When you listen to pop singers on the radio, they sound like a million bucks. After all, they have all those instruments and backup singers behind them. At home, you probably don’t have a professional sound engineer to record you every time you sing.

So how do you get your voice to sound like a million bucks without an engineer? You figure out the style of pop music and add your fabulous technique that you’ve been developing.

One of the key ingredients in a good pop sound is a flexible voice. Pop music offers a freedom of movement and sound that’s unlike classical music. When you sing classical, you sing what’s on the page with musical precision.

With pop music, however, you sing the lyrics with your own take on the music — called improvising. Singers who can move their voices easily have a much easier time singing the riffs and licks in pop music. Riffs or licks are short pieces of music, commonly in pop songs, that move quickly in a specific pattern and are often improvised.

The singer adds notes that express a unique version of the song. Naturally, you still want healthy technique as you sing cool pop sounds.