Blog - Sam Johnson Vocal Studio

How to Extend Your Singing Range

A huge concern with most singers is whether they have the range to support singing the music they like. A lot of confidence is built when you nail the high note at the end of your favorite song. For some, if they don’t have a massive range, they feel like bad singers–even if they are fantastic storytellers with beautiful tone.

So what’s the secret to getting a huge range?

How does singing work?

At its most basic, singing is blowing air past some tiny muscles in your throat, and forming it into a word. To create pitch, the muscles in your throat (vocal cords) come together (adduct) and vibrate to produce a sound frequency. When air blows through adducted vocal folds the mass of the folds come together rapidly because of the Bernoulli effect.

Vocal cords open and closed

Note: “Vocal cords” and “vocal folds” are used interchangeably.

To make a middle C your vocal cords come together 261 times. The A above is 440 times. The A above that is 880 times. As the frequency produced by your vocal folds increases, the pitch we perceive gets higher.

Seems pretty simple, right? Make higher frequency, produce higher pitch.

So how do we make a higher frequency?

Unlike an instrument like the violin, where to make a higher frequency you just move your finger to make the string shorter, to create a higher frequency with singing the vocal folds need to stretch out and lose mass.

The Unseen Instrument

Because with singing our instrument is in our body, a challenge is knowing what is physically happening with the unseen moving parts as we make sounds. It’s difficult to isolate and manipulate small muscles if we aren’t aware of what they feel like to be used.

A good voice teacher can help you figure out how it feels to use these muscles.

Air, muscle, and word. All three work together to make a resulting sound. In healthy and beautiful singing, the air flow needs to be constant, resistance by the vocal cords consistent, and words congruent.

Start by sliding around the pitch of your speech. If you are really struggling to recognize what it feels to make a higher frequency, pretend to talk to a baby or puppy. Make a pitch slide from the highest pitch you hum to the lowest pitch. Choose a volume from 1-10, and keep the volume of your hum consistent through the whole slide.

Sliding is good practice because it’s the only way for the vocal folds to move. They don’t just teleport from one pitch coordination to another, they glide (glissando) quickly through many micro-pitches. If you can keep a balanced coordination of air/muscle through a glide, you will build good habits through your whole range.

Hum along to a siren to get used to the feeling.

After you get used to the feeling of making a smooth slide through your whole range, try to hold on to that feeling as you switch to singing songs. If the air and muscle stay consistent when you change your word around you will maintain ease across your whole voice. Hums and other nasals are a great starting point for stretching your vocal cords to make higher pitches easily.

Good vowels can help your voice stay balanced

The way you form your vowels amplifies the frequency created at your vocal folds. Good vowels are generally the result of not working too hard. If you pronounce your words the same way in singing as you do for speech, you will probably do a lot of things well.

Often rather than keeping the easy pronunciation of words from speech, when people sing they work hard to manipulate their vowels, and in turn add in unnecessary tension and imbalance.

This is actually the origin of the term and company “Speech Level Singing”. The logic is if you aren’t doing anything wrong with your speech, and singing uses the same instrument as speech, you shouldn’t change much between speaking and singing.

Transitively, learning how to be a better singer can help you become a better speaker.

Try doing the same hum-slide exercise as earlier, then hum a song the same way. When you get to a high note, treat it the same way as you would when just sliding up in the exercise. After a few repetitions, open your mouth and sing the phrase by pronouncing it the same way you would in speech. This way you won’t sabotage your good vowels by trying to change them.

“Singing is the art of minimal changes.”

If the phrase is more difficult with words than humming, you’re probably changing something about how you pronounce the words. Record yourself singing and speaking the same phrase, then compare what you did differently.

With practice, a wider range is achievable by anyone. The best thing to do is keep your intentions simple, focusing on air, muscle, or word. Bringing the rogue component into balance will do wonders for your range, and help you nail the songs you love.

Large range grill — That’s a huge, efficient range.

Vocal Coach vs Voice Teacher: What’s the Difference?

Many people use the terms vocal coach and voice teacher interchangeably. In fact, they are separate jobs that can help singers become better in different ways. Knowing what your goals are as a singer can help you choose whether to hire a voice teacher, vocal coach, or work with both at the same time.

Vocal Coach

A vocal coach works with singers on interpretation and preparation of music. The vocal coach is generally a skilled pianist, and they are great at helping singers learn to perform a piece authentically.

