finally realize that your critics are at least partly right, it’s time to take singing lessons. Your vocal coach—if they care AND have the skill to transform you—wants you to have a good voice, because you represent your voice coach, every time you sing.
Vocal health
Vocal health is really based on good singing technique, a balanced diet, rest, and keeping the entire body healthy and trained physically as well. Vocal health is often ignored in favor of presupposed ‘naturally gifted’ singers.
In other words, you’ll often hear folks saying ‘you either have it or you don’t’, but they don’t take into account all the disciplines that the best singers in the world have had to endure to obtain their supposedly natural gifted voices.
Here’s a few immediately actionable tips, that you practice and implement to improve vocal health.
Stay Hydrated
Your vocal cords need hydration to protect them from damaging your…
Respiratory Mucosa — is a specialized mucous membrane lining the respiratory tract, including the nasal cavity, trachea, and bronchi. It plays a crucial role in humidifying, warming, and protecting inhaled air from irritants and pathogens.
This mucosa can be measured with the term:
Vocal Fold Viscosity— refers to the resistance of vocal fold tissue to deformation and flow, and it is a crucial component of vocal fold biomechanics, significantly impacting voice production. Hydration levels directly influence vocal fold viscosity with dehydration, increasing viscosity and reducing pliability, potentially raising the PTP.
PTP— this is an acronym for Phonation Threshold Pressure. This is the measurement of how much tension is required to phonate (make sound) via vibration of your vocal cords. The better you hydrate, the healthier your vocal cords will be for the minimum effort needed to produce a good voice sound.
Take Vocal Breaks
You will NEVER exercise your voice into effectivity, by heavy pressure or tons of repetition. Throughout more than 30 years of coaching singers, we’ve seen 2 groups of singers…. the lazy and the overworked.
Those who do the minimum amount of exercises MAY stagnate. But not always. Some people defy lazy habits by sheer talent and a strong will.
Others may feel rushed to get their voices coordinated and strengthened, pushing past the rest point and send their voices into fatigue and often suffer vocal damage and/or deterioration.
A great vocal coach will know how to push you past your comfort level, and then immediately rest you. Recovery is necessary to grow strong. But you HAVE to REST!
Vocal Exercises
At Singing Success Studios, something we say often is, “All vocal exercises are NOT created equal”. My international best selling Singing Success course and follow up courses are a proven method to exercise your voice with the safest, yet most effective, warm up exercises.
Keep a relaxed mouth, careful not to sing with poor posture, and let your vocal endurance happen naturally over several months of consistent voice training.
Ask for Feedback from a Voice Coach
Some choose to go at it alone. We do NOT! We have several people we trust to give us honest—sometimes painfully honest—critiques of our voices.
Note from Brett: “HOWEVER…. I don’t get feedback with piano very often, until I get super frustrated and TAP OUT! Fortunately, my classical piano genius has fixed many of my bad habits.”
But for most of us, hearing the critiques, instructions, and ‘yes’ the corrections, can be humbling. But it’s what ALL the ‘greats’ choose to do.
Sometimes, you may not hear the subtle lack of pitch accuracy. Especially, the sounds of lower notes. The higher the pitch, the more blatant a sharp or flat pitch sounds. Pitch variation, stylistic variation, dynamics, and phrasing are important checklist points, as you listen to your recording.
Use High-Quality Equipment
If you have the funds to get a high quality microphone and decent speakers, and/or headphones, you should make the investment. Many electronic stores, music stores, or even online music outlets will work within your current budget.
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