What are your vocal goals? Do you have a friend’s wedding to sing at, a piano bar you frequent, or an open mic you want to venture out to? Do you have an audition coming up, a recording you’re working on, or a band that you play in?  Are you interested in beefing up your resonance, taking bigger breaths or increasing the intensity of your sound?  Maybe you’re just looking to hear your own voice and explore the feeling of singing and the experience of sharing it with other people.

There are actually a bunch of things to think about before you meet with your candidate teachers. Let’s help you get all your ducks in a row before going on the hunt for a good vocal coach.

Performance Based Goals

This kind of goal relates directly to the situation in which you are performing. Are you performing just for yourself in the privacy of your living room, or on stage in front of an audience? How do you plan on using your voice once you train it, once it’s stronger, healthier and more beautiful? What’s your timeline for meeting these goals? Let’s take a closer look at some of the most common kinds of performance goals.

1.    You have an event to prepare for.

This is a fairly common reason why singers get interested in voice lessons. Perhaps you sang in childhood or in high school and took a break for a while, and now someone has invited you to sing at a wedding or some other special event. Maybe you feel rusty and want to dust the pipes off. Maybe you need to gain a bit of range or strength to hit the notes you want in whatever song it is. Maybe you want to feel confident when you sing at your event.

These are all great reasons to get voice lessons, and to find a teacher. Keep your deadline in mind and make sure that if you have an event coming up to be ready for, that you give yourself enough time to train. While polishing up a song can take as little as a few weeks of lessons, training your voice to get noticeably stronger, or to expand your range, can take up to 3 months or even more, depending on where you are starting out. Definitely let your prospective teachers know if you are going to be preparing for an event so that your teacher can pace your lessons accordingly.

2.    You sing for fun.

This is another big one. Maybe it’s a piano bar night with friends, or karaoke. Maybe you enjoy singing on Smule or making Garage Band recordings. Maybe you’re writing your own songs and want to get better at singing them just for fun. Maybe you just don’t want to see your friends making faces when you sing in the car, or you want your significant other to be pleased with your shower singing. Maybe you want to sing well for your kids at bedtime, serenade a special someone, or impress your parent with the gift of a beautiful song for a special occasion.

Whatever it is that you do for singing fun, vocal training can make a huge difference. Working on your voice is just that - work. Practicing and training takes sustained, consistent effort. It’s challenging and fun, but it does take work to implement your training and get the results you want, just like it takes work to go to the gym.

The great thing about doing all that work is that as your voice grows and strengthens, singing gets easier - and more fun. You don’t have to work so hard anymore. You don’t have to strain or find yourself gasping for breath. You know how to stand, how to hold yourself, how to shape your vowels, how to connect the notes… because you do it all the time in practice. So singing becomes more fun than ever before.

3.    You want to audition for something.

Maybe it’s a part in a musical at school, or in community theater. Maybe it’s a larger role or with a more professional company. Maybe it’s a pageant, talent show, or a TV show. Or, maybe you’re applying for a voice program at a school or conservatory. Whatever the details, an audition can certainly feel scary. Walking into a room full of judges and letting your voice shine is easier said than done.

Many singers seek out a vocal coach when faced with the challenge of an audition. Training is absolutely the best option in the face of an audition. The more you can train to make your voice stronger, the easier your song will be. Choosing a song is also something a teacher can help you with. You need to know your range and your vocal quality within that range if you want to make sure that the song fits your voice. Then coaching on your song is super helpful to make sure you’re using the best version of your skills on that particular song.

At Academy of Voice, I coach students to prepare them for auditions, as well as many other types of events. This is absolutely a performance goal that, more than any other, requires a great vocal coach.

4.    You want a stronger speaking voice.

You’d never think of it, but it turns out that the exercises we practice to make our singing voice stronger absolutely do improve the speaking voice. You hear it as student trains - over a few months the speaking voice gains depth, intensity, clarity and becomes what’s known as a “radio voice.” It’s not easy to describe what that sounds like since for each student, but it’s basically an upgrade in sound for each person, and totally depends on the voice. Developing the voice will result in better singing AND speaking.

And what’s that good for? We are social animals, so communication affects our status and our attractiveness in society, as well as how other perceive us on other levels as well:

●      Professional work. Customers buy things from people with beautiful voices. Bosses get more respect, employees get heard in the boardroom, lawyers get more sway in the courtroom, and overall, careers are boosted with vocal development.

●      Personal life. Clear resonant voices are sexy and youthful. The voice is an important asset for drawing in a new love interest, or keeping one interested long term.

