Stop Comparing Your Voice To Other Singers
You are comparing your voice, live, in a room, on a Tuesday, against a recording that took a week, a producer, and several hundred takes. That is not a fair fight and it never was.
What you are actually comparing against
The vocal on a track you love is not a performance, it is a construction. Multiple takes comped together. Tuning applied. Compression, reverb, doubling. Possibly a different day for the chorus than the verse.
It is also somebody at the top of their profession, ten years in, recorded by an engineer whose job is to make them sound extraordinary.
You are measuring your raw voice against a finished product. Of course it loses.
I am not trying to make you sound like the artist you admire. I am trying to find out what you sound like when nothing is in the way. Those are very different jobs and only one of them is worth paying for.
Imitation costs you the thing that matters
Everybody starts by copying somebody. It is how we learn and there is nothing wrong with it. The problem is when it never stops.
Generic voices bore me. A singer can be word perfect, pitch perfect and completely forgettable, and that is a failure of the teaching rather than a triumph. Technique is supposed to give you access to your own voice, not replace it with somebody else's.
The roughness you have been trying to remove is quite often the most interesting thing about how you sound.
The comparison changes what you sing
This is the practical damage. Comparing yourself to a particular artist makes you choose their songs, in their keys, in their style, none of which may suit you.
Then you struggle, and conclude you are not good enough, when actually you have been singing material built for a completely different instrument.
Finding songs that suit your voice is not lowering the bar. It is the single fastest way most people improve.
Every lesson is recorded for exactly this reason. Your own progress over months is the comparison that matters, and human memory is hopeless at it. The recordings do not flatter you and they do not lie.
A better measurement
Compare yourself to yourself, three months ago. It is the only comparison with any useful information in it.
Recordings make this easy and it is one of the main reasons I record lessons. Listening back to where you were in the spring is far more motivating, and far more accurate, than measuring yourself against someone else's mastered single.
What to do instead
Pick three singers whose voices are nothing like yours and work out what you actually admire about each. Usually it is phrasing, or commitment, or a way of telling a story, rather than the sound itself. Those are all transferable. The timbre is not, and it was never the point.
Then find two songs that genuinely suit your voice rather than your taste. They are not always the same thing, and this is where a teacher earns their money.
Finally, record yourself once a month and keep them. In six months you will have the only comparison that has ever been useful to a singer, which is the one against yourself.
What I would do in your lesson
We would work on songs that suit your voice, which may not be the ones you arrived with. Then we would find the qualities in your sound worth keeping rather than sanding off. Most people have been trying to remove the most interesting thing about their voice.
Book a consultation, £25Working on this on your own is slow. In a live one-to-one online singing lesson I can hear what is actually happening in your voice and fix it in real time. More about how I teach, or how I work with singers who have ADHD.
Related articles
- Perfectionism Is Hurting Your Singing
- The Voice In Your Head That Says You Cannot Sing
- Confidence Is Not A Personality Trait
Matt Thompson trained at the Academy of Contemporary Music and has taught singing for more than 25 years, from complete beginners to recording artists and performers with international careers. He teaches live one-to-one online singing lessons from a mobile studio, and has ADHD, which is why every lesson comes with a recording, a written summary and a clear plan rather than something you have to remember. Read his story.