Author: Mark JW Graham

Many people ask (and search for!) the answer to – where does my voice sound best?. As it happens, I was reading a blog article about moving into head voice by fantastic OC based voice coach, Guy Babusek. This article is excellent reading for anyone brand new to the idea of what it takes (functionally speaking) for the vocal cords to get themselves into head voice and a co-ordination that provides that all desireable mix quality.

The explanation in Guy’s article (which you should definitely read) is perfect to get you started in understanding moving into head voice. And there’s depths to this explanation even at higher levels.

However, I will confess that at certain points in my development I’ve found certain aspects to this explanation a little confusing once I’d FOUND my mix. The challenge with identifying that the vocal cords are constantly (meant to be) thinning and stretching as you ascend and contracting and thickening as you descend, to my mind implies that once you’re mixing your voice should be feeling effortlessly and imperceptibly smooth/perfect when singing songs… not just to the audience but to the singer too… Right? RIGHT?!?

Mmmm, not exactly…

And it’s this misconception I wanted to talk about today.

A “landscape” to your voice

If anything, once I started mixing, I found that the expanded range mix afforded me revealed what you might describe as a “landscape” to my voice, with areas of noticeable harmonic intensity as well as a feeling of physical intensity when approaching or passing through those areas. Now of course, there are always things to be addressing in singer’s voices voice at any stage, and I’m not pretending to have a perfect voice, however, the idea that things are going to be perfectly homogenuous up and down your range is not quite true… and I think that’s worth breaking down, don’t you?

Now some of the more well-read of you might be thinking ‘those areas in your voice, you mean bridges right?’… well, kind of, as these areas are to some extent connected with bridges, but what I’m actually talking about are the unique characteristics of particular instruments. If we could have perfectly homogenous ranges, then we could truly sing in any key we liked, notice no discomfort or difficult in any key, and sound great… but the voice doesn’t work that way, even after years of high quality training.

Your voice is TRULY unique

For better or for worse, we all have uniquely dimensioned instruments, from the shape of our throat and the various chambers in the vocal tract, to the thickness and exact length of our vocal cords. All these things play a part in our instrument’s ideal setup and ultimate tone.

This means that in most cases, mixes will not feel perfectly uniform to the singer themself. There will be pockets of intensity and comfortable areas to sing in and lean into, and areas where the opposite is true.

You can consider these favourable areas to be vocal “sweet-spots” in your voice. Areas where your voice’s unique attributes align to create an intense and aesthetically desireable sound that is your sonic signature, i.e. they are signposts that will help you understand the answer to “where does my voice sound best?”.

WARNING:

If you attempt to locate these or pin these down BEFORE having built your voice to an appropriate standard, you will miss out on your true sweet-spots, and likely will settle for whatever the best tones of your current limitations are. However, once you train your voice in line with Guy’s article, you may well notice it isn’t a perfectly uniform sensation all the way up and back. Guy and I were chatting about this very topic recently, and Guy said that he’d describe his own sensation and experience more as a connected and co-ordinated voice rather than having “one voice” per se, and that neither of us feel it that way.

In that same conversation, both Guy and I chatted about how areas that we used to feel were real *bastard* areas in our voices are now the places that we often want to stick money notes of songs. Isn’t that weird? Often it’s excessive resistance in particular areas of your voice at the beginning of training (the areas that initially get in the way) that indicates once the co-ordination is better, THAT’S where areas of increased sonic intensity and power (i.e. sweet-spots) are hiding. Often these areas can feel like they are screwing everything up pre-training!

As such, if you’re feeling like your mix is not uniform even after years of quality training, this is not abnormal, and you should not take this as a slight. This can be (with the assumption of correct training) taken as a hint as to where your sweet spots may lie, where money notes and key notes of song melodies should be placed to exploit YOUR sonic signature.

SMALL FOOTNOTE:

To those who’ve never mixed, I’m afraid this may not make a lot (or any!) sense. To those who’ve been mixing for a while but are not satisfied in some undefinable way with their mix and you can’t understand why it’s not that perfect “one voice” that so many talk about… I really hope this sheds some light on an oft-underdiscussed topic.

OK, a little bit sensationalist, but it got your attention!

One of the things that I think underpins being a good teacher, is NOT trying to teach people… (bear with me), but trying to change lynchpins in the way people think. If you just try to teach them something new without challenging underlying preconceptions, you are just building on a foundation that isn’t necessarily strong enough to take the layers you are about to lay down.

With this in mind, today’s post is going to cover three different secrets of singing that I want every singer to at least reconsider in the light of the following info. Some things you will be doing you may want to stop doing, other things you won’t be doing that you may want to start doing… and some things will just be plain different to the way you normally think of things.

Recently I was asked what the most helpful things that I’ve learnt about my voice over the years are and so I thought I would share the top three… They all end up linking together – used together these singing secrets can help your vocal health as well as your vocal development.

SOMETHING YOU NEED TO DO MORE

REST. FOR GOODNESS SAKE, REST.

It is crucially important that singers regularly rest their voices. If your voice is tired or feeling rough, then for goodness sake rest. If you continue to use it without giving it adequate rest, you could end up causing more damage to your vocal cords which would then take much longer to heal than if you’d just rested it in the first place.

And by resting your voice I don’t just mean “not singing for a day”. I mean actually taking a day where you don’t talk (or at least keep talking down to an absolute minimum) on those days when your voice is feeling tired or run down. This gives your vocal cords a real chance to properly recover as you aren’t using them constantly.

The consequences of not getting adequate rest for your voice can be severe. For example, just look at the vocal problems of Megan Trainor, or the even more severe health issues Sam Smith is currently facing. Rest your voice. For goodness sake, rest it!

SOMETHING YOU SHOULD REVISIT

Understand exercises that work for your voice NOW (i.e. get stuck into quality coaching)

I know I’ve blogged on why I love lip bubbles before (you can read it here) and – quite frankly – I love them. This is because they work for my voice! Heck, they work for almost every voice. Whether my voice is feeling tired or on top of the world lip bubbles are an exercise that I *know* I can depend on – I know exactly what they’ll feel like in my voice and if it’s something that will actually be helpful for my voice.

Many self-taught singers or those who try searching the internet for the “silver bullet” exercise (CLUE: there isn’t one!) develop their own pet regimen of exercises… but they need to be the RIGHT ones prescribed for your voice, not just ones you’ve read about. There is no one size fits all approach