Why You’re Not Improving as a Singer: six things worth changing
Kate WandAugust 13, 20269 min read
A singer I work with has a remarkable instrument. Huge range, very agile, comfortable up in the sixth octave doing the kind of runs you associate with Ariana Grande or Whitney Houston. When she first came to me her voice cracked and strained around the passaggio, so that is what we have been building: one connected range that moves smoothly instead of breaking in the middle.
A few weeks ago she arrived frustrated. She had sat down to sing an Ariana Grande song and it felt shaky and cracked again, and she could not work out what had undone months of work.
Nothing had undone it. She had been listening to Ariana on repeat, measuring herself against that voice, and when she sang the song she started bending her own instrument into the shape of somebody else’s. The technique was still there. She had just stopped using her own voice to sing with.
I hear a version of this constantly. Singers who practise, who warm up, who genuinely put the hours in, and who feel like nothing is moving. Almost never is the problem effort. It is usually one of six things, and only two of them are about the voice at all.
Short version: if you are practising consistently and still feel stuck, look at these six things. Comparing yourself to finished recordings. Not knowing why you sing. Waiting to feel motivated. Holding every session to a performance standard. Practising songs instead of training the instrument. And expecting a process that takes years to show up in weeks.
Watch the full breakdown on YouTube
Singers who practise consistently but feel stuck are usually held back by one of six things, and only two involve the voice itself: comparing yourself to finished recordings, not knowing why you sing, waiting to feel motivated, holding every session to a performance standard, practising songs instead of training the instrument, and expecting years of change in weeks.
1The comparison problem
Stop measuring your voice against somebody else’s finished record
We learn by imitation. That is not a flaw, it is how the whole thing works. As children we sing along to the radio and absorb something from whoever is singing, and we keep doing it forever. If I sing a Bob Dylan song I do not sound like Bob Dylan, but there is more twang in my voice on Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right than there would be in something else. That is fine. That is style.
It stops being fine when you lose your own voice inside it. Especially when you are mid-repair on something specific, like the singer above smoothing out her passaggio, or the male singers I work with who are still finding their head voice and go home to sing Teddy Swims. They hear a voice that is high, agile and effortless, and conclude they are missing something the other person was born with.
Two things are hiding in that comparison. The first is that you are usually listening to a produced, edited, finished track and comparing it to your practice room. Even the live comparison is unfair, because a singer who is extraordinary live got there through years of coaching and process you never saw. The second is more practical: some voices simply sit somewhere different. Lighter, airier, more forward. Addison Rae could probably go and find the depth of her voice if she wanted to, but her produced sound is not that, and superimposing your instrument onto hers may not be where your voice naturally wants to go or where it can go safely.
Pavarotti said he had studied music his whole life and would carry on studying singing until he stopped singing altogether. There is always something else to learn, always something else to work on. He also said the voice is like a beautiful piece of marble that you then have to sculpt, which I think is exactly right. So be your own sculptor. Pay attention to your own block of marble. You cannot do that while staring at somebody else’s finished sculpture.
2Direction
Know why you sing
This is the one singers skip, and it is the one that quietly decides everything else. If you do not know why you sing, you have a vacuum, and things rush in to fill it. The inner critic. Distraction. Whatever you saw on your phone this morning. Motivation that comes and goes for no reason you can name.
The answers vary enormously, and they change across a life. One singer I work with sings to reach something in herself: to settle her nervous system, to have a conversation with her own interior and with whatever is out there. When she keeps that in view, technical things start to loosen on their own. She gets more resonant, her vowels open, her jaw unlocks, the breath connects to the sound. Not because we drilled it that day. Because she stopped fighting herself.
Other people want something concrete. They play guitar, they write, and they want to sing their own material well enough to record a demo and send it to someone. Or well enough to play a small gig now and then, or to sing around a fire with their family without wincing. Some have wanted to sing their entire lives without ever examining why, and have simply decided it is time to stop leaving that part of themselves in a drawer.
