How to Sing Better: 18 Expert Tips
Tyler Connaghan Music Producer, Singer
06/30/25 | Last modified: 11/18/25
Though many believe it, singing is not some magical genetic gift reserved for the chosen few. It takes years of training and dedication to master. And whether your goal is to front a touring band or just feel better about belting in the shower, knowing how to sing better can give you the confidence, presence, and control you’re looking for.
Like a tennis player learning to serve or a chef learning to poach an egg, singing is a skill, and a very physical one at that. And like any skill, it can be trained and sharpened with the right habits and consistency.
The unfortunate truth is that there are no shortcuts, no matter what someone on a salesy YouTube channel might tell you. However, there are tried and true, science-backed strategies that work. In this guide, I want to present you with some singing tips that will help you build the range, tone, breath control, and pitch accuracy you’re looking for, as long as you’re willing to be diligent with practicing them!
So, ready to take the first step toward becoming the singer you always knew you were meant to be? Let’s dive in.
Understanding the Basics of Singing
Before you start dreaming of impressing the crowd with Beyonce-level riffs and runs, you have to nail the basics. Having a strong foundation is important for any skill, and for singing, it can often mean the difference between getting better and burning out.
Trust me, there’s a reason why some of the best singers in the world continuously come back to this stuff (Michael Jackson warm-up, anyone?).
If you want to know how to be a better singer, here are a few pillars you need to master first:
Breathing and Breath Control
Your breath is your power source as a singer. If your airflow is weak or inconsistent, your voice will be too. This is why every great vocal coach should start by teaching diaphragmatic breathing.
The essence of this skill is breathing downward into your belly rather than up into your chest. The sensation should feel like a 360-degree expansion below your ribcage, giving your airflow support to carry your voice, which, in turn, provides better control and endurance.
Try these exercises before each singing session:
- 4-7-8 Method: Inhale for 4 seconds, hold for 7, exhale for 8. Do this a few times and you’ll strengthen your breath control.
- Straw Phonation: Blow air into a small straw while vocalizing in a comfortable range to get your diaphragm working. This is a great exercise for managing airflow
Posture and Body Alignment
Your voice is tied to your entire body. So, when you slouch, you choke off that airflow you just worked so hard to strengthen.
The best singing posture is head tall, shoulders back, spine neutral, and feet grounded It’s strong and confident without feeling tense.
One of the best ways to get a feel for this posture is to stand against a wall to align your head, spine, and heels. Poses like Warrior II or Mountain can also help build body awareness and stronger posture.
Don’t make the mistake that so many singers do and only adjust your posture once before your practice session. Instead, use a mirror to keep yourself in check the whole time. You might be surprised how often you zone out and slouch.
Vocal Warm-Ups
Can you think of an Olympic athlete who would begin a heat without warming up? Probably not. And as a vocal athlete, you need to warm up your muscles (vocal cords) to ease yourself into the harder stuff.
Warming up vocals helps prevent strain, improves overall flexibility, and quite literally sets the tone for the rest of your practice session. While there are hundreds of kooky and crazy sounding warmups out there, here are a few time-tested ones that work wonders for most singers:
- Lip Trills: Perfect for waking up the voice and locking into your breath support
- Sirens: Sliding from low to high without strain is an excellent way to open your range. Try a semi-occluded mouth position for better breath support.
- Tongue Trills: Many singers hold tightness in the tongue, and tongue trills on a rising five-tone scale can help loosen the muscle.
Pitch Awareness
If you’re not on pitch, it’s hard for people to really grasp the message of what you’re singing. Being able to sing the right notes means training your ear to hear those notes first. There’s a feedback loop that occurs between your brain and your voice, and the idea with pitch awareness is to think about the exact note you want to sing just before it leaves your mouth.
There are a few ways to train this skill, though piano drills are some of the best. Simply play a note, match it, and repeat. You can also try call and response drills, where you play a short melody and try to match it as precisely as possible.
These kinds of skills can help strengthen your sense of internal pitch (Resonance and Placement)
These two vocal qualities are where the character of your voice lives:
Resonance is the way the sound vibrates in different parts of your body and face, while placement is where you aim those vibrations.
In chest voice, you have power. In head voice, you have clarity. Mix those two in what many coaches refer to as “mixed voice,” and you get the best of both worlds.
Try familiarizing yourself with placement using the following tips:
- Say “ng” as in “sing.” While on this consonant sound, move up and down the scale while maintaining the buzz in your nose and face.
- Hum lightly and visualize your voice moving forward into your cheekbones. As you go up in pitch, imagine the sound moving into your forehead.