●      Identity. The voice is inherently tied to who we are. People know us by our voiceprint, our unique sound. We know who people are by the sound of their voice. Fitness, health, vitality, personality, emotions, desires… all of those things are held in the sound of your voice. Having a strong, healthy beautiful voice draws more positive qualities to your life.

5.    You want to get closer to your inner self.

We’ve touched on vocal identity but there the goal was more about how you sound to others. On a deeper level, training your voice brings awareness of your breathing, your body, your energy flow. You feel your voice leaving your body and can work on releasing any emotional or energetic restrictions. Your voice is an integral, very deep part of who you are, and directly tied to the rest of your body.

Many voice students who study yoga are interested in this goal. They may feel their throat chakra is weak and want to strengthen the energy there, or bring more energy to the throat or larynx in an effort to bring confidence to their communications. If you want to grow as a whole person, body, mind and spirit, training the voice can be a profound part of that development.

6.    You want to see what your voice is made of.

Have you ever just been curious about your voice? Have you ever thought maybe you had a talent but just never developed it? This goal is more about finding out who you really are, what your voice has the potential to become, and what your voice is really made of.

According to medical studies, only 1-2% of people are actually tone deaf. The rest of us have no excuse for not singing. We all have the ability, if we choose to develop it, of training our voices to at least the level of a choir soloist. That’s huge!

What’s your excuse for not developing your voice?

Voice Based Goals

Voice based goals have more to do with physical development of the voice and specific skill sets with singing and performance. These goals are also important to define before looking for a teacher so that you can assess whether the person’s teaching addresses the issues you want to work on.

1.    You want to breathe better.

There is a lot of confusion in the vocal teaching world around breath and breathing. Some teachers say it’s important to “support” the breath, or to squeeze the abdominal muscles for the best sound. Neither of these are going to lead to a natural healthy sound and can actually contribute to bad vocal health.

While squeezing and forcing the exhaled breath is not going to do any favors to your voice, training with good exercises to increase your inhaled breath will do wonders for your sound and make it possible for you to surrender your air in a way that makes the voice (and you) sound natural, sexy and beautiful.

Look for a teacher who will give you exercises to increase your inhaled breath. Train with these exercises and watch your voice grow by leaps and bounds, and get some great side effects for running, scuba diving, and other air-intensive sports. When you can get lots of air, you don’t have to be stingy about how you use it.

2.    You want to find the best posture for singing.

This is one of those things that may not seem obvious at first, but posture is what either sets you up for success or failure when you sing. Everything from how much air you can take in to how your voice performs has to do with your posture. Posture is the way you hold your body, and is one of the most profound aspects of singing that is easily optimized.

The keys to posture are two-fold. First, making sure the ribcage is raised with a neutral head position will ensure that your diaphragm is available to take in air and your larynx is not being pulled out of position. Second, relaxing all of your muscles as much as possible will also keep the air flowing, help your sound be natural, and will allow your vocal cords to have freer motion.

Posture is also highly psychological, and can give you an instinctive advantage on the stage. If you can find the right balance between a raised ribcage and your weight distributed through your skeletal system, with your muscles as relaxed as possible, you can find the posture that says, “I’m open.” “I’m present,” “I’m ready to express myself,” but most importantly this posture says, “I am not afraid.” ‘

When your audience looks at you on the stage in this position, they naturally relax and feel confident in what you are going to sing before you even sing it. You appear as a leader. If you notice the loose postures of celebrities on stage you can always spot that ‘star’ quality in the limp fingers, slack jaws and casual stance. Find a teacher who can help you use posture to your advantage and watch yourself soar.

3.    You want to use your vocal cords better (and in a healthy way).

Finding a teacher who cares about this issue is the key to getting training that will be good for your vocal health. The larynx is an organ made up of cartilage and various muscles as well as connective tissue and epithelial tissue (mucous membrane). The muscles used to operate the voice box are complicated and delicate. There is a lot going on inside the voice that allows it to operate at various frequencies. The vocal cords themselves are much like the string of a guitar or the wood in the reed of a woodwind. This is where the sound is made. 

There are sets of muscles which control the lengthening and shortening of the cords, similar to the lengthening and shortening of a guitar string, which controls the pitch of the voice. There are also sets of muscles which control the cords opening and closing. This opening and closing motion is called “adduction,” and it’s how you turn the sound on and off. When the cords are not in use they are open so that you can breathe quietly. When you go to sing or speak, you naturally adduct your vocal cords, or bring them together to initiate sound.

This adduction is a very important motion for singing. Singing with an adducted voice is one of the most important things you can do to bring intensity to your sound and to protect your vocal health. Singing with an underadducted voice adds breathiness or whisper to your tone. Like a loose sail, your voice flaps all around, at times adducted and vibrating and at other times open and flailing. There is a lot of friction created if you try to sing loudly while your voice is underadducted. This is where most damage on the vocal cords and most vocal problems begin.

