What is Singing? - An Introduction to What Skilled Pop and Theatre Singing Actually Is
Note: This article is still in draft stage and will be more pretty and readable soon. If you’re looking for singing lessons in Vancouver, you can get this info in a more fun and personal way by booking a free consult.
The question of ‘how to sing’ can be answered clearly and succinctly. The hard part is understanding what the answer means, and what to do with it.
Hyperintelligent Beings: Deep Thought, do you have...
Deep Thought: An answer for you? Yes, but you're not going to like it.
Hyperintelligent Beings: It doesn't matter. We must know it.
Deep Thought: All right. The answer to the ultimate question... of life, the universe and everything... is... 42.
–Deep Thought, the supercomputer in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Before we begin, there are three qualifications I must address: Type of Singing, Aspect of Singing, and Simplifications.
Qualifications:
Type of singing: Skilled Singing.
This article is about what I call 'skilled singing.’ This isn’t about beginner stuff, like, for instance, how to sing your first notes in chest voice (nothing wrong with that topic, though!). This article is about how to sing challenging high notes, with diverse healthy tone options for pop and theatre singing, including what we typically refer to in these industries as belt, mix and head voice.
For this article, and in most of my writing, I’m going to use ‘skilled singing’ or just ‘singing’ to mean the clean, strong, relaxed high singing that advanced pop and theatre singers can do all day, but that eludes most beginning singers, and leaves most intermediate singers feeling stuck with not quite enough range and finesse.
Aspect of Singing: Technique
This article is about technique, not artistic experession. It’s about developing the underlying skills and adaptations that will give you more options for artistic expression. In practise, this is a messy distinction. When I work with singers, expression is interwoven into the lessons, not just for ‘polishing the songs,’ but often, ironically, as a tool to help singers find better technique, and not just on songs, but on exercises, too.
This article, however, focuses on theory.
Simplifications:
Finally, the ‘answers’ that follow are my simplified, ‘just what singers need’ take on the the science of singing. Many concepts in the fields of singing voice science and pedagogy are, in reality, nuanced and/or not fully understood or agreed upon. Also, the fields are in a period of exciting change. The following breakdown of ‘how to sing’ reflects my current view of what concepts are most crucial and practical, based on a decade of scholarly study, and two decades of working with commercial singers. Some of this may change, as the science or my own depth of understanding evolves.
What is Singing?
Skilled pop and theatre singing is the successful consistent balancing of 3 key technique skills, combined with sufficient vocal conditioning—both of which may need to be built over time—combined with sufficient vocal health.
Learning how to sing is about getting in reps at ‘doing the thing’–and the fancy concepts discussed here will not suddenly accelerate your progress. Or will they?
I believe it is helpful talk with students about the concepts, below, in small doses, over the first few lessons. Students who understand the key concepts are more likely to avoid the mistake of just ‘going through the motions’ when practising an exercise, and risking having that time spent be worthless.
Students who understand the concepts will be able to focus on the deeper purpose of a given exercise. This can make practice much more effective, and more effective practice, I believe, does speed progress.
The Three Macro Concepts of How to Sing – Technique, Conditioning, and Health:
Singing comes down to building technique while simultaneously developing conditioning to support the technique. While building your voice should be fun and rewarding, it can also be very subtle so, the better you get, the more vocal health becomes a factor in your ability to access the ever more subtle balance and coordination you need.
This article will focus on technique concepts. I’ll talk a bit about conditioning, too, as it’s a bit inextricable from technique. Health is a bit more separate, usually, and beyond the scope of this article.
Almost Ready to Dive Into Technique:
Learning ‘skilled singing’ is mostly about technique, for most singers, especially at first.
A Few Introductory Analogies:
Learning vocal technique is a bit like learning a balance sport. Freer sports like skiing, skating, snowboarding, skateboarding, surfing, etc. where you must learn to maintain your balance in all three dimensions, at once, are most analagous like how technique works for singing.
Another great analogy for learning singing technique is learning to juggle. Just like there are three balls, initially, for juggling, there are three key concepts of technique we need to juggle as we sing. What are these three key concepts? I’ll tell you, but first, yet another caveat:
On Terminology, Here:
These three concepts of technique are easy enough to name and describe loosely, but difficult to name and describe accurately without a lot of jargon, and we’re going to avoid jargon as much as possible, here.
With my clients, I embrace a tradeoff, and I’ll do so, here, as well: I use a few more common, but broad-meaning words like, ‘tone’ and ‘timbre’ when talking about these concepts. The upside is these words are relatively accessible. The downside is these words have many potential meanings and are therefore imprecise. Other specialists, upon learning how I use, e.g., ‘tone,’ here, might immediately question my terminology, but this article is not for them—it’s for you. That said, I’ll keep ‘tone’ and ‘timbre’ in quotes so you know that I know that they normally have broader meanings.
