What’s your vocal coaching style? Part 1 Exercises & game-changers

People sometimes ask what my “vocal coaching style” is. I never know whether to answer like a grown-up, or just say, “I’m basically a friendly director with a piano and a slightly alarming number of options.”

The real version takes more than one blog post to explain.

So here’s part 1

What’s your ethos?

When I do vocal coaching, I teach like your voice is a whole person, in a whole story, under real pressure. Not a set of notes that needs polishing, or a machine that needs fixing. We work on sound, yes, but we start with meaning, intention, and the moment-to-moment mechanics of performance.

That means I’m usually doing three things at once:

1. Keeping you safe enough to take risks.

2. Helping you make choices that read clearly to an audience.

3. Giving you practical levers you can repeat next time, without me in the room.

Let me show you what that looks like in real life.

We start with “What’s the job?”

Most singers arrive to a vocal coaching session with something like, “I want it to sound better,” or “I need this for an audition.”

Great. But “better” is vague.

So I’ll usually ask some version of: what’s the job of this song, in this room, for this panel, today?

Sometimes that leads straight into style, casting, and what the listener needs to hear from you in the first 20 seconds. Sometimes it leads into storytelling, like: who are you talking to, and why now.

And if you don’t know yet, that’s not a problem. We can build it. I’ll often say some version of, “If we don’t know, we make it up,” because invention beats vagueness every time, and it gets you moving.

Internal vs External, the simplest game-changer I know

One of my favourite tools is a toggle: internal vs external.

External is when you’re talking to someone, in the room, right now.
Internal is when you drop inside, processing, remembering, picturing, thinking it through.

The point is not to “act” harder. The point is clarity.

When singers get stuck, they’re often trying to do one long emotional wash. It can be beautiful, but it goes static. The audience stops learning new information.

So we map where you’re speaking outwards and where you’re disappearing into thought. Then we alternate it. It instantly creates contrast, narrative, and watchability. You can hear the singer clock it in real time, because it suddenly becomes usable everywhere. That’s the goal, tools that travel.

I often use images because your nervous system understands images

I’m not precious about imagery. If a “correct” technical instruction isn’t landing, we’ll go sideways.

In one vocal coaching session recently we talked about a song as if it was shot like a film, with scene changes, cuts, and moving scenery. Not because we’re trying to be cute, but because the brain does story and pictures faster than it does “support more.”

So you’ll hear me say things like: “This is a scene change, the cardboard flats come in and the nurse is wheeled on” and suddenly the singer knows exactly what to do, without me giving them a single vocal instruction.

Then, when you change the scenery in your head, the sound changes by itself. It’s one of those annoyingly effective things.

I’m always listening for “too smooth”

This might sound odd coming from someone who cares about technique, but I’m suspicious of “smooth” when it’s covering up story.

There’s a moment in a vocal coaching session where I said, essentially, you’re singing it too smoothly, and the reason is that the memories in the text are not connected. They’re flashes. Visions. So if you make it one continuous, polished river, it stops being true.

That’s a classic example of how I teach style. We are not chasing prettiness. We’re chasing accuracy.

And sometimes “accuracy” means we deliberately mess it up a bit. More breathlessness. More panic. More anger. More drama. Because the genre demands it.

Word hacks that change everything (without you trying harder)

Here’s a very “me” thing: I’ll change one word to change your whole delivery.

If you’re stuck in a habitual tone, your mouth and brain will keep reproducing it. So we swap the word in rehearsal, just to knock your system off autopilot.

Example: if “dream” makes you sing in a floaty, romantic way, we temporarily sing “think” instead. Suddenly it becomes factual, present, and spoken. Then we bring the original lyric back, but you keep the new behaviour.

This is how I work a lot. We don’t fight the voice. We trick the habits.

Click here to book a coaching session with me yourself. And yes, you can bring your teacher too if you want to!

Part 2 – Choices & Techniques out next week