You do not need to understand vocal anatomy to learn how to sing.
How do I know that you don't need to know vocal anatomy when learning to sing?
Because I learned how to sing without knowing, understanding or focusing on vocal anatomy at all!
If you'd like to see how my voice transformed over the course of my 12-year (and counting) vocal journey, here's the video where I compare each year of my voice! All of my improvement was achieved without knowing or focusing on vocal anatomy at all.
It is optional to learn vocal anatomy when learning to sing, and in my case, it wasn’t necessary at all.
On this subject, I am going to speak on my personal experience of attempting to learn vocal anatomy (which ultimately did not help me learn), and explain everything that did help me learn to sing instead. However, though vocal anatomy didn’t help me learn, it doesn’t mean it can’t help other people learn how to sing. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with learning and understanding how your voice works anatomically. But after years of attempting to learn that way, and getting more and more confused and unable to figure out how to sing, I decided to stop trying to learn it that way, and I found another way that felt so much easier, simpler and faster to me. I am going to share with you every single thing that helped me learn to sing with full freedom, anatomy knowledge-free!
My experience with trying to learn how to sing by focusing on vocal anatomy
This blog isn’t to say there is anything wrong with learning to sing by studying vocal anatomy.
This blog is for anyone who is trying to learn how to sing based on the anatomy of the voice, but still hasn't found any success that way.
When I first started learning to sing, I started with trying to understand the vocal anatomy. But no matter what article I read, what video I watched, or what anatomy-based teacher I had, it still didn't click for me. If you have been trying to learn how to sing from an anatomy perspective and have been hitting wall after wall after wall... it might just mean that this isn’t the way you learn how to sing. It may be how others do, but you don’t have to learn to sing that way. We all learn things differently, and anatomy wasn't the route for me. I still learned how to sing, just a different way. And so can you! I know just how frustrating it was for me to try and fail to learn how to sing by learning vocal anatomy, and how it made me feel like I was dumb or naive or just not destined to be a singer.
But that isn’t true.
If you are coming here to find a new, non-anatomy approach to singing, this blog is for you!
I will one more time reiterate that I am not trying to say that there is anything wrong with learning vocal anatomy if that works for you.
This blog is for those whom learning anatomy does not help.
So, if that's you, I've got you covered! I am now going to share every single thing I did to learn how to sing without understanding or studying vocal anatomy.
Why You Don’t Need to Learn Vocal Anatomy in Order to Sing
Say you’re learning how to do a squat exercise.
You are working with a trainer, and they are teaching you how to do a squat by showing you diagrams about your legs and torso, displaying all of your muscles, tendons, ligaments—everything anatomically involved in doing a squat. They explain to you what happens when you squat; what muscles you engage, what do your tendons and ligaments etc are doing while you perform this action.
According to restorefunction.com.au, "The primary muscles working at the hip during a squat are the gluteus maximus and the hamstrings. The gluteus maximus acts eccentrically to control the descent, and concentrically during the ascent. The hamstrings function at the hip to assist the gluteus maximus during hip flexion and extension." (x)
I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that didn't make a whole lot of sense to you, because it sure didn't for me. That is really interesting to know how we anatomically perform a squat, however I think if someone explained it to me like that, I would be so confused that I wouldn't even bother learning how to do it.
Truthfully, I don’t even know what a "hip flexion" exactly is. I don’t know what I’m exactly doing with my body anatomically to perform the skill of a squat movement. I do squat exercises often throughout the week, and yet I don't understand any part of the anatomy of my legs.
However…
If I don’t understand the anatomy of a squat, then… how am I able to do it?
Let’s rewind—
What if instead of talking about muscles and hip flexion, they just told you, “Stand up, then bend down like you’re going to sit in a chair. Then, hover there, like you’re sitting on that invisible chair.”
Isn’t this how we learned how to do a squat?
Of course to do one properly they encourage you to keep your back straight, keep your weight off your toes and knees, etc.
But do they ever mention what our specific muscles and hamstrings and anatomy are doing?
We learn how to do squats this way much easier and faster and simpler by relating it to something else we do: sitting in a chair. We know how to sit in a chair. We can immediately and naturally understand how to do a squat when we relate it to sitting on a chair. If we’re doing a proper squat with our back straight, a trainer might relate that to pretending you are doing it against a wall, and you want your back to completely be touching the wall; not leaning forward.