What to do if you genuinely do not know
Not knowing is a legitimate answer, and it is often the most interesting one. The singers who cannot answer this question are usually the most frustrated, because there is nothing to aim at. But the blank space is rarely empty. It is generally sitting on top of something: an old story about your voice, an identity question, a sense of how you are seen. Worth exploring rather than worth solving quickly.
What a clear answer buys you is focus. If you have a gig coming up and you want to reach the audience, you know what to bring into a lesson: harmony, freestyling, riffs, whatever that performance needs. Vague goals cannot be broken into pieces. Specific ones can.
3Getting started
Motivation arrives after you start, not before
I am as guilty of this as anyone. For years I believed I had to wait until I felt it. The right mood, the right afternoon, the right interior and exterior conditions, and then I would do the thing.
That is not how it works. Motivation tends to show up in roughly the first five minutes of doing something, which means waiting for it in advance guarantees it never comes.
So plan instead. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at a set time, warm-ups, and this fortnight the focus is resonance, or breath work, or humming, or open vowels. Build the routine yourself or get help building it, then commit to running it whether or not you feel like it when the time arrives.
This matters even more for writing than for practice. I told one of my students to treat it as a challenge: sit down for fifteen minutes with the intention of working on a new song, and if nothing comes in fifteen minutes, stop. You did your fifteen minutes. Come back another day. What actually happens most of the time is that you start to flow around minute six, and two hours later there is a song. Rick Rubin describes it as putting your antenna out. You cannot pick anything up with the antenna retracted.
The alternative is waiting for perfect conditions, and the cost of that is invisible, which is what makes it so easy to keep paying. Songs that never got written. A voice that never changed. You do not miss them, because they never existed to be missed.
4Standards
Aim for good enough
One of my students, a recovering perfectionist, described it at an open mic better than I could: perfectionism is a carrot on a stick. You reach the thing you were reaching for, and the target has already moved. You never arrive, and in the meantime you are being fairly cruel to yourself about it.
There is a stage for sanding the rough edges, and it comes late. An architect has a phase for ideas and a phase where the building has to be exactly right, because buildings must not fall down. The mistake is applying the second phase’s standard to the first phase’s work.
Accepting good enough also means accepting that a session with no visible breakthrough was still a real session. You came in to work on head voice, it did not cooperate, and the day feels wasted. Meanwhile you were also training resonance, vowel shaping, tongue position, breath support, and, if you were going up chromatically, a pitch map in your brain that gets stronger every time you use it. None of that announces itself.
The same applies to performing. If you are actively rebuilding your voice and you have gigs, you cannot hold those gigs to a finished standard. They will reflect where you are, which is the only thing they can honestly do. That keeps evolving as long as you are kind enough to yourself to keep going. There is a longer piece on this in why perfect technique is not enough on its own.
5What to practise
Train the instrument, not the songs
This is how my students and I work, and it is probably the most concrete item on this list. You are not coming in to learn songs. You are building the instrument that sings them.
Warm-ups and focused technical work are your playground. That is where you explore, try things, apply a technique badly, and gradually apply it well. Then you sing your songs, and the technical work transfers into them by osmosis. Not immediately, and not neatly.
Why it falls apart the moment you sing a song
Singers ask me about this constantly. Things shift in the warm-up, and then the song arrives and it all seems to evaporate. That is normal, and there are two reasons. One is muscle memory: you have sung songs a particular way for years, and years do not undo themselves in a fortnight. The other is that a song pulls you into default mode, where you either imitate the original artist or abandon everything you were working on because now you are Performing.
Bits do come through, though, and they are usually not the bits you were watching for. Your breath may still be all over the place while your jaw has quietly started dropping. Something is landing.
If you want to speed the transfer up, do this. Take one thing you are working on, say breath support. After your warm-ups, run a song as an extension of that exercise rather than as a performance. Pause, breathe properly, open your mouth, drop the jaw, get it wrong, stop, go again consciously. It is not a nice listen. It is the fastest route I know from exercise to song. This is also why a warm-up routine that never changes stops working, which I have written about in why your warm-ups are not improving your voice.
