Archive for the ‘How To Sing’ Category

One of the most difficult hurdles for a singer to tackle, is learning how to sing the high notes. This can be a daunting task, given that we don’t often use this area of our voices during everyday speech. However, one of the most common reasons that singing the high notes can be challenging, is due to tension in the larynx and lack of focus in the resonators.

So, here a few tips and tricks that will help you release tension, make a more resonant sound and access your upper register with more ease than you thought possible!

1) Before you do any form of singing, it’s really important, and of great benefit, to WARM UP THE VOICE. Much like an athlete needs to stretch and warm up their muscles in order for them to perform at their best, so too a singer needs to stretch and warm up the muscles that are used for vocalising.

Most of us can relate to that ’stiffness’ in your legs when you go out for your morning walk. You’ve probably also noticed that as you walk, you seem to walk more briskly and ‘freely’ than when you first set out that day. This is because your muscles have begun to warm up and so, they are able to extend and contract more easily. Singing without warming can lead to a feeling of ‘heaviness’ in the voice and body, and amongst other side-effects, can cause vocal damage.

Simple warm ups such as HUMMING or SIRENING, can warm up the voice gently and effectively and also prepare you for those higher notes by encouraging you to ‘ckeck in’ with your ‘head register’ as you do so.

2) In order to provide adequate support for the voice and the energy required to sing higher notes especially, a good foundation in CORRECT BREATHING TECHNIQUE is essential.

Make sure that you are breathing low and expanding the abdomen and and lower rib cage. Imagine a tire tube around your middle and inflate it 360* with your breath. Aim to lift your chest off the abdomen with a feeling of ‘buoyancy’ rather than pull it up ‘military’ style. This will enable your ribs and abdomen to expand more fully and your lungs to inhale with greater efficiency.

Make sure you are standing in an aligned position. If your chest is ‘collapsed’ or your chin is jutting forward or your shoulders are rounded for instance, this is going to hinder your ability to breathe efficiently. Good breathing technique is where good singing emerges from. If your breathing is no good, everything from that point on will suffer.

3) Make sure your throat is relaxed and open as you prepare to sing. Very often, too much energy or trying too hard, causes singers to tense up and force the tone from their throat in order to ‘push’ the notes upwards from the throat area. This causes your larynx (voice box) to rise inside your throat as the ’swallow’ muscles that surround them engage as a result of the force. Singing high notes should be as easy on the vocal muscles and cords, as singing in the lower range.

In order to open the throat and relax the larynx, imagine you are just about to yawn. If you look in the mirror when you yawn, you will notice that the sheath of ‘muscle’ that hoods the top of your throat, contracts upwards. This is your ’soft palate’, and raising it will help you access the resonating cavities in your face and head, more easily.

Now, place your index and middle finger across the middle of your neck and swallow. That ‘bumpy thing’ moving up and down in the front of your throat is your larynx.
This time, with your fingers still on the front of your throat, try to yawn. Notice how your larynx moves downwards?
This is a dramatization of the placement of the larynx and soft palate, that you should be looking for when approaching singing.

4) OK, choose a scale or exercise you already know or make a ’sirening’ sound from the bottom of your range, to the top and back down again.

Be careful not to put too much effort into producing the notes in your chest voice. Too much emphasis on this area of the voice or weight on the chest resonance, will only encourage you to engage those swallow muscles mentioned earlier, as you rise in pitch.

Does your larynx rise in your throat? OR, does it feel somewhat easier to reach those higher notes that were a little strained before?

Hopefully, the latter…….

Singing high notes takes practice, co-ordination and control. A few practice sessions over a couple of weeks will not ‘banish’ bad habits nor will it transform your voice from amateur to professional quality. There are many aspects and elements to singing well and only with consistent and regular practice to implement the techniques required to develop the WHOLE voice, will you see dramatic changes in your vocal production.

Next time you are practicing or even singing along with a familiar song, try to implement the above technique. Try to work on material that is not OVERLY challenging – something you can memorize quickly, that has a reasonable range of pitches.

You will notice that over time, that your voice becomes less ’strained’ and more ‘even’ across your registers.

The Essential Voice – Vocal Training Program:
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How To Sing – Fixing Breaks In The Voice…

One of the most common issues that singers experience when learning how to sing, is a ‘break’ in their voice. This usually occurs when you’re singing from your lower register – namely the ‘chest’ register, where you use your ’speaking’ notes – up to your ‘middle’ register, notes you might use in more animated or excited speech.

