How To Improve Your Tone When You Sing
As singers we want to sound our very best. Whether singing high or low, we want to have an amazing tone quality to inspire and entertain our audience. Inside this video I’ll show you how to improve your tone when you sing.
How To Improve Your Tone When You Sing
Our tone quality is what makes our voices unique. When we speak and sing, people recognize it’s us!
Often when we sing, we feel like we need to help improve our tone quality so we add something to our singing voice.
I wanted to add more power, so I raised my larynx and pushed out a sound I thought was more powerful. Like this. [Demo]
I was trying to get a tone like others I’d heard. Something stronger and brighter than my voice.
But when I did that, I was adding more tension. Even though I thought it was better…it wasn’t. It had an unnatural sound. It sounded like I was trying to sound like someone else. I didn’t think of it like that. I was trying to make my voice sound better. Instead I ended up sounding worse.
When we imitate someone else’s voice, we don’t sound like ourselves. Our audience immediately loses interest because they sense it’s not authentic. It’s not real. It’s artificial…it’s made up. They’re not interested in connecting with an imitation.
Creating your own natural singing tone is as simple as speaking. Singing tone is created like speaking tone and works like this:
First, air from inside the lungs travels up the windpipe (trachea). At the top of the windpipe are your vocal cords. When you speak or sing, the vocal cords close and resist the air flow just enough to vibrate as air passes through them.
Second, this vibration creates a sound wave which bounces around your throat, mouth, and head and exits out your mouth.
Third, the surface and spaces of your throat, mouth, and head cavities are activated by the sound waves and begin vibrating too. All this combines to create and augment a tone unique to you.
It’s a very personal thing. It’s your tone signature. Often you sound like your father or mother or a sibling. That’s because of similar anatomy between family members. But it’s still uniquely your very own sound.
When we try and add or change something in our tone when we sing, we usually tighten or loosen some part of our vocal muscles. Usually this makes things worse, not better.
By changing how we make tone as we start singing, we run into problems.
How To Make Your Tone WORSE When You Sing
#1. We add tension to our vocal cords. Now they’re too tight. This changes the balance between the air flow and the vocal cord muscle. Now the tone jams up. The sound is tight and labored.
#2. We raise the larynx. This adds extra tension and squeeze to the vocal cords. It changes the natural openness of the throat cavity. Now the natural tones of your voice are prevented…making your voice sound incomplete. Which causes you to add more tension.
#3. We overly relax the vocal cords. This releases too much air and results in a breathy tone. We lose air too fast and this causes us to question our breathing technique. Which introduces more tension. Then we squeeze to get more sound and the larynx goes up.
#4. We sing very loud or very soft because we think it’s going to help the tone. The vocal cords and air flow quickly get out of balance which adds tension, raises the larynx and changes the natural tone quality.
These are the things we should not do when we begin to make tone when we sing.
How To Improve Your Tone When You Sing
Here are 4 tips on how to improve your tone when you sing.
1. Don’t add anything. This is the number one source of tone problems as discussed above.
Concentrate on the feeling in your voice when you speak. Make this same sound when you add a melody…and start saying the words with the melody. [Demo]
2. Concentrate on initiating original singing tone just like you’re going to speak. In this way, singing is just like speaking. The larynx stays at speech level and the vocal cords maintain a balance with the air flow, like you speak. [Demo]
3. Learn to bridge from chest voice (low pitches) to head voice (high pitches). Most problems with singing come from the added tension of trying to sing higher notes.
Higher pitches cause the vibrations and resonance to move above soft palate. When we speak it’s usually on a lower pitch and the vibration and resonance stays in our mouth and throat.
Bridging enables you to sing high notes while keeping everything at your natural speech level which is without reaching for any notes. [Demo]
4. Add to your “speaking on the pitch” (singing), the vocal cord adjustment for different pitches and the air supply from the lungs to hold words longer with changing dynamics (louder or softer). These things make singing different from speaking. [Demo]
These four tips will improve your tone more than anything else.
It will enable you to sing with your natural voice and sound like you, which is what we want.
Your real voice and tone creates an immediate bond with your listeners as you sing. Then great things happen and lives are changed.
If you liked this video, give it a thumbs up, subscribe and share it with a friend. How’s your tone quality? How’s your singing tone? Tell me about it in the comment section below.
Vocal Type
Discovering your vocal type will help you know how to improve your tone when you sing. How? Doing the vocal exercises for your vocal type will help you learn to bridge.
Go to PowerToSing.com and take the vocal test which I call the PowerTest. Take the quiz and discover your vocal type.
Go to the Knowledge Center and watch the videos about your vocal type and download the free exercises and start practicing them. They will help you progress rapidly.
I’m Chuck Gilmore with Power To Sing. You can sing higher with beauty, confidence and power.
I’ll see you inside the next video.
