How to Sing Better: Brightening Your Vocal Tone

Many people can sing well. Many people have good vocal ranges and can hit lots of low and high notes. On the flip side, many people cannot sing well naturally and do not have the best vocal range. However, one thing both have in common is their need to produce a crisp vocal tone that brightens up the voice. It happens too often that while people are singing in pitch (or even out of pitch), their sound will tend to be dull (on the flat side) or immature sounding (on the sharp side). Learning how to sing with quality vocal tone will produce vibrant and rich tone colors that will captivate audiences of any kind (a real audience or just family and friends).

The first step to learning how to brighten and produce quality vocal tone is learning what two factors influence the "brightness" of your tone: vocal cord closure and tonal resonance¹. When these two things are set correctly in place, your vocal tone will be rich, full and pleasing to hear.

The vocal cords are where tone is originally produced. Without the correct touching of these cords, your tone will be distorted: too much closure leads to a very tense and harsh tone and too little closure leads to an airy and weightless tone. The idea of vocal cord closure is to strengthen the vocal cords enough so that those muscles do all the work for you! The way you strengthen the vocal cords are through exercises such as lip rolls, tongue trills, and other various edge exercises (squeaky sounds - stick your tongue out of your mouth and say the word "ahh" like in the baby cry "waaaaaah"). The lip rolls, tongue trills and edge exercises focus on building the strength of your vocal cords so they come together correctly and produce quality tone.

The resonance cavities (mainly your mouth and head, but also your throat) are where your tone is compacted and balanced to produce sound. If you have too much mouth resonance, your tone will sound as if it "splats" all the time, giving it a very dull sound. If you have too much head resonance, your tone will sound very light, giving it a weightless feeling. The idea of good resonance is to create a good blend between your mouth and head resonators when singing. Doing this will sweeten your vocal tone tremendously.

One may say, "This is so much to think about!" True, it is a lot to think about when singing, but if you focus on doing those exercises mentioned earlier, these two areas of your voice will begin to fall into place. Yes, it takes practice, but practicing with these exercises will brighten up your tone in no time flat.

1. "Use Vocal Tonality Exercises To Sweeten Your Vocal Tone." Become a Singing Master