How to get 1% Better at Singing Every Day – Voice Science

It’s a given that singers want to improve—we’re perfectionists chasing those rare moments when everything just clicks. But what if those moments didn’t have to be rare?

The problem with these moments is that most singers truly do treat them as events straight out of Greek mythology when the muses whisper inspiration to them. That is to say that their success, and enjoyment, is dependent on chance. Goodness knows I spent the majority of my undergraduate studies in this camp. But, what if that belief is the very reason most singers never improve? 

The truth is, those “magic moments” aren’t gifts—they’re built. One adjustment, one repetition, one percent at a time.

Over the last 18 years working with singers, one thing keeps showing up—we live in this constant chase for “the breakthrough.” We convince ourselves we’re always on the edge of one, yet somehow always stuck. And that stuck feeling isn’t neutral. It comes with fear, frustration, sometimes even anger. Because when you pour yourself into something and nothing seems to move, it starts to feel like failure.

The biggest plateau of my career hit during my junior year of undergrad. It was recital season. I was doing everything I was supposed to—learning melodies, memorizing text, checking boxes—but it still felt empty. Off. I couldn’t tell you exactly what was missing then, and honestly I still couldn’t label it perfectly now. Maybe it was brightness, dynamic shape, artistic grip. All I knew was this: those qualities would occasionally appear when I was goofing off alone, but never when it mattered. Never in the lesson, never in performance.

And that was the problem. I was waiting for all of it to fall into place at once, instead of stopping to ask: what piece am I actually chasing? I treated singing like a single breakthrough, not a pile of small ones. But singing isn’t one thing. It’s vowel shape. Tongue height. Breath that lands the same way every time. Dozens of tiny mechanics that never get attention because we’re busy hunting for transformation.

The truth is, what we call a breakthrough is usually the day we finally notice the sum of a thousand small corrections. And if we never chase those small pieces, of course it feels like nothing is changing.

So when it feels like we’re stagnant, we really aren’t. The voice is never fixed, it’s always shifting. Every time we sing, we’re making microscopic adjustments to the muscle memories we rely on. Some of those adjustments move us forward; some quietly pull us off course. But nothing stays perfectly still. Progress or drift, that part depends entirely on what we choose to focus on.

Most singers do practice—but we practice in bursts. We show up in waves of urgency: before a lesson, before an audition, before a performance. And when we finally sit down to “work,” it usually means running the song top to bottom, hoping that somewhere along the way, something will fix itself. That kind of practice doesn’t build anything new; it only reinforces whatever habits are already there. Maybe you recognise feeling like you are practicing as hard as you possibly can and feeling like you’re singing worse than when you started? It’s a painful feeling that can be all too familiar for singers. But there is a better way.

James Clear, in Atomic Habits, argues for the power of 1% daily improvement. At first, that sounds like nothing. And it is—if you only count today. But compounded daily, it doesn’t make you three or four times better after a year. It makes you roughly thirty-seven times better. Most singers never see that—not because it isn’t available to them, but because they never work in units that small.

And that’s the core problem. We think we’re practicing “singing,” but singing isn’t one action. It’s a stack of micro-skills: vowel shape, tongue position, onset control, breath timing, resonance decisions. When you treat singing as a single thing, you keep waiting for all of those parts to improve at the same time. They won’t. This lack of progress in singing as a whole can feel like a plateau. It is easy to throw our hands up and give up saying “I can’t sing, I give up”. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. With consistent practice you will slowly, steadily improve.

This is why talent is such a misleading story. We hear someone who sings effortlessly and assume they were born that way. In reality, what we’re hearing is the long-term result of unconscious precision—tiny decisions repeated until they became automatic. Not inspiration. Not luck. Just compounding. What we don’t see is the weeks and months that they felt trapped in a plateau. In reality, they were progressing, piece by piece, skill by skill.

So if 1% better really is possible every day, the question isn’t can I improve? It becomes far more direct:

What, exactly, am I improving today?

So what does 1% actually look like in singing? It isn’t mastering an aria in a day or overhauling your entire voice in a weekend. It’s choosing one thing—one behavior—and refining it with full attention. That’s it. And when you stack those days, the voice follows.

Something to be cautious of. There is an unfortunate trap that gets even the best of us. One day of focus on a single component won't change much. Unless we think in larger pieces it’s easy to pick the focus of the day, but with all of that shifting focus we get frustrated and angry with the lack of apparent progress, mistaking slow growth for a plateau that causes us to give up. 

This is where most singers quietly sabotage themselves. We get bored. We assume that if we’re not doing new things, we’re not getting better. But mastery doesn’t live in variety—it lives in intentional repetitions. Athletes don’t change drills every day; they revisit the same movement with new awareness. Singing is the same. If you abandon a focus the moment it feels familiar, you never stay long enough to rewire anything. What feels like a plateau is often just the moment before change becomes audible.

If you want to see real change, you have to stop practicing songs and start practicing the parts that songs are made of. At VoSci, we always recommend beginning with the foundations, because they’re the most transferable. A few examples:

• Doing the full Vocal Function Exercises, not to “warm up,” but to coordinate airflow and muscle balance.
• Practicing a single interval, like an ascending major 2nd, for ten focused minutes.
• Running a simple minor scale, not fast, but with perfect intonation and even tone.
• Working your sight reading—not for performance, but to strengthen your ability to learn music accurately.
• Adjusting nasalance by raising and lowering the velum, so resonance becomes a choice, not an accident.
• Spending time in cricothyroid-dominant production—head voice—not because it’s comfortable, but because control there unlocks access elsewhere.

If your focus is repertoire instead of raw technique, the same principle holds. One percent looks like:

• Reciting lyrics as poetry, out of rhythm, to understand shape and emphasis.
• Writing the text down and marking the important words you actually want listeners to hear.
• Planning breaths—when to take them, how to take them—and then practicing those decisions.
• Singing the melody out of time, isolating pitch accuracy without the distraction of rhythm.

What all of these have in common is simple: they take minutes, not hours—but they demand complete focus. Mindlessly running scales won’t refine anything. But a scale sung with precise intent—onset, pitch, vowel, breath—will follow you into every song you sing. That’s how the voice changes. Not with breakthroughs, but with microscopic accuracy. One percent at a time.

I want to come back to the question we started with: What if those rare moments—those clicks, those glimpses of the voice you know you have—didn’t have to be rare?

They don’t. They were never magic to begin with. They were the result of something you did—some alignment of vowel, breath, onset, intention. The tragedy is that most singers experience those moments without ever asking why they happened. And so they spend years waiting for something they could have built.

The hardest part of this work is that real progress is quiet. It rarely feels triumphant. It feels like repetition. It feels like boredom. It feels like nothing is happening. But that’s only because you’re finally working small enough to create change. This is where most singers walk away—not because they can’t improve, but because they never learned how to notice it.

If you can learn to care about one percent, you will never need motivation again. One percent gives you something to do today. Not “be a better singer.” Not “fix everything.” Just one decision, one adjustment, one piece of control that wasn’t there before.

And here’s the challenge—don’t wait until your next lesson or your next rehearsal. Decide today what your one percent will be. A single vowel. A single phrase. A single breath. Train it with unreasonable attention. Let everything else wait. That is how voices change.

At VoSci Academy, that’s the work we’ve built everything around—clarity, not confusion. Our Practice Paths are designed one focus at a time, long enough for it to take root. No guessing, no gimmicks—just the discipline of compounding.

If you’re ready to stop waiting for breakthroughs and start building them, I’d love to see you there.

Until next time,

Keep singing smart.