Why I Sing Even Though I Was Told I Never Should

I Spent My Life Hating My Voice. This Is What Changed.

By Rafi Barides Nov 21, 2025

I have been at war with my voice since the moment I could open my mouth and sing. It’s a strange thing, because I truly love to sing. At the same time, I always felt frustrated with the sounds that came out of me. There were so many issues. When I listen back to old recordings, I hear a lack of articulation, a hoarseness, a lack of conviction, and this high, nasal grit. Despite all that, I was deeply passionate about music. Once I got into music production, I would occasionally try to lay down some vocals. I still have some of those early bounces, and they left a lot to be desired.

My first albums were born out of me proving my producer chops. I wrote the songs and made the music, but I leaned heavily on other singers to carry the vocal side of things. Collaboration became a much needed workaround for the fact that my voice wasn’t there yet. I hid behind talented vocalists because I felt like mine would ruin the songs.

To talk about my singing now, it helps to break down the way I understand vocals. To me, singing has a few main components: pitch, tone, articulation, vibrato, and conviction. Back in 2015, when I made my earliest demos, I had none of these. My ears were far ahead of my voice. Painfully ahead. The most frustrating part was that I knew exactly what the correct pitches should sound like, but I couldn’t produce them no matter how hard I tried. I had zero control. I couldn’t sing the simplest run. My voice would break every couple of notes. I physically could not produce vibrato. I thought I was articulating clearly while I was doing the actual singing, but when I played back the recordings, it sounded like I had a speech impediment. The ironic part is that my confidence back then was higher than it is now. There was so much passion in those awful vocals.

Pitch, at the technical level, is just sound waves vibrating at a specific frequency. If a singer hits an A4, for example, that note is vibrating at 440Hz. Melodyne, which is a tool I’ve used for years (alongside your favorite artists), visualizes those frequencies as blobs you can literally drag around. It turns the idea of “singing in tune” into something you can see, measure, and most importantly manipulate.

As a producer, I’ve spent thousands of hours in Melodyne analyzing, listening, and pitch-correcting vocalists. I’ve worked with freaks of nature whose pitch lands perfectly on the grid, and I’ve worked with total beginners who couldn’t sing in the key of the song. Every singer has a unique pitch fingerprint. I can identify the artists I work with regularly simply by looking at the way their vibrato curves on screen. No two vibratos are shaped the same. Everyone has tiny quirks, habits, pitch drifts, micro-slides. These tiny vocal features are invisible to the ear for most people, but are made super recognizable in a software like Melodyne.

This work made my ears extremely sensitive. I’ll hear a singer go slightly sharp or flat during a live performance and physically react to it. Not because I’m trying to be critical, but because my brain is trained to lock onto pitch like a heat seeking missile. No one else in the room seems bothered. I have a hard time listening to songs like “Someone Like You” by Adele or “Halo” by Beyoncé. The slight pitchiness legitimately sounds bad to me. I know that’s not normal — billions of streams prove it’s a feature, not a bug. Adele’s imperfect pitch is part of her emotional rawness. But I still melodyned a version of “Someone Like You” just so I could enjoy it the way my brain wanted to hear it. Something about natural pitchiness just hits me wrong.

A huge part of my hesitancy to sing now comes down to pitch. My ears are ahead of my vocal chords, and I struggle to hit notes accurately in a relaxed, emotional performance. With extreme concentration, I can sing pitch-perfectly, but the performance sounds rigid and lifeless. I think that the best singers have mastered technique so deeply that pitch accuracy becomes automatic, freeing them to focus on tone, emotion, and expression.

My pitch is not worse than most singers I know, but I’m extra sensitive to it, and that sensitivity makes me self-conscious. I have landed on an interesting way of recording. Comping is the process of recording multiple takes of a vocal and then stitching together the best moments of each. It’s like building a frankenstein performance out of many takes. My workflow is this: first take, I obsess over pitch. It’s accurate but stiff. Then I do several takes where I completely let go. Emotional, sloppy, and free. I then comp the emotional moments with the cleanest pitch moments, and finish with pitch correction correction. This gives me a natural, expressive, pitch-perfect take.

I spent a year doing budget-friendly vocal lessons. Some of it helped, but some was genuinely harmful. There are so many vocal coaches teaching online who have hundreds of videos but no evidence of them actually singing, or when they do sing, they sound bad. I have realized with time that there is a crazy amount of Dunning–Kruger in this space. Lots of blowing into straws, lots of random scale exercises that don’t translate into real-world improvement. The only elite lesson I ever had was with William Riley, who has coached actual legends, but it was very very expensive.