- Practice scales on different vowels throughout your chest, head, and mixed voice, and feel where they shift and how they’re placed.
18 Tested Expert Tips to Sing Better
While “singing from the heart” is a nice affirmation, it’s not a very actionable tip, as without proper form, even the most emotionally resonant singer may have trouble expressing themselves how they’d like.
So, rather than giving you vague advice on how to sing better, here are some professional-level singing tips you can use to actually help strengthen your voice. Pick one to explore per day, or use a few during your singing sessions, and you will 100% feel the difference.
1. Hydrate
If your vocal cords are dry, your tone, control, and range will suffer. Water keeps the vocal folds lubricated, which, in turn, helps you stay more flexible, so you can reduce strain
Chugging a ton of water before singing won’t do the trick. Rather, stay hydrated throughout the day and keep caffeine and alcohol consumption to a minimum.
Pro Tip: Room temperature water is best!
2. Stop Whispering to Save Your Voice
If you’re having a vocal recovery day, don’t whisper to save your voice. Whispering can create more tension in the vocal folds compared to talking So, if your voice is feeling tired, try either speaking softly and clearly or not speaking at all.
3. Use a Mirror for Real-Time Feedback
Watching yourself in the mirror while you practice is one of the best ways to reveal problems with your singing. If your shoulders are rising while you breathe or your jaw is locking up as you reach for high notes, you’ll be able to see whatever is sabotaging your voice right away.
Self-correction is incredibly important if you don’t have a vocal coach in the room with you, so start making this part of your routine.
4. Record Yourself
Not many singers like the sound of their own voice at first. However, listening back to recordings is one of the best ways to catch pitch issues or bad habits, as you’re hearing what the audience would hear. You don’t need any fancy tools to do this. Just use your voice note app on your phone, play it back, and take notes for next time.
Self-monitoring is an excellent way to improve your auditory awareness, which allows for more accurate vocal correction.
5. Keep Your Face Relaxed
If you’re like most beginner singers, you probably hold tension in your jaw and tongue. This tension can choke off your high notes and dull your resonance. One exercise is to place your thumb gently on the soft, fleshy area beneath your chin. When you swallow, you should feel a downward pressure in this spot.
That pressure is your tongue.
If you have tension when you sing, you’ll feel this downward pressure harden that spot. The ultimate goal is to keep this area free from tension, so pay attention to how it feels when singing certain warmups or phrases.
6. Use Forbrain
Using a specialized device like Forbrain can help you become more aware of how your voice actually sounds. This bone-conduction headset delivers your voice back to you through vibrations, which sharpens your auditory feedback loop.
That means you can catch pitch issues, improve clarity, and strengthen vocal control as you practice. Many singers find that using Forbrain helps them stay more focused during warmups and build stronger vocal habits over time.
7. Practice Your Vowels
90% of your singing is your vowels. Focus on keeping your vowel shapes (ah, ee, oo, etc.) tall and round, especially as you go up in pitch.
If you’re struggling to sing a song, one fun exercise is to sing each passage without any consonants. You’ll be amazed at how much more fluid your voice feels.
8. Have Fun With Scales
Practicing scales every day can be a dreadfully boring experience, so why not spice things up? There’s no reason to just go up and down. Add a melody or rhythm. Make them feel musical. As a bonus, you’ll be prepping your voice to sing a real song, not just mindlessly going from bottom to top.
9. Build Relative Pitch with an Instrument
If you play piano, guitar, or some other instrument, try matching your pitch to it by playing a note and singing it back. A few minutes of this a day is a wonderful way to develop relative pitch and get you more in tune with the notes you’re singing.
10. Train with Backing Tracks
While acapella training is great for control, backing tracks help develop rhythm, harmony, and context for singing. The more you practice with real music, the more comfortable you’ll feel when it’s ultimately time to record or play live.
11. Sing Softly
There’s no reason to bust out the gate belting when you’re starting your singing practice for the day. Often, louder isn’t better anyway. Singing softly (with proper breath support, of course) forces you to pay more attention to the muscles you should be working while exposing pitch issues that would otherwise be hard to hear at a loud volume.
12. Don’t Sing When You’re Sick
Pushing your voice when you’re sick or have a sore throat is never a good idea. It’s how singers develop nodules, inflammation, or worse, permanent damage. If your throat feels hoarse or weak, stop singing. Rest up and try again tomorrow. The last thing you want is to ruin your instrument because you’re impatient with it.
