Do you love singing, but find that your voice can be unreliable?...Like, it sounds better some days than others?

Or, you're singing away, enjoying yourself, in full flow, and then suddenly you get an awkward 'break' in your sound?

Well, don't worry, this is very common, you're not the only one by a long way!

There are a few different ways that our singing voices can be unreliable:

• You get 'register breaks', which can be embarrassing;
• Your tone can be rich and ringing in some parts of a song, but thin and weak in others; and it's a let-down;
• You can't sustain the breath for long enough, so the first part of a line sounds good but then it fades away, which is frustrating;
• Your high notes sound squeaky;
• Your basic sound is sometimes clear and strong, but sometimes gravelly / breathy/ raspy / strained, which is disheartening;
• You struggle to get the pitching right and it drives you mad.

These are the most widely experienced 'unreliability' issues. Does any of them ring a bell with you? Or do you have a different problem?

Obviously the points mentioned above, relate to widely differing areas of the voice, so I can't give you 'one tip fixes all' here today.

But I'd like you to understand, that all these problems are down to 2 main causes :

1. Your voice may not be in very good condition ( please don't be offended... your voice is a very delicate and complex instrument, and is subjected to all the stresses and strains of your life, which can't be helped!)
2. You may not be skilled in knowing how to adjust and adapt to all the changing demands of a song.

So, to help as best I can in a piece of writing, with the unreliability issue, I'd like to give you a really valuable exercise, which will:

• Put your voice in better condition;
• Help it to become more flexible, more versatile; 
• Support it to overcome register breaks; 
• Stretch to higher notes more freely;
• And generally sound smoother.

This exercise is a really fundamental one, a real all-rounder that I recommend to all my students to use regularly!

Here's how it goes:

Step 1. Relax your tongue. Really, deeply relax it, all the way from the back to the front. Let it become heavy in your mouth. Allow it to lengthen.  Get comfortable with this process. Spend a couple of minutes deepening into the relaxation.

Step 2. Make the sound 'ng' - like the sound at the end of the word 'sing'. On any pitch that is comfortable for you. 'Nnng' just gently, quietly, a long note.

Step 3. Keep the Nnng going but move the pitch around: Not step-by-step, but gliding smoothly and slowly through all the notes, linking them all up without gaps : First going down, to the bottom of your range, then sliding upwards again to the heights of your range. Keep it light.

Glide throughout your range, contouring smoothly, a bit like this image.... but move around in pitch playfully, sometimes to the heights and the depths, sometimes more slowly in a smaller section of your range. Obviously take a breath whenever you need to.

This is SO good for your voice! It exercises the vocal folds in a very beneficial way, and gets all the muscles working more optimally especially if you remember to keep pausing and relaxing the tongue again.

You may have heard of this exercise before, it's called 'sirening'. But the important thing is to DO IT, to do it regularly, and carefully, so your vocal anatomy starts to respond and 'tune up' its condition and flexibility.

I recommend spending at least 10 minutes a day doing this exercise to give your voice an essential maintenance workout. It will smooth out your register breaks and enable you to sing higher notes with more ease. And it helps a lot with improving your pitch-ability!

If you want to tackle a particular area of your voice which is unsatisfactory or unreliable, I welcome you to check out my 'Special Topic Mini-Courses' which will help you transform a specific issue....such as Breathing, Pitching, Range / Registers, Power & Projection; Performance. Check out what's on offer at: Special Topic Mini-Courses

And here's to you having a dependable, strong, smooth, reliable voice that you can be proud of!