Many people think that a perfect vocal with a broad pitch or range is something you’re born with. And thus, beautiful singing is a gift that only some can enjoy.
However, we’ll clue you into a secret: you can learn how to train your voice to sing better.
Working to enhance your singing takes a combination of ingredients, coordination, balance, and the proper exercises, including:
- Warm-up exercises
- Correct breathing technique
- Understand posture
- Use your head voice
- Watch your larynx
- Substitute words and modify vowels
- Be consistent and patient
Today’s post is to add to your singing property and help you build an appropriate practice routine, so you can vastly be better in a short time. Let’s go!
How To Train Your Voice To Sing Better?
Of course, you can’t level up your singing overnight, and learning how to promote your singing is not a rapid solution. However, with proper vocal exercises, you can proceed with the journey to become an excellent singer.
#1. Warm-ups Exercises
First thing first, vocal warm-ups are fundamental to how to improve voice for singing. This step is one of the essential tips regarding preparing your mouth muscles and throat before singing.
Please remember that your voice is also a muscle. And any muscle will need some warm-ups before going through intense paces.
Before starting vocal training, you can adopt plenty of vocal warm-up methods, like practicing your tongue-soft palate coordination, practicing scales, simply humming, or repeating lip trills and tongue.
There are plausible warm-up exercises that help loosen your vocal cords and get them ready for the business.
#2. Correct Breathing Technique
Proper breathing enables you to remain on notes for longer and reduce the possibility of voice damage.
Start with an easy tone for you in a breath, then sing it in a low and soft volume. After that, gradually raise your volume until you get to the max comfortable degree. Then, gradually revert to a softer volume.
It’s never redundant to emphasize the importance of learning to control breathing. It would help much with teaching yourself how to sing correctly and professionally.
The most common mistake that many beginners make is to hold back their breath while singing.
It’s necessary to allow adequate airflow to pass through your body. Should you run out of air after singing a short line, you need to change the way you breathe. The little secret is to breathe from your diaphragm in place of your chest.
We suggest doing a straightforward exercise and combining it with diaphragmatic breathing.
Simply place a hand on your chest and the latter on your diaphragm and breathe slowly and steadily.
If you do it right, the hand on your chest shouldn’t move, whereas the latter should move outwards and inwards slowly as your diaphragm moves.
#3. Understand Posture
Many of you might not know that posture plays an essential role in improving your singing and promoting a powerful vocal range.
Sagging shoulders, a flopped back, tilted head, or even hunched-over stance can negatively impact tone, pitch, and note-producing power.
When singing, air passes through the body. So, when you sit or recline, you are preventing your diaphragm from entirely expanding.
Proper posture helps keep the airflow moving fluidly, your throat fully open, and you remain on high notes for longer. It also aids with projecting the voice more efficiently.
The best stance for promoting the vocal range and comfortably singing is standing straight while unlocking knees and keeping a shoulder-width distance between two feet.
Try to relax your abdomen and shoulders. Title your chin down a little bit to hit the higher keys more effortlessly and provide your singing with more control and power.
Another surprisingly helpful way to practice good posture is to sing while lying down. This exercise aids with keeping your body straight and comfortable, which you sometimes find hard to do when standing.
#4. Use Your Head Voice
How to train your voice to sing higher? The answer is to sing in a head voice.
Head voice, a term used by old-school Italian teachers, refers to notes on top of your vocal range.
Try doing this to feel the head voice: Place a hand on your neck’s back, then sing an incredibly high note using an “ooh” vowel, like in “oops.”
The back of your hand should feel the vibration. That’s the head voice. Why should you sing with your head voice?
If you wish to hit the higher notes, take advantage of your head voice. It’s responsible for the top notes in your vocal range.
The common mistake among beginner vocalists is singing high keys using too much of the chest voice. Pulling the chest voice to top notes too frequently will strain your voice and flatten your notes.
Thus, if you desire to reach those glorious higher notes, correctly singing in your head voice is a must-have technique. Here’s our three-step exercise of choice for using the head voice:
- First, place a hand on your neck’s back and speak out loud an “ooh” vowel, like in “oops” at a decent volume.
- Then, sing that “ooh” on the most comfortable note for you from your range’s bottom.
