Unlock Your Vocal Power: 5 Ways to Sing With Confidence

Unlock Your Vocal Power: 5 Ways to Sing With Confidence

Everyone with a desire to sing has a dream to touch the world. Control over your singing voice helps you reach your audience and feel the confidence that comes from knowing what you are doing.

It starts with getting control over your instrument. The best way to do that is to practice vocal technique that is based in voice building and vocal health. Learn more about the Cole Vocal Method.

Your voice is an instrument inside the body. Gaining control over your voice has to do with getting control over the mechanics of the voice and breathing. Singing with great emotion starts with technique. Without it, the voice will fall flat.

Here’s a quick outline of the topics covered in today’s blog:

• Mastering Breath Control
• Building True Vocal Strength
• Control Over Your High Notes
• Building Tone and Resonance
• Mindset Tools to Sing With Courage and Conviction

Let’s dive in!

Mastering Breath Control

Real breath control starts by breathing diaphragmatically deep into the lower triangles of the lungs and then controlling the breath as you sing.

It starts with moving the ribs. This is where it begins.

Let’s do a quick exercise.

Put your hands on your ribs. Exhale. Now hold your ribs firmly with pressure and breathe slowly into your hands. Do you feel the ribs slowly expand and swing outwards into your hands? The trick is to breathe slowly and not too fast and you’ll feel the ribs move.

This is the beginning of breathing diaphragmatically.

Next, it’s not only how you breathe that gets the results over mastering your breath, it’s what you do with the breath as you sing and how strong your instrument is.

Building True Vocal Strength

To sing with more confidence, the voice needs to have more strength and consistency. The way to build strength is to learn how to sing correctly using the proper techniques that will increase sound and power in your singing voice.

Singers often try to gain more power by singing more forcefully or loudly. But this only constricts and mutes their sound and can even cause vocal problems over time.

Vocal techniques and approaches that work with the voice instead of against it will help the voice resonate, creating more sound and power that comes from true vocal strength.

In my Cole Vocal Method I use a technique called “drinking the tone”. It helps the singer avoid the tendency to push the sound forward and opens the throat and voice to resonate more.

Try this:

Stand up with good posture. Lengthen the back of the neck and stand tall with your hips under you and your shoulders rolled back and down without arching your back. Keep the chest lifted and tip chin down for high notes to make room for the soft palate to naturally lift.

Sing “Kah-ah-ah. 3-2-1 or E, D, C.” Try to get the back of the tongue to drop down on the “AH” following the “K”. Look in the mirror to monitor the tongue’s movement.

Now repeat but this time put your hand out in front of you and draw it towards you as you sing, as if you are “drinking the tone” or pulling the sound inward toward you. Repeat it a few times until the motion is more natural.

See if you feel the sound swirling around in your mouth and head. Was it easier to sing? Did you feel the natural resonance and sound?

Getting this motion programmed into your voice will help you get more sound without constricting the voice and will keep your voice singing healthfully with more power.

The way to build consistency is to train with a solid vocal technique. Learn more about building true vocal strength with the Cole Vocal Method™ here.

Control Over Your High Notes

The first step in singing with more power in the high part of your range is to get your voice out of your throat. As long as you continue to sing from your throat, you will constrict and limit your range and constrict your high notes.

Singing is a coordination of air and muscle. Most untrained singers will overuse muscle and underuse air. This results in vocal strain and loss of range.

To set up the right breath support, after improving your alignment, the next step is to set up the body to support the singing voice with the correct muscles, motions, and to establish the core support for the voice.

Areas of support are: Chest wall, pectorals, ribcage, upper abdomen, and back.

The key to these movements is to isolate the muscles involved and avoid tensing additional muscles. Practice only feeling the muscles as instructed and reducing other tensions.

Chest wall: With the chest lifted towards the chin, expand the chest wall outward. As you do this, relax the back of the neck. This provides additional support for the singing voice, reducing pressure on the throat.

Pectorals: The pectorals play an important role in healthy singing. Place your hands on your pectorals. Now puff out the pectorals and squeeze your arms to your sides as if you were holding something between your upper arms and your sides. Relax other muscles like the back of the neck that can tend to stiffen. The pectoral muscles provide support, taking the tension off the throat.

Using the support of the chest and pectorals will help anchor the laryngeal muscles, providing more support and taking pressure off the voice so the instrument can function with more ease and less strain.

Building Tone and Resonance

It is common to overuse muscles when singing, especially to get volume or try to “project” the voice to an audience. However, this can result in tensing the instrument, which only constricts and thins the sound.

The path to building real tone and resonance in your voice is about finding the balance between air pressure and support and the surface tension of the voice — finding the balance between air and muscle in singing that will unlock the sound and tone.

Singing with tone instead of pushing air is the hallmark of a great singing voice and is an audible difference.

Using too much muscle interference will constrict the voice and thin the sound. Vocal strain will constrict or limit volume. The more you can train to open up your voice (using my Cole Vocal Method™ taught in my Vocal Freedom Circle), the more volume and power you will experience in your singing voice.

Try this: Put your hand out in front of you with your fingers facing your face. Lift your chest upwards toward your chin to elevate the chest during singing. Sing an “AHHHHH” keeping your chest raised and move the fingers toward you, imagining that you are “drinking the sound.” Let the sound come toward you instead of pushing it outward. Do you notice that the sound comes out a little easier?

This technique is one of the many inside my method that help singers learn how to sing with more volume and sound with less effort.

Mindset Tools to Sing With Courage and Conviction

It’s common to focus on the things you need to fix for a performance, but over-fixating on the issues when you are not working on them will create a negative mindset that backfires.

The goal is to work on the issues but keep a positive mindset — and visualize the performance working out exactly as you want it to. Visualization techniques are proven to improve performance by up to 40% according to Olympic athletes who use them.

Where things can go south even with those factors is if you are not preparing enough ahead of time. Building a strong, solid foundation for your vocal technique to support your singing voice is still the number one way to improve overall confidence and conviction in performance.