All musicians (including singers) should cultivate vibrato to make the tone more beautiful and warm. Vibrato is often the result of a well-balanced voice. However, more often, correct vibrato must be encouraged and developed.

Sometimes singers create bad habits, like a shaking jaw or tongue, when they try to learn vibrato. Or the vibrato speed is too fast or too slow. This happens when we don’t understand how vibrato is properly produced. So that is what we will be discussing here.

The word vibrato comes from the Italian word vibrare– to vibrate. Vibrato originates in the brain and is initiated via the limbic system- the part of the brain that creates emotion. That’s why advanced singers automatically use vibrato on sustained pitches and emotional sections of a song.

Vibrato is an oscillation or slight variation of frequency (perceived as pitch) and/or amplitude. Frequency variations of a quarter step above the mean of the pitch and a quarter step below are pleasing to the ear. Wider variations exist in some styles.

Vibrato is characterized in terms of two factors: the amount of pitch variation and the speed at which the pitch is varied. A pleasing vibrato rate is between 5-6 cycles per second for most popular singing.

A vibrato rate faster than 8 pulses per second produces the unpleasant bleating sound of the tremolo. The goat type vibrato, caprino vibrato (Italian) or chevre (French) is created with the vocal folds.

A vibrato rate slower than 4 pulses per second produces a wobble, which sounds like inconsistent pitch. Occasionally, pop singers fall outside the norm; pitch variation can range from minimal to fairly wide in some R&B singers like Aaron Neville.

The amount of pitch variation is ideally a quarter-step above the mean and a quarter-step below the mean of the pitch. Fluctuations of up to a half-step above and below the mean occur in some singers.