An adducted voice is a healthy, sustainable voice. It’s also a beautiful sound and when you use your voice this way, you protect it and develop it. A good voice teacher will always listen very closely to your tone and give you the tools you need to modify adduction. At AoV, we use a tool called “Speaky Voice” to help students achieve an adducted voice. Achieving healthy adduction is a value at the core of the exercises as well as the lessons. When you interview a voice teacher, vocal coach or singing instructor, be certain to ask about how adduction is part of their teaching. If it’s not a passionate subject for the teacher, run, don’t walk, in the other direction.

4.    You want to sing better.

Singing is a juggling act with lots of simple skills that all need to be handled simultaneously. You may know to take a deep breath, and have rehearsed that breath hundreds of times. You may know to form clear vowels, keep your cords adducted, and to relax your jaw, but training yourself to do all of those things in an orchestrated way is the art of singing. That’s where you need a vocal coach to remind you in real time what to focus on, so you can begin to get the feeling of juggling all these skills into your muscle memory. Once they are ingrained in your body there’s a lot less thinking and you can just enjoy singing.

There is a process to this dance, putting various skills together in pairs, in groups of 3, 4, 5… there is an orchestrated way to teach singing so that a student can learn it quickly, efficiently, and effectively. Make sure to choose a teacher who supports this, who has a plan to help you achieve your goals not just separately, but as part of your performance. It’s always good to get a wider range, a bigger breath and a better posture, but being able to use them in a song is just as valuable. Make sure your chosen coach can get you all the way there.

5.    You want to captivate your audience with the emotion in your songs.

Captivating one’s audience… can you believe that this is a taught skill? It is!

What is it that gets the hairs on our neck standing on end during that ballad, or makes us feel euphoric as we stand and dance at a concert? What is it in the singer’s voice that breaks us down and finds our sadness, or helps us feel our anger? What is it about that song that takes our breath away?

The emotions in a song are there when it is written. If the songwriter is good, the song captures something universal as well as something specific, usually an experience the songwriter has had. The surface is always something specific with details, telling a story or narrating a plot or giving us something concrete that the song is about. Under the surface, though there should be a current of something human, something we can all feel, in the music, in the lyrics, even if it’s difficult to describe it.

Our job as singers is to describe it, then bring out whatever those emotions are. Finding it, describing it - this is called interpretation. It’s finding the meaning in your song, and describing it in the most specific way that you can. This is so important, because without this step of interpretation there is no way for the singer to get to the next step… expression.

Expression is the second step of the process where the singer takes the meaning described in the interpretation and finds a way to get those feelings and emotions in the song into his or her voice. How can you vocally show these emotions? Where can we take or eliminate breaths, add or subtract volume, ornament or simplify a melody in order to bring out and magnify these emotions that we interpreted in the song? How can we make those feelings real for the listener?  How can the singer evoke those same emotions very strongly in the listener?

The next step is to try out various ways of expressing those emotions vocally. Trying them all out and deciding on which ones you will use. Then you take that song and practice it over and over again until that emotional expression has become just the normal way you always sing the song. Each audience will feel the power of that emotion even though to the singer it’s just part of the performance, like anything else.

It’s incredibly important that any vocal coach or voice teacher you are considering working with understands this process and can teach it to you. Without it, you may happen upon vocal moments that do captivate your audience but you will always be working hard to achieve it, forcing yourself to feel emotional for each song. But it won’t be consistent. On a bad day when you are feeling bored with a song, or distracted, or unhappy about something else in life, your audience will feel you falling emotionally flat. A song that’s properly prepared never loses its emotional charge, and doesn’t require you to feel any certain way to get your audience feeling captivated. Since the emotion is embedded in your performance of the song, all you need to do to make the song successful is execute it.

6.    You want to develop your performance skills.

Scared of an audience? Stressed by the stage? You definitely need a teacher who can help you hack that one. Here are some signs your voice coach knows what’s up.

First, you need a safe place to perform. Does your voice coach ask you to make recordings of yourself performing? That’s pretty important. How can you perform for others if you can’t see yourself perform? Next, is there a place for you to perform for others, either in person at a masterclass, or online in a forum? Sharing your work with small groups of other singers can help a lot. Lastly, do you have some sort of recital each season to work toward, where you will be singing in front of an audience? Most great teachers provide this, whether it’s in person or virtual.

Getting up in front of people and performing your songs is key to reaching your performance goals. While you can also have your own performances as we discussed above, an excellent voice teacher will help you to expand your performance opportunities. He or she will also help you recap after the performance, looking at a video with you and dissecting what happened so that future performances can improve.