Operation Car-eoki: What If I Tried to Sing?

I play guitar. I play bass. I have never once trained my voice. Not a lesson, not a YouTube video, not even one of those “find your range” apps. The voice just does whatever it does.

I want to fix that. Not in a “quit my job and study at Berklee” way. More like: what if I gave it five minutes a day and actually tried? Could I find a karaoke song that slaps? Could I stop mumbling through worship on Sunday?

One way to find out.

You’re Probably Not Tone Deaf

Good news first. Actual tone deafness, the clinical kind, affects 1.5% of people. Researchers at the University of Montreal tested over 16,000 people to get that number. You almost certainly aren’t one of them.

So why do untrained people sound bad? It’s not your ears. It’s your muscles. Peter Pfordresher at the University at Buffalo found that bad singing is a motor control problem. Your brain hears the right pitch. Your vocal cords just don’t know how to get there yet.

It’s an instrument you own but have never practiced. And like any motor skill, the fix is reps. Slow, deliberate, at a comfortable volume. Not singing louder. Singing more often.

Step One: Figure Out What I’m Working With

I don’t even know my vocal range. That feels like the place to start.

Download Sing Sharp (free, iOS/Android). It has a vocal range test built in. Sing up, sing down, it tells you what you are. No piano required.

Type	Range	Sounds Like
Bass	E2-E4	Johnny Cash, Barry White
Baritone	A2-A4	John Legend, Hozier
Tenor	C3-C5	Stevie Wonder, Sam Smith

If you’re eyeing songs above your range, that’s not a wall. It’s a project. Range expands with training, especially the upper register. Mix voice and head voice are probably sitting there unused.

Don’t marry the result. What matters more is your tessitura, the zone where your voice sounds like it belongs, not just the notes you can technically hit.

Step Two: Pick a Song

I started with a shortlist. Songs I actually like, across different ranges, that I could see myself doing at karaoke without wanting to disappear.

Song	Artist	Why
Dust in the Wind	Kansas	Gentle, mid-range, almost spoken in parts
Simple Man	Lynyrd Skynyrd	Conversational melody, crowd-pleaser
Spoke in the Wheel	Black Label Society	Grittier, more power, stretch goal

The rule: don’t pick the song you like the most. Pick the song that lives in your tessitura. The one that feels easy when you hum it. That’s the one you can actually improve on.

If none of these fit, that’s fine. Find something in your range that you wouldn’t be embarrassed to sing in front of people. That’s the only criteria.

I’m committing to one song and using it as the entire training vehicle. Same approach I used learning Sultans of Swing on guitar. One song. All the reps.

The 80/20: Three Skills, That’s It

I went down a research rabbit hole. A thousand things you could work on. But three keep coming up everywhere.

1. Breath support. Diaphragmatic breathing. Ribs expand, not chest. You’re managing air pressure, not air volume. Chris Liepe breaks this down with Aretha Franklin.
2. Pitch accuracy. Your ear hears the note fine. Your muscles need reps to find it. This is where apps with real-time pitch feedback earn their keep. This 10-minute routine from Singeo has a million views for a reason.
3. Vowel shaping. How you shape your mouth changes how the note sounds. The difference between “on pitch” and “actually sounds good.” Melissa Cross calls it “painting with vowels.” Adam Mishan’s beginner guide nails it.

That’s the whole stack. Breathe right, hit the note, shape the sound.

The Practice Stack

Here’s the thing about vocal training that surprised me: a lot of it can happen in the shower, in the car, wherever. You don’t need a studio. You need reps. The science backs this up. Dr. Ingo Titze at the National Center for Voice and Speech has published extensively on Semi-Occluded Vocal Tract Exercises (SOVTEs). Buzzing your lips (lip trills) or singing through a straw (straw phonation) creates back-pressure that helps your vocal folds vibrate more efficiently with less effort. A study out of the University of the Philippines found measurable improvement after just 3 minutes of lip trills.

Three tiers. Pick the one that matches your day.

Tier 1: Five Minutes (Shower, Car, Anywhere)

No app. No gear. No excuses. This is the “never miss” tier.

Minutes	What
0-2	Lip trills, ascending and descending
2-3	Sirens on “oo”, low to high and back
3-5	Sing a verse of your anchor song

That’s it. You can do this in the shower. You can do this at a red light. The only rule is you do it every day.

If you only watch one warm-up video: Jacobs Vocal Academy’s 5-minute warm-up has 50 million views. Just follow along.