That is still a relatable way to understand what our body should be doing, without understanding exactly how our body is doing it.
This doesn’t just work with squats, either. It works for walking, running, jumping, learning gymnastics, other exercises, handwriting, typing, any kind of skill in a sport. Because no matter what you are learning in any sport, you can relate it to something you already know how to do in some way. Squats are similar to sitting in a chair. Doing a cartwheel: first you put one hand on the ground, then another, then kick your legs over and imagine a wheel motion. Does it take practice and polishing and extra instruction? Of course. Kick a little harder. Keep your back straight. Spread your fingers evenly.
We still aren’t thinking about what our anatomy is doing at all.
And the most important thing in regard to singing, is that we don’t focus on anatomy when we speak.
We use our voice every single day, and I would bet you don’t think about how to properly open and close your vocal cords to speak, to whisper, to yell, to scream when startled, to squeal in excitement, and so on. You probably don’t think about your larynx position, your pharynx, compression or any other vocal anatomy term that I still don’t know the definition of.
Being able to learn based on relatability or copying what we see (which is how babies learn) goes for any physical skill, and singing is a physical skill.
Also, keep in mind the biggest proof that you don't need to understand vocal anatomy to learn how to sing: children who are naturally good singers, who learned based on feeling and intuition. Or, how many people in the world are incredible singers who just shrug when asked how they learned to sing? If you go ask every singer how they learned to sing, you'll hear probably more than half of the singing population say that they did not learn based on vocal anatomy.
Again; this is not to say that you can’t learn how to do a squat or throw a ball by understanding exactly what’s happening with your muscles and anatomy. But… at least in my experience, it was far more confusing to think of. If you like vocal anatomy and want to learn that way, be my guest! However if you would like a simpler way to think of singing and to learn based on relating singing to things we already know and understand, this perspective is for you!
Instead of vocal anatomy, I learned how to sing by realizing that we already do every singing technique in daily life. We use our voices in many, many ways in daily life that we just don’t associate with singing. Everything changed for me when I wondered to myself why I can hit higher pitches when speaking, but not when singing. Or why I could hum high notes without straining, but not be able to sing them without straining.
The answer is just that we didn’t associate these things with singing.
Below is every part of how to learn how to sing, and associate things we already do with singing.
So let’s get started!
How I Learned How to Sing Without Learning Vocal Anatomy
The way that I learned to sing is based on relating singing to things I already knew how to do naturally.
Through all of my experimenting with my voice, I discovered that there are really only 3 parts to learning to sing:
Vocal Placement (Also known as the 3 Vocal Registers. Vocal Placement is the 3 places you put, or concentrate, your voice in your mouth when you sing in order to get your voice to access all the notes in your range with freedom and ease. Vocal placement is your ability to sing low notes, high notes and all the notes in between with complete freedom and ease to sing either softly or powerfully without needing to push or strain.)
Breathing from your Diaphragm (This just means breathing lower and deeper than you usually do, in order to have more air to draw from for singing)
Singing Vowels (Singing Vowels are just the way you shape your mouth when you sing in order to create space)
We’ll start with vocal placement first!
How I Learned Vocal Placement Without Learning Vocal Anatomy
Essentially, vocal placement is where we place (put) our voice in our mouth. Pretty much, it’s where you feel your voice in your mouth.
You “feel” your voice by a sort of vibration or buzz (also known as "resonance"). If you hum a low note and then hum a high note, you’ll feel that vibration move to a different place in your body -- you'll feel the lower notes vibrate a little in your chest and mouth, and the high notes in your mouth and in your head.
Here is a diagram of how most people who strain think their voice does as they go higher (the dotted lines represent the space in your mouth):
NOT how your voice moves
Think of the orange line as your voice going up all the way to the highest notes in your range.
This is how most people think of singing higher.
That's also where the term "reach for the high notes" comes from. This idea that we have to reach up.
But what if I told you that those high notes... aren't actually UP?
Straining doesn't work because you're attempting to reach high notes that you think are up through the top of your head, but those notes are actually NOT THERE.
Those notes aren't there because there is no place for your voice up there! If you try to sing straight up through the top of your range, halfway there you're going to hit something hard.
The roof of your mouth.