Okay… here we go.
The three big concepts of technique:
Below are the three big concepts you need to be aware of for better singing, and the words and definitions I use with singers. I’ll also give a brief description of the goal with each. Explaining and understanding how to meet each of these goals can be challenging and ever-shifting, and is why most mortals, in terms of singing skill, benefit from a skilled teacher. So we’re not going to attempt that, here. I’m just going to tell you what they are so that while, no, after reading this, you won’t be suddenly able to sing, expertly, you will hopefully understand way more, on a conceptual level, than most singers do about what singing is – so the time you put in to learning to sing, can be much more focused and effective.
The big three concepts of technique, according to moi, are:
Tone Adjustment
Pitch-muscle adjustment
Vowels
‘Tone’ Adjustment:
‘Tone’ can have many meanings, but I use tone, here, and in lessons, in a very specific way: I use ‘tone’ to describe how the vocal cords are vibrating and/or colliding. Ask yourself: Are the vocal cord vibrations causing the tone to be breathy, squeezed, or clean? The best specialist term for this quality is vocal fold closed quotient but I feel that saying that in lessons can make singers' brains shut down, a bit–nothing to do with intelligence–there’s just a lot of even more challenging motor learning we are dealing with, already, so I don’t want to add unnecessarily complex jargon that they’ll then also have to juggle.
For developing relaxed-but-powerful technique, we need to be able to sing with clean tone through the top of our mix/belt range. Above a certain range, we will need to shift into some kind of ‘head voice’ or ‘falsetto.’ (Most singers, teachers and researcher have slightly different ways of defining these terms, but if the sound is in the upper third of a singer’s range and also some degree of breathy, it’s basically it’s head voice or falsetto.) Head voice and falsetto always need to be at least somewhat breathy due to physics, and also just how they’re defined, but this article is about skilled commercial singing so, even though my ‘big three technique concepts’ largely apply to head voice and falsetto, too, we’re going to mostly ignore them, here, and talk more about belt and mix singing.
What are belt and mix? That’s a complex, not-fully-agreed-on topic, too, and this entire article is my personal answer. But if these terms are new to you, for now, I will say we all know it when we hear it: Belt and mix are the often tricky-to-learn types of skilled singing that diva superstar pop and Broadway singers specialize in that allow them to hit easy-but-powerful high notes, eight shows a week, without strain.
Being aware of your ‘tone’ and being able to maintain a relatively clean tone is the first component of mix, belt, and all technique. Moving on…
Pitch and ‘Timbre’ Muscle Adjustment:
Pitch:
There are two main muscles we use to adjust our pitch. With singers, I call them ‘high note muscle’ and ‘low note muscle.’ The specialist terms for these are the cricothyroid (just one of ‘em) and thyroarytenoids (two—basically ‘the vocal cords’ or ‘vocal folds’), respectively, but, again, I seldom use technical terms in lessons.
Beginning singers are often comfortable singing clean low notes with the low note muscle and, conversely, can often sing breathy high notes with just the high note muscle. The problem for less skilled singers is that, at first, most singers are only able to use these two muscles like ‘on/off’ switches. For skilled singing, however, these muscles need to be used together, more subtly and strategically, like two independently adjustable dimmer knobs with many different potiential configurations.
Part of what makes our ‘break’ happen, when it happens, is the challenge of gradually ‘dimming’ the low note muscle while simultaneously ‘turning up’ the high note muscle, and not letting either abruptly switch to all the way on or off.
Timbre:
The pitch adjustment muscles are also important for adjusting timbre. You might be wondering what the difference between ‘tone’ and ‘timbre’ is. In many contexts, the difference could be nothing, but for our purposes, I’m limiting the definition of timbre to mean the different ways we can adjust the two pitch muscles to give us many different qualities of sound—even while singing the same pitch and vowel, and with the same ‘tone.’
e.g. A woman singer on a B4 (i.e. alto high B) could adjust her pitch muscles differently to create different clean sounds that pop-based teachers could likely all agree sounded more ‘mix-like,’ ‘belt-like,’ or ‘straight-up yell.’ Beyond timbre, in this limited sense, ‘tone’ and ‘vowel’ are also inextricably tied up in the overall voice quality we hear, but it’s important to grasp that the pitch muscles do more than just affect pitch—they also affect timbre.
Vowels:
Vibrations that ‘Shift Gears’ via Vowels:
The vocal tract (VT) is the area starting just above the vocal cords and extending to the lips—think ‘throat+mouth’— I’m going to stick with the technical term here. I don’t say ‘vocal tract’ much, in lessons, but when you see this, just think ‘throat-mouth tube.’ Technically, the vocal tract can include the nasal passages, as well, but we can ignore that, for the purposes of this article. The important thing is to be able to visualize the vocal tract as a shapable tube that can powerfully alter the sound from the vocal cords in two key, related ways.