Tier 2: Fifteen Minutes (AI Coach)

This is the upgrade. Phone in hand, an AI listening to every note.

Singing Carrots AI Coach is the pick here. It claims to actually listen, think about your voice, and build personalized lesson plans. Their own data says users improved pitch accuracy by 6 percentage points and expanded range by 2.7 semitones over 4 months. Those are the company’s numbers, not independent research. I’m testing it so you don’t have to. Results in the next section.

Minutes	What
0-3	Lip trills + humming (warm-up)
3-8	AI-guided pitch and scale exercises
8-12	Technique work (breath, vowels)
12-15	Anchor song with pitch feedback

You can do this at your desk, in a parked car, anywhere quiet-ish. The app is the coach.

Tier 3: Thirty Minutes+ (Dedicated Session)

This is real practice. Blocked time, structured curriculum, recording yourself.

30 Day Singer ($15/mo) is the most complete structured course I found. Real vocal coaches, progressive curriculum, short enough lessons to fit in a session.

For a one-time investment, Jeff Alani Stanfill’s Let Your Voice Soar ($55) is worth it. It’s an hour-plus video with 4 demo lessons and a 36-exercise vocal workout for both male and female voices. He shows singers at different stages of development so you can see where you are and where you’re going. The exercises are available on streaming platforms so you can run them on repeat.

Pair either with the extra exercises below and you’ve got a legit routine.

Minutes	What
0-5	Full warm-up: lip trills + sirens + humming
5-10	Pick 2 from the extra credit menu (below)
10-20	30 Day Singer lesson
20-30	Full anchor song run-throughs, record yourself

The Extra Credit Menu

Mix any of these into your warm-up or technique block.

Exercise	Time	What It Does	Link
Straw phonation	2 min	Sing through a small straw. Builds pressure safely without straining vocal folds.	Jacobs Vocal Academy
Lip trill scales	3 min	Push a little further into your range than the basic warm-up.	Jacobs Vocal Academy
Bratty “nay” scales	2 min	Exaggerated nasal sound. Feels obnoxious. Helps find your mix voice without straining.
Humming resonance	2 min	Feel where the sound lives in your face before opening up to full vowels.
Record and compare	5 min	Sing a phrase. Play it back. Sing it again. Brutal but effective.

The Before

Coming soon. Recording day one before I know anything.

What Actually Happened

Coming soon. Check back for real results.

The Goal Ladder

Month 1: Build the habit. Hit Tier 1 every day, Tier 2 or 3 when I can. Find the anchor song. If I stick with it for 30 days, book a single session with a vocal coach to check my form before bad habits set in.

Month 2-3: Nail the anchor song. Be karaoke-ready. Stop mumbling at church.

Month 3-6: Expand range. Work through 30 Day Singer curriculum. Start recording myself regularly. Start working through David Phelps’ 14-part masterclass with New York Vocal Coaching on YouTube. Breathing, high notes, belting, resonance. Millions of views. Free. From the actual guy.

The horizon: This is the part where I admit what I’m actually building toward. David Phelps singing “He’s Alive.” If you know, you know. That’s a world-class tenor with classical training doing things with his voice that shouldn’t be legal. I’m a baritone. He’s a tenor. I’m not delusional about the gap. But that’s the reason to keep going past month three. And Jeff Stanfill has a course called “Teaching the Contemporary Commercial Music Tenor” that’s basically a roadmap for exactly this kind of range-building project.

Try It Now

If you’ve read this far and want to actually do something, here’s your 10-minute kickstart:

1. Download Sing Sharp (free). Run the vocal range test. Takes 2 minutes.
2. Look at the table above. What are you? Bass, baritone, tenor?
3. Pick a song from the shortlist that fits your range. Or pick your own.
4. Do a 5-minute warm-up. Sing the first verse of your song.
5. That’s it. You just did more vocal training than most people do in their entire lives.

What’s Next

That’s the system. Three tiers, one song, five minutes on the bad days and thirty on the good ones. The anchor song builds your solo voice for karaoke. But breath support and pitch accuracy pay off everywhere. Including Sunday morning, where the quiet goal is to be on the mic at least once instead of just playing the bass.

I’ll update this post with real results once I’ve got a couple weeks in.

If this sticks, Part 2 is the real story. Real recordings, the David Phelps masterclass series, and a session with a vocal coach to find out what I’m doing wrong.

For now, I’m downloading Sing Sharp and finding out what I’m working with.