Singer's PATH Podcast
The Singer's PATH Podcast will premiere in 2025!
This podcast provides quality, transparent information for singers and artists. We discuss everything including ways to establish good vocal technique, advice from leading entertainment industry professionals AND mindset support for artists. Whether you're a novice or professional, the Singer's PATH welcomes all singers and helps to guide the way on the journey of developing artistry.
Singer's PATH Podcast
The 4 Steps to Learning Singing (And Where Singers Go Wrong)
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Most singers aren’t stuck because they lack talent — they’re stuck because they skipped steps in their training. In this episode, Sarah breaks down the correct order of learning to sing, from building a clear chest voice to developing head voice, mixing, and eventually adding advanced techniques. She explains why so many singers struggle with things like belting or range, and how it often comes back to missing foundational pieces. This episode gives you a clear roadmap so you can stop guessing and start progressing with intention.
It's that time of year: DISCOVER TIME!
Most singers get stuck at some point
Not because they lack talent…
But because they don’t fully understand their voice.
Most singers are stuck in a cycle of:
– trying random exercises
– searching for answers online
– hoping something finally works
Without knowing what their voice actually needs, progress feels inconsistent and frustrating.
Inside this episode, we break down why that happens — and what’s actually missing.
If you want to go deeper, I’ve made something available for you:
Discover — a mini course that teaches you how to:
– hear what your voice is doing
– identify your vocal tendencies
– understand what your voice needs to improve
So instead of guessing, you can start making clear, intentional progress.
For a limited time, Discover is available completely free.
🗓 Access runs from March 20 – April 10
After that, it returns to a paid course.
👉Access DISCOVER for FREE HERE 🔥
If your voice has ever felt confusing, inconsistent, or frustrating…
This is the place to start.
Have you loved these episodes? Leave a 5 star written review on Apple Podcasts, take a screenshot and send it to singerspath@gmail.com to be entered to win a FREE private lesson with Sarah! Winners to be announced at the end of spring! *You MUST email a picture of your screenshot to be entered!***
Reminder- if you HAVE already submitted a review for the podcast or other products from SB Vocal Studio- send an email with a screenshot and let Sarah know so you're eligible to win a FREE lesson!
Make sure to follow Sarah on Tik Tok and Instagram @singwithbish
Questions or Topic Recommendations for Sarah? Know someone who would be a perfect guest on the podcast? Fill out the form below!
Want to check out the associates at Sarah Bishop Vocal Studio?
If you're tired of not making progress and you're ready to be the artist you know you're meant to be, you're in the right place. You're listening to the Singer's Path Podcast. The Path or Performing Artist Training Hub will cover everything, including singing tips that actually work, advice from top industry professionals, and life-changing mindset shifts. Out with the starving artist and in with the thriving artist. I'm your host, Sarah Bishop, professional singer, actor, educator, and entrepreneur. I'm not afraid to speak the truth and stop the gatekeeping of quality information so you can actually become the artist you dream of being. So let's get on the path, shall we? Even though we're all on our own journeys, it always helps to have a guide. Hello, hello, welcome back to the Singer's Path Podcast. It's me, your host, Sarah Bishop. Last episode was a little bit on the spicy side because I was, you know, processing how I want to show up online and how annoyed I am by like quick fix things confusing people and doing more harm than good, and making people not understand how much of a discipline it is to actually study singing. And today we're not gonna talk about that, but I did mention in the last episode that I was going to provide the steps of learning to sing so that y'all could have a little bit more substance to understand in what actually goes into knowing what you have to do, right? And I'm gonna say this right at the top of the episode here so we get it out of the way, right? All of this is about learning how the voice works and what steps need to go in. But a big part of that is understanding where you are and what steps you need to take. So, real quick, as we dive into this, because this is gonna directly tie into what I'm about to say. If you do ever feel like you are trying everything with your voice, nothing is consistently working, you're scouring online for answers, you still feel confused, or even like you know something's physically off, like you can tell your voice isn't doing what you want it to do, but you don't really know what to do about it, how to work on your voice. It's really not because you're doing something wrong, it's because you probably just were never taught how to actually understand your voice and what your own vocal needs are, and why would you? Because nobody's actually out here teaching this beyond me, who sounds like a parrot or broken record. But I'm telling you, this is what the problem is because you are looking for a solution to a problem that you don't even know what the problem is, right? You are scouring online, looking for answers without getting clear on what the actual problem is. What is the thing that you're actually adjusting? And I had these problems myself. I struggled with this myself as a professional singer. So that's why once I became a teacher, I created Discover. Discover teaches you how to hear what your voice is actually doing, how to isolate and understand, how to detect that, how to recognize your own vocal tendencies or your own vocal habits. Like what are the habits that your voice is falling into? There are actually um a set number of different habits that people have. And so this