The Gap - How to take your voice from potential to exceptional.

I’ve known so many musicians who are so close to being great singers.

They know what good music is and what a good voice sounds like. They practice and they know what they’re aiming for but they just can’t seem to bridge the gap between where they are and where they want to be...

...they have a voice that has potential written all over it, yet they just can’t seem to realize that potential.

...they don’t sound that bad - the thing is, they just don’t sound like anything special.

The big misconception

You would understandably assume that the difference between a great singer and a singer with potential is simply time: time practicing and time doing. While this formula would apply to pretty much any other musical instrument, it doesn’t apply to singing.

For these singers with potential, more practice isn’t the answer - better practice isn’t even the answer. The problem is this: there are missing pieces, or fundamental roadblocks getting in the way of their greatness. What I mean is - there are fundamentals that are essential to having a great voice that are either missing in these singers voices, or their potential for a great voice is being hindered by something.

The problem of these roadblocks and missing pieces isn’t their fault, because most of us aren’t being taught these things as the fundamentals of singing. The answer is then to identify these fundamental elements that are missing and preventing them (and maybe you too) from going from potential singer to exceptional singer.

If you think you are one of these people - you know your voice isn’t bad but something seems to be preventing you from building a voice that is undeniably good - maybe this post can help you to bridge that gap.

The following section might help you identify what’s missing from your voice.

1. It could be a lack of strength

If you’ve tried but you just don’t “get” breath management and support, you’re not alone and it’s not what’s missing. Strength and structural integrity in your “core” is potentially what’s missing. You can read more about this here but in a nutshell: vocal range, power, and control comes from a strong and structurally sound body.

I’m not saying you need to become a bodybuilder or Olympic athlete but merely that if you’ve grown up sitting down, like pretty much everyone in recent history has, you won’t be in an ideal physical condition for singing. Forget breathing technique, you probably need some strength training for singers.

2. Every wind instrument needs an optimal sound space. The voice needs the same - to achieve this, we need full vocal tract mobility.

Most people are aware these days of the negative impacts of living a sedentary lifestyle: tight hip flexors, weak glutes, general desk posture - is pretty much the norm. Most people though, aren't aware that related things are happening to the moving parts of the voice.

In order to produce a vibrant sound, you need to provide an ideal acoustic space for the sound to travel through, but in order to do this you need to be able to take your vocal tract through its full ranges of motion. A lack of mobility in the vocal tract produces stifled sounds.

This is a lot less complicated than many teachers make it out to be and does not involve extensive jaw, tongue, or larynx manipulation, or extensive vowel modification to achieve a good sound (classical music being somewhat of an exception but that’s a whole nother discussion).

3. You’re trying to sing high and low and interfering with the natural subconscious processes of the larynx

Let me tell you something that may provide some psychological relief: there’s no such thing as high notes.

Scientifically, we say notes have a “higher or lower frequency” but this doesn’t literally mean that the notes are “up or down”. Likewise, physically (in your throat), the vocal folds stretch horizontally, they don’t move up and down. And although the larynx does move (and should move, contrary to what some training methods will try to tell you), it isn’t innervated with the types of nerves that allow you to feel what’s going on down there.

I tell you all this to say that you shouldn’t think about moving up and down with the melody, and nor should you physically feel like you’re moving up and down with the melody.

Learning to “sing on a single point” plays a big part in creating vocal freedom. And vocal freedom plays a huge role in creating an exceptional voice.

4. It could be that you’re always subconsciously singing like someone else

Do you have a voice of your own or are you just borrowing other people’s voices all the time?

Plenty of teachers will tell you to “find your voice” as a point of developing as an individual artist but it doesn’t quite work like that. If you’re still at the ‘potential’ stage, it could be because (as most aspiring singers do) you practice with covers and you’re unaware that you’re subtly imitating the voices of the artists you’re covering.

For many reasons, this just doesn’t work and it causes a whole lot of problems with your innate vocal mechanics.

You have your own voice by the sheer fact that your vocal tract is as unique as your fingerprint. You’ve just never opened it up before because it’s been covered (pun intended) by the dust of all the artists you’ve been subconsciously imitating.

5. Your voice isn’t “functioning” the way it’s supposed to (“it’s not what you said, it’s how you said it”)

Our voices evolved in order for us to communicate. Long before complex sentences and all the words we use now, there were a few baseline noises that we’re essential aspects of our survival as a social animal. Everything else has been built upon these few tones-of-voice and so they still form the underlying map of our how we speak and sing.

Understanding these baseline functions and how to manipulate them will take your voice to the next level.

Of course there is an incredible amount of nuance in the human voice but just as there are shades of color that originate from the primary colors, there are many shades of the human voice that center around the primary vocal functions.

The old way to map the voice was with a chest voice, a head voice, and the elusive “mixed” voice. There is still debate around the efforts to categorize the voice but I can assure you that chest/head/mixed makes the least scientific sense and is the least helpful way to understand your voice. A happy fact I can share with you is that the "break" between you head and chest voices is a mythical beast.

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Each of these are big topics to cover and I’ve only provided a brief introduction here, but I hope this provides some insight to how you can improve your singing.

If you’d like a little more detail on these fundamentals of singing, I’ve created a more detailed overview of the five points covered here in a PDF you can download below for free.