Singing requires space. And if you try singing straight up, there is no space there. The roof of your mouth prevents you from moving your voice higher!
What we have to do is move our voice somewhere where your voice can move.
For example, it's the same idea as if you're trying to reach something in the backseat of the car, and your arm simply doesn't reach, if you keep trying to push your arm for it, you'll end up hurting yourself. Instead, what do we do?
We shift our position, or we use a different arm, or perhaps try to kick it toward ourselves.
Bottom line: if we cannot physically do something using one part of our body, we try to achieve it with another.
This is the same exact situation with your voice.
Except, think of what you're reaching for as the notes or the volume you want.
We can keep reaching and reaching and reaching, but we can't reach those notes the same way our arm can't reach that thing in the backseat.
That doesn't mean that we can't find a way to reach those notes, however. Just like in the car, we just have to use a part of our body that can reach it.
And the biggest secret of singing (though I have no idea why it's such a secret!):
Your voice does not move STRAIGHT up; it moves BACKWARDS!
how your voice DOES move!
This is how your voice moves!
Think about it logically; if we hit the roof of our mouth in the halfway point of our range, and we can't move our voice up because there's no space there, where do we have space to move it? Where in our mouth can we go? Not forward, because that's no longer in our mouth. Not down, because there's no space there either. But, we do have space if we move up and backward.
When you move your voice like this, there are three distinct places you're utilizing. And they're the three voices.
The Three Voices
There are three places we can use to sing in our voice. But unless you've had some vocal training, you're probably only utilizing one. Therefore, you're trying to hit a whole bunch of notes that don't exist where you're singing.
The Two Main Voices:
Head Voice
Chest Voice
These are your two main voices. And don't worry; you've already used them both throughout your life. You've probably used them both already today!
But you might not have used one or the other while you sing.
Chest Voice is the lowest part of your voice. When you sing in chest voice, you'll feel it resonate (a little vibration feeling in your body) in your chest as well as in your mouth, closer to your teeth. Chest voice is speaking or talking voice. So, the entire time you spend talking to someone, you're using chest voice! It's a very full sound - the fullest sound your voice can physically make.
Here is a video I made for Chest Voice, with the exercises I used to learn this placement!
Head Voice (also known as falsetto) is the opposite of chest voice; it's the highest part of your voice. When you sing in head voice, you'll feel it resonate in the back of your head, or sometimes even the whole upper half of your head. You've also used head voice many, many times, and you might have even used it today already. Head voice is a very soft, light voice, and we often use it to speak to a young child, baby, puppy or cute animal. It's the voice you use when you go, "What a good boy!" or "Got your nose!"
And here is my Head Voice video, with easy exercises you can use to learn this placement!
Often, new singers are used to only singing in just one of these two voices. So, those who are used to singing in only chest voice have trouble with high notes, and they're the culprits of major straining and pushing, because they're trying to reach high notes, and high notes don't exist in chest voice alone. And those who only sing in head voice (ahem, where I started) have an impossible time trying to sing with any kind of volume, because head voice in of itself is soft and light, and physically cannot give you the fullness that chest voice can.
But, even when you learn both of these voices, you still run into a problem.
Switching between them.
There's an area between them, a few notes in your range that sit right between chest voice and head voice, that is called your vocal break. This is literally where your voice breaks from chest voice into head voice. And when you try to switch between these, it tends to be very abrupt, and it's not seamless. This can also make people want to strain to push through that break.
BUT, there is a solution!
And that's the third voice, which isn't exactly it's own voice, but it's a mixture of head and chest voice.
And that is mixed voice.
Mixed Voice
Mixed Voice is a lifesaver. And it's often the one step singers don't know they need to take, and leaves them frustrated for years and years (ahem, me).
Mixed Voice is the transition area between Chest Voice and Head Voice. It's a mixture between the two, that allows you to seamlessly transition between them without that break, and sing in that break without a problem. (post on HOW to sing in mixed voice coming soon!)
Here is the video on mixed voice, as well as the exercise that taught me how to sing in mixed voice, the "Nay" exercise!
The Three Voices:
Chest Voice
Mixed Voice
Head Voice
the three voice placements!
Think of vocal placement using this image:
Chest Voice Mixed Voice Head Voice
When you put yellow and blue together, they create green. Green is a mixture of yellow and blue. (Yellow didn't read well in the diagram I drew, so pretend that orange is yellow!)
