In my experience, one sure-fire way to improve your singing is to learn how to trust that your body knows how to make sound. What do I mean by that? The human body evolved with an incredibly effective and efficient mechanism for producing and resonating sound. By learning how to stop overdoing, over-thinking, and trying so hard to make and manipulate your sound, you can allow your body to do what it already knows how to do: make a much more free and resonant sound while singing.
To experience this concept in action, pretend you are playing with some young children who have asked you to imitate an ambulance or a fire truck. Make a siren sound in the higher part of your register and experience how freely those notes come out when you are not thinking about “singing” them, but rather just playing a game with some kids. That is your body doing what it already knows how to do in a free and efficient way. Unfortunately, many of us don’t trust our bodies to do this while singing, so we adopt all kinds of habits that we think are helping our sound, but really only get in the way.
One major tool that can help you get out of your own way is to stop listening to yourself as you sing. Listen to the accompaniment, but stop paying attention to the sound of your singing voice as you hear it inside your head. What you hear inside your head is not what we hear out here (which is often why it’s so strange to hear our voices on an answering machine). If you judge your singing by how it sounds inside your head then you are likely making adjustments to that sound based on false information.
Instead, focus on what good singing and good technique feels like inside your body. At first, this can be hard to do without the help of a good teacher. Whenever your instructor says, “Good! Yes! Right!” while you are singing, that’s the moment to check in with your body to ask yourself questions such as: What was I dong with my lower support there? What was going on in my ribs? How did my soft palate and my tongue feel? What was I feeling (or not feeling) in my jaw? etc. Then it’s your job to recall and recreate those feelings every time you open your mouth to sing. Once you understand what good singing feels like in your body (as opposed to what you think good singing should sound like inside your head) you will be able to instill the muscle memory of good technique and find it consistently every time.
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