Music- How To Get A Better Tone When Singing

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.