course teaches you how to identify where you are at on that particular day. Okay. And finally, it teaches you to understand what your voice actually needs. So instead of guessing and again, throwing spaghetti at a wall and not really finding a solution and doing some exercises or some routines that actually move you in the opposite direction of where you want to go, you finally start to have clarity. And honestly, if this has been something you're struggling with, this is taking Discover is the very obvious next step because right now I have made Discover available for free, which I do not do often. I think this is the only time in 2026 this is happening. This is your window. And and this is the catch though, okay? You only have access to it for free until April 10th because this is super valuable. We got to have some boundaries on it, okay? So if you know that you have been struggling with this, you have to actually take the step. You have to sign up for Discover, you have to get it on your phone and you have to finish it. So don't be the person that signs up, who doesn't finish it, because that's the kind of thing that sabotages us. And if you say in you genuinely want to change where you want to go, this is the first step. Actually, understanding what your voice needs and how to hear what it needs and give it that. Okay. You can get Discover by swiping up in the link in the show notes. Um, and then go get it, go through it, please finish it. There's also some uh really special things in there, including a live class with me. You will only find that once you begin watching Discover. There's also like an insane, insane, insane discount happening in there. Um, so you really, you really should go honestly, just get it for that. Just even get it for just that. Like, you're not gonna want to miss the offer that is in there that is gently, delicately folded into the lessons, giving you a sweet treat and some steps on how to actually make huge, huge progress. I mean, listen, don't get me wrong, we do not hold back and discover you're gonna get a lot of sweet treats in there just by nature of absorbing the thing for free because it tells you what no one else is fucking telling you. Okay. And it gives you the next steps, okay, for an insane price. So please, for the love of God, just go. I'm trying to help you. Take some time, go download it. And with that, let us get into this episode, shall we? Okay, the order of studying singing. And this is actually something that we do talk about at a greater depth within Discover as well. So most people don't really understand that like voice teachers, we have like a best plan of events, like the best order of operations when you're studying your voice. Okay, it's not just like, oh, I just like work on my flip, and then I just like get rips, and then I bell, and then that's it. No, no, no, no, no, no. Uh, yes, we do want to target the break in your voice, and I'll have another episode on why teachers are so obsessed with your passaggio and like why we're constantly talking about that, um, in a sic. Okay. But uh, this the the main purpose of studying voice um is to have full use of instrument in whatever artistic way you want to. But there are steps that are best practices to do that. First of all, okay, this is the first step. You have to have a chess voice that's clear and sounds like you talking healthily and clearly, okay? This is like sometimes y'all have everything else in in the kitchen sink, but you can't you can't sing in chess. Do you sound like this? You have like a singer accent, right? Where this is what my voice sounds like, or you just sound airy, right? Some people will call this an unsupported sound, but like what does that mean? Well, it means that you don't have good chord closure and you don't have the right pressure balance, and it sounds like you're getting the wind beat out of you every time you open your mouth, okay? So you need to speak. You need to, if if you have a hard time, if your singing voice sounds like this, you're gonna need to get your chest voice under control. Okay, you gotta talk to have something to build upon. And if you hate your speaking voice, you're gonna have to start there with learning to figure out why you hate your speaking voice and maybe giving yourself some TLC and some love that you know your singing voice really is going to be built upon your speaking voice. Okay. Second step, you have to learn how to stretch your vocal folds and get into head voice. Now, a lot of you are you have an allergy to going high in your voice. You are a head voice adverse, head voice conscious. You hate it, you hate, you need to just say, like, I'm just never going into my head voice. I can never sing high. No, no, no, no. Yes, you you can. Everybody has head voice. I don't care if you're an alto or a bearitone, you have some kind of head voice. Your head voice just might be lower than most people's. If you want to learn to sing other things, you're gonna have to learn to thin your vocal folds, which is learning to sing in head. Okay. So step one, chest. Step two, head. Then, once we have the two ingredients, then and only then do we start to blend and mix them together. Now, mixing it can be really confusing, and we've had whole episodes on mixing. It's it's honestly physiologically, it's a way to get from the TA muscle, which you would have been working on by getting chest voice going on, to give over gradually, evenly, and like we can't we can't really sense that shift, um, and we can't really hear it, and you might not be able to hear it. Hear that shift over to the CT or the cricothyroid, which is what makes up head voice. It's what pulls the vocal folds thin so that you get a head voice sound. So, mixing is learning to go from chest to head evenly using full range of the instrument. It's also vocal balance, it's balancing all of the ingredients: the airflow, the vocal fold depth, the thickness of the cords, the space in the mouth, and it's balancing all those things. So you can play all your notes easily and effortlessly, okay? Then after that, you