Learning to use my voice as an instrument has been a challenging thing for me as developing vocalist. I often see vocals as words and emotive expression, rather than a melodic or percussive instrument. I’m doing my best to change this, and these are my best tips and some of my experiences along the way.
About me – deathdoom.com, music and more
- Stefan Nordström
- Musician, songwriter, content creator, digital freelancer
- Stockholm, Sweden
- Bands: Desolator, Soliloquium, Ending Quest, Ashes of Life, Trees of Daymare, The Ashen Tree
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My background with vocals
I started as an extreme vocalist in my teens, mainly singing old school death metal and thrash metal tunes. This didn’t require particularly much when it comes to using my voice as an instrument, aside from being on time, aggressive and not destroying my voice. However, as my taste in music started to change, new challenges started arriving.
Introducing clean vocals more and more in my band Soliloquium meant that I need to think about way more than lyrics, hooks and vocal phrasing. Suddenly, melody was key, and I had obvious issues. For a few albums, I soldiered on without quite addressing this issue, singing in a rather monotone way.
Vocal lessons helped a lot
Doing 10 singing lessons with a great vocal teacher in 2023 highlighted many issues, technical as well as mental. One of the main ones was that my sense of melody wasn’t quite up to bar. I largely saw songs as words, not focusing on melodies enough to learn them properly. This obviously doesn’t cut it. Slowly, I started shifting it. I haven’t gotten close to far enough, but things are definitely changing.
As my friend said to me recently: “singing wrong notes is no different from playing the wrong guitar note”. That should be obvious, and maybe it’s not that clever, but it was a revelation to me. And this is how I will need to think to write better music in the future.
Recording sessions and technological tools
But how did I start understanding my voice as an instrument? Well, a lot happened in 2024-2025. First off, I simply decided to put more time on my vocal melodies, exploring different notes and phrasings. I think this shows on the 2025 Soliloquium album “Famine”, both in the clean and extreme vocals. Just the fact that the wordless “aa-aa” part shows up in “Själamörker” (above) is solid proof that it’s going somewhere.
This album was still largely written lyrics first, rather than melodies, however. I think that’s where a change needs to happen, so I started doing more and more sketch vocals with no words. The parts on the upcoming album with this method definitely gives a whole different flavour, and it’s something I intend to explore more.
I also started looking under the hood more, using Melodyne to analyze my clean vocal melodies and performances. This gave me so many new insights, as I could see what kind of melodies I wrote, which notes I intended to hit, and where I went off the scale or just plain botched the singing. It’s definitely an important thing to have in my arsenal for my upcoming music, and a great tool to learn songs correctly.
Songwriting and creative mindset
So, I intend to take a step in this direction for my new music for sure, writing vocal melodies, phrasings and other ideas with my guitar or as scratch vocals without lyrics. I think my music will be so much better and expressive for it, if I can learn to use my voice as an instrument and find better melodies. I will hopefully be more of a full-on composer and the instruments will be more in sync. Time will tell!
5 tips for using your voice as an instrument
So, that’s my background and my future plans to improve as a writer and vocalist. What about concrete tips? Try this:
- Jam out vocal melodies on a guitar or piano over your pieces
- Think in syllables and phrases, rather than words. It helps to make things catchy and more unique
- Improvise over parts until you find something ear-catching, e.g. by repeating in your DAW and recording spontaneous ideas
- Move vocal/ideas melodies around in Melodyne or another autotune/midi software to find interesting notes to record
- Recording all your takes and listen for potential improvements. Don’t be afraid to share them with other people, even if you might face criticism
Summary – using your voice as an instrument
Using your voice as an instrument is a worthy thing to invest time and energy into. It will make a difference in your singing, no matter what music style you’re performing. For me as a death metal vocalist gone indie rock and folk, it’s one of the most important transitions. I still have a long way to go, but I think composing my new music differently will help a lot.
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