Question 1

What is a singing voice?

Tom Stein · Accepted Answer

According to Merriam-Webster, a singing voice is “the sound of a person’s voice when singing.” Another way to think about singing is that it is using the voice to produce musical sounds. Someone who sings is usually called a Singer or a Vocalist.

Question 2

What are the 4 types of singing (vocal ranges)?

Tom Stein · Accepted Answer

i. Soprano: A high female (or boy’s) voice
ii. Alto: A low female (or boy’s) voice
iii. Tenor: A high (adult) male voice
iv. Bass: A low (adult) male voice

Question 3

What’s the difference between vocals and singing?

Tom Stein · Accepted Answer

In popular music styles, the words vocals and singing can be used interchangeably. In classical music, a Vocalist usually sings the lead and has a powerful voice, while Singers can provide background parts or sing together in a chorus. Singers and Vocalists must sing in tune and be able to blend with other musicians singing or playing instruments.

Question 4

Is singing a talent or skill?

Matt Farnsworth · Accepted Answer

Singing is a natural gift and talent. However, singing can also be improved on any level. When is difficult to teach a Singer, it is usually because the person attempting to sing cannot match pitch. That does make teaching singing very difficult. However, people are born with different levels of ability. Some are just natural Singers where others need to practice more and spend more time learning.

Question 5

What is the best age to start learning how to sing?

Matt Farnsworth · Accepted Answer

I don’t think the kids who are less than ten years old have the attention span to be in a technical singing lesson. (They for sure can be in a lesson where they’re singing for fun.) It is usually best to allow children to sing naturally when they are young. Real singing lessons can start around twelve years old.

Question 6

How can someone improve their singing voice?

Justin Stoney · Accepted Answer

There are lots of different ways to improve the singing voice, but how we usually like to work is through really good vocal exercises. These are best done if they are designed for the individual because it’s just like working out.
There’s a serious muscular and athletic component to the singing voice. It really is, at the end of the day, training a lot of little muscles. But they’re not big, obvious muscles like what we do at the gym. They’re all these little muscles on the inside that need the training.
You might have different strengths or weaknesses with your voice physically, and different exercises can help you work out those areas. There are exercises for improving the range of your voice. There are exercises for improving the strength, agility, resonance, tone. For the freedom of the instrument. For the stamina and longevity. Some people will just be naturally stronger or weaker in different areas. But if they do the right vocal exercises, they can develop strengths in those different areas.
Finding good exercises (or working with an instructor to guide you to what those exercises might be) is always a good thing. Also, doing lots of listening to artists that you really like. It’s not a bad idea to find aspects of what they’re doing and basically copy. There are some limitations to that because you want to be singing with your own voice and not just a mimic.
But a lot of Singers actually get really good by playing their favorite artist, identifying what they like, and trying to get those things down. It might be riffs and runs, or vibrato, or a certain kind of tone quality they like. There is great value in doing a lot of listening and then doing healthy mimicking. Again, not trying to change one’s voice from what it naturally is, but identifying those stylistic elements that make good Singers great.
I would say from there, [it’s] finding repertoire and songs that are appropriate for where you’re at as a vocalist. Not pushing yourself too far to things you’re not ready to handle, because that can build some tension and strain. Not feeling like you have to sing “Happy Birthday” or something, but pieces that are an achievable goal, a moderate challenge, and building from there. Instructors can obviously help with that, but some Singers can figure that out on their own and select good material to be practicing.
Folks are often looking for, “Well if I just do these 5 exercises or these 10 exercises then I’ll be a great Singer.” It doesn’t work that way. If I wanted to be a great athlete, it’s not like I go to the gym and do my bicep curls and my bench press. I can’t just follow a routine and expect to be a great athlete. I have to know something about what my voice needs, and that can change over time, and [you can] target those areas with good exercises.
That’s where a Voice Teacher comes in, much like a Personal Trainer, to say, “What’s going on with your body? Let’s do these exercises to make sure you become this kind of athlete.” That’s how it works with the voice. And people have different goals. Somebody might want a lighter pop mix. Somebody might want to be an Opera Singer. Those are all different kinds of athleticism, and you need to do different exercises and different work to make sure you’re achieving that kind of sound.

