“ You have bad technique, so you are naughty and bad.”

I feel so jealous of all the teens wanting to sing nowadays who can just type ‘sing better’ into Youtube and a plethora of information presents itself. I also feel a little worried, you know. There’s a lot of information available and some of it is totally contradictory. You could spend an afternoon reading and watching videos, wanting to learn but then get overwhelmed. You decide, ‘whatever, I enjoy singing and am going to carry on, just for the love of it’ and THE NEXT DAY, see a comment on an Ariana Grande live performance from richardT9483_8473:

“She has bad technique.”

The paranoia about whether or not richardT9483_8473 would say you have bad technique kicks in; and you’re desperately googling – trying to find the definitive guide to ‘good technique’, once and for all, all over again.  

Once I heard the phrase “lift your soft palette”, I was obsessed. Before my late teens, I had NO idea you could/should sing better by manipulating your body parts. I had singing teachers who had taught me a lot, up to that point, about performance and song interpretation and other very valuable things but, if I wanted to sing a high note, I simply had to ‘go for it’. Funnily enough, that didn’t work all the time, so imagine the utter awe 17yr old Megan felt, having her first lesson with her new singing teacher as she told her about posture and placement and support AND noticing an improvement. Wow. Incredible. I ate that stuff UP. 

And then I went to Uni and everyone told me I was over supporting and I need to chill out with my technique. Hilarious. 

But there was an improvement then, as well. So, what are we supposed to believe? If good technique is so good, why can’t we just technique as hard as we can and be the best singer ever?! 


***

Have you ever noticed how often people will say things like ‘oh, did you know, *famous diva-type singer’s name* is SO SMALL in real life?’ and that trope of ‘the little girl with the big voice’? … I feel like there’s a connection.

Going back to Ariana Grande – she is a very tiny person. Being so tiny, you’d imagine she has a tiny larynx and in that tiny larynx are some tiny vocal cords. The higher you go, the quicker your vocal cords need to vibrate and that will just be easier for her because there’s not as much space to deal with. Because Ariana Grande (probably) has such a small larynx, she won’t need to push through as much air as other people. So, if there’s a technique out there that explicitly tells you that you need a lot of air to sing a high note, that could work amazingly for some people, but Ariana Grande might end up cracking because her lil larynx doesn’t have the space for all that air.

Do you get what I mean?

This is the simplest example I can come up with to demonstrate that our bodies are all different and have their own, unique needs. There are infinite ways in which singers’ bodies can vary, which will dispose us all to certain tricks and sounds. It all depends on science! It all depends on your own, personal science!

On the flip side, research carried out by speech therapists and vocal coaches has revealed that, although we’ve all got different equipment, it all works in a similar way. You’ll be hard pressed to find someone who needs to lift their larynx to make their sobbiest, darkest sound. And this is where, I think, we fall into traps. When you’re first learning about technique, it’s really hard to distinguish between a teacher giving you personal advice and a teacher simply explaining what happens in our bodies when we sing. A lot of the larynx-placement and diaphragmatic breathing we’re taught about is happening already and doesn’t necessarily need to be focused on, unless something’s gone wrong (could be a physical injury, could be social conditioning etc.) that means your vocal mechanism isn’t performing in the most optimal way. So when we* point out ‘bad technique’ in other vocalists, it’s a bit of a tricky one, because we have NO IDEA of their history and why they’ve settled on singing the way that they do. There’s a clip of Rihanna from years ago where she reveals that she likes to smoke a cigarette before a show because it makes her voice raspy. Outrage ensues. OBVIOUSLY I do not recommend smoking EVER for MANY reasons, but I’m also aware of how much of a stress reliever it can be (for people who ALREADY smoke – DO NOT TAKE UP SMOKING). If you’re a nervous performer who has a lot of issues with bodily tension and you happen to be a smoker and you find that having a cigarette calms you down and relieves a lot of that harmful tension, I’m not sure it’s right to slap ‘bad technique-er’ on your forehead and condemn you forever more. It’s definitely not something you should continue long-term but, in the moment, you have to do a bit of a risk assessment. 

If anyone ever tells you, flat out, “you have bad technique”, I wouldn’t bother with them. It’s such a broad statement to make. And it’s usually made with a heavy stink of shame attached to it. Vocal technique, regarding physicality, only really became a thing around the late 17th century. This was because opera was developing and microphones didn’t exist yet, so singers had to work out how to make their voices fill these huge venues, without damaging themselves. Of course! Nothing wrong with that. However, there is a type of person we assume to be attending operas, particularly in those days. It was an activity for the socially elite. People with lots of money. People who consider themselves very well-educated. Naturally, that kind of environment is quite gatekeeper-ey and so having an awareness of vocal technique has become synonymous with being better educated so, if you are perceived to lack a knowledge of technique (no matter how good you sound or how you make your audience feel), well .. you’re just stupid, aren’t you? Like everything, vocal technique is a lot more nuanced than that. A whole audience is made up of individual people who all want something different from the singer in front of them, and every vocalist is an individual who sings for whatever reason they want. Learning to sing isn’t a video game where you unlock levels and eventually win. It’s a journey with peaks and valleys and all kinds of stuff to mess you up at any given moment! Your vocal technique is YOUR technique. It’s the way you sing that makes you feel best and allows you to express yourself and create the way you want to. 

I’m just going to leave a video of Buffy Sainte-Marie here, because I would LOVE to do a survey and see how many people would consider her to have ‘good vocal technique’ …

… but you know what? She sang because she liked the feeling in her throat (I have no reference for this, other than my Dad telling me once that that’s a thing she said – we’ll just have to believe it so that I can make my point). She’s still doing it at the age of 79, loves the way it feels and people love the way her singing makes them feel. What’s the problem? richardT9483_8473 can piss off.

*I say ‘we’ because I know I’ve done it. I would DELIGHT in pointing out the other singers at competitions taking shallow breaths and having terrible posture. I didn’t tend to do as well as I liked at competitions, so it was probably a defence mechanism. Nobody seemed to enjoy my performances very much, but aT lEaSt I kNeW hOw To BrEaThE**

**Which perfectly illustrates what an arrogant arsehole 18yr old me was, because I would go on to discover that I have terrible breath control.