 I like to break vocal tone production into 3 categories--air, space, and resonance. Each of these categories, of course, is broken down into further steps and sensations.  Air For air, I covered most of it in an earlier post. The biggest idea is to keep everything very relaxed and tension free. This includes not obstructing your breathing by leaning back or hunching over. You have much more control over the inhalation and how much air you take in than you do by pushing on the exhale. If you can remember to breathe to the bottom of your lungs, and let your belly pop out, you will be going in the right direction.  Space For space, you want everything as open as it can be. Starting with the jaw, we drop the jaw without forcing it down. If we think of the “aw” vowel shape, we can mostly keep the jaw dropped even when our lips are forming other vowel shapes like “eh”, “oh”, “oo”, etc. For “ee”, we simply raise our tongue. This small adjustment with the jaw can make a dramatic change in your sound. Try practicing it in the mirror to be sure your jaw stays down. A good exercise to practice this feeling is to say “yaw, yaw, yaw, yaw, yaw” but keep the jaw in the low position and only use your tongue to say the word. It will sound silly, but the sensation will be there. Going further into the mouth, we can use our tongue to feel the roof of our mouth. At the front of the mouth is the hard palate, which does not move. About halfway back is the soft palate. The soft palate naturally raises when we yawn. With practice, we can consciously raise our soft palate when we sing. Try exercises using words with the “ng” sound like sing, ming, etc. to feel the soft palate raise. This is where we get the “tall” tone that many singing teachers describe. Keeping the soft palate raised is one technique that I have struggled with for many years. What I have found helps me to check the position of my soft palate is to touch it with my tongue. Obviously I don’t do this while I am singing, but a brief tap right before I sing helps me to be sure it is raised. Eventually, it will become a habit to have it raised. The difficult part is that you cannot use a mirror to see this happening, so it all needs to be done through sensation and the evidence in your sound. With the jaw dropped and soft palate raised, the last step to creating space is to be sure to keep your throat open. I have a terrible habit of tightening my throat when I know higher notes are approaching in a song, when in reality the high notes would come out no problem if I just stayed relaxed and open. Practicing exercises with series of notes going down can help to relax the throat and lower the larynx.  Resonance For resonance, there are several ways to think about it. Every instrument produces sound through resonance. For a guitar, the strings vibrate as well as the body of the instrument. On a clarinet, the reed vibrates as well as the body of the instrument. A drum or cymbal is great to watch for resonance because you can see the drum head or cymbal moving. For singing, the vocal cords are vibrating but there is also vibration happening in tissues in the sinus cavities, mouth, lips, etc. Just like with your soft palate, you cannot see this in a mirror, but instead go by the feeling.
We can feel this vibration, or as I describe “buzzing on the front of the face” when we have closed consonants like “m” or “n”. When the lips touch you can really feel the vibration. To practice controlling resonance and use it to its fullest potential, it is good to start with these types of sounds before moving to other types of consonant and vowel combinations. Words like mom, marmalade, now, one, etc are good to use in exercises. During my second or third year of teaching, I began to have problems with vocal pain and fatigue. Since there was nothing physically wrong with my vocal mechanism, I was referred to speech therapy, which made a world of difference. It turns out, I had not been using much resonance in my teaching. When I wanted to speak louder I would try to push air or push from my throat. What I learned from the speech therapy is that more sound comes from more vibration--more resonance. Putting these three concepts together- air, space, and resonance, allows one to have a tall tone that stays consistent across the range from low notes to high notes. It also allows you to create a big sound with very little effort. If you are just starting out to explore vocal tone, I recommend that you work on just one category at a time, in the order I have presented them. Get your breathing working properly for you to start. Next, be sure you are providing the sound the space that it needs. Finally, work on producing some good resonance. Please let me know in the comments if you have questions or different tricks that work for you.
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 There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding in terms of how breathing works when we need it in order to sing. I am not a doctor, but I can share the knowledge I have gained over time as a singer and working with other singers. The biggest misconception that many singers seem to have is that they can get a louder or more powerful sound by squeezing their abdominal muscles and pushing harder. Breathing is an automatic process and we really don’t have as much control over it as we think. Singing longer notes is really about the amount of air we inhale and nothing about pushing from our gut. One important thing to remember is that when we sing, we want as little tension as possible in every part of our body. Tension can actually be heard in your sound. One thing I always tell my singers is if a vocal sounds like it hurts, most likely it does. When you, as the singer, feel pain, you need to stop singing right away and rethink how you are creating your sound. Tightness in your throat leads to fatigue from overusing muscles that are not actually needed. It is very difficult to only tense your abdominal muscles and not react in other places in your body.  The process of breathing, as you know, has two parts--inhalation and exhalation. The major muscle at play is the diaphragm. Unlike many muscles that seem to get larger (think biceps) when contracted, the diaphragm actually collapses when active. By collapsing, it creates a vacuum in the lungs. In a sense, your body is not working hard to pull air in, the vacuum in your lungs is filled by nature. Think of scenes in a movie when a character is sucked out into the vacuum of space, except the vacuum is now your lungs. Other active muscles during inhalation are the intercostal muscles. These lift the rib cage, which gives the lungs space to expand. If you hear wheezing or a groaning sound when you inhale, it means that your throat is not as open as it should be. A moan or a groan means that the vocal cords are causing resistance against the air. For inhalation, the vocal cords should not be working at all. When it is time to exhale, the diaphragm then moves back up to its larger position. As you can see, pushing with your abdominal muscles will not make nonexistent air suddenly appear. All it will really do is make you uncomfortable. If you want to be able to sing a note longer, it really does you more good to focus on the full inhale and keeping an open chest and abdomen so that your lungs can fully expand. Instead of squeezing your abdomen, your stomach will actually appear to pop out when you inhale completely. Society tells us to always “suck in your gut” so you do not appear chubby, but proper, healthy singing requires us to pop out our belly. Besides, people will be too amazed by your incredible voice to watch your stomach move when you breathe. If you only notice your shoulders moving when you inhale, it means you are filling the top portion of your lungs. If you breathe like this normally, it is in your best interests for singing, exercise, and general health to retrain your body to breathe to the bottom of your lungs. If it’s easier for you to remember “breathe from your stomach” that is fine, as long as you remember that no air is entering your stomach. Hopefully this brief explanation has provided some clarity and useful things for you to focus on when singing.  |
