You do not have an inherently bad voice.

Author

Ivan Lu
February 27, 2025

You do not have an inherently bad voice.

Today’s episode is for some of you who are on the fence with pursuing singing.

For some of you, this might have been the reason that’s holding you back from learning to sing.

And it’s this

What if I inherently have a bad voice?

What if even if I trained. I worked at it. And improved every little detail or part of my technique.

There was something core to my voice, my anatomy that is fundamentally flawed.

And so insurmountable that I would never sound good?

This is a good question.

And one worth asking.

So let’s explore this question together today, I’ll share how some even some parts of the voice which we might think are fixed and inherent. Might not actually be.

Real quick! Just establish some credibility. For those of you who don’t know me. My name is Ivan, I love making music and also teaching singing to students all around the world. On this newsletter my goal is to make learning to sing simple. If that’s up your lane, consider subscribing. If you want to improve your voice faster, check out the links down below for ways to work with me

If you want to inspire our next episode! Drop in the comments below what you want me to talk about next.

Part 1: Are you truly tone deaf?

One of the first things I hear from people is that they think

“I’m tone deaf”

And that maybe I’m just one of those unlucky few who was born with this inherently.

Now tone deaf is an actual thing.

It’s called “Congenital amusia” and unfortunately it has no known treatment currently.

The good news though is for most of you who enjoy listening to singing.

This is VERY highly unlikely the case. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.

But then why do some of us struggle with pitch so much? Whilst others have an easier time.

Now I don’t have a specific answer. For some maybe they grew up with musicians, maybe they learnt to use the right muscles to change pitch. There’s many factors.

But what I do know is it can be trained. I’ve found from teaching countless students around the world, that learning to sing on pitch is really 3 things.

(1) Building their fundamentals/mechanics that allows them to change pitch (how can you sing on pitch, when you don’t even know what it feels like to change pitch?)

(2) Building pattern recognition. Aka, when they are on pitch, I call it out and have them describe what it feels like. There’s usually some feeling or intuition behind it.

(3) We also start from simple scales and slowly ramping them up to the level of singing.

When we train it through very deliberate progress as opposed to jumping into a song and wondering why it doesn’t work.

My students sing on pitch better.

And so this shows that singing on pitch isn’t inherent. It can be trained.

Part 2: Our TIMBRE or TONE isn’t completely inherent.

But Ivan, I can generally sing on pitch. But my voice just sounds inherently bad.

Another common belief I hear all the time is that the tone/timbre or the sound of my voice is inherent. It’s fixed.

Whether it naturally sounds dull and flat, whiny.

You’re just born with it.

And I agree, part of this is true.

Every voice has it’s own unique anatomy from length and general thickness of your vocal folds, to the shape of your throat, mouth, all those spaces which can contribute to your unique tone.

But this doesn’t mean that the sound of your voice is FIXED or is inherent.

Consider this.

What we think of as “timbre” is simply a catch all for everything that’s not pitch.

For example, often we’ll hear a voice and label things as breathy or nasal or dark voice, or it sounds dull. All of these different traits we lump it up into timbre.

Even when your technique is lacking. It can affect your timbre

For example, I’ve had many instances where my students were just straining, which generally gives a tighter more shrill quality to their voice.

And just simply resolving this, finding a free-er technique. Their timbre just opens up and sound much better.

Now what this means is that for sure, there might be a core part of your “tone/timbre” that can’t be changed.

But this is only part of your overall sound. And maybe smaller than you think.

Really for most of you listening, once again it comes back down to training. You’d be surprise how much your voice can change with training.

Which brings us to this?

Part 3: How do we train our voice?

So we’ve gone through a together journey.

We’ve realised, we’re probably not tone deaf. Just haven’t trained.

We’ve realised our “timbre or tone” isn’t necessarily fixed. We just haven’t trained.

How do we train?

Now we can go really deep with technique or I can give you something really simple and practical to focus on.

On any scale that you do, can you do this?

Can you change and match the pitch without

(1) Changing volume (adding more or flipping to falsetto)

(2) Changing the vowel articulation

(3) Changing your posture.

I try to only change pitch. I try to only engage feel the STRETCH of the vocal folds.

The better you can do this, the more control you’ll have with your voice. Why?

Most people struggle because as they are singing higher. They don’t know what to feel and so we engage all these random muscles and things to make it work.

But what if you just learn to isolate the feeling of the pitch change. Everything else becomes more of a choice.

This cleans up your tone, because you’re straining, you’re more deliberate with your articulation and volume.

And it allows you to hit the pitches better!

Anyway! That’s all. Let me know if there’s anything I missed. If you found this episode useful, please share or give it 5 star wherever you’re listening from. This really helps spread the word and means the world to me. If you’d like to study with me, links are down in description. Take care!

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