What I truly learned that year was how to breathe. And that alone changed everything. Learning to breathe into my stomach fixed decades of hoarseness in my speaking voice. Cutting dairy helped my phlegm issue. Sleeping more helped. Drinking water helped. But the biggest improvement came from reducing throat tension in my daily life. Speaking better gave me a clean foundation for singing. Still, the number one factor in my improvement was simply this: I sang every day for five years straight. I am no Sinatra, but when I eventually film my five-year vocal transformation video, I think the before-and-after will shock people.

The tone and range of my voice are their own journey. I’m a tenor with a lowest note around F and a highest belted note around B. Occasionally I can hit a clean C. There’s a crunch in my tone, not smoky or raspy, but textured. Years of childhood hoarseness baked in a natural grit. My breathwork cleaned up the tone, but the grit remained, which I now see as a feature. In recording my upcoming eight-song album, Storm Before the Storm, I embraced it a lot. For the first time in my life, I listened back to the masters and thought, My voice truly sounds like nothing else, and I love it.

Tonally, I don’t have an extreme “height” bias. Think Alec Benjamin (naturally high) versus Alex Warren (naturally deep) — even though they share similar ranges. My tone sits closer to The Kid Laroi or Harry Styles, but with a completely different texture. Slightly high, but not bright.

I have a nice falsetto range and usually flip around B. A lot of singers talk about mixed voices, which is that airy, belt-adjacent sound, but I have a very hard time producing it. My transition is usually a very clear, rigid flip. The natural distortion in my belted notes sounds like Hozier’s screamier notes but with a touch of Dominic Fike’s texture.

My vibrato is the most unique part of my voice. It’s a slow, wobbly pitch vibrato, not a velocity vibrato. I can control it well and use it emotionally. For years, I couldn’t do vibrato at all. The breakthrough came when I discovered that pressing my fist into my stomach while belting created a vibrato effect, almost like “playing” my stomach the way a guitarist wiggles their finger. That sensation trained my body to internalize the motion. After weeks of this, I removed my hand and realized I could naturally produce a beautiful, controlled vibrato.

I also worked on agility, spending hours repeating the same runs. After a few weeks, things I could never do became instinctive.

A big part of how you sing is what you sing. For a while, I experimented trying to find the right “outfit” for my voice. I have dabbled in every genre you can think of. At this point, I gravitate toward dramatic ballads. I don’t rap, and my articulation can get sloppy in fast-paced songs. I have an especially hard time singing Jonas Brothers songs for example because they’re so percussive in their delivery.

Honestly, a lot of my early vocals sucked because my early songs sucked. I had nothing to say at 16. Now I do.

In the last few years I have gone through a lot. I dealt with heartbreak, emotional intensity, losing people I loved, falling in love with people who didn’t want me back, political upheaval, family fractures, antisemitism, extended family cutting me off, applying to hundreds of jobs and getting rejected, feeling unwanted romantically, hitting rock bottom, getting rushed into emergency surgery, losing meaning, struggling with being Godless, losing direction, and losing myself. The songs on this album wrote themselves. I didn’t sit down and try to write them. They were pulled out of me by the year I lived. I released Rags to Rags three months ago. I didn’t plan on making another album. This album exists because I have something to say. And I’m singing like I’ve never sung before because goddammit, I have something to say.

Earlier this year, this Israeli kid walked into my life with this awesome mix of street confidence and unexpected softness. Someone who could talk Gemara with me in the same breath that he joked about niche Israeli stories he never actually finished. It was super relatable, and made me feel a sense of “home”. We had these long walks, and stupid jokes, and the most adorable mannerisms. We spent a holiday together upstate, and it’s so corny but it felt absolutely magical to me.

To me, to be known is to be loved, and I think I caught such strong feelings because he just got me. I really started to have strong feelings for him, and he cared about me, just not in the way I needed. But I also had to contend with the slow dawning realization that he just wasn’t mine. That he never could be mine. He was always half inside the connection and half already planning the life he’d eventually build with someone else. Not because he didn’t feel something for me, but because he didn’t see a version of the future where he let himself choose me. Ending things with him wasn’t dramatic, but it was extremely hard. Truly devastating.

