Vibrato in Singing, Part 3: How to Develop Your Vibrato
26/03/2026, last updated on 16/04/2026
You know what vibrato is. You know what types exist. Now for the part many of you have been waiting for:
How do you actually get it?
This is Part 3 of a series based on one of last year’s Ask-Me-Anything webinars.
If you want to see these tools in action (including a live demonstration of the bouncing exercise that made the whole group laugh) the recording is in The singsing! Sofa Library!
Can Vibrato Develop Naturally?
I love how Dana framed it in the webinar: her goal was to
create a “relaxed larynx” and aligned physical environment for the vibrato to show up.
That is exactly the right mindset, because vibrato can emerge “naturally”.
When the vocal system is balanced: stable breath management, functional vocal fold closure,… your larynx can start to swing, producing oscillations. That is your vibrato, appearing all by itself.
This is why I sometimes like to call vibrato a gift. When everything is well-coordinated and in equilibrium, it can simply show up.
It also makes vibrato a wonderful assessment tool. If you invite vibrato and it won’t come, something in your system is not quite in balance yet. That is useful information, not a failure.
In case your vibrato isn’t a gift, here are…
7 Practical Tools for Singers to Develop Vibrato
Tool 1: Build a Solid Straight Tone First
Before we invite vibrato, we build the foundation it needs: a well-supported straight tone.
This means experimenting with resistance in breath management. The idea is not to squeeze or hold, but to slow down and manage the natural movements of your breathing apparatus.
Here are the places I like to work:
- Your respiratory diaphragm wants to move in and up as you sing. Try applying gentle resistance, keeping it a little longer down and out.
- Your ribcage wants to collapse inward. Use your upper back muscles and external intercostals to keep it open, resisting that inward movement.
- Your lower abdominals naturally move inward. You can slow that movement slightly with gentle resistance.
Which spot works best depends on the person. Experiment with each one and notice where you feel the most feedback and control.
Little caveat: Just because I am aiming for muscular resistance, doesn’t mean I’ll use that language to guide you there! For many people, the direct instruction of “Do this with that muscle.” is quite unhelpful and might even create a lot of unwanted tension. And the majority of the muscles recruited for singing, we can’t consciously control… But that’s food for another blog post!
Tool 2: Release Tension in Your Jaw, Tongue, and Larynx
You can apply “perfect technique” to a tense system and get nothing for your efforts.
If there are unwanted tensions in your masseter (jaw muscle), tongue or the tissues around your larynx, vibrato simply will not appear. Your larynx needs freedom to swing.
Some targeted releases I recommend (and that I demonstrate in Part 3 of the Releasing a Tense Voice webinar series of The singsing! Sofa Library):
- Massages and stretches that release the temporomandibular joint – your jaw
- Tongue release exercises
- Laryngeal mobility work
When those areas are free of unwanted tension, you may be surprised at what shows up without any further effort.
Tool 3: Activate Your Pelvic Floor for Better Breath Management
This might sound unexpected, but your pelvic floor is part of your breath management system. It is one of the multiple diaphragms in our body, and when it is engaged and responsive, the whole system becomes more alive and flexible.
A quick and surprisingly effective way to connect everything: jump up and down and let your hands, arms and shoulders flop along freely. Exhale on a long Vvvvv or Zzzz and allow your voice to dance along with your flopping limbs. Yes, “flopping”. Do not try to be elegant 😉
The bouncing connects your pelvic floor to your respiratory diaphragm and all the way up to your larynx, loosening and waking up your whole system. It also gently shifts your nervous system toward a calmer, more regulated state; and that is often where vibrato feels most at home.
If your pelvic floor tends to disconnect from your singing, I wrote a separate blog post about that: When the World Feels Heavy, Your Voice Might Too.
Tool 4: Use Imagery to Invite Vibrato
The brain is incredibly responsive to imagery. Here are some of my favourite mental pictures for inviting vibrato:
- For laryngeal vibrato: Imagine you are falling asleep on a bus driving down a bumpy road. Your head nods slightly, gently, involuntarily. That quality of surrendered movement is exactly what you are after.
- For hammer vibrato: Now imagine you are on a bicycle on a bumpy road. More rapid. More energised. Or imitate a giggling teenage girl 🤭
- The velum trick: Some singers find it helpful to imagine the velum (soft palate) being gently pulled upward on a string and then releasing, like a tiny yo-yo. Worth experimenting with!