Learning to sing without straining, with complete freedom, is about relaxing your muscles and learning to move your voice.
Think about it like the gears of a car. If you want to drive slow, first gear is fine. But when you want to drive faster, you need to move up to a higher gear to physically allow the car to travel at those speeds. If you try to go 60mph in first gear, I think you know what will happen. You'll hear a whole bunch of bad noises, and perhaps damage the car. And you will definitely not be driving smoothly.
Why You Don't Need to Learn Vocal Anatomy to Sing in Head Voice
Because we use Head Voice in daily life!
Head Voice is the epitome of the “lullaby” type of singing. It’s quiet singing, the idea that you don’t want to wake someone up who is sleeping nearby.
Head Voice is also the same voice you use when you talk to a cute puppy or baby. The “Awwww, you’re so cute!” or “You’re such a good boy/girl!” voice. This is Head Voice!
Also, any time you speak to someone quietly, you are using Head Voice.
See? You probably already used Head Voice today!
Just apply this idea to singing, and you’re singing in Head Voice!
Why You Don't Need to Learn Vocal Anatomy to Sing in Chest Voice / Belting
Just like Head Voice, we also use Chest Voice in daily life!
If you speak, you know how to use Chest Voice.
If you are singing lower notes and it feels very different than speaking, then you are not correctly in Chest Voice. It should feel identical! The only change you need to make for your lower notes is adding in vowels to make it sound more polished.
Now - Chest Voice, all through your range (not just low notes) is also known as belting.
How have we used this belting placement in daily life?
Whenever you yell.
If you yell to someone, “Hey, go long!” or “Watch out!” or if you’re angry, “I can’t believe you!” etc etc, you are yelling. But think: when you yell in daily life… you don’t strain to do so.
Your voice already naturally knows how to change placement to allow you more volume and a higher pitch.
That is the essence of belting! (However, if you are learning to belt, please refrain from using yelling as the way to teach yourself, since in my own experience the idea of approaching it like yelling can lead to a tendency to strain.)
We also enter belting placement by making a complaining sound, such as (a higher pitched) “Ughhhhhhhhh!” or “Ewwwww!” Or, the same sound kids use on a playground, mocking each other with a “Na na na na na!” There is another thing we do in daily life (okay, probably not daily life), but this is something you probably have done at least once in your life.
And that’s to speak like a Valley Girl.
The Valley Girl accent (the stereotypical Californian, “Mean Girls” type of accent) is in the exact same placement as belting. (This exercise I do suggest, haha!)
Mixed Voice in Daily Life
So, how have we used Mixed Voice in Daily Life?
Well, have you ever hummed anything in your life?
Great!
You know how to find Mixed Voice.
Humming is the exact placement of Mixed Voice! The trick of it is to be able to keep your voice in that placement… while your mouth is open.
But don’t worry - you’ve done that before too!
One of the best examples of your voice in the Mixed Voice placement in daily life is when you imitate a baby crying. That exact sound is Mixed Voice! Granted, it’s Mixed Voice in its rawest form, so it doesn’t sound too good. But once you add in singing vowels, it is beautiful, polished singing!
Please keep in mind that though we have used Head Voice, Mixed Voice and Chest Voice in our lives many many times before, learning to use these placements while singing takes a long time of pratice! Your muscles are not used to singing this way and your old singing habits tend to get in the way too. Habits generally take 2-4 months to start becoming new habits, and it was a solid year of semi-daily practice to get Mixed Voice into my muscle memory, and another year for me to get Chest Voice and Belting under my belt (couldn't resist the pun).
Singing is all about muscles and muscle habits! Singing isn't a one-and-done kind of thing, the same way that learning to do 100 pushups at once or learning how to ride a bike required repeated practice over time. But you will get there!
Breathing
The way I learned to sing was on relating singing to what I do in everyday life, and breathing from your diaphragm is no exception from that.
Anatomically, the diaphragm everyone is talking about is a horizontal muscle that moves down when you breathe in and up when you breathe out, which allows you room to take in air, and then helps you expel that air out. It’s important for singing because since singing requires longer notes to sing, and for our voice to come out more supported than speaking, we need to be able to take in more air at once. However, knowing this information didn’t help me learn how to breathe. Breathing was one of the most elusive things for me to learn.