Experiencing a break in the voice, is one of the main reasons that alot of singers feel that they don’t have a wide vocal range that allows them to sing many different vocal styles and colours. This is beacause most people feel, that at this point, their voice is trying to alert them to the fact that it is pushed to it’s limit – that there are no more notes to sing.
In actual fact, the potential vocal range of these voices is usually considerably larger and in most cases, the singer is only limited because of a misunderstanding of how the voice and vocal muscles actually work – and DON’T work.

Unfortunately, like most other professions, the singing industry offers teachers of many different singing techniques, to people wanting to learn how to sing. Some teachers are fabulous and some either don’t have the qualifications – both academic and demonstrative – to be able to back up their technical knowledge when teaching you how to sing. It’s the students of these teachers that usually end up pushing their voices beyond healthy limits without ever coming close to reaching their full singing potential – and all the while, they’re experiencing vocal fatigue, strain, frustration and discomfort – not to mention causing damage to their voices.

So lets looks at what’s actually happening when you’re experiencing a ‘break’ in your voice…

So why is it that you feel tension when you’re approaching the ‘break’ in your voice?

Well, to get a teeny bit technical for a moment, the voice is controlled by muscles and cartilage, that sit inside the larynx – AKA the voice-box. Oversimplifying, these muscles adjust the position of the vocal folds/cords to produce the different notes that you sing.

If you place your fingers gently over the front of your neck/throat and swallow, you will feel the larynx move upwards towards you jaw and then down again. The muscles that control your swallowing mechanism sit on the OUTside of your larynx and are NOT the muscles you use for healthy vocal production. As you can feel, these muscles work in a way that makes the larynx rise in the throat.

When you’re experiencing strain whilst singing, you are engaging these same ’swallow’ muscles. When they are pushed or stretched to their physical limits, the larynx can rise not further in the throat and the vocal cords become imobilized due to the tension in this area. This is precisely the point at which you experience the ‘break’. At this point, the muscles are forced to release causing your voice to ‘flip’ into the next ‘area’ of your voice where you will no doubt find that your voice is weak or breathy and lacks control and vitality.

Most often, the reason that we use our voice in this unhealthy way, is due to the desire to sing ‘louder’ or with more power. However, singers that have powerful voices – and there are many – achieve this power through the use of their ‘resonators’ and developed breathing techniques (which I’ll cover another time), NOT as a result of physical strength or learned ‘force of tone’.

So, how to fix this break?…

The first thing to understand when learning how to sing well, is that good singing technique takes time to develop. If you’re looking for a ‘quick-fix’, you’re looking for trouble. Alot of teachers may tell you that you can learn to sing like a pro in just a few lessons. To be really honest with you – they’re simply lying. It’s equal to guaranteeing you that you can become a professional sports player in a few training sessions. Remember, the voice is governed by a muscle group and like any other muscle group, it takes time to train it and be able to control it at an elite or professional level.

If you’re feeling strain or pain when you’re singing – SOMETHING IS WRONG!!
Singing should feel as easy (vocally) as speaking does, although having said that, singing does require more conscious effort and physical co-ordination and energy, than speaking.

One of the simplist and most effective exercises that will take the pressure off your larynx and help you learn to sing without breaks, can be found in a video I’ve uploaded to Youtube called ‘Vocal Tips & Tricks Episode #4 – Fixing Breaks In The Voice’.

Click my YouTube link below to watch the video!

…Break the cycle, ditch the frustration and begin experiencing your true vocal potential TODAY!

P.S. I’d love to read your comments and hear about your results so feel free to leave a comment here…

Fixing Breaks In The Voice:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6_3vR8oT18

The Essential Voice – Vocal Training Program:
Sign Up For Our FREE! Beginners Course
http://www.TheEssentialVoice.net

How To Sing – A Beginners Course!

Studying the voice and learning how to sing well takes time, patience and above all, PRACTICE! You must allow your body AND your voice time to develop a ‘muscle memory’ so that it can remember how to respond when singing. Repetition is the key to developing a secure technique and this is achieved through regular practice – every day, wherever possible.

Preparing To Sing

Goal Setting:

Did you know, research shows that It takes 21 days to form or break a habit?

For us singers, this is great news because we can begin to set goals for ourselves, based on a 21 day cycle. In this way, we are regularly achieving short term goals which gives us a sense of progress and momentum and it becomes a source of inspiration.

Stay Hydrated; Drink Water:

Drinking water is the most valuable support you can offer your voice.

Keeping your body hydrated means that it has the resources to produce the lubrication that your vocal cords need in order to maintain proper function.

