You were told you can’t sing by somebody who doesn’t understand singing

Let encouragement, knowledge, and an open mind be your guide

Can anyone sing?

A worryingly large number of adults have a variation on a story that sounds similar to the one below. An ‘expert’ or teacher has told someone that they can’t sing, typically at a young age.

I hear this one so often, I felt it necessary to open up a discussion, and dispel some myths on the topic.

‘We were made to line up and sing. The teacher walked down the line with their hand cupping their ear, and those that ‘couldn’t’ sing were told to sit down, mime, or pulled out of the line altogether.’

The childhood experience of far too many people

Feel free to comment below if this is you. I’m curious to know how widespread this experience is.

The problem is that this perpetuates not only an unhelpful myth about music, but the acquisition of skills in general.

The myth goes something along the lines of this: Either you can, or you can’t.

Let’s explore why this is as unhelpful as it is untrue.

Understanding How The Voice Develops

The instrument we call the voice changes throughout our lives.

The smaller the instrument, generally the higher the pitch. Babies and children make higher-pitched noises, which will naturally lower as we grow over time. For all sorts of reasons, the timbre of our voice changes with us throughout our lives. It’s biology, and it’s always moving.

As our bones harden with age, so does the resonance in our sound. Gain or lose a significant amount of weight, the sound changes. Like boys, girls’ voices also change as teenagers and will continue to do so throughout our lives as the muscles of the larynx lengthen and thicken.

The beauty is that just as we’re physically unique, so too are our voices. All the ways we use our voices, from our speaking habits to our singing, all leave an imprint on the sound.

Voices develop at different rates in different ways. But too many people are told they cannot sing because of a lack of understanding of how voices actually develop.

The first step any good singing teacher or music leader takes when dealing with a voice is ensuring that the middle of the voice is consistent and well-knitted together.

Consistency is the most important step. Well-roundedness, timbre, range, dynamics, and even intonation are all things that can be improved in time with the right guidance.

Imitating The Wrong Sounds For Singing

Trying to sing a part that is too high or too low for your tessitura (comfortable vocal range) is a sure fire way to encounter problems down the line. If Barry White (Bass Voice) attempted to sing a Freddy Mercury (Tenor Voice) song at the same pitch, it’s probable that he would cause a diplomatic incident at the ticket office.

Our internal ear is different to our external ear: or what we hear when we sing is different to what our audience hears.

Singing is an aural tradition

The learning is imitative, we copy the sounds, in the same way we pick up accents when immersed in the culture of an area.

It might even go further than that. Singers of a given genre will generally imitate the musical soundworld of the instruments being played. Think of Louis Armstrong sounding like a jazz trumpet, a bluegrass singer sounding like a banjo, an opera singer like a cello.

Today, with so much electronic music and that rancid invention auto-tune, it is extraordinary how many people are imitating flat, robotic, and lifeless sounds.

Of course the singing is unlikely to be exceptional if we are imitating robots, placing the voice where it doesn’t want to go like in the nose, or swallowing the sound like Kermit the frog.

This is by no means genre specific either. A cursory glance at singing instruction on the internet in just about any style will unleash all manner of confusion and contradiction.

So with a lack of trustworthy external ears that understand how to guide your instrument, and a world of confusion about what good healthy development sounds and feels like, it is likely that the beliefs you hold about your ability to sing would more positive had you experienced different circumstances.

The good news is that it is never too late to make improvement and learn how to sing.

Round Pegs In Square Holes – Singing Something You Are Not

The more unusual voices are our first victim. Typically larger, or more resonant voices, are the quickest to be accused of being unable to sing. Maria Callas, one of the greatest singers of all time, was told her voice was ‘ugly’ when she was starting out.

The tallest nail gets the hammer first.

Unless you were lucky to begin your singing journey with both considerable confidence and technical proficiency, it is unlikely that you will be able to negotiate your instrument in settings obsessed with making everyone sound the ‘same’.

If this is you, then trying to match the tone of everyone around you is probably counter-intuitive. Different instruments playing the exact same pitch will approach this differently and have slightly different outcomes.

Think about the tinny sound of a glockenspiel, compared to a piano, then a trumpet, and so on. Orchestras can play a unison note, but it is inevitable that we will have an array of timbres.

And ensembles would be forever limited if it weren’t for such a varied palette. Unhelpful perceptions about how a voice ‘should’ sound can stop a potentially great voice dead in it’s tracks.

Trying to sing something you are not is as fruitful as trying to be someone you are not.

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all. We are all built differently on a physical level, just look at the contrast in athletes. The cyclist is built very different from the bodybuilder, the long-distance runner from the shot putter. Like our bodies, our voices have natural predispositions too.

Some voices have considerable natural resonance, others are more precise. There are so many different practices and musical traditions. It’s unlikely that the person claiming you can’t sing has much authority beyond narrow perceptions of how voices ‘should’ sound.

The right guidance with a trusted set of ears is the variable. Singing well is a process, and requires encouragement from the perspective of what you could sing like, rather than your current perceptions.

The Role Of Practise In Improving Singing

The greatest system ever devised for the training of skills and tacit knowledge is the apprenticeship system of the Middle Ages. Apprentices would sign a contract committing to a term of seven years, after which they would have to produce a master work in order to advance to the rank of journeymen. Adding up these hours would total more than 10,000 hours, enough to establish exceptional proficiency.

The Gothic Cathedrals of Europe, monuments of stability, craftsmanship, and beauty, were constructed under this system.

Without book or blueprint.

Durham Cathedral took a mere 40 years to build, at the height of the apprenticeship system.

Progress with anything isn’t linear.

Expecting to be excellent at something immediately, within the first dozen or so attempts, is highly unlikely. You likely won’t be all that good in the first 100 to 500 hours of working at the craft.

In a time that is obsessed with the instantaneous, with golden tickets and quick wins, take reassurance that getting good at a craft requires consistency over time. This is as true for singing as it is any other field of human endeavour.

As a child, Mozart was obsessed with the piano to the point that his parents had to drag him to bed. Leonardo da Vinci, born illegitimate and deprived of an education, would draw voraciously for hours to the point he developed something akin to x-ray vision. His developed and trained skills for perception in time becoming too big to ignore.

All of the great achievements and discoveries of history, including those yet to come, are derived from this profound level of focus and depth that comes from immersion in an activity over time.

You will forgive me for assuming that the person who told you that you can’t sing probably had no idea.

When starting out with singing (or just about anything), we are an outsider. We simply don’t know the rules. We might not understand the relationship between breathing and release, how we form vowels. How much is too much before we get fatigued. How to approach extending the range, or simply feeling comfortable singing in front of others.

Time spent learning the craft is the most important variable.

In time, we learn the rules. We move from a novice, through towards competence, to a practitioner, and eventually something akin to the journeymen of old.

Let’s refer back to our most unhelpful myth, with a slight revision:

Either you can, or you can’t (YET!)

If you want to develop your singing, please explore my Singing Tuition page.