My shower voice is genuinely good. I've heard it. I know what I sound like in there — the acoustics are forgiving, the tiles throw your voice back warm and full, and nobody's listening so there's no tightness in the throat. Then I try singing literally anywhere else and something collapses. The voice goes thin. The notes crack. The confidence I had five minutes ago in the bathroom is completely gone.

This gap — between shower-voice and real-voice — is not a talent problem. It's a practice problem. The people who "can sing" are mostly just people who practised behind closed doors long enough that their real voice caught up to their bathroom voice. Twenty-one days is enough time to start that process. Here's exactly how.

The shower voice is real. This is the 21-day plan to take it out of the bathroom.

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Week 1 (Days 1–7): Foundation First — Breathe Before You Sing

The most common reason teenage voices crack or go thin has nothing to do with the voice itself. It's posture and breathing. Hunched shoulders, shallow chest breaths, jaw tension — these are the actual enemies. Most vocal coaches spend the first two lessons fixing posture before touching a single note.

Days 1 and 2 are purely breath work. Stand against a wall — spine straight, shoulders back and down, chin level. Put one hand on your stomach. Breathe in slowly through your nose for four counts. Your stomach should push out, not your chest. That's diaphragmatic breathing. It feels unnatural at first because most of us breathe backwards. Do this for five minutes, twice a day. It's boring. It's also the foundation everything else sits on.

Days 3 through 7 add two exercises you'll do every morning. The first is the lip trill — buzz your lips like a motorboat while humming a note. It sounds ridiculous and works perfectly. It warms the voice without straining it and teaches breath control without you having to think about it. The second is the siren — slide from your lowest comfortable note to your highest and back down, like a police siren. Do this three times each morning. It maps your range, loosens the passageway between your chest and head voice, and catches problem spots you'll need to address in Week 2.

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Week 2 (Days 8–14): Find Your Range and Your Break

Every voice has a break — the point where your chest voice gives out and your head voice takes over. Most untrained singers either avoid it entirely (which shrinks your usable range dramatically) or push through it too hard (which causes cracking and strain). Week 2 is about finding yours and getting comfortable right at that boundary.

Open GarageBand on your phone, or any free piano app. Play a note — any note in the middle of your comfortable range. Match it with your voice. Hold it for three seconds. Then move one note up. Match. Hold. Keep going, very slowly, until you feel your voice wanting to shift or break. That's your passaggio — your bridge. Sing through it gently rather than pushing it. Every day this week, start your siren exercise from two notes below that point. You're training your voice to transition smoothly rather than break.

Day 11 is when you do the hardest thing of the entire 21 days: record yourself. Not to post. Not to share. Just to hear. Most people have never heard their actual singing voice through a phone speaker rather than inside their own head, and the experience is genuinely humbling. Save the file. You'll compare it to Day 21.

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Week 3 (Days 15–21): One Song, Worked Daily

Pick one song. Not your favourite — the one you can almost sing. The one where you get the verses right but the chorus beats you. This song is your benchmark for the next seven days. You are not learning it in three new songs. Just this one, daily.

Days 15 through 17 are about identifying the problem sections. Sing the whole song through once. Note where you strain, where the pitch drops, where your breath runs out. Then work those sections in isolation — just the difficult phrase, repeated slowly, five times in a row, before attempting the full song again.

Days 18 through 20 are full run-throughs — start to finish, once daily. Focus on breath phrasing: where do you breathe? Mark it intentionally rather than gasping wherever feels urgent. A planned breath sounds like expression. A gasped breath sounds like panic.

Day 21 is your comparison. Record the same song you recorded on Day 11. Then listen to both. The difference is there — not in the sense that you now sound like a trained professional, but in the sense that the voice is more relaxed, more consistent, and doing less of the cracking and thin-note stuff that characterised the early recording. That's real progress, made in three weeks, in your bathroom.