Record Yourself:

The best device to use is, of course, a video camera which will record not only the audio but the visual content of your ‘performance’ – whether that be exercises or songs. This way you can play back your recording and make constructive criticisms on things you can improve and more importantly, make notes of the things that you do well, in order to remember to do them again next time! If you don’t have a video recorder, a tape recorder or even a phone will do for the time being. It’s important that the quality of the recording is clear and undistorted.

Sing In Front Of A Mirror:

During lessons with students, I make sure they stand in front of a mirror. However, I often find that I am constantly reminding them to LOOK INTO IT!

The reason for this, is that it can often be easy to get carried away while you’re singing – especially when you’re singing a song that you are really connecting with – or focusing on a particular aspect of technique that requires alot of concentration.

So, if you decide to use a mirror, make sure you look into it!

You will need to make mental notes as you go along and remember to write down the things you want to work on along with the things you did well when you complete the ‘exercise’ or song

Voice Classification

What does this mean?

Well, it simply means that each of us START with a particular singing range – that means the range of notes (from say, lowest to highest, for example) that you are able to sing comfortably. Now, I want to say here, that many teachers will tell you that the voice you have now is the voice you must love and accept. However, so commonly I hear singers using about 1/3 of their vocal potential – focusing only on one ‘area’ of their vocal range. It is important to know what your approximate ’starting range’ when you are learning how to sing, not only so you can use the ‘right’ exercises and choose the ‘right’ songs for your voice, but so that you can start exploring your WHOLE voice with OUT putting it under undue strain.

Breath

Many people believe that to learn how to sing well, you must have an incredible lung capacity and that this is something that can take years of rigorous practice and exercise to obtain. Elements of this belief hold some truth – it is possible as well as beneficial, to increase your lung capacity through practice, as you do need to use all of your lung capacity whilst breathing IN for singing. However, it’s what you DO with that breath whilst you are singing, that REALLY counts.

Its not too often that singers have great difficulty in taking a good breath – granted, it can be a little tricky to co-ordinate or focus the breath into the right areas of your body, but mostly, singers generally have MORE difficulty controlling the outflow of that breath, once taken.

Common Problems

One of the most common problems that singers encounter, is vocal tension…

If you are experiencing tension in the throat or neck area when you sing, chances are you’re using the wrong muscles or maybe even excessive force. Experiencing tension can be frustrating, painful and at the very least, vocally restrictive not to mention destructive.

The muscles that surround the vocal apparatus are delicate and require patience and persistence in order to develop a sensitivity of them and therefore, learn to use them in a correct and healthy way. Tension surrounding the throat and neck area whilst singing, is usually brought on by engaging the muscles that we use for swallowing. These are found on the OUTside of the voice-box or ‘larynx’.

The reason WHY we often engage these muscles is due to an over-flow or under-flow of air pressure being sent through the vocal cords, causing them to stay open. The muscles on the outside of the larynx will then try to compensate by tensing up, thereby forcing the vocal folds/cords to close. Unfortunately, whilst this does in fact result in a stronger tone being produced – all-be-it within a small range of pitches, it also forces the larynx either up or down (depending on the height of the pitch you are singing at).

The tension you feel is the result of the larynx no longer being able to physically stretch any further up or down and thus, you experience a ‘pulling’ or tightening sensation. If you raise the larynx, the muscles above will close the throat. This is a swallowing action and cannot be turned off. You can’t swallow and breathe at the same time! Just like you can’t swallow and sing at the same time!The following exercise will enable you to not only take the pressure off the larynx but to help you engage and employ the use of the correct muscles used for easy, freer singing.

Warm Ups

Warming up the voice prior to singing, is equally important to warming up the body before exercise. Those little scales or strange humming sounds you often hear from singers before a performance, is a limbering up of the muscles around the vocal system and a physical warming and gentle stretching of the vocal cords. This gets the blood circulating, awakens the lungs and the inter costal muscles between the ribs and engages the mind-body connection.

Singing is a physical exercise. We can often forget this…but think of an athlete going out onto the track or onto the ground without warming up and stretching their body…In most cases, even though most of the muscles used for gross motor skills are large and powerful, an injury could be expected. Now, think about how small and delicate the muscles surrounding the voice are …without a good limbering up session, damage can be caused easily and, at first, unknowingly.

So, always maintain a habit of including a vocal warm-up in your work-out session whether it be for practice or performance.

The Essential Voice Program:
Sign Up For Our FREE! Beginners Course
http://www.TheEssentialVoice.net