It can create and change vowels.
It can shape and also shift the way the air vibrates in the tube, or the air’s mode of vibration.
This second point about ‘shifting modes of vibration’ may be confusing—and I’ll explain, right now—but before we go there, please know that this concept is crucial if you want to understand what mix and belt are. i.e. It’s worth it to wrap your head around this, so please indulge me, here.
To get us started, here are some quick analogies for how the air in our vocal tract tube can ‘shift’ modes of vibration.
Shifting modes of vibration in singing is similar to…
Shifting gears on a car or bike. This is likely the most readily accessible analogy to the most people, and it’s a good one–but it’s also also the most abstract analogy in terms of how it connects to singing.
‘Sounding a harmonic’ on a stringed instrument. This is a good analogy for people who already knows what this means. Ask a guitarist friend to show you, if you don’t know about this, or [here’s a video]
Shifting octaves on woodwind instruments. The shifts in singing are most similar to wind instrument shifts (the voice is a wind instrument, or sorts), but woodwind shifts are also the least likely for us to be familiar with–or remember, at least (grade 3 recorder, anyone?)–but it can be incredibly valuable to get familiar with this analogy. This is because, for all the metaphors and tips we typically encounter about finding mix and belt, this analogy applies much more literally than most–it cuts right to the least understood aspect of what mix and belt actually are.
Shifting modes of vibration on a recorder:
A low note sounding on a recorder (i.e. the woodwind instrument) is similar to a vibrating open string on a guitar, except now, as with singing, we have a vibrating column of air. If we play a low note on a recorder, and then create a small leak in the tube, near the middle, by partly uncovering the thumb hole, we can split the large vibrating column of air into two half-size vibrating columns, similar to dividing the string in half. These smaller columns of air vibrate twice as fast–and, like the guitar harmonic, sound an octave higher.
We can make the air in our vocal tracts do something very similar.
Shifting modes of vibration in our voices:
Most people can access these two modes of vibration in their voices:
Chest voice: e.g. Speak a loud 'hey!’
Head voice or Falsetto: e.g. Shout a loud, high-pitched 'woo!’
The reason the ‘woo’ is easy, even though it’s much higher in pitch than your ‘hey,’ has a lot to do with how your tongue ‘splits the air column’ when you shout a high ‘woo.’ The shape we all tend to make encourages the air that is bouncing around in your vocal tract tube to bounce in a smaller, faster way. Just like when we split a vibrating string or recorder tube into two halves.
One caveat: Between ‘hey!’ and ‘woo!’ there are also important changes to ‘tone’ (i.e. how clean or breathy the sound is) and also to the pitch adjustment muscles—so three things change from ‘hey’ to ‘woo’:
The vibratory mode shifts—roughly, the air column in the vocal tract ‘splits’ from hey to woo.
The ‘tone’ goes from clean to breathy.
The ‘pitch and timbre muscles’ adjust from ‘mostly low note muscle’ to ‘all high note muscle.’
We’ll come back to this, but just consider, for now, that when the vibratory mode changes, the other two key elements of ‘tone’ and ‘pitch muscle adjustment’ often change, too—or at least want to change.
We now need to go a tiny bit deeper with vocal vibratory modes, with the help of bikes, which will enable us to finally talk concretely about mix and belt.
Vocal Vibration and Bikes - IMPORTANT:
Imagine your bike has ten gear sprockets on the rear wheel, and you’re in high gear, and you want to shift down one gear.
Now, imagine that you have really clunky shifters, and you accidentally shift down all ten gears at once. This doesn’t feel very subtle. When we’re learning to sing, these stark, unintentionally clunky shifts are often the only kind available to us.
So, we have the ‘hey!’ gear and the ‘woo!’ gear. To shift to the ‘gears’ that lie in between these two extreme gears, we need to upgrade our components. On a bike, it would mean upgrading our shifters. For singing, it means, mostly, upgrading how skillfully we tweak our vowels, which is how we control shifts in what mode the air vibrates in, which is a huge part of what allows us to access the middle ‘gears’ of belt and mix.
When the air in the vocal tract is vibrating just right for a given pitch and syllable, via skillful adjustment of the vowel, the vibrations send a helpful feedback to the vocal cords, helping the cords open and close more efficiently. This efficiency helps you sing with a better balance of desired timbre, power and ease, e.g. belt and mix registers–similar to how finding the right gear on a bike creates a sweet spot between desired speed and effort for a given terrain.