Allow it to be irregular or jumpy at first. This works beautifully as a first taste of vibrato, because the body learns what releasing into movement actually feels like.
Tool 5: Why Forcing Vibrato Never Works
Vibrato emerges from release, not from forcing.
This is the single most common mistake I see. When singers are new to vibrato, they often try to push it out, manufacturing a wobble. This is counterproductive. The more you push, the less it wants to appear.
A few approaches that help you lean into release rather than effort:
- The decrescendo + octave jump:
Make a big interval jump (an octave works beautifully) and then let the tone gradually decrease in volume while you maintain the same energy in your breath management. The jump activates the breath management muscles, and the decrease in volume releases the tension. Vibrato often slips in right there. - Alternating notes:
Consciously alternate between two neighbouring pitches, gradually speeding up until the interval gets smaller and smaller. Add a decrescendo (decrease the volume) as you speed up, and the distinction between the two notes dissolves into a continuous vibration. This trick does not work for everyone, but for some singers it is the key that unlocks the whole door. - Focus on volume, not pitch:
Many singers get stuck trying to create this pitch fluctuation. If this is you, try instead to aim for a volume vibrato. Imagine the sound undulating between loud and soft. Quite often, the pitch fluctuation follows naturally, almost as a surprise guest.
Tool 6: Hand Gestures and the Brain-Voice Connection
This is one of my absolute favourite discoveries, and I never work on vibrato without it.
In her paper What Garcia Got Right: Understanding Cortical Signaling of the Glottis, Heidi Moss Erickson describes a fascinating neuroanatomical point: your hands and your voice are wired close together in your brain.
Geeky explanation: the dorsal laryngeal motor cortex (dLMC), the part of the brain that controls laryngeal function, is located very close to the motor regions for our limbs: hands, fingers, arms, feet, toes. Because of this proximity, neural signals can travel quickly and efficiently between these systems.
In practice, this means: using hand gestures while singing gives your brain extra support. Neurons that fire together, wire together!
Here is how to experiment with this:
- Up and down hand movements or jazz hands: a basic, versatile starting point.
- Shaking your fist rhythmically: the physical shaking of your arm and shoulder actually helps your larynx move, on top of the neural effect.
- “Conducting” your own vibrato extent and speed: make bigger movements with your hands to enlarge your extent or wiggle your fingers faster for more speed.
Ever since I learned about this research, I finally understood why my hand simply refuses to stay still when I am working on ornaments and riffs. I always thought it was just a quirk. Turns out it is my brain being clever.
Practice until your brain no longer needs the gesture. Conducting yourself looks quite funny 😉
Tool 7: Why External Focus Beats Internal Focus
This is actually a second, independent reason why gestures work so well; and it connects directly to that little caveat from Tool 1.
Motor learning research consistently shows that an external focus of attention – focusing on the effect or result of a movement – leads to better performance than an internal focus – focusing on the body movement itself.
When you watch and feel your hand moving, your attention shifts away from the invisible, largely uncontrollable mechanism of your larynx, and toward the sound you are aiming for.
That is exactly the kind of shift that supports more efficient, automatic motor control. Sebastian Brand explored this beautifully in his 2021 paper Enhancing Vocal Performance through Body Movements and Gestures as External Foci of Attention.
How Your Brain Learns Vibrato Over Time
There is one more fascinating piece of research I want to share, by Boris Kleber and his colleagues.
In their 2024 paper Operatic voices engage the default mode network in professional opera singers, they compared how the brains of trained opera singers and untrained people respond to listening to opera singing with vibrato versus a straight tone.
The results were striking: when listening to operatic singing with vibrato, trained singers showed significantly greater activation of the default mode network compared to non-singers. The default mode network is the part of the brain linked to self-referential thinking, to our sense of who we are.
In other words: vocal training does not just change how you sing. It changes how your brain hears singing, making it something deeply personal, connected to your artistic identity.
What does this mean for vibrato practice? Over time, with consistent repetition, neural adaptations accumulate. The more you train vibrato, the more it becomes tied into your self-referential brain network. And when that happens, vibrato is no longer something you have to think about. Your brain has learned it as part of who you are as a singer. It just arrives.
That is worth the patience it sometimes takes.
Coming up in Part 4 & 5: When Vibrato Goes Wrong
The next step? Train control:
- Practice speeding up and slowing down. Make it really tight with a metronome!
- Experiment with smaller and bigger extents
If vibrato does not yet appear, that is not failure. It is information.