People separate all the time, and I know that this is just part of life, but this one really broke me. Ending things on good terms is sometimes harder because there’s no drama, no big fight, just the realization that this won’t work. When I realized we could not be together, I thought I could accept it while he and I continued doing everything we love together. But I was totally delusional. Suddenly, I felt resentful towards him for not wanting me back, and that was how I knew we needed a more serious break. I hated feeling resentful towards him. After that chapter ended, I tried to find myself again, but I was dealing with strong feelings of being rejected by the Jewish community for being gay. I was dealing with strong feelings of being rejected by the gay community for being Jewish. My endless job search kept on reinforcing a message that I am not useful to anyone. Some of my friends moved away, and I was feeling particularly lonely. I tried hard to stay positive, but my feelings got the better of me and I dwindled into a several month long depression until I hit what truly felt like rock bottom. I started crying a lot randomly, sometimes in public which felt embarrassing for me. It was hard because my family would ask what’s going on, but I felt like they didn’t have the capacity to hear or understand. I remember looking in the mirror and saying holy shit, things could actually not get any worse. And then my stomach started to hurt.

It was a Saturday evening, and I felt a sharp pain in my abdomen. It started off bearable, but quickly got so bad that I had to call an ambulance. After being rushed to the hospital for a CT scan, the doctors let me know that I had to have my appendix urgently removed. I was in physical pain, but I started to feel an overwhelm of emotions, almost like my body was giving out on me. I felt humiliated and powerless, and reminded that I could die at any time. I felt like I was staring at my mortality during a time where I genuinely wondered if I would be better off dead.

It all happened so fast, that when I woke up from anesthesia I wasn’t sure if the surgery happened at all. I lifted my blanket and looked down, and saw my abdomen scarred, bulging and bloody. I knew that this was life saving work but I felt so violated by the gory sight. The surgery was successful, but put a lot of stress on my body. The incisions were deep, and the weight of my recovery hit me like a train. My friend Bob visited me in the hospital, and that gesture meant a lot to me, because it took me out of my thoughts, and made me do a little reset. I came home thinking about how every time I hit rock bottom, it feels like they dig another layer.

I named my album Storm before the Storm before the surgery, but it could not have turned out to be more apt. When I think of the phrase calm before the storm, I think of peace and serenity, that empowers us to take on the storm, meaning the expected chaos which we are bound to experience in our lives. I named the album Storm before the Storm because of the particular pain and chaos I had been experiencing in this chapter of adulthood, but also because pain and chaos are things that I have been experiencing for most of my life. But you’re probably wondering what this has to do with my vocals.

My singing is great on this album because this was the worst year of my life. When you can’t rely on God, or family, or love, or health, or certainty, you really cling to whatever intense emotions hijack your body. For me, this came out as me using the voice I’ve been fighting with since I was a kid. The voice that finally learned how to tell the fucking truth.

People also shaped my voice and my perception of it. I was told my whole childhood by my family that I would never be a singer, that I sounded terrible. My friends knew it too but smiled through it. I don’t blame them. Those early recordings were awful. I posted some online and it was hell trying to scrub them from Spotify and the internet a few weeks ago. I was offended when friends did concerts and never invited me to sing — but they weren’t wrong. I wasn’t ready. And I didn’t have the material.

Rafi Barides, Musician

Even now, reactions are mixed. People who met me recently tend to think I sound great, which feels nice. Some older friends still hear me through the old lens of sounding bad. But the biggest change is this: I love my voice. And I never thought I’d say that.

So why sing? If after years of work, I’ve reached “good” but not “earth-shattering,” why bother? Because I want to sing my own songs. This is my art. These lyrics came from my life, my heartbreak, my confusion, my body, my memories. My voice is the only honest vehicle for them. Someone else singing them would feel like a lie.

The point of a movie isn’t to make you feel good, it’s to make you feel something real. A great horror film can devastate you, unsettle you, scare you or disturb you, and none of that makes it a failure. In the same way, I’ve realized that singing isn’t meant to fit into some arbitrary “good or bad” box, it’s meant to communicate something. This exists beyond the lyrics, in the singing itself, in the same way that you can have a happy scat, or a melancholy hum. This is about my voice. The body that experienced these complex experiences is producing the sounds that express them.

Sing anyway. If you hate your voice but love to sing, sing anyway. Get a vocal coach or don’t, it doesn’t matter. The biggest improvement comes from making noise, from showing up every day. I kept singing even when I sounded terrible. And now, I’m genuinely proud of what I’ve made.

If your voice isn’t naturally great, sing anyway. If it embarrasses you, sing anyway. If it breaks, cracks, shakes, or makes you cringe, I’d say sing anyway.

Because one day, without noticing, you’ll sing something and think, Wait… is that me? And you’ll realize that the sound you thought you’d spend your entire life hating has become something you’re proud of.

That’s what happened to me.