Question 7

How long does it take to learn to sing well?

Kevin Richards · Accepted Answer

Minimum a year. You’re probably looking at two years. Again, because it’s a physical skill. It’s a physical skill you can’t see. Learning piano or guitar is a little bit different. You can actually see your hands moving and when you go to play a G chord, you know you’re going to get a G chord when you hit the strings because you see your fingers in the right place.
With the voice, it’s all invisible. So it’s a very weird instrument to train. It’s odd because you have to describe a sensation to people. “It feels like this. Do you feel it here? Do you feel it there?” And people feel proprioception–their proprietary perception of something might be different from how I feel it. If the sound you just made is correct, however you felt that: remember that. And just keep doing that.
I always tell people you’re looking at a year at least. If you take someone from bare-bones nothing, then that timeline will either expand or shrink depending on their innate ability. I’ve had people come to me who’ve never had a vocal lesson before and told them, “You’re actually a really good Singer.” They had no idea. I said, “You actually sound better than you think you do, and it’s not going to take as long as you think.” They just have to learn better.
I have people who come to me who’ve never had a vocal lesson, don’t seem that great, and who see pretty good improvement over a short amount of time.
More than people who had natural ability, but were resistant to learning to sing differently because they were always singing in this natural way without knowing what they were doing. Now they have to do it as a process and it’s kind of throwing their brain into disarray.
People who have been singing for a while or taken lessons before have built-in, predetermined ideas about how things should be done. Someone who’s a blank slate is a lot easier to teach.
But it’s always a year minimum. In the grand scheme of things that’s a short amount of time. For how long you’re going to be able to use that skill, taking a year to learn the basics is no time at all. It’s going to take you a year to learn to fly a plane. So give it time. It’s worth it in the end.
If you play an instrument, did you learn how to play your guitar amazingly in a short amount of time, or did it take a year to get fairly good at it? Same amount of time. Same brain process.

Question 8

How many hours a day should you practice singing?

Kevin Richards · Accepted Answer

No more than one. I get that all the time. There’s science behind this. The human brain can only take concentrated thought processes, training like that, for 20–25 minutes. Then it starts to shut off. It doesn’t want to absorb any more information.
Grade School Teachers know this as well. That’s why they change the lesson plan about every 20 minutes within a period–because the kids’ brains can’t maintain a state of concentration for longer than 20 minutes. Singing is fine motor control. After about 20 minutes, your brain starts to go into gross motor control and it’s not doing the fine movements.
There’s a process called chunking where you learn things in little chunks; 15–20 minute chunks of time. I’ll tell my students, you can practice for an hour, but don’t do an hour in one shot. Break it up into little 15–20 minute sessions over the course of the day. So that you can really concentrate during that 15–20 minutes. Really dig in. Really concentrate.
Because if you’re going to do an hour, you can’t maintain that kind of level of concentration for an hour. But for 20 minutes, you can really focus on a couple of things and then leave it. Let your brain absorb it, work on it, and come back to that same thing or something else later in the day. Really concentrate for 15–20 minutes, then leave it alone. Another 15–20 minutes, really concentrate–next thing you know you’ve done an hour.
People think if they sit and do two to three hours, they’re going to get so much better so much faster. It doesn’t work that way with physical skills.
You can do that with a language, a cognitive skill. You can sit there for two hours and you’ll get better at it at the end of two hours. Physical skills though? Your brain can only absorb so much information in a short amount of time. So you have to chunk it into little bits. And then leave it alone for a day or two and come back to it.
That way your brain has time to absorb all that information and coalesce it and put the puzzle together. The longer you move away from the thing that you did, the more you remember it. Which is a weird thing.
They’ve actually done tests with this and studies where you give people a paragraph to learn, and then another group, and tell them to try to remember everything they can about that paragraph. The people they come back to it four days later remembered more than the people from two days later. It’s a weird part of our brain.
So I tell people, put a day in between. Or if you do something on one day, do something else on the day between. So on Monday and Wednesday do the same thing. On Tuesday and Thursday, do different things.
It’s just like what bodybuilders do. They train one muscle group on Monday, another muscle group on Tuesday, then come back to the first muscle group on Wednesday. So there’s that day of rest in between for the different muscle groups. Do that same thing with singing.
Sing on Friday. Take the weekend off. Let your brain relax because it needs that vacation. Come back on Monday and repeat the process. With those two days of rest, they [bodybuilders] do something else like swim or run. So just sing. No warm-up, no nothing; just sing. Do something musical. Play an instrument and do whatever you’re going to do. But do something else away from the training so your brain can get a break to absorb all of it.
This is part of the way I teach. I bring in some neuroscience and some of how our brains function to speed up the learning process. A lot of Teachers don’t go that route. They have the book that they teach out of. My thing is, adapt to the student, how they learn, how they absorb things, and the rate they want to learn at.
You can’t force them to learn faster than their brains want to learn. You can’t force an exercise on them if their brain isn’t ready for it. Switch gears and go to something else and maybe come back to it later on.
That’s what I do and I’ve always been interested in how our brains work and learn. So when I started to teach, I brought a lot of that information into it. I spoke to Neurosurgeons and Psychologists and people like that to understand how we learn.

