How To Overcome A ‘Child-Like’ Singing Voice
If you feel like your singing style is too simple, and you sound like a kid while singing - here are some exclusive tips from Coach Hanna and Bojana to help you to bring out your expressive, pleasurable singing voice!
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In order for you to overcome a kid-like singing style, you need to first understand what makes your singing voice sound like a child. Here are a few problems that people with a child like singing voice often experience:
1. Throaty, Sharp Voice Tone
The higher you raise your voice, the more painful it gets... to you and to others.
The biggest reason why you sound like a child while singing might be because of your voice tone. But what is voice tone? You can think of voice tone as the colour of your voice, timbre, breathiness, and the way your voice resonates. Some people have a very clear and light voice, while some people might have a breathier, darker and heavier voice while singing. The difference in tone depends largely on your breath support, the tension you exert on your throat (vocal cords), as well as how you modify the inner space of your face (oral, nasal cavity) to shape the resonance of your voice.
If you sound like a child, it is most likely that you are not using enough diaphragm support to release your singing voice in a relaxed mode; instead you constrict your throat more, in order to squeeze out your voice. Moreover, the tension on one’s throat causes it to close up even more, such that your voice comes out piercing. If you continue singing like this for a long period of time, it will cause discomfort and also stress on your vocal cords - you may even end up losing your voice too.
For students who have this problem, the priority of a vocal lesson would be for them to reshape the way of producing their singing (speaking) voice. With the right training and exercises, you can learn how to keep your throat relaxed and open for sound to travel and resonate warmly. You will also learn how to support your voice with the right amount of air and pressure.
2. Singing Multiple Separate Notes
Little sense of melody and flow; lack of emotions.
Phrasing means shaping a sequence of notes in a passage of music, in order to express an emotion or impression.
In written language, words are punctuated with space in-between for efficient visual understanding. But in a spoken language, these words are not always pronounced separately. You pronounce them together to make them flow better. This creates intonation, and this creates the mood of the sentence and emotion as well. Imagine speaking each word separately - how awkward and emotionless would the phrase or sentence would sound like!
Singing a melody or a phrase is similar to speaking. If you sing individual notes of a melody separately, the whole melody loses the connection and sounds overly simplified. It just doesn’t flow. If you have this problem, then you need to learn how to link up a couple of different notes instead of jumping from one to another.
3. No Dynamics
Singing the whole song with an ultimate & even volume creates a dry and boring singing voice.
Dynamics in music is affected by many elements, but mainly comes from the changes of your volume from soft to loud. The main difference of singing from speaking is that it creates a more vivid emotion through the changes of the melody and also to the dynamic. So, if you sing the entire song simply at the same volume, it doesn’t convey the emotion that you are trying to express.
Understanding how the emotionality and intensity of the emotion is expressed through the dynamic changes of your voice is therefore the key step for your singing voice to become meaningful and expressive to the audience, by captivating their ears and their heart!