My singing journey

See how I found my voice in a year and what I plan to do with it.

Welcome to the fourth installment of my hobby journey series! In this post, I will now write about my singing journey. This is the shortest journey of all my hobbies, as I started taking singing seriously in February 2025. Nonetheless, I would like to share what I have accomplished thus far and where I plan to take this hobby. Continue reading to learn just that.

The (Many) Prior Years of Singing

Singing is another activity I have always found enjoyable and inspiring. My early (and continued) inspiration for singing is Amy Lee of Evanescence, and I listened and sang to a lot of their songs growing up. What drew me to her singing voice particularly was the rich, full, and emotive qualities of it. Everything I start at one point or another is because there is a strong source of inspiration behind it. It just took me a while to get to that point with singing.

As I started writing my own “official” songs (probably towards the beginning of 2019), I practice sang and performed many of those at open mic nights. Mind you, I knew nothing of actual vocal technique, so my vocal outcomes were inconsistent and sounded strained. Maybe I had an okay performance here or there, but there is one particular time when I freshly wrote a song and forgot how it was supposed to sound. I messed it up pretty bad when performing but did get all the way through the song. I remember overhearing a young gal commenting to one of her friends “that was tragic.” That’s just something I laughed off because, at the very least, I had the courage to get up there and ride it out, which is the most you can do when things go wrong.

A Mock Singing Demo

As my music journey indicated, there were a few unintentional hiatuses I took when it came to music as a whole. Inspiration struck in 2022, though, when I helped some of my company’s book authors publish a poetry book on addiction and trauma. One of the authors of commented how it would be neat if someone wrote a song to promote the book, which got my wheels turning.

Soon after, I remember knowing exactly what I wanted to name the song, and the song nearly wrote itself the same morning. I then created some basic complementing background instrumentals in MuseScore and recorded myself singing the song as a proof of concept for what I came up with and had in mind. Seeing their reactions after listening to the song made me want to get it recorded and see this mini project through to the end. I just told them it’d be a bit since there were some minor tweaks they wanted to make to the song progression and because my voice needed some work.

Now and then, my boss and I would see one of the authors at the restaurant they worked at, and I’d give them a progress update on the song. For a while there was no progress at all, but I reassured them that I’m still serious about doing this and that it’d start once my singing voice could do the song justice (even though they were so appreciative that I even got as far as I already had).

Starting Vocal Training (and Where I Am Now)

It wasn’t until February of last year that I actually became serious about learning healthy vocal technique. The years prior to that were all about enhancing and completing my song compositions for my first album concept (eight years in the making), which gave me plenty of new vocal parts to eventually try. When I originally became serious about learning to sing, I had no idea where to start since this was new territory for me. So, I watched several beginners’ videos to determine the best place to begin.

The first vocal exercise I did was for finding and encouraging the throat to stay open. My throat was quite tight at the time, and it took a bit before I could figure out what it felt like for the throat to open and how to keep it open. Next, I ventured into finding my vibrato, which I almost thought was a lost cause. Turns out I just had a tight tongue, which I proceeded to do vocal exercises for. I then worked on the ee, i, and ah vowels, which are the most closed off vowels that tend to sound most strained. I also confirmed my jaw tension was fine.

Here is when vocal training started to get a bit interesting. My next stumbling block was correcting strained and pinched high notes. For a while, I thought the issue is that my larynx was jumping and that I needed to keep it more stable. What I figured out several weeks later is that I needed a better understanding and implementation of breath support.

I was doing some breath support exercises as part of my vocal training, but I still needed to figure out how much resistance was too much resistance and figure out the best way to inhale to ensure even support. This I figured out around two months ago. I then ventured into vocal mixing to address pitches that originally sounded strained (mostly because I was attempting pitches in chest voice that should have been in head voice). A year later, I am now focusing on embouchure (mouth position) to achieve tonal fullness, along with practicing songs I find inspiring that have various levels of difficulty to continue building vocal agility.

My Vocal Aspirations

Once I get to a point in my singing where I achieve the consistency and command I am looking for, that it when I will consider the next steps for getting my first album concept recorded, along with the song I wrote for the poetry book. I look forward to the day I record my music after all these years.

In addition to the vocal techniques I am practicing right now, I would like to venture into more specialty techniques this year. My first and foremost priority, though, is to ensure I am singing in a way that is healthy and will sustain my voice for years to come. Techniques I want to learn and incorporate into my own music is kulning (which is an ancient form of heard calling in Nordic countries), harsher vocals used in hard rock and metal, and kargyraa throat singing (if my voice is capable of figuring that out).

Having more versatility with my voice will enable me to further experiment with different vocal sounds to include in my music, and I think it will also unlock new aspects in my creative process for how these songs initially come about. I am excited to see where all this leads and what my music looks like going forward.

An Ever-Expanding Journey

Thank you for reading my singing journey! I hope you found it inspiring enough to revisit (or find) a hobby that serves as a source of inspiration in your life. I may not have singing updates as frequently, but it is something I am continuing to practice pretty regularly.

This will probably be my last hobby journey post for a bit, as it takes a long enough period of time and enough trials and tribulations before something can constitute as a “journey”. Stay tuned for updates on all the hobbies I did write journey posts about, along with side quest activities I try along the way. Who knows; you may even see some journey posts from George soon.

Happy hobbying!