That is, until I learned that we already breathe this way naturally every single day!
Everyone naturally breathes from their diaphragm (deeper and lower) while laying down on their backs.
Try it!
First, lay down on a couch, bed or even your floor.
The number one way to tell if you’re breathing from your diaphragm instead of your lungs is to notice that your stomach moves out when you breathe, your chest doesn’t, and your shoulders stay put. When you breathe from your lungs (like normal) your chest and shoulders rise. When you sing, your chest and shoulders should not rise (though everything is connected; you will see them move, but a tiny fraction of the amount they used to). When you sing, the movement you should make when you breathe is for your stomach to expand forward with your air. This is showing you that your diaphragm has moved far down enough to get a nice, low breath.
Put your hands on your stomach, and notice that, while laying down, your stomach moves outward. Your chest and shoulders do not. And this happens naturally.
But notice when you sit or stand back up, you’re back to breathing from your lungs and your chest and shoulders rise again.
Why?
Gravity! For whatever reason, you always breathe up and down, so, toward the sky and back toward the ground. So when you sit or stand up, you breathe with your chest and shoulders rising to the sky. When you lay down, your stomach raises to the sky. I’ve no idea why, but if you were wondering, there’s the general answer. (If you're a scientist and you know why, please leave a comment letting me know why!)
But now, the big question: how do you train yourself to breathe from your diaphragm while sitting up or standing up?
There are a million tricks people have invented to teach you to do this, but nothing I ever saw helped me. I tried everything on the internet, but still, I really struggled with being able to breathe this way sitting or standing up.
So, one night, I invented my own trick, and I can 100% guarantee to you that it’s a foolproof method to teach you how to do this yourself.
Step 1 - Lie on your back, preferably on the floor.
Step 2 - Notice that you’re breathing from your stomach, not your chest.
Step 3 - Lift your chest and torso up about an inch off the ground, propping yourself up on your elbows to stay there. Notice that you’re still breathing from your stomach.
Step 4 - Lift yourself up another inch. Notice that you’re still breathing from your stomach.
Step 5 - Lift yourself up until you hit the point where you switch to breathing from your lungs. Notice this.
Step 6 - Try to force yourself to breathe from your stomach instead. If this is hard, go back down an inch, see how it feels again to breathe from your stomach. Then raise yourself up and make yourself breathe into your stomach instead. Do not leave this step until you can do this.
Step 7 - Keep lifting yourself up inch by inch, repeating step 6 at each new level until you reach an upright sitting position.
This was a trick I made up one night after getting frustrated with the though, “I can do this laying down, why can’t I do it sitting up?” I wondered when the switch happened, from diaphragm to lungs, and I found it about halfway up. I made myself breathe from my stomach instead, and then made it to standing and breathing from my diaphragm.
With breathing, I didn’t focus on the diaphragm muscle, my lungs, or anything anatomical. I just focused on the feeling of breathing lower that I did naturally when laying down, and I worked to translate that to an upright position (which took several weeks to be able to do, and get used to!)
You’ll see soon with the rest of this blog that all singing is relatable to things we already do.
So let’s see how it works with singing vowels!
Singing Vowels (Mouth Shapes)
If you’ve done even more digging into learning to sing, you may have heard the term “singing vowels.” Singing Vowels are just the way you shape your mouth when you sing.
(I have a very detailed post on what singing vowels are and how to form them, as well as how to practice them and deal with consonants and other things, so if you’d like to check that out, feel free!)
Vowels are very important, and all you need to focus on for vowels is the literal shape you open your mouth into. In essence, this shape that you will maintain while singing is the feeling of having an upright egg on your tongue. You’ll feel your jaw drop (not uncomfortably!), and your mouth will become very tall and narrow, versus wide. When we speak, we shape our mouths very wide and don’t drop our jaw much (which often leads to mumbling!).
The importance of this is to create round space in your mouth for your air to circulate properly. This is what creates clear tone, as well as what allows us to stay on pitch and gives your voice freedom. Without proper mouth shape, you can experience your pitch going flat or sharp, dull tone and you can feel like your voice keeps getting stuck. That’s because your air is getting stuck and unable to circulate! Often, people strain and push their voices due to that stuck feeling, when the real culprit is mouth shape.
