Develop Your Singing Tone

One of the most common complaints heard from training singers is dissatisfaction with their singing tone. Many of these frustrated individuals believe that people are either born to sing well or they are not – and then resign themselves to sounding a certain way the rest of their lives. Fortunately for all of us, this is a misconception.
Very few people are “born” with great singing ability. Most of us have to practice regularly and work to improve our skills…just like most athletes. This is where the art of productive practice and understanding factual singing concepts can really make a difference. Today our focus is on vocal tone and resonance – how to control it, change it and own it.
How is your vocal tone? Rich, warm, thin, weak, powerful? And, is it different on any given day? This occurs because everything affects everything – from the air we breathe to how much sleep we get. One way to combat this arbitrariness is to learn to increase and decrease the amount of resonating space being used at any given time. This can be as simple as dropping your jaw to add additional space, or focusing your tone through the nasal cavity to take advantage of that resonating space.
Learning to change the focus and direction of a vocal tone at will does require practice, but if you understand what you are trying to accomplish during that practice time your development will occur more quickly. Remember that a very important portion of your personal sound is developed by how much you choose to open and close those resonating spaces. The trick is to learn which spaces you can control, and how to control them. Of course, in order to make the most of resonance you must be building upon a good foundation of proper airflow, tone creation and diaphragm support.
Vocal instruments are unique in that they can easily change the size and shape of resonating spaces at will. You wouldn’t be so lucky if you were designed as a rigid tuba or trumpet! A tuba uses the large provided spaces to create a rich, warm, low sounding tone. The trumpet has smaller spaces to work with and produces an edgy, more brilliant sound. A tuba will never sound like a trumpet; the trumpet will never sound like a tuba. This is not the case for voices! By understanding these concepts we can train our voices to sound like both the tuba and the trumpet.
Very simply put, here is how the concepts fit together: To make sounds warmer, increase the amount of space inside your instrument (raise the soft palate, drop your jaw, etc.). To make sounds more brilliant, increase your airflow and direct the tone through smaller resonating cavities (nasal and/or sinus cavities), also taking advantage of hard surfaces like your teeth and hard palate (roof of mouth).
While experimenting with this idea, be very careful to monitor your “placement.” Tonal placement should always stay centered, not swallowed (hooty sound) or pushed too far forward (nasal sound). Adjusting the cavity spaces and resulting resonance should be built on top of good tone placement and not the other way around.
So remember, don’t be just a tuba or a trumpet when you can be both by learning to properly adjust your resonating spaces.