There are vocal coaches who specialize in different styles of music. Vocal coaches are much more prominent in classical singing training, but there are also coaches who make their careers working with contemporary singers.

Italian sheet music on piano, used by a vocal coach.

Classical music often has more difficult melodic and rhythmic patterns than contemporary commercial music (CCM) or musical theatre. A good vocal coach can help you sing the music as it was written, and isolate any problem spots you have musically.

Classical vocal coaches often prioritize diction. So much classical repertoire is sung in non-English languages. The most common languages of classical singing are Italian, French, German, and English. Vocal coaches know how to correctly pronounce these languages, and know how to help singers sing in whatever language their music is written in.

The main goals of classical music are authentic representation and emotional expression. Vocal coaches main concerns are helping a singer achieve these goals.

Voice Teacher

A voice teacher’s primary purpose is to help singers sing better. They achieve this by focusing their effort on vocal technique. Vocal technique is how one uses their body to create sound.

The voice is a unique instrument in that it is someone’s body, not an external object. With most instruments the expectation is that you must be taught how to play them. Where to put your fingers, how to best hold your body, etc. Someone isn’t just born able to play violin. Singing is also a teachable skill, but it comes with interesting challenges because most of the parts used to create sound are unseen.

With singing we have control over three things. Air, some little muscles in your throat, and how you shape your mouth. A good voice teacher should help you balance those three things so that sound production is efficient, easy, and useful.

Because we can’t see our instrument as we play it, singers have to rely on feeling and sound. Voice teachers give direction and exercises that help you become aware of what good singing feels like.

Our voices sound different to ourselves than they do to people outside of our heads. This is because we hear the sound bounce around off of muscle and bone before getting to our ears. Listeners hear the sound bounce around in the room before their ears. Voice teachers are important because they can hear what your voice actually sounds like to listeners.

When you trust a voice teacher they can help you put together the puzzle of what singing feels like, sounds like in your head, and what the end result is.

Who would win in a fight?

When you get a good vocal coach and voice teacher on your team you’re the one who wins. Without good fundamentals of vocal technique, a vocal coach’s skillset may not be particularly useful. There is some overlap in jobs, voice teachers can help with language and expression, and vocal coaches can help with basic vocal technique. The best use of your time is to make specific goals, and find the best professional to help you make progress toward those goals.

Black and white boxer winning a fight

Nasals: Supervillains or superheroes?

Nasality has become a bad guy for a lot of singers. They are constantly told that any amount of nasal sound in their tone will make them sound terrible, especially when they sing high notes! Is it really true, or do nasals have a place in voice training?

What is nasality?

Nasalization happens any time some air is let through the nose during singing. When singing consonants like [m, n, and ŋ] there is no way around nasality, they are nasal to their core. Whenever the mouth is blocked off air follows the path of least resistance and goes through the nose.

[m] blocks off the mouth at the lips, [n] by sealing the front and sides of the tongue to the roof of the mouth, and [ŋ] uses the back of the tongue.

Vowels become nasal when the velum (soft palate) lowers slightly and allows air to exit through both the mouth and nose. This makes nasality a spectrum, and one is able to adjust the percentage of nasality in a sound.

How is this useful?

Experiment with this by sustaining an [ŋ], and slowly lowering the back of your tongue. Thinking about a relaxed schwa [ʌ] as you do this exercise helps relax the front of your tongue and jaw. As the seal between the back of your tongue and soft palate breaks you are left with a highly nasalized schwa [ʌ̃].

Try to create a smooth gradient between [ŋ] and a rich [ʌ]. By starting with the nasal your tongue is placed high and forward, which is super useful in healthy vocalizing.

High and forward tongue — Photo by @Doug88888 on Flickr

This exercise is also good for finding healthy French nasals. Native English speakers sometimes struggle to make authentic French sounds, because English doesn’t use nasals to differentiate vowels. In French a nasal [ã] versus a “pure” [a] can change the meaning of a word. You can use the same nasal-gradient exercise to find a healthy French [ã ɛ̃ õ ɔr œ̃].

Singing with nasality is also helpful in finding a thinner vocal coordination. This thin coordination is easier to balance with airflow throughout your range. It is important to learn how to stay vocally thin, especially as you go for higher pitches. Getting too heavy vocally makes bridging to high notes very difficult. Gentle nasals are a superb tool in finding a connected head voice.

Play around with nasals! Being able to control and use them effectively gives so many color choices to use as an artist, and they are amazing in developing healthy technique. Personalized training with a teacher will help you utilize this powerful singing trick.