I can’t quite leave this concept with the bike analogy, because having a well-tuned vocal tract can yield a much less linear ‘effort-to-reward’ ratio than with biking. I know this article already uses too many analogies, but please permit me just one more.
Singing and… Trampolines:
Having a well tuned vowel is like being on a trampoline with a friend–a friend who has timed all of their bounces to maximize yours. You get incredible height with almost zero effort. With the right vowel, you can access a similar feeling: multiple timbre and volume options with increased range and stability–and your throat can remain surprisingly relaxed.
This is an incredibly important topic, and there is so much more to say, but it can’t all fit into one overview. I will break this into many upcoming articles.
Why Learning to Sing Can be Challenging:
Most people can learn to make strong, relaxed sounds in their lower ‘hey!’ range (chest voice) and their upper ‘woo!’ range (head voice). Many figure out, over time, how to seemingly stretch their chest voice upward into what we call belt. There may be a bit of extra tension when singers begin working in belt, but they’re getting higher notes that aren’t going breathy, so they keep doing it. Some might learn to sing with more nuance in their head voice, as well.
Based on auditioning a decade’s worth of singers for my pop band, and two decades worth of singers for musicals, I can tell you: For many singers, even with performance degress, this ‘limited, slightly tight belt’ discovery is as far as they ever get. Some may believe that they’ve just hit their natural limits. Some may believe that there’s more they could do if they could only fix a certain aspect of their technique. But they’ve misidentified the culprit. In fact, anyone who tells you they could sing better if they could just fix one thing is probably wrong. Even if they’re right. Because juggling.
We Need to Juggle Three Shifts, Simultaneously.
As we’ve discussed, fixing technique is about learning to juggle three concepts. Just as it’s hard to pick up a dropped juggling ball while keeping the remaining two in the air, it is also hard to keep two out of three technique concepts functioning well when one falls out of balance.
There are brilliant ways to break down learning the skill of juggling, so that almost anyone can get going with the basics and even juggle three balls for a cycle or two. However, if you really want to ‘own’ the skill, you better be ready to drop balls for a long while. It’s just an unavoidable part of the process.
But what if your muscle control is too erratic to juggle?
Conditioning:
Depending on the quality and frequency of your singing, there’s another factor that can add a few months to the process of learning skilled singing: Ennervation. Sometimes the body just needs time to grow more nerve endings in the muscles you’re trying to subtly control. This applies especially to your pitch adjustment muscles.
Because of the time needed for nerve growth, just understanding the concepts might not do much for your singing, at first. Just keep practising. More and shorter sessions may be ideal–just keep asking your body for increasingly subtle control of your pitch adjustment muscles, and, eventually, your body will adapt.
Habits and Motor Learning:
Back to juggling. What happens between knowing what to do, but still dropping balls constantly… and the day that seemed would never come, when it’s almost impossible for us to drop balls? Similar to the time it takes to grow nerves, your brain needs to do some growing.
Your brain needs to run the patterns, over and over. Each time it will get some things right, but it will also get some things wrong. This is how how it learns what the boundaries of a given skill are before that skill goes out of balance.
As the patterns get more and more dialed in, your brain moves them away from conscious control, and into the ‘habit region.’ Here it can run the patterns unconsciously, freeing up more conscious processing power so you can do things like improvise riffs, tell stories, and be more in the moment, etc.
Like conditioning, this also just requires time and practice.
Tips for How to Learn to Sing:
There are No Shortcuts… But it’s Worth It:
Most of my clients experience quick wins all the time. But the difference between ‘pretty good singing’ and ‘exceptional, born-to-sing singing’ takes time. There are no shortcuts. But it’s so worth it.
How do you do it? You do it by consistent, focused insistence on balancing:
Maintaining clean tone as you ascend into belt/mix range.
Hitting high notes with a relaxed throat, via skillful adjustment of the pitch muscles.
Smooth shifting of modes of vibration, from chest to belt/mix to head, via skillful adjustment of vowels.
If you keep at it, one day you’ll realize you’re like the juggler who finds it almost difficult to drop balls. You don’t even remember how to strain for high notes, or what it was like to worry about hitting a note. It’s almost difficult to do anything but play your instrument beautifully and efficiently–sometimes powerfully or with raw emotion, but always from a home base of more technical subtlety and skill than most singers ever find.
Singing with great technique has a bumpy learning curve. After some quick wins, it might seem like you were working on the highest part of your mix for months and months, but then, one day, you realize you’re there—your whole voice just WORKS. It’s completely put together. There might be little things to work on, now and then, but you realize, you know how to sing–really sing!
I was born with a mediocre, challenging vocal instrument, but it happened for me. I unlocked my voice. It feels like flying. If you love singing, ‘worth it’ doesn’t begin to describe the payoff. This is what I wish for you, too, if you want it.
Happy singing :)