- Finally, sing a siren by working your way from a low note to the top one of your range and turn back down.
You can check this video out to walk through it:
#5. Watch Your Larynx
What about how to train your voice to sing lower? There’s a straightforward exercise to sing lower notes emotionally without “shadowing” the words – be aware of your larynx.
You can do it in two ways:
- Stand in front of a mirror and watch the larynx while singing
- Gently press your index finger and thumb against your neck to feel the larynx.
These two tricks will let you feel and see how your larynx moves as you switch from high to low notes and vice versa.
Just to note, a significant mistake that almost anyone will make is allowing the larynx to drop when going down to lower notes.
Remember that the goal is to maintain the balance or keep it balanced. Of course, it’ll always stir slightly, but avoid pushing your larynx down or up too far (when hitting high notes).
Once you notice you’re pushing it over, keep it relaxed instantly. Try using your speaking tone and just let the low keys come out naturally.
#6. Modify Vowels and Substitute Words
Let’s talk about the pivotal moment as you shift from the chest voice to the higher register. In your vocal range, this moment is around a point that you can encounter “the break.”
That means as your voice will strain or crack, your natural reaction is usually to avoid the issue by adding tension.
An effective strategy for coping with this issue is to modify the vowel. You can shift from your chest voice to a higher register by using closed, rounded vowel sounds.
For instance, try singing a random high note in your vocal range with an “ee” or “oo” sound several times. Then, gradually open your mouth a little bit and change to an “uh” or “oh.”
You might not notice it, but you are expanding your range when doing this. You make it open by taking a rounded or closed vowel, which provides the note with more sound and space.
You can take advantage of this method to deal with arduous phrases or notes in a song. When you encounter a problematic area, try changing the way you articulate a vowel so that it becomes more effortless to sing.
Begin with some closed vowels, like “ee” and “oo,” then open to “uh” or “oh.”
Another applicable technique to handle a tricky phrase or note is to substitute the lyrics for vowels. Link a vowel to a syllable so you can differentiate the word. Take the “noo” as an example.
Substitute every word in that tricky passage for “noo” to concentrate more on generating a focused and clear vowel. When you can comfortably sing the note, add your lyrics back in.
It’s also possible to apply vowel modification to modifying words. Certain words and vowels are more challenging to sing with different registers.
Here we have an example. You can encounter the word “that” when hitting a high key.
Experiment with substituting the vowel “ah” to the vowel “eh,” hence turning “that” into “thet.” Although it may seem silly, it’s surprising that you can sing that word more comfortably without differentiating it much.
#7. Be Patient and Consistent
The process of bettering your singing is not and shouldn’t be an overnight task. You need to reinforce your fundamentals first to step up in the future. So, the most difficult thing now is probably to wait.
With proper exercises, you are doing more than simply mastering some low notes or expanding your range.
Although you can’t hit that arduous E-flat right when you like, sooner or later, you’ll quickly notice that your singing is becoming more powerful and holding on notes longer than before.
Also, you’ll suddenly realize that on a beautiful day, you can hit the notes that you’ve never reached before more confidently and clearly.
So, it’s normal to feel depressed or discouraged sometimes. As long as you keep focusing on practicing and the set goal, you’re making progress.
Bonus Tips To Improve Your Voice
- Do physical exercises to stay fit.
For vocalists, their instrument is a healthy body and voice. Please take care of your health regularly by doing physical exercises frequently. This way, you can promote stamina to maintain energy throughout a long performance.
- Stick to healthy food.
Singers munching on unhealthy food can suffer from acid reflux – the condition where your lower chest experiences a burning sensation. It burns and dries your vocal folds, eventually resulting in vocal hoarseness, laryngitis, or even throat cancer.
- Sing the songs you love.
It is helpful and crucial to sing the song you love and deeply understand, be it jamming with your friends or just singing randomly in the bathroom.
You’ll not only have an enjoyable time indulging in the song but also stimulate your prowess doing this.
Final Words
Human characteristics and skills are from both nature and nurture. The singing ability is no exception.
Even when you already have a powerful voice as a godsent or were born with a singing talent, it’s still crucial to insist on a practice routine to maintain and enhance it.
Learning how to train your voice to sing better is important for either a professional singer or a novice vocalist. Without consistent practice, even a golden voice can step away.
