Maybe you don’t feel confident singing. When it comes time to sing on Sunday mornings, you know that it shouldn’t really matter “how good you sound”, but you can’t help but feel a bit self conscious about your voice. You would like to improve your voice to feel more free and confident in worship.
Maybe you think you have a decently good voice. After all, your mom and at least a handful of other people have said you have a good voice… which has to count for something, right?! You’ve been thinking about possibly wanting to join the worship team, but would still like to work on improving your voice.
Or maybe you don’t really know whether you have a good voice or not, but you would like to develop your voice for personal enjoyment and to be able to worship God more freely.
Whatever situation you find yourself in, here are several ways you can go about improving your voice.
1. Sing a Lot
I know this might seem rather obvious, but the best and simplest way to improve your voice is to sing a lot. Don’t worry, I will dive into more creative ways to improve your voice in a second, but I don’t want to skip over the obvious. The more you sing, the more your voice will strengthen and improve.
Your voice is a muscle, and the more you use it the more it develops. If someone were to ask you how to get better at running, you would probably tell them, “just get outside and run”, right? I know that approaching your singing voice can feel a bit more complex and mysterious, but at the heart of it, you just gotta do it!
Sing a lot! Sing in the shower. Sing in the car. Sing around the house. Sing with new songs, old songs, Christian songs, musical theatre songs, you name it!
Here’s the next challenge: while you sing, try to become more self aware of how you are singing. Be extremely observant of how things feel and sound. Don’t just sing without engaging your mind. This will help you improve even more!
2. Take Voice Lessons
Ok. I do think it is a good first step to just sing a lot. However, it is even better to take some voice lessons while singing a lot. Your voice is a muscle, true, but your voice is also a musical instrument.
If you wanted to learn how to play the violin, you probably would pretty immediately think “I should look into taking some lessons”. Well, it’s the same with your voice. It functions just like a musical instrument… there is a correct and not so correct way to go about singing.
If you learn the right way from the start, it will save you a lot of time in needing to break bad habits later down the road. You will also have someone to help keep you accountable to practice—your teacher.
If you really do want to improve your voice, which truly is an individualized skill, taking lessons is the perfect place to start.
Once you have decided you will commit to voice lessons (and yes, this needs to be seen as a commitment if you really want to succeed), how do you go about finding a good voice teacher?
Some places to start looking are through your local university. Another idea is to ask your worship pastor or other musical people in your church if they have any recommendations. You could also go to local music schools.
Before signing up for lessons, make sure to do some research on your voice teacher to find out 1) if they have actually studied voice 2) if they have teaching experience 3) if they sing professionally. These can be good indicators of whether the teacher will guide you in the best possible way on your vocal journey.
Beyond this, it is important to realize that it might take a while to find the right teacher for you. Even with qualified, experienced teachers, you may not connect with their teaching style or personality. So, after giving someone a chance, don’t feel bad in moving on to try to find the right teacher for you.
3. Join a Choir
This advice might not be as intuitive, but joining a choir is an amazing way to improve your voice. Often times when you sing by yourself, you don’t get much feedback on how you’re singing. Unless you record yourself (which is a good idea) or ask someone else to give you feedback (which can feel awkward and may be rather subjective when you ask someone like your Mom 😉), it can be hard to get constructive feedback.
However, when you join a choir, all of a sudden you are singing with others, and it is necessary to build an awareness of how you are singing. It matters what vowel shape you are producing, how loud you are singing, if your voice matches with the other voices around you, if you are singing with the correct rhythm, and so on…
When it comes to singing, training your ear and how you hear yourself and those around you is extremely important. If you join a choir you can immensely grow these skills.
It’s definitely not the same as voice lessons, because you will not get individualized technical training geared toward building your instrument. However, you will get valuable direction from whoever is conducting the choir as to how to sing with a group. These principles can transfer over into other settings as well.
I would recommend seeing this as a good thing to do in addition to weekly lessons. Or if private lessons are not within your budget, this option is for sure more affordable and much better than purely singing on your own.
A good place to look for choirs to join are 1) within your local community 2) at some churches 3) at a university or school (especially if you are currently going to school).
4. Listen to Good Singers
Having good vocal models is more important than you may think. It is quite amazing how much we pick up from those we listen to. That is also why I said “good” singers, because various (especially unwanted) stylistic choices and vocal characteristics of those we listen to can easily creep into our own singing. And often times, this can have a negative impact on our singing.
For example, I grew up listening to Christian rock music and when I started seriously studying voice I had no clue how to sing with vibrato (I didn’t even know what vibrato was). Now, with training I was able to learn how to sing with vibrato, but this made me realize how much my vocal models had really shaped me… because I wasn’t accustomed to hear people sing with a lot of vibrato due to the singers I had been listening to. And honestly, growing up as a relatively sheltered missionary kid, the spectrum of vocal models I had were rather small. (If you don’t know what vibrato is either, no worries… this is just a personal example that came to mind.)
Listening to a broad array of musical styles, and the critically acclaimed “good singers” within those styles, is a good place to start in this endeavor. An important side note is that a singer may actually be a “good singer” and you may still not prefer their style of music—or even style of singing.
I remember when I listened to some videos of Luciano Pavarotti sing for the first time, I honestly didn’t like it that much. It wasn’t until after I began to study singing did I come to appreciate and enjoy how amazing of a singer he was.
By listening to such singers and learning from them, your understanding of what “good singing” will deepen. And you may find that your own singing will start to be positively influenced by this.
5. Take an Online Course
Although this is not necessarily the conventional way of developing one’s voice, it can be very valuable to take an online course as an introduction to vocal technique. The benefit of an online course is that you can get quality material in a step-by-step format that is intended for good learning. It can also be cheaper than private lessons.
Of course, there are so many YouTube videos one could watch as well… which can be helpful to an extent. However, the downside is that it’s extremely hard to grasp the correct progression in which to learn the techniques presented in YouTube videos. Haven’t we all surfed from one video to the next without really getting anywhere? That’s where the course comes in.
Another problem with watching YouTube videos is that you will receive instruction from so many different people that it can be very confusing. This is especially true with studying voice, because there is so much variance in terminology between voice teachers (even when they may be meaning the same thing… the wording they use to describe the same thing can vary a lot). That’s why getting a detailed, comprehensive layout from one source in the format of an online course can be great.
Now, the downside of online courses is that it does not address your specific vocal issues and tendencies. That is why it really can not fully replace private lessons.
But, it can cover a good amount of basic vocal technique and address common vocal faults. This can be a very valuable resource to get a person off the ground and a great first step before taking private voice lessons.
Well, I hope these 5 tips prove useful to you. Singing is so rewarding, and I really believe that God designed us to sing for a reason. If you’d like to read more about why we, as Christians, should sing, check out this blog post.
All the best on your vocal journey!
