Train Your Voice

How to Use the Vocal Trainer

Pick a mode, pick the voice type closest to yours so the exercises land in a comfortable part of your range, and allow microphone access when the browser asks. Everything is analyzed in your browser and thrown away: nothing is recorded, stored or uploaded.

Pitch match is free and needs no account. Interval singing, the guided warm-ups and the steadiness test are part of Explorer, and saving your sessions so you can watch the trend over weeks is part of Player. The exercise below is the same either way; what the paid tiers add is more ways to work and a record of having done it.

The number that matters in every mode is the cents error. A cent is one hundredth of a semitone, so 100 cents is the distance between two adjacent keys on a piano. The needle spans a semitone either side of the note, and the green band is the tolerance you are being scored against.

You are not supposed to sit on dead centre

This is worth saying plainly, because the meter invites the opposite conclusion. A held human note is never a flat line. Vibrato in a trained voice swings roughly 30 to 100 cents peak to peak at about five times a second, and that is a feature rather than a fault: a completely straight tone sounds synthetic in most styles. Even a deliberate straight tone drifts by a few cents as breath pressure changes.

So the tolerance is set where a listener stops hearing a problem, not where a tuner stops complaining. Normal is 30 cents either side, which is about a third of a semitone and roughly the point at which a sustained melodic note starts sounding off. Relaxed (45) suits a voice with a wide vibrato or a first session on a cold voice. Strict (15) is a real discipline for straight-tone work, and it is genuinely hard; treat it as an exercise rather than the standard.

Two things also work in your favour by design. The reading is a median of the last few frames, so a single wayward frame does not count as your pitch, and drifting out of the zone drains the hold rather than resetting it, so one blip does not wipe a note you had nearly landed.

Pitch Match: The Core Exercise

A note plays, you sing it back, and the needle shows how far off you are while you are singing rather than after. That immediate feedback is the whole point. Singers who practise without it learn to reproduce whatever they habitually do, including the habitual error, because there is nothing in the room telling them the note drifted flat halfway through.

You have landed a note when you hold it inside the tolerance for half a second. The bar under the meter fills while you are in the zone and tells you how much longer to hold, so you are never guessing whether the note counted; drift out and it drains, faster than it fills, so a brief wobble costs you a little and a real slide costs you the note. That duration is deliberate: long enough that a lucky pass through the right pitch does not count, short enough that the exercise stays a drill rather than an endurance test.

Two errors are worth telling apart. Approach error is scooping up from underneath or landing above and sliding down, and it is a habit rather than a hearing problem: aim to arrive on the note instead of near it. Drift error is landing correctly and then sagging, usually flat, as breath support fades. The first shows up as a slow needle at the start of a note; the second shows up as a needle that will not stay put. The steadiness mode below exists specifically for the second one.

Interval Singing: The Half Nobody Practises

Ear training teaches you to recognise an interval you hear. That is the passive half. The active half is producing one on demand, and the two are genuinely different skills: plenty of musicians can name a minor sixth instantly and cannot sing one.

Here a root note plays and you are asked for a named interval above it. Start with the easy set, which is octaves, fifths and fourths, because those are the intervals with the strongest internal anchors: nearly everyone can find an octave, and a fifth is the opening of a hundred songs you already know. Add thirds and sixths next, since those carry the emotional weight of most melodies and are the ones people miss by a semitone. The full twelve is a real test.

If an interval keeps escaping you, sing the scale up to it once, then try to leap to it directly. The scale gives you the destination; the leap is what you are actually training. Pair this with Interval Training for the listening side.

Warm-Ups: Do These Before Anything Else

Three patterns, each walking up by a semitone every repetition so they climb through your range and then come back down. A piano guide plays the pattern first and you sing it back.

The pattern is laid out as a ladder of notes above the meter. While the guide plays, the chip for each note lights as it sounds, so you can see the shape before you sing it. Then the ladder walks again at the same tempo for your turn, the current step marked, and each chip fills in with how far off you were as you pass it: green inside 25 cents, amber to 50, red beyond, and dimmed if nothing was heard at all.

Read the ladder left to right rather than chasing any single chip. The useful pattern is where in the shape you drift, and it is remarkably consistent per singer: sagging flat on the way up is breath support giving out, sharpening on the way down is tension that has not released, and a wobble only on the top note is that note sitting near the edge of your comfortable range.

The siren has no discrete steps, so it gets no ladder. The needle tracks a target that slides up and back down with the guide instead, which is the same information in the form a glide can carry.

• Five-note scale (do re mi fa sol and back down) is the standard warm-up for a reason: it moves smoothly, has no leaps to fumble, and covers a comfortable span in every register.
• Major arpeggio adds the leaps back in once the voice is moving, and it is where you will hear your break, the point where the tone changes character as you move between registers.
• Siren glide is a smooth slide from low to high and back with no discrete notes at all. It is the gentlest way to visit the extremes of your range and the best thing to do first on a cold voice.

Ten minutes of this before you sing anything demanding is worth more than any single exercise on this page. A cold voice tests badly and, more importantly, is easier to strain.

Treat the numbers here as information rather than a grade. Warm-ups are about moving the voice, and a score you are trying to beat will push you to force notes that want easing into.

Steadiness: The One Teachers Actually Assign

Hold one note as long and as straight as you can while the graph draws your pitch over time. The clock starts on your first sound, not when you press the button, and counts down on screen from twelve seconds. It runs to zero whether or not you are still singing, so letting the note go at the end is fine and the round still finishes. Then read the shape rather than the score.

A rising line means you are sharpening, which usually means pushing. A falling line means you are going flat, which almost always means breath support is running out before your air does. A regular wave is vibrato, and whether that is a problem depends entirely on what you are singing: it is expected in classical and musical theatre and out of place in a tight pop double-track. An irregular wobble that you did not intend is the one to work on, and it responds to breath support rather than to trying harder.

The honest measure here is not how long you lasted. It is your average error across the whole hold, because a long unsteady note is worth less than a short controlled one.

How Often, and What Progress Looks Like

Ten minutes daily beats an hour on Sunday, the same as with any motor skill. A reasonable session is warm-ups first, then one mode you are working on, then stop while it still feels easy.

Expect your numbers to bounce around, because your voice genuinely varies with sleep, hydration, time of day and how much you talked yesterday. A single bad session is not evidence of anything. What you are looking for is your average error trending down over weeks, which is exactly why Player saves each session: the trend is the measurement, and no one remembers last Tuesday's number accurately.

For most people starting out, an average error under 20 cents in pitch match is solid, and under 10 is genuinely good. On intervals, expect the easy set to come first and thirds to lag by weeks. That is normal and not a sign you lack an ear.

Frequently Asked Questions