Do you feel like your voice sounds monotone? Are you having trouble making your vocals sound more expressive and colorful? Singing with a monotone voice is common among inexperienced singers, but it can be easily fixed using only a few simple adjustments.
So how do you fix monotone singing? To fix your monotone voice, make sure to open your mouth wider when you sing. This will help you create more dynamic and expressions in your vocals. You need to activate your facial muscles and visualize your lyrics to add more emotion and understanding of the song so you can sing with more understanding of the song.
Singing is one of the best ways to express yourself and the way you feel. Knowing how to use your voice’s dynamics and evoke emotion can be very powerful and take your singing to the next level. In this article, I’ll go in-depth on how you can fix your monotone singing so you can stand out with your vocals and sound that much better!
Let’s get started.
Focus On Opening Your Mouth
One of the best ways to instantly fix your monotone voice is by opening your mouth a bit more when you’re singing. For many singers, singing aloud can be quite scary to begin with, especially if you’re performing in front of an audience or creating a video.
Mentally, when you first start singing, your mouth only wants to open very little and stay closed. This creates a “muttering” sound and naturally creates a monotone voice.
But by focusing on opening your mouth while you sing, you’re allowing your sound to project and give it the necessary space to create the expressions and feelings that you want in your voice.
Put your index and middle finger stacked on top of one another in the opening of your mouth to have a ballpark range of how big it should be. When you’re singing, your mouth shouldn’t be smaller than the size of one finger.
Once you understand how “opened” your mouth should be while you’re singing, start practicing with an actual song. You’ll notice that by opening your mouth a bit more, you’ll be able to project a bit louder and create expressions easier through your vocals.
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Activate Your Facial Muscles
To get rid of monotone singing, you have to express your feelings. One of the best ways to do so is by using facial expressions and activating the facial muscles to help create the emotions you want.
When you’re singing with a monotone voice, you’ll notice that many parts of your face don’t move while you’re singing. Your facial expression is plain, which reflects on the bland sound that comes out.
If you start activating the muscles on your face and focus on creating more feelings, you’ll notice that you’ll add more warmth and passion to your voice.
Many of your favorite singers use their facial expressions to evoke emotions in their voices as well. They sometimes frown their brow, clench their face and move all parts of their facial muscles. Doing so not only helps with helping them sing with more feelings but also clearly shows the audience how they’re feeling.
During your singing warm-up, spend a minute or two massaging your face. Rub your forehead, cheekbones, cheeks, and your jaw to loosen them up.
When you sing with your facial muscles activated, you’ll find yourself naturally feeling more with the music, and you’ll start singing with more color with your voice.
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Create More Dynamics In The Song
Learning how to use vocal dynamics is important to fix monotone singing. Vocal dynamics is the quality of singing from soft to loud or vice versa. When executed correctly, this technique creates dramatic intensity and feeling for your listener. By adding more dynamics in your vocals, you’re providing something to interpret and draw your audience into your story and your music.
It’s important that singing with dynamics isn’t merely just singing with different volumes. Instead, it’s about controlling your voice and moving between both extremes (loud and soft) in a controlled way. By doing so, you’ll be able to emphasize specific phrases and notes, which will help eliminate your monotone voice.
So how do you go about learning vocal dynamics?
Breath Management
You need to be able to support your voice by using the air that you have to control the projection of your sounds.
A good breathing exercise that you can use to improve your breath support is “Hissing.”
- Slowly breathe in for 4 seconds. Then breathe out, hissing, for 4 seconds as well.
- Next, breathe in for 6, and hiss out for 10
- Inhale for 6, out for 12
- Inhale for 2, out for 12
- Inhale for 4, out for 16
- Inhale for 2, out for 16
- Inhale for 4, out for 20
- Inhale for 1, out for 20
The main idea is to slowly let the air come out during your “hiss.” This exercise trains your body to take in more air and release only the necessary amount of air for your phrases. Make sure your hissing (air release) is consistent. You don’t want to have irregular air and sound coming in and out during this exercise. It should be smooth and steady.
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Lip Trill Like A Revving Engine
A great voice exercise that you can use to practice vocal dynamics is lip trills or “lip bubbles.”
Start with a nice deep breath. Start at a comfortable low to middle vocal position in your voice, and begin to trill up to a comfortable high point. When you start to move down to your register, you can “rev up the engine” by trilling high and low notes. This exercise is not only great for warming up your voice and strengthening your sound but also helps you build more dynamics when you sing, which will remove your monotone voice.
Changing Vowel Shapes
Another way of adding more dynamics to your song is by changing the way you generally sing the vowels of the song. Doing so can change how the song would sound like in a very subtle but effective way. For example, for the lyrics “me,” you can pronounce it as “may.” Changing the vowel can add a unique sound to your performance and make your voice sound less monotone and distinctive.
Learn more about the Lyrics
Understanding and learning about the song’s lyrics are an important step to help fix your monotone singing. Simply finding the lyrics online and singing to them isn’t going to help you sing with more emotion and substance. Rather than just looking at a bunch of words, singers need to look over the song and truly understand what the lyrics are talking about.
While you’re reading the lyrics, think about some of these questions to help build more feeling into your vocals.
- What is this song about?
- Is it a happy song or a sad one?
- What is the story that the song is telling?
- Do I relate to this story?
- Can I use my own experiences to sing the song?
Knowing the answers to these questions will help guide you through the song while you sing. You’ll have a clearer picture of the song’s overall mood, and your vocals will reflect that.
After answering the initial questions, take a deeper dive into the lyrics.
See if there are any words or phrases that stand out to you. Every song should have a few that pop up and attract you to sing the song.
Let’s use Coldplay’s “Fix You” as an example.
“Lights will guide you home/ And ignite your bones/ And I will try to fix you.”
This line/chorus can be sung and performed in so many ways. For myself, “lights will guide you home” is a line that stood out to me. I would accentuate and add more dynamics and expression to this phrase.
There is no right or wrong answer with lyrics analysis.
But there should be an answer and a decision on which line you want to add more or less to. No line or phrasing should ever be static or the same. There has to be “highs” and “lows” in the emotional levels of the song.
By being more active and aware of your lyrics, you’ll notice that your voice will sound less monotone because you’ll feel more deeply with the words in the song.
Read Next: 15 Essential tips For Singers To Remember All Their Lyrics
Final Thoughts
If you feel like your singing is always monotone and bland, don’t worry! Singing with a monotone voice can be easily fixed with a few changes in the way you approach singing and additional vocal exercises. But remember: singing is a form of expression. Whenever you sing a song, think about what the emotions should be and let your own experiences and thoughts come out. You’ll definitely see more color and charm in your vocals and your performance if you do so.
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