And if it’s there, but not yet quite the way you want it… too slow, fast, wide or irregular: In Part 4 and 5 I will offer a troubleshooting guide. Stay tuned!
This is Part 3 of a 5-part series on vibrato in singing:
- Part 1: What It Is, How It Works, and What Science Says
- Part 2: Different Types of Vibrato
- Part 3: How to Develop Your Vibrato (you are here!)
- Part 4: Troubleshooting the Wobble
- Part 5: Fixing a Fast Vibrato, and the Power of Stacking
Reading about vibrato exercises is useful. Watching them is better. The full AMA recording shows every tool from this post demonstrated live, with real-time feedback from participants and the kind of “aha” moments that are hard to reproduce in text.
You will find it in The singsing! Sofa Library, alongside 50+ other webinars on topics from metallic singing to brain science, resonance to storytelling. Over 70 hours of content at the time of publication, with new sessions every month.
Perfect for a rainy Sunday on the sofa (pyjamas strongly encouraged)!
Susanne Vahle - Vocational singer
Susanne Vahle - Vocational singer
This session was a great add-on to my voice lessons with Sarah!
M.J. Johnson - Singer & Voice teacher
Ariane De Dom, Avocational singer
Ariane De Dom, Avocational singer
Bec Tilley, Voice Coach & Singer
Frequently Asked Questions About Developing Vibrato
Why don’t I have vibrato yet?
Vibrato often emerges naturally when the vocal system is well-balanced: stable breath management, functional vocal fold closure, and freedom from unwanted tension. If it is not showing up, that is not a failure. It is useful information about where your system needs more support.
Can hand gestures really help develop vibrato?
Yes. Research by Heidi Moss Erickson (2023) shows that the brain areas controlling hand movement and laryngeal function are neighbours. Using hand gestures while singing gives your brain extra support through neural co-activation. It’s the same principle behind Hebb’s famous rule: neurons that fire together, wire together.
How long does it take to develop vibrato?
This varies enormously. Some singers find vibrato within a single session using imagery or gesture techniques. For others, it takes weeks or months of consistent practice. Building the muscular coordination for reliable vibrato is genuine training. Patience is key.
RESOURCES:
- The Role of Vibrato in Group Singing: A Systematic Review by Helena Daffern (2025)
- Operatic voices engage the default mode network in professional opera singers by Adél Bihari, Ádám Nárai, Boris Kleber, Judit Zsuga, Petra Hermann & Zoltán Vidnyánszky (2024)
- A Longitudinal Study of Vocal Functionality and Longevity in the Mature Female Singer by Rebecca Moseley-Morgan (2024)
- Lecture “The Art and Mechanism of Vibrato” at PEVOC 2024 in Santander (ES) by Lisa Popeil
- Complexity of Vocal Vibrato in Opera and Jazz Recordings: Insights From Entropy and Recurrence Analyses by Helena Daffern (2023)
- What Garcia Got Right: Understanding Cortical Signaling of the Glottis by Heidi Moss Erickson (2023)
- Vocal Learning and Songbirds: An Evolutionary Tale by Heidi Moss Erickson (2022)
- Enhancing Vocal Performance through Body Movements and Gestures as External Foci of Attention by Sebastian Brand (2021)
- Presbyphonia by D’Alatri et al. (2018)
- Blend in Singing Ensemble Performance: Vibrato Production in a Vocal Quartet by Helena Daffern (2017)
- Vibrato Rate and Extent in College Music Majors: A Multicenter Study by Nix, Perna, James & Allen (2016)
- When the brain plays music: auditory–motor interactions in music perception and production by Robert J. Zatorre, Joyce L. Chen & Virginia B. Penhune (2007)
- Video Controlling Vibrato Speed by Lisa Popeil (2001)
- Learned birdsong and the neurobiology of human language by Erich D. Jarvis (2004)
- Birdsong and human speech: common themes and mechanisms by Allison J. Doupe & Patricia K. Kuhl (1999)
- NCVS – National Center for Voice and Speech
- Complete Vocal Institute
- “Minding the Gap: Connecting Research from Neuroscience to Vocal Pedagogy” — Heidi Moss Erickson’s ongoing column in the Journal of Singing (NATS)
- Joanna Cazden, Kenneth Bozeman, Kim Chandler, Henrietta Carter (contributions from Voice Geek Group, Facebook community for voice professionals)
As always, feel free to send me your thoughts, questions, and feedback in the comments below this blog, via the contact form or in the singsing! online community 
Cordially,
Sarah