Good technique is a strong starting point—but technique alone doesn’t automatically create a great performance. In the end, singing is an expressive art: it exists to deliver a message.

This chapter focuses on practical ways to prepare expression in a way that directly helps your recording.

1. Build Diction and Pitch Into Your Body First

Before you worry about expression, at minimum, these two things need to be “in your body”:

• You can sing without constantly reading the lyrics—your memory is solid enough that the words come out naturally.
• Your pitch and rhythm don’t swing wildly—you’ve repeated the song enough to stay stable.

If those aren’t stable yet, most of your brain during recording gets trapped in “Don’t mess up the lyrics. Don’t miss the notes.” And when that happens, there’s almost no energy left for emotion or phrasing.

In practice, it helps to spend at least one focused session on reducing mistakes, using methods like:

• singing at a very slow tempo, almost like speaking the lyrics
• repeating the song a few times over an instrumental that’s slightly slower than the original

2. Analyze the Song and Design Your Performance

The next step is to design how you’re going to sing the entire song.

Print the lyrics and mark things like:

• emotional arc and energy changes by section
• where the speaker’s situation or point of view shifts