As a society, we love to speculate about celebrities, including singers and musicians.  Accusations of lip-syncing and auto-tuning are levied with the same contempt as speculation about plastic surgeries and cheating.  The implication is often that the singer is a faker, relying on prerecorded tracks to mime having talent.  In the summer of 2024, the internet went wild over lip-syncing at the Olympic ceremony by artists like Lady Gaga and Celine Dion.

There are ethical issues with using tools like lip-syncing and autotune, but they’re far from the villainous gadgets they’re made out to be. In fact, they have a place in many talented pop singers’ tool belts.

Whether you’re from the other side of the country or the other side of the world, chances are you have an accent. Some of us lean into our accents while others do our best to neutralize them. As singers, we’re faced with the choice of whether or not to sing with our accent origin every time we take the mic. How do we decide if and when to sing with (or without) our accents? And, how do we even sing without an accent in the first place?

Over the last 53 years, karaoke has become a globally beloved pastime.  Every night, singers take the stage in karaoke bars from Tokyo to Turku to Toronto.  How did this hobby with a decidedly Japanese name become a worldwide hit?  The answer is more complicated than you might guess.

When you imagine childhood music lessons or think back on your own experience, you might conjure visions of tedious scales and exercises.  So many adults have a complicated relationship with our early experiences with music and learning.  A bad teacher can kill a budding interest before it has a chance to bloom.  However, lessons with the right instructor can be a chance for students to discover a lifelong passion, learn a new skill, or build lasting friendships. Unfortunately, finding the right voice teacher for your child is rarely as easy as calling the top-rated coach on Yelp.  In this article, we go into what to look for in a great vocal instructor to support your child’s musical journey.

When I was born, I made sounds.   

From the moment I took my first breath as a newborn, I used my voice. Like any typical baby coming out of the cozy, comfort zone into the strange new world that would become my new home, I would no doubt have cried.

Was it a polite, petite cry? 

Not likely. The first cry of the newborn has been described as “vociferous, shrill, and piercing.” Not at all a pleasant sound, but it sure is a powerful form of communication

Nothing induces involuntary cringing quite like hearing your voice played back at you.  Despite this, recording yourself (and listening back) is one of the best tools a vocalist can use to improve their singing and an essential skill for professionals.  So how do you get past the reflexive cringe when you hear yourself recorded?  And why is it so dang uncomfortable in the first place?

Learning a second or third language is a massive accomplishment.  Not only do you have to learn to comprehend a totally new language, you need to learn to use over 100 muscles in your mouth, face, and throat to make completely new sounds.  Training those muscles is one of the most important steps in reducing your accent to make your speech clearer and smoother.  In this article, we look at fifteen tongue exercises to help make your English sound more natural.

Singing harmony is an amazing way to expand your vocal and musical horizons, but singers are often expected to just know how to harmonize. The ability to harmonize is often talked about as though it’s so inborn talent that you’re either lucky enough to have or can never learn, but this simply isn’t the case. Harmonizing is a skill and, with a little bit of time and effort, almost anyone can learn to sing harmony.

If you speak for a living - whether you’re a teacher, therapist, motivational speaker, or podcaster - you’ve likely spent hundreds of hours studying and then editing your content, to ensure what you say is as engaging and informative as possible.  Great content is only half the battle, however.  Your delivery can be a greater barrier to your audience retaining and engaging with what you say than the quality of the content itself. Below, we’ll look at the common complaints people have about their own voices and others’, and how to address them.

“How do you get to Carnegie Hall? - Practice, practice, practice!” The punchline to this famous joke, which has been in print since 1955 and was probably told long before that, isn’t wrong. One of the best things you can do to improve your singing is practice as regularly as you can. But regularity alone doesn’t make a good practice routine. It has to be good practice! As we talked about in our article, The Myth of the Impossible Daily Practice Routine, practicing daily (or as close to daily as you can get) isn’t as hard as it may seem. Creating a great practice routine doesn’t have to be hard either.

A crowd-pleasing karaoke performance is more about being fun and entertaining than performing wild feats of vocal acrobatics, and there are plenty of hit songs that don’t require great (or any) vocal chops to turn up the energy in a room. In this article, we look at twenty songs that both you and your audience will have a blast singing along to, regardless of whether you’ve got diva vocals.

If you ask us, karaoke is a wildly underrated hobby. It’s fun, confidence-building, and can be a gateway into a lifelong passion for music. Picking up a new hobby can teach you all kinds of things about yourself and lead you down unexpected paths, from promotions at work to meeting a new romantic partner. Below we’ll look at why you should absolutely pick up that karaoke mic and how investing in your new hobby can build confidence both on and off the stage