Think of mouth shape and air the same way sound reacts in a room. A spacious room that has hardly any furniture or carpeting to absorb the sound and no open windows or open doors (such as a cathedral or a bathroom) gives singers and musicians great acoustics. The sound circulates freely and it’s very concentrated; it has nowhere to escape. On the other hand, if you’re singing in a room that has open windows and open doors and plenty of furniture for sound to absorb into, it has plenty of room to escape. You don’t get that glass-like, beautiful tone that you get in a church.
The same idea goes for how air circulates in your mouth.
Your mouth shape is your room, your breath is your voice. The more space you have in your mouth and the smaller/narrower the opening of your mouth, the more glass-like your voice comes out. If your mouth is open too wide, that’s like opening the windows in the room. You’re letting the air escape and breaking that glass-like tone of your voice. (Not to mention causing a bunch of other issues).
Singers like Ariana Grande and Kelly Clarkson have beautiful glass-like tone because their vowels—their mouth shapes—are so perfectly shaped. They’re both classically trained, and classically trained singers are usually taught very perfect vowels. Anyone can achieve glass-like or autotune-like tone if they perfect their vowel shapes.
Now, let’s talk about what the singing vowels are, and what the mouth shapes look like!
The shape of singing vowels is the most important part to get right. This is where many singers go wrong—they understand that there are singing vowels, they know what they are and how to find them in words. But... they aren’t shaping their mouths correctly.
The most important thing to keep in mind when shaping your mouth is to narrow the opening. Pretty much, you want the corners of your mouth to be closer together; not so wide. The wider your mouth is open, the more air escapes, and the less space you keep in your mouth.
Remember that we’re thinking about our mouth as the “room” our voice sings in—like that cathedral. We want a nice big room with no open windows. So, to make that nice big room, we want our mouth shape to be tall and the opening to be more narrow. My chorus teacher from high school always told us to “imagine an upright egg sitting on your tongue.” Do that now—pretend there’s an upright egg in your mouth. Feel your tongue lower and the back of your mouth lift higher.
This is the kind of space we always need to have.
So, we want the inside shape of our mouth to look more like this (these photos are from my Vowels video, where I discuss all this stuff, except in video-form!):
And less like this:
These 5 singing vowels help you to keep that shape with everything you sing.
The Fish Face Tool
There’s a helpful tool I used when I was first learning my vowels and it’s one I use to teach all my clients (and a tool I learned from that same chorus teacher—thank you!). Pretty much, you’re going to make your face into a fish face.
It also is the exact same feeling/shape your mouth takes on when you drink or blow through a straw! (This is why OOVO/phonation straws work for singers!)
Step 1: Take both hands and open them, making a “high five” hand with both, but don’t put your hands together.
Step 2: Now, flip your hands upside down, toward each other, so that your fingertips point toward the floor, and your wrists are at a right angle. The backs of your hands will now face each other.
Step 3: Now, lift both hands in that position, and press the backs of your hands to your cheeks (one hand on each cheek). If you’re hitting your cheek bone with your wrist, move your hand down so it’s beneath your cheek bone.
Now, push your cheeks toward each other, so that your lips get closer together in a fish face. This isn’t forceful or hard, but make sure your fish face is very, well, fishy. If you’re doing it right, you’re gonna look pretty dumb. Just like me, in this still photo from the video:
The corners of your mouth should be fairly close to each other (not wide, like they are in a smile), and you should feel like you have more space in your mouth. That’s the entire point of vowels—to get more space in your mouth. You should imagine having that upright egg in your mouth—think tall.
This feeling is also the EXACT same as you naturally drinking or blowing through a straw. Notice how much taller your mouth becomes? That's what it feels like to sing with vowel shapes!
This is how your mouth will be shaped as you sing. (You won’t look this dumb in the future, thank goodness; you won’t need to do this hand tool as it becomes natural).
Now, go through and say each vowel sound: Ah, A, E, O, and Oo, while pushing the corners of your mouth in like that, and not moving your hands at all even when you change vowels. This is NOT forceful! Try some singing like this, and hear how already this is changing the tone of your voice into something much more clear and smooth!
Here’s an idea of the mouth shapes your lips form (and feel free to look up performances from singers like Kelly Clarkson, Beyoncé, Ariana Grande, Adele and Josh Groban, who have some of the best vowels I've ever seen! So if you want to learn to sing like Ariana Grande, or to sing like Kelly Clarkson or any of these awesome singers, vowels are where to go!):
Ah - it's almost a circle with your lips. But it’s still more narrow than a perfect circle.