6Time
It is a process, and the process is invisible from the inside
Nothing here happens overnight and there are no shortcuts, which everybody knows and almost nobody believes about their own voice.
Think about children. If you have kids, they are growing every single day, and you cannot see it. You look at them each morning and they are fractionally taller than yesterday and it is completely imperceptible. If you do not have kids, you get the same information from a mirror, on the day you notice a line that was not there before. Change accumulates below the resolution of daily observation. Voices are the same.
So give yourself a reality check. Go and find a recording from when you started genuinely working on your voice, and listen to it. Not to be nice to yourself. To collect evidence. Things have moved, and you cannot hear it in a practice session because you are standing too close.
There is a trap waiting on the other side of this, which is worth naming. We assume that when we arrive somewhere we will know it, feel it, and be satisfied. Mostly we do not. You get to a place you once could not have imagined and register almost nothing, because attention drifts to what is still wrong. Humans track threats well and progress badly.
The counterweight is deliberate and slightly unglamorous: take stock, out loud, in words. How much less does my throat tighten than it did six months ago? How much more connected is my breath than when I did not know what the diaphragm did? Name the things you have already got. Then keep going, because anything you do with intention, done consistently, and not in a way that strains and builds bad habits, produces results. You will feel them. Take the time to enjoy them when they arrive.
Not sure which of these is your block?
Most singers reading a list like this can name four things that might apply and cannot tell which one is actually costing them. A Pro Voice Analysis answers that for your voice specifically.
You send me a recording. I listen properly, work out what is genuinely holding you back technically, and give you a clear path forward with the order to do it in.
For singers who are putting in the work and want to know where it is going.Get Your Voice Analysis →
Common questions
Before you go.
Daily practice without a clear target tends to reinforce what you already do rather than change it. The most common causes are practising songs instead of training the voice itself, comparing your working voice to other singers’ finished recordings, and having no specific reason for singing that tells you what to focus on. Progress is also slow enough to be invisible day to day, so singers who are genuinely improving often cannot feel it. Recording yourself every few months is more informative than how any single session felt.
Noticeable change in tone, ease and range usually takes several months of consistent focused practice, and deeper structural change takes longer than that. The voice is muscle coordination plus habit, and both move slowly. Compare a recording from six months ago with one from today rather than judging week to week. Singers who expect a transformation in a few weeks tend to quit shortly before the change they were working toward arrives.
Both, in that order. Vocal exercises are where you train the coordination itself without the pressure of performing a piece. Songs are where that coordination gets tested and gradually absorbed. If you only practise songs you keep rehearsing your existing habits. To speed up the transfer, pick one thing you are working on technically, such as breath support, and run a song as an extension of that exercise rather than as a performance.
Stop treating motivation as the thing that starts the session. It usually arrives a few minutes after you begin, which means waiting for it in advance guarantees you never start. Schedule specific slots, decide in advance what each block is for, and run the session whether or not you feel like it that day. Knowing why you sing helps too, because a singer with a concrete reason has something to aim at when enthusiasm is low.
Imitation is how everyone learns, and picking up stylistic details from artists you love is normal and useful. The problem starts when you push your voice into another singer’s shape, especially while you are still resolving something technical in your own instrument. You are also usually copying a produced, edited recording rather than a live voice. Sing the song in your own instrument and take the phrasing ideas rather than the sound.
Go back to an old recording. Improvement accumulates too slowly to notice in real time, in the same way you cannot see a child grow day by day. Listen for the specific things you have been working on rather than for a general impression: whether the throat feels less tight, whether the breath connects, whether a passage that used to break now holds. Those markers are more reliable than whether today’s session felt good.
Yes, mostly because the standard keeps moving. Singers who hold every practice session to a finished-performance standard discard useful work and avoid the exposure they need in order to develop. There is a stage for refining and polishing and it comes late. Earlier on, a session counts as successful if you stayed focused on what you set out to work on, even when nothing obviously improved.
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