7 Tips to Improve Your Singing Voice, Eliminate Strain and Sing Stronger High Notes

I put together my top tips to help you improve your singing voice, eliminate strain and sing stronger high notes. I hope it helps you sing your guts out at your next performance!

1. Vocal Wellness Regimen

Voices are sensitive instruments. Your voice requires health and wellness care to stay in optimal performance shape. Here are my top 6 elements in a vocal wellness regimen that will help keep your voice healthy and ready to perform. Your voice will LOVE you back when you do this!

When you aren’t hydrated, breathing diaphragmatically, when your voice is dry and you are not warmed up and focused — any one of these can compromise your performance.

Our Vocal Rescue Kit comes with conditioning cooldowns that decrease inflammation at the vocal folds. Cool downs can be used for warmups when your voice needs some extra help. Learn more here.

2. Develop a solid vocal technique

If you have that dream to have a great voice, or a really good voice, you’ll get there faster with a solid vocal technique. One that teaches diaphragmatic breathing and how to decrease tension in the instrument while building strength.

Check out my tips for singing stronger high notes below.

Start here: Practice vocal technique for 20 min a day using our Singers Gift Vocal Warmups which includes breathing exercises and vocal stretches and massage to eliminate tension while you build and warmup your voice. Learn more here.

3. Work your phrasing and style.

Your voice is a rhythmic instrument as well as a melodic one. Having really strong rhythm is super important to nail the emotion and execution of your songs. Practice your runs and rhythm. Get it super tight!

4. Stop lifting your chin for high notes.

When you lift your chin up it contracts the back of the neck pulling the soft palate down and makes it harder to sing high notes. Keep your head level and your chin down for high notes.

5. Sing stronger high notes.

The top 5 components of singing stronger high notes:

• An oval jaw position. Your jaw should move downward, not spread sideways when you sing. This helps to keep the larynx down improving “the break” area and produces a rounder, fuller tone.
• Tongue down in the back. One of the goals of technique when it comes to belting and singing stronger high notes is to get control over the back of the tongue. While certain vowels will pull the tongue up in the back, you want to practice lowering the back of the tongue to get more control. When the tongue is lowered in the back it helps to control the belt and keep the laryngeal muscles down so you can have more power. I teach this in the “Kah” exercise in the Singers Gift Vocal Warmups.
• Soft palate lift. The soft palate needs to lift up to make room for high notes. When it comes down it squashes the overtones and makes it harder. You can feel the soft palate lift when you begin a yawn or when you bring a cup of water to your lips to drink. It’s a subtle movement that is perfected with a good vocal technique. We teach this in our Singers Gift Vocal Warmups.
• Chin stays level for high notes and does not reach upward. See #4 above.

Visit my Youtube channel to watch demonstrations and get more of my vocal tips like these.

For all of my tips and tools to strengthen your voice and have stand out performances I gathered all of my top guidance and put it in one place to for you in The Ultimate Performer Guidebook.

This resource is a deep dive into all of the tools and techniques I’ve taught my artists over the years – and they will help you to be THE VERY BEST – so that you can go out there and BE THE STAR you were born to be.