can start doing the fancy stuff because you know how to mix already. You know how to get your voice and your notes to sound even and clear. So after you have those ingredients established, you understand them enough to tweak them to get to a vocal balance sound. Then we can do the fancy things like doing a chess dominant mix that will get you to a belt, moments of belt, moments in the woods, opening a few of the notes that are plugged mostly into a chess dominant mix. You can do more of a head dominant mix, so more of that operatic, classical, legit musical theater kind of situation, or heady mix, right? Um, where you're straight toning more of that head dominant shape. And then we can go into, you know, having agility and control over the instrument, right? You could even probably do this one after vocal balance place, doing more of the fancy things like doing runs, improvising, artistry, storytelling, all of that, okay? But if you skipped any of these other steps, okay, and you at least didn't land on the vocal balance. I know how to get up and down on my voice evenly and effortlessly, kind of thing. Um, you're gonna have to go back and figure out where you missed that step and give yourself the medicine for that area of your voice so that you move forward so so often, okay, and I mean like most of the time, people have skipped steps and they want to bout and they're not worked on their head voice. And they're trying to sing my days and they wonder why they're screaming. Well, because you skipped some steps. You're gonna have to go, you're gonna walk your booty back, and you're gonna have to do that again so that it becomes easier and you can do so in an effortless way so that you don't have to blow a bunch of air and hoist your chest voice all the way up so that it happens for you. Okay. Some of you wanna be able to do, you know, the wizard and I and Wicked on Broadway eight times a week, but you've never experienced vocal balance before. You've never experienced a way to mix belt in a way that is less effortful, right? Some of you have been studying classically, and you sing exclusively in a very head-dominant way, right? And you've studied for years singing in a head-dominant way, but you've trained your passaggio to start at D4 or F4. And so you're wondering why you're having such a hard dang time singing Lady Gaga, you know, and you're going to a bar for karaoke and you are just screaming your face off, and you can't figure out what about your classical training led you wrong. Well, because you never got vocal balance, you never really understood how to get fully into chest voice and bring chest to an appropriate place, not flipping into heads so prematurely. Okay. So that's what I'm saying. Like when you go to a voice teacher, especially more of a contemporary voice teacher like myself, where we're teaching you to sing more contemporary music, I can help classical singers as well, because I study classically, but my training and pedagogy is mostly from the contemporary lens. That's why we have this order of studying things. So the first step for you to know what you need to do, okay, is to learn the listening that you will learn and discover, learn what to hear and detect in your voice so you can see which of these steps you skipped, and then know what to do in those steps so that you can finally get where you want to go. Okay. Again, you can't be solving a problem when you don't know what the problem is. You're gonna have to kind of go and see where in your vocal journey you kind of avoided doing something or just didn't have the opportunity to learn that thing in that way. Okay. This is a punchier episode, but I I think this is something that I'm asked a lot. Like, how do I study the voice? Like, what are the steps? Like, what is the order? This is the order, I swear to God. This is what we're taught, and how I operate my business and how I help students when I'm working with them individually or in group. Like, this is it, okay? Now, I will say, we'll all kind of ebb and flow, right? When you take discover and you watch it, you're gonna see there's different vocal tendencies and different habits. You're gonna swing back and forth from these habits, okay? So this is like a never-ending process. You're going to be weaving in and out of, you know, strengthening these different areas of your voice. But the goal should always really be if you've if you've sung off balance in for a long time, make your goal to sing on balance, okay? And I promise you, doing the harder things, the head dominant stuff, the chest dominant stuff, the high mixed belt stuff, all of that's gonna become a lot easier once you take a second and you, you know, rewind and you go back to vocal balance, right? And that first step is in discover. So take this time right now. Go get that for absolutely free before April 10th, 2026. Please don't miss it. I don't want that for you, please. Um, watch it, finish it. And with that, I love you. I hope this gave you some clarity over the steps that actually need to happen. And maybe even from this right now, you're going, huh? Maybe I did skip a couple steps. I do hate my head voice. Okay, that's information. So then even if you're gonna scour and do the DIY stuff on the internet, you can at least see, hey, maybe I should be looking at some head voice stuff because that's the thing I've been avoiding. Okay. If you've loved this episode, please don't be afraid to leave us a five-star written Apple Review podcast. Remember, if you actually take a screenshot of and when you leave a written five-star review and send it to me, I enter you to win a free voice lesson with me because I really care about this getting out to more people. Um, and I would love to connect with you and have give you that chance to win that for free. Right. With all of that, I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. And I will talk to you soon. Bye-bye. Let's work together to spread the joys of music. Until next time, I'm your host, Sarah Bishop, signing off from the Singer's Path Podcast. Thanks for listening.