Should I use vibrato when I sing?

I get this question a lot: What is vibrato?  And is it a good thing for singing?

First, vibrato is a very natural thing for human voices to produce.  Vibrato is essentially a wave in the pitch a human voice produces.  That wave can be fast or slow, wide or thin, but everyone produces vibrato to a certain degree.  Vibrato is so natural to singing that instrumentalists are taught from an early stage to produce vibrato so their instruments 'sing!'  Even if you cannot hear vibrato from a singer, it is there - it just happens that the vibrato is so slow or thin that our ears have a hard time picking up on it.

Whether vibrato is desirable or not is entirely dependent on the style of music that you sing.  Even the quality of vibrato (how fast, slow, wide etc...) changes from genre to genre.  In opera, the preferred vibrato is noticeably faster than a country singer.  But both genres do use vibrato.

When it comes to training vibrato, however, you have to be very careful.  If you try to produce vibrato unnaturally, the sound that comes out is typically very forced and unpleasant to listen to.  Unnatural vibrato can actually damage your voice!  Therefore, a good voice teacher trains vibrato by working on elements that will allow your natural vibrato to emerge.  Breath support and relaxing/releasing tension in your tongue and throat will allow the vibrato to emerge.

One final note: For the vast majority of singers, vibrato is not produced naturally until you are 15 or older.  For vibrato to emerge, your vocal instrument has to develop to a certain point before vibrato comes out when you sing.

DWS