Question 9

What else do you want people to know about singing?

Justin Stoney · Accepted Answer

Singing works best when it’s a joyful process. We want to go on that joyful path. But so often what happens with people’s singing voices is somebody says something when they’re five-years-old like, “Oh, you don’t have a voice,” or, “Ugh, keep it down in there. We don’t like that!” or, “You’re not as good as so and so in school.”
Maybe it’s even something we say about ourselves. We get into this habit of thinking, “Why couldn’t I sing that note well,” and, “My voice is disgusting,” and, “I play it back and I just can’t bear to listen to it.” Then we start to place these negative thoughts or negative words over us, and nothing could be more stifling to the voice than that.
The encouragement I would offer is, don’t let that stop you. Whether it’s something that somebody’s said or you’ve gotten into the habit of speaking negative words about your own voice, we want to break that. That never helped anybody become successful as a Singer. If you’re feeding your voice joyful messages, positive messages, and encouragements, you’re going to make much more progress and you’re going to be much freer in the process.
To be clear, it’s not wrong to sing about pain and things like that. You don’t always have to be happy. There’s great value in letting it out when you’re feeling bad. Some of our best songs and best Singers are coming from a place of hurt or vulnerability. But when they do, they’re not thinking, “Do I sound pretty? Will people like this? Am I any good?” They’re singing from a soulful place or a joyful place and they’re not letting the messages block what’s within.
That’s my big encouragement. There’s the technique side, yes. We have to get good at the craft. But there’s also this freedom that we have to have one way or another where we accept our voice, we’re joyful about our voice, and we’re letting it come from the soul.

Question 10

How can I learn to sing?

Caleb J. Murphy · Accepted Answer

One of the most critical factors in learning to sing well is proper breathing because it gives you more control over your pitch and how long you can hold a note. The most efficient route to learning how to sing and how to breathe while you sing is to hire an experienced vocal teacher. They will give you the tools, techniques, and attention you need in order to learn the basics of singing. That being said, you can learn a lot of info as a beginner singer on YouTube.

Question 11

How can I practice singing at home?

Caleb J. Murphy · Accepted Answer

First, you need vocal exercises you can practice at home. For these, you can work with your vocal teacher or head over to YouTube. Then just practice your exercises and warmups a little bit every day. Just make sure you take a break when you feel your voice getting tired. You don’t want to injure or over-exhaust your vocal cords.

Question 12

What's the highest note you can sing?

Caleb J. Murphy · Accepted Answer

The highest note ever sung by a human was technically not a musical note but rather a frequency. The record-holder is Georgia Brown from Brazil who hit a G10, according to Guinness World Records. She also has the greatest vocal range, going as low as a G2. The goal as a singer, though, is not to sing the highest note possible or even have the greatest range. The most important thing to focus on, other than hitting the right notes, is to convey emotion as you sing.

Music Career Finder

Start Here: