Job Description: Voice Coach

 Voice Coach

There’s a lot of behind-the-scenes work that goes into the making of a star. In many cases, a well-known singer, actor, or entertainer will have a coach guiding them, ensuring that they perform to their potential and take care of their assets, whether that be their bodies, instruments, or other equipment. Especially for a singer, a good vocal coach can be extremely important for ensuring long-term success, as the voice is an instrument that is poorly understood and easily damaged when overused or mistreated. Other times, a good vocal coach can help a singer come into their own as a musician, and transform them from a solid vocalist to a top performer. From all things including stage presence, preparation for competitions, vocal doctoring, and many others, a vocal coach is there to help a singer with the various aspects of their performance and help them achieve the goals they want to attain. 

As a vocal coach, there are several aspects to the job:

• Accumulating a Clientele

• Assessing Client Needs

• Warmups and Technique

• Musicianship

Depending on circumstances and the kinds of music that a coach teaches, there can be many more, but these are the major blocks for any vocal coach to address.

Accumulating a Clientele

Before you can teach voice, you must have people that you can teach voice to. When starting out, this can be difficult if you do not already have a reputation as a coach or vocalist. A few things you can do are to reach out to high school choir programs, music clubs, and use word-of-mouth outreach to friends and acquaintances who have demonstrated an interest in studying voice. If you are already a known vocalist in your social circles (as a vocal coach, you should at least have a bit of vocal ability) this can be easier because your reputation can carry the conversation and increase your credibility as a teacher. Social media can also be a good place to start. Establish a website, Instagram profile, Facebook page, TikTok, or whatever grabs attention these days. Announcing it and making it known that you are offering these coaching services will increase your chances of having interested people reaching out to you. When you gain your first client, you will finally be able to move onto the next step.

Assessing Client Needs

Before you can help your client, you need to know what the client wants and what the client needs from you as a coach. The biggest differentiation from your job as a vocal coach versus a singing teacher is that a vocal coach guides a performer through all aspects of an already established performer, while a teacher is much more focused on vocal pedagogy and teaching a student vocal technique, sometimes from the ground up. The first session you have with a client is extremely important for setting the pace for your future sessions. You should ask your client, “Why are you taking vocal lessons?” Depending on the answer, you should appropriately adapt your lesson plans and your methods of teaching. Does the client have a competition or audition to prepare for? Are they preparing for a video submission for a scholarship? Or does your client simply want to sing better and post covers on Instagram for their friends to watch? Depending on what your client’s goal is, your strategy for instruction as a coach can differ greatly. If there is a competition or audition to prepare for, there is inevitably a day that the competition or audition is on, and you should structure the number of sessions between your first session and that day accordingly. Set a timeline and stick to it, pick a day to go into the studio and record the client’s submission, make sure that the client is not still memorizing words to their competition piece the week before showtime. If they just want to post covers on Instagram, let them know the best practices for making those and help them with that. Essentially, ask your client what to prioritize in your time with them so that you can best help them achieve the goals they want to fulfill.

Warmups and Technique

Although a vocal coach is less focused on vocal pedagogy than a singing teacher, proper technique is essential for healthy singing habits and should be encouraged for long-term preservation of the voice. The last thing a singer wants to hear is that they have vocal nodules, which are extremely easy to develop if the client is singing a lot with poor technique. Ensure that the client has a comprehensive warmup routine covering breath control, range, pitch, diction, vocal agility, and resonance. A proper warmup routine can be just as important, if not more important, than teaching the client repertoire during your sessions because good singing comes much easier if good habits are established through warmups. If you can play the piano, this part is made much simpler as you can customize your warmups to the range of your clients, and not rely on external resources like YouTube videos or CDs.

Musicianship

This is the fun part of coaching. Once your client has a basic understanding of their voice and can sing mostly on-pitch, the next part is developing their identity as a musician. Determining what their voice type is, what music they would sing well, what music they want to sing, and finding the great middle-ground between all of those factors to give your client a direction for future musical development is one big job for coaches. Dig into your knowledge of pop, alternative, jazz, and R&B music to come up with recommendations for your client. Setting up a foundation for your client to make musical choices on their own can be an extremely rewarding aspect of the job, and proper enablement of clients to do so is a mark of a strong vocal coach.

Hopefully, this demystified the process of vocal coaching for some. It seems like a daunting job and one with a lot of responsibility involved, but if you break it down it’s a really manageable operation and can be very rewarding if done for the right people. Happy coaching!

Flesch Reading Ease = 55.8

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level = 11.6

Passive Sentences = 10%