No Vibrato In Your Singing Voice? This video is about the pain and suffering until you get it.
Hi I’m Chuck Gilmore with Power to Sing. I’m going to talk to you about what it was like for me to not have vibrato in my voice for 44 years. Please hit the like button, subscribe and click the bell to be notified when I upload a video.
It hurt not having vibrato in my voice. Not physically hurt, but mentally and emotionally it hurt.
I feel like I was born lacking something that others were given freely at birth.
So why didn’t I get vibrato at birth? Why wasn’t I born with it?
You may remember that my teacher told me when I was 15 years old that if I wasn’t born with vibrato, I didn’t have it.
I believed her because she was a really good teacher and she was a well known singer too. She also had her Master degree in Voice from a popular university and she had recorded an album…which no one did back in my day…unless you were the Beatles or Iron Butterfly.
I knew nothing about the technical aspects of singing and I had no other reason to doubt her. I think I knew I could fake vibrato…but never tried to because that would be faking it.
It was painful not to have vibrato because all my friends had vibrato in their voices.
My best friend, Ted, who was an awesome singer, had vibrato. We sang everywhere together and both had leading roles in our high school plays our last two years and our Madrigal group, which we’d both been in for three years, was earning it’s way to Europe for a 3-week singing and sightseeing tour the summer after our graduation.
Also, we had some great singers in our group. Becky and I sang a duet from the Fantastics, called Metaphor. It was very fun to sing with her because she was the best soprano in the school. I remember singing the big finish…the ending of the song….love… love, Loooooovvvvvvvvvve.
I remember the last note was a D4 and for me as a bass, at that time in my singing, it was right next to the top of my voice…and I felt like I might break at any moment. For sure I felt like I was under pitch sometimes. If I could only do vibrato, I knew it would help me get the last note better and more on pitch.
It’s times like these that gave me this feeling of just being just being lucky to sing a duet in Madrigals. I often felt like I was at the edge of vocal disaster…slightly under pitch and ready to break or crack at any moment especially when we sang the big finale.
No one ever said anything about it. I just felt like I wasn’t as good a singer as my friends. To be honest, I wasn’t. I didn’t have vibrato.
When I got to college, I became aware that all the great singers in the department of music all had vibrato. Plus they could sing amazing high notes…which I could not. Couldn’t sing any high notes, let alone, amazing high notes.
So it was kind of the one-two “knockout punch” of self incrimination. No vibrato. No high notes.
What could I do? I was a very experienced performer and choir singer. But, inevitably I began saying I wasn’t a soloist…I’m a choir singer… which made me sad through and through.
I was denying my true passion… that of singing and performing on stage…especially in leading roles.
Don’t get me wrong. I was no wall flower. My last year in high school I was president of the choir and a leader in my madrigals. I’d played King Arthur in Camelot my junior year and Enock Snow in Carousel my senior year. A group of us had been singing together almost everyday for 4 years.
I decided to major in music and become a high school choir director like our friend and teacher, Mr. Farris…who’d influenced me so positively during those years.
We made it to Europe and had an amazing experience. We had worked hard to achieve this dream and by the time I got to college that fall, I knew I could accomplish anything.
But I couldn’t sing with vibrato. And I couldn’t sing above the middle E.
At the university, you are no longer the big man on woman on campus like you were in your home town and school.
You are surrounded by kids who all did similar things (although I’ve never met anyone, ever, who went to Europe with their high school Madrigal group).
As a result, the competition is fierce. Maybe not openly, but status is bequeathed upon the gifted singers…as well as the scholarships…although I really didn’t know any freshmen who had vocal scholarships.
This was also a Church School and we had kids from all over the US…all over the world…Our biggest groups came from Utah, California, Arizona, and Idaho. I grew up 1000 miles away from Brigham Young University. So I knew no one, teachers or students, in my music classes.
I did become close friends with a department graduate assistant who auditioned me for one of the choirs. He encouraged me to take voice lessons, but I didn’t have the extra money at the time.
