Hilerie Klein Rensi, Voice Teacher

The singers who move us aren’t performing. They’re experiencing.
One of the biggest misconceptions I see among singers is the belief that emotion is something we add to a performance.

We watch incredible artists on stage and see tears, passion, vulnerability, heartbreak, joy, rage, and assume that what made the performance powerful was how well they displayed those emotions.
So we try to recreate the outward signs.
We furrow our brows.
We squeeze our eyes shut.
We gesture.
We “emote.”

But think about the performances that have truly moved you.
The ones that left you speechless.
The ones that made you cry.
The ones that felt so intimate that you almost felt uncomfortable witnessing them.

Most of those moments weren’t big.
They weren’t dramatic.
They weren’t theatrical.
They were often incredibly still.
Because the performer wasn’t trying to show you what heartbreak looked like.
They were actually experiencing it.

The audience doesn’t connect to the performance of emotion.
The audience connects to the experience of emotion.

And here’s the part that fascinates me as a voice teacher:
When a singer is genuinely connected to what they’re saying, the voice responds automatically. Tiny changes in resonance, breath, timing, inflection, color, intensity, and phrasing emerge on their own. Not because the singer planned them, but because they were living the moment truthfully.

That’s why technique matters.
Not so you can sound emotional.
Not so you can manufacture vulnerability.
Not so you can control every detail.

Technique exists so your voice becomes trustworthy enough to carry the truth of the moment without getting in the way.
The goal isn’t to perform emotion.
The goal is to experience it deeply

There comes a point in every singer’s journey where sounding good stops being enough.

The high notes are there.
The belt is there.
The technique is there.

And yet something still feels missing.

For me, that realization was both frustrating and liberating. My teachers stopped caring whether I could sing the notes and started asking a much harder question:

“Do you mean it?”

Not “Can you make it louder?”
Not “Can you make it prettier?”
Not “Can you make it more emotional?”

Do you actually believe what you’re saying?
Because the audience isn’t there to admire your vocal folds.
They’re there to experience something true.

And once you’ve tasted that kind of singing, it’s very hard to go back to chasing flashy for flashy’s sake.
And do you even want to?

Most singers are trying to solve ten problems at once.

The jaw.
The tongue.
The larynx.
The high notes.
The breath support.
The nerves.

And while all of those things matter, your brain can only focus on so much at one time.

One of the biggest breakthroughs in my own singing and teaching was realizing that sometimes the fastest path forward is to stop juggling and pick one thing.

Today, that one thing is a low, silent breath.

Not because breathing is magic, but because a low, silent breath often creates a chain reaction throughout the entire instrument. When the body releases low enough for the breath to drop in, the jaw often softens. The tongue often releases. The larynx settles. The nervous system recalibrates.

Suddenly you’re getting the benefits of several adjustments while only thinking about one.

So if singing feels complicated right now, try an experiment:

Drop nine balls.

Keep one.

Take a low, deep, silent breath.

Then sing.

You might be surprised how much your voice already knows how to do when you get out of its way.

Voice exercises used to make me want to quit singing.

And the worst part?
I actually did them.

Religiously.

I was told to repeat the same exercises over and over until my voice eventually “developed.”

But nobody could answer the question my brain kept asking:
“What am I actually looking for?”
So I kept repeating exercises while building muscle memory for tension, effort, and disconnect.

And honestly?
My voice got worse.

Until….. I found a master voice technician who stopped giving me random exercises and gave me a very specific goal instead:

“Put your thumb under your chin and swallow.
That hard muscle pressing down? That’s tongue tension.
When you sing, it shouldn’t do that.
Go practice until it doesn’t.”

Suddenly practice became a puzzle instead of punishment.
I had something to feel for.
Something to notice.
Something to discover.

I practiced for HOURS a day because my brain finally understood the assignment.
And within six months, my voice doubled in size.

Before you practice another vocal exercise, ask:

What’s the goal?
What am I feeling for?
What am I listening for?
How will I know when I’ve found it?

Because repetition without awareness can reinforce the wrong coordination just as efficiently as the right one.

What’s more important: the singing or the story?

I think a lot of us singers accidentally learn to present our voices instead of communicate through them.
And honestly, it makes sense.

We spend years training technique, chasing beautiful sounds, trying to “get it right.”

But eventually there has to come a moment where the technique becomes so natural that the story can move to the front.

Not: “Listen to me sing beautifully.”
But instead: “I need you to understand what’s happening to me. And I will do it on these pitches that happen to be a beautiful melody.
That shift changed everything about the way I perform and teach.

Singers: where are you on this? Voice first? Or story first?

Voice teachers: how do you teach storytelling in your own studios?

If you hate the sound of your voice… there’s a reason.
And it’s probably not because you’re untalented.
Most singers don’t actually lack confidence.
They lack understanding.
When you understand why your voice feels strained…
why your breath disappears…
why your jaw tightens…
why certain notes feel trapped…
your voice stops feeling random.
And the less random your voice feels, the more you begin to trust it.
That’s where confidence comes from.
Not perfection.
Partnership.

Most singers notice resonance, but never realize they can work with it.
You’ve probably felt it before: low notes buzzing in your chest, higher notes feeling like they shift into your face or head. That feedback matters.
Because when everything feels stuck in your throat, your throat is usually trying to do all the work.
Resonance is one of the ways your body teaches you where sound is vibrating most efficiently. And for many singers, when the vibration feels higher, freer, and less trapped, singing suddenly feels easier.
Less pushing. Less gripping. Less forcing.
Sing what you want to say and let your resonance help you do it.

What if healthy singing isn’t about forcing your voice to become something else…
What if it’s about removing the things blocking the voice that’s already there?
Most singers are rowing upstream.�
More effort.�More tension.�More control.�More panic.

But your instrument already knows what to do.
Your job is not to force the river.�Your job is to stop fighting the current.

“Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream…”
Maybe we’ve been singing the lesson the whole time.

If you want help figuring out what’s getting in the way of your voice, I offer private voice & pedagogy consults through the link in my bio.

If singing feels tight, strained, or exhausting… you’re probably doing too much.

The goal isn’t to force your voice into working.�It’s to stop interfering with it.

Because every bit of extra tension you create will follow you into your sound. Every time.

Can you teach yourself how to sing?
Most people would say no. And honestly, I understand why. Singing can feel so subjective, and it’s easy to believe you need someone else to tell you when you’ve done something “right.”
But the truth is, once you understand how your voice actually works, you don’t have to rely on guessing anymore.
You can start to observe what’s happening in your instrument- what you feel, what changes, what you did to create it- and that’s what allows you to keep improving long after a lesson ends.
As you learn how each part functions- breath, coordination, tongue, larynx, resonance, registration, and JAW- I FORGOT JAW LOL… the game becomes doing them all at the same time. And that takes time. A lifetime, really.
But the goal isn’t perfection. The goal is understanding.
Because once you understand your voice, you don’t lose progress. You build on it.
That’s how singers keep getting better and better. And understand more and more…