Do you have grand singing goals for this year?

While strategies like SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, timebound) help guide and track your singing goals, it’s the tiny, incremental actions that get you there. For beginner and experienced singers, vocal training sometimes involves the intricate learning and practice of skills, and gradually joining these up to develop a technique you can rely on when performing.

I often say to singers of all levels: ‘Singing is about body and mind. Your voice will look after itself’.

What do I mean by this? Singing is a physical act and part of our learning is to notice the physical activities that enhance and embed an action into our body, be it in the lower torso or mouth and throat space. By working on one or two areas of technique at a time, you thoroughly embed these small skills in both your body and mind.

We’ve previously looked broadly at the idea of making small steps – what I call target practice. And a recent article in The Conversation suggests that you find greater meaning and motivation through small, repeated actions towards a goal, an approach backed by behavioural science.

So, here are some specific intricate singing skills to pay attention to:

Your inhalation is gasping or noisy

This usually means that as you intake air through your mouth, you’re engaging your false vocal muscles, which can create tightness or unnecessary holding in your throat and affect your sound.

Take this small step: Notice and work on an open in-breath where your jaw is relaxed, as if hanging, and your throat uninhibited and open. Aim for an in-breath that’s neither noisy nor inhibited, and feel your lower torso relax and drop as you take in air. This is slow, detailed work which involves observing the slow opening of the throat space on an in-breath rather than trying to ‘grab’ a breath to sing.

You run out of breath on a short phrase

If this happens for you, it may not be the troubling phrase, but the one before it. You may need to finish the final note of the prior phrase to allow time to take the breath required for the next phrase. This requires work on your breath management.

Take this small step: Isolate some phrases in a vocalise or song and repeat them to identify where the problem lies. This helps you develop a deeper understanding of how your breath support works. This intricate step may feel like you’re interrupting the flow of a song, but with repeated finessing, your new, strengthened breath support will transfer to other songs and allow you to achieve more challenging repertoire.

Anne R. during our 2025 Studio Concert

Leaving your throat open as you sing

Resisting the urge to close the back of your mouth and throat space while you sing takes time. Time to notice the moves – or lack of – and hear the change in your tonal colour.

Take this small step: Sing just the vowels of the words in a phrase. This high-level skill doesn’t come overnight, as your brain needs to pay attention to the space in your throat and coordinate with other skills, such as breath control and the unified, precise moves of your articulators between the vowels.

Improving your use of consonants

For most beginner singers, consonants are often too weak to decipher the word. In speech, use of consonants interacts with several articulators (tongue, lips, teeth, soft palate), but if consonants are overly pressed they may create tightness in your throat, which won’t help your singing. So, consonants need attention to efficiently use articulators while keeping your throat space open.

Take this small step: Try two consonants, such as k (kit) and g (go). These are called stop consonants, because they momentarily stop air before it bursts through a small opening.

Repeat these several times, and if an ‘uh’ sound follows the voicing, keep it very short. Notice what your articulators are doing. Is breath/air involved? Try repeating each consonant with much effort, then little effort. You need to feel a vibration against the soft palate at the back of your throat, but not so much that it creates undue pressure.

Interval training is for all singers

Nancy performing God Help the Outcasts

Beginner singers especially need to work on intervals (the distance between two musical pitches). Whether wide or narrow, descending or ascending, intervals need accuracy, so you don’t sound out of tune, and can ably sing the various intervals in a song, which tell its story.

Take this small step: When you’re singing on a downward scale, if it sounds muddy at some points, this is most likely at the semi tone interval. This requires slow and deep listening to identify the fault in pitch and correct it.

Hearing smaller intervals is hard because you are using intricate muscle memory and finely tuning your ear to locate the pitch. This is important work for singers who want to use riffs, embellishments, and improvisation.

When you feel and hear the results of working on small, focused actions, you’re not only embedding reliable voice skills, you’ll most likely find more meaning in your craft and the incentive to go further.

A 5- or 10-week singing training package offers the regularity to hone those small skills that add up to big wins. To learn more, call 0402 409 106. And sign up to our regular newsletter for more singing tips.