13. Explore Different Genres
Are you mainly a pop singer? If so, try some jazz standards. Maybe you’re a rock singer? In that case, try softening it up with a folk song. Singing different genres is not only a great way to explore other parts of your voice you may have never tapped into, but it’ll also make you a more versatile singer in the end.
Plus, it keeps your training from feeling monotonous.
14. Learn the Lyrics Before Singing
Have you ever noticed that when you sing a song you don’t quite know, it’s harder to sing? This is because our brains are spending valuable energy trying to help you survive the narrative aspect of singing.
When you know the lyrics like the back of your hand, it allows you to spend time interpreting them as you perform. You’ll know what vowels are coming up, how long words and phrases are, and be able to connect with the emotion of the song, rather than just singing the notes.
Knowing what you’re singing about helps guide your delivery.
15. Be Dynamic
Singing the right notes is all fine and dandy. But being dynamic with your voice is when you get into “goosebumps” territory.
Watch Jeff Buckley’s live performance above and see how he moves from softer, more intimate parts of each song into explosive, larger-than-life choruses. He’s able to build, swell, and bring it back down in an instant. It feels dynamic, but never out of control,
This quality is one of the true indications of a great singer.
16. Sing Each Day, But Rest Strategically
Like exercising, consistency will always beat intensity when learning how to sing better. If you go hard one day and burn yourself out so that you can’t practice the next three days, you’ve lost a ton of precious time.
Actively practicing 10 to 20 minutes each day is much better than a single, hour-long marathon once a week. Plus, your voice needs recovery time, especially after long performances.
Be intentional about your rest days and know that if you’ve been consistent, you’ve earned them.
17. Be Patient As You Build Your Range
Don’t shoot for that high C5 on day one if you can only comfortably sing up to G4. Build your range one note at a time. Slowly stretch your voice using controlled exercises, like slides or trills. If you’re experiencing any pain trying to hit a high note, you’re either not using the correct coordination or you’ve gone too far.
Learning to sing is a marathon, not a sprint. A little bit of progress every single day will make you better in a year’s time. The last thing you want to do is rush it and hurt yourself.
18. Join a Choir
There’s no reason to go it alone on this journey. Join a local choir or singing group. Learning to blend with other singers, harmonize, and listen intently are skills you can gain from singing with a group, especially if you have the right conductor or teacher to give you structure and feedback.
How Forbrain Can Help Improve Your Singing
So, you have some tips and tricks under your belt, and you’re ready to start singing. But what if there was a way to get to where you want to be as a singer even faster?
That’s the beauty of Forbrain’s cognitive feedback approach to training. Built on the foundations of neuroscience, this vocal training tool uses bone conduction and real-time auditory feedback to help singers gauge tone, pitch, and control faster than traditional singing methods alone.
Forbrain can help strengthen the way you process your own voice while improving a few key skills great singers need to master. It can sharpen your articulation, giving you clearer diction and resonance, and help with pitch stability by helping your brain lock in with the right frequencies. With faster feedback, it can also improve your rhythm, which is a major benefit for singers who struggle with phrasing and timing.
The Science Behind Forbrain
Forbrain works using bone conduction, which sends the vibrations in your voice directly through your skull, rather than into the air and back into your ears, creating a faster, clearer feedback loop between your voice and brain.
Essentially, you hear yourself more accurately as you sing, which is a huge deal. The better your auditory input, the better your vocal output.
And while this may all sound like some new age pseudoscience, it’s not. Research shows that auditory feedback can accelerate motor learning, which can help you, as a singer, develop new habits.
If you’re truly looking at how to get better at singing faster, this is it.
Integrating Forbrain Into Your Practice
Adding Forbrain to your daily training is simple. Here are a few ways singers already use it in their daily vocal practice:
- During Warm-ups: Perfect for centering tone during different exercises
- In Pitch-Matching Drills: Faster feedback for pitch mistakes, allowing for quicker corrections.
- Sight-Singing: Closes the gap between thinking of pitch and singing it.
Final Thoughts – How to Get Better at Singing Faster
Now that you know how to sing better with these tips and tools, it’s up to you to put them to use.
These strategies and advice above stem from real, expert-backed vocal coaches and scientists. Mixing your traditional practice with cutting-edge tools like Forbrain is a great way to reach your goals faster.
Just remember that strong fundamentals are the foundation of any great singer. Be consistent about your practice to develop these. Even 10-20 minutes of focused practice each day can be transformative.
With the right mindset and a solid plan, you’ll be well on your way to developing the voice you’ve always dreamt of.
Reference List
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