(Ariana Grande)
We use the “Ah” vowel in two different daily scenarios:
When you are in the middle of a conversation and you finally understand something someone said. You go: “Ahhhhhhh, now I get it!”
When you are watching or playing a game, and you (or your sports team) loses points. You go “Ahhhhhhhh!” Imagine how you react when your football team drops a pass or your team’s batter strikes out. You go, “Aww!” or “Ahh!”
This is the same as the Ah vowel in singing! Notice how much taller your mouth is when you do this in daily life?
Just apply that to singing!
O - this one is like an oval. Narrow and tall, like a more open “Oo.”
(Josh Groban)
The 'O' vowel in daily life:
Similarly to “Ah”, when you understand something finally. You go, “Ohhhhh!”
E - E will look like a square with your lips. Really get the corners of your lips to push in for this one. It will deepen the sound of that E.
(Adam Lambert)
Even though the “E” vowel is the exception of the shapes we use in our daily lives, remember: the essence of vowel shapes is that feeling of blowing through a straw. Something we do very often! The only difference is a little bit of a change in how your lips and chin are shaped.
Oo - Oo is the easiest shape to get, because we pretty much do this already when we say words like “do” and “too”.
(Kelly Clarkson)
Daily scenarios you use this vowel:
When you are impressed or excited in a conversation. You go, “Ooooooh!”
When you are sympathizing with someone or something, you may go, “Oooh….”
A - this is where the corners of your lips are at their widest. A is a more open vowel.
(Miley Cyrus)
Daily scenarios you use this vowel:
The slang greeting of: “Ayyyyyy!”
The outburst of the word “Hey!” that you use when someone does something you aren’t happy with (aka, cuts you in line at the store, etc.)
When you're new to this, it's a very unnatural feeling. It’s very unnatural (but not uncomfortable), because we never do this. When we speak, we don’t need all that space. Our vowels aren’t tall when we speak; they're very wide. So, it’s going to take quite a while for this to become second nature. It’s a muscle-memory thing.
Just to see how much muscle memory it’s going to take, pick a vowel, and say it using your hands as a tool. Then, remove your hands and hold that shape. Notice just how different it is from how you speak. Notice the muscles in your cheeks that have to work hard to get your mouth shape to stay like that without your hands as a crutch. (In time, it will not be hard at all to do this).
The most different of all these vowels is e, because when we speak e (as in “see”), the corners of our mouth are at their widest, like we’re smiling. But with singing, e is the second smallest vowel (second only to Oo). That’s going to take some getting used to for sure. But trust me, it's so worth it!
If you want to learn how to find the correct vowel shapes to use for the words you sing, check out the full singing vowels post over here! There, I include more detail on what singing vowels are, how to find them in the words you sing, what to do when you encounter vowel sounds that are between two different vowels (which happens often in American English as well as other languages!), and how to add in consonants without losing your mouth shape. That post is here!
That is how we learn singing vowels without understanding or thinking about anything your vocal cords, larynx or any other anatomical part of your voice is doing. All you need to do for singing vowels is to make that shape, learn how to find which vowel to use when, and practice to get that shape into your muscle memory so you sing that way without thinking about it!
Conclusion
Everything I’ve shared here is everything I used to teach myself to sing, and also to teach every singer I’ve worked with! Many of them were like me; they came from trying to learn how to sing based on anatomy, but were left confused and ultimately unsuccessful. If that has been your experience with learning to sing, please don’t give up hope! Singing is so simple in the end, and if I learned how to do it without understanding or thinking about any of the anatomy, so can you.
I’ll reiterate my disclaimer once more that this was not in any way an attempt to disrespect or say that learning how to sing by focusing on understanding vocal anatomy is wrong. It’s just not how I learned! And since it isn’t how I learned, and I did learn, it just goes to show that learning based on anatomy is not the only way you can learn to sing.
I hope that if you have been unsuccessful with anatomy-based learning so far in your vocal journey, you give some of these techniques and start to see success with your voice!
I’d love to hear from you! Let me know how this goes for you, and if you would like to take a 1-on-1 online voice lesson with me, you can do that here!
Happy Singing!
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