One day in about the first week of school he walked into a rehearsal room of the Oratorio Choir and standing at the door, pointed at me and signaled with his finger to come with him.
I got up in the middle of rehearsal and left with him. He said, “I have decided to teach you lessons, for free.” And he taught me voice lessons that first year of school.
But we never talked about vibrato. He said he was sure I could sing higher than middle E, but didn’t know how to get it in my voice. So we worked on tone quality and breathing and other things.
Even though I was benefiting from his confidence in me, still, I was losing confidence in my voice, until the following Christmas, I had a major fail in a solo, and became so discouraged about my voice, I stopped singing solos. I didn’t sing a solo again for 25 years.
I sang in church choirs. But with a straight tone, no vibrato, because I wasn’t born with it.
I never spoke with anyone about it. I had several other classes at school that first year with professors of singing. One was a language pronunciation teacher and the other was a vocal group class. No discussion of vibrato, ever.
It’s kind of like I was born without an arm, and so you didn’t talk about it. You and everyone else knows you were born without it…what else is there to say?
Later I took lessons from my sister-in-law who was a vocal teacher and performer. No discussion of vibrato. I had another lesson from an opera singer. No discussion about vibrato.
It really is something comparable to a handicap you are born with and learn to accept and live with.
So when I said to my teacher, Debra Bonner, a Seth Riggs Associate teacher at that time, I didn’t have vibrato, and she said to me, anyone can get vibrato, I was skeptical. I think I was in a group class with her and one or two of the other students who said…”sure, anyone can learn vibrato”.
So, I started learning to get vibrato in my voice. I could tell right away that I was doing something like vibrato in my voice. And the more I did it, the more exciting it became.
It felt awkward at first…very artificial and forced. Anything but natural. And even though I did it a little in the exercises, I couldn’t sing a song with vibrato in front of an audience for several months.
It became apparent that this was a miracle. An absolute miracle to me. It was as if the heavens parted and vibrato grew in my voice. I felt it was unbelievable. Add to that, that the exercises I was learning to do, began increasing my vocal range. These were miracles to me!
At that time I was 44 years old, learning that I could have had vibrato in my voice when I was 16 and sang with it all my life.
My teacher when I was a teenager wasn’t trying to deceive me or withhold information from me. She just didn’t know that she didn’t know.
It may be that her teachers didn’t know either…or because she could do vibrato…never needed to be taught how to get it in her voice. But somewhere along her education, she was taught to believe that if you weren’t born with vibrato, you didn’t have it.
I hold no ill feelings about it. It all worked out.
But what a joy it has been. It immediately improved my voice. My tone improved, pitch improved, confidence increased. My songs got better.
In no time my vibrato has become something I do without thinking about it. It is a natural part of my voice and my singing voice.
It’s made a huge difference in my life because it’s enabled me to audition and win leading roles in musical theater, sing for public events and solo in choirs and churches.
It’s as if I was born again. This time with vibrato.
I’d love to hear your vibrato story. Is it similar to mine? Let me know in the comments.
I hope you have not given up hope about singing with a natural vibrato. It’s 100% possible to learn to sing with a vibrato so natural, everyone thinks you were born with it.
Here’s a link to a vibrato playlist.
There’s a bunch of great videos about learning vibrato that will help you. I’ve also created a course, Conquer Vibrato, inside the Second Nature Singing System which I’m making available to my fellow sufferers.
Let me just say… whatever pain and suffering and discouragement you’ve felt about vibrato, there’s an equivalent joy waiting for you when you learn it and start using it in your voice!
I won’t say it will feel like a miracle to you, but the confidence it brings to your singing is off the charts! And it will change your life.
I’m Chuck Gilmore with Power to Sing. For you vibrato will not just feel like second nature, it will actually BE second nature.
Responses
Hi Sue: This video should help, for sure!
THIS IS ME! I am 66 years old and I have been obsessed with music and singing since I can speak.
And, just as you mentioned, I have zero, zilch, no vibrato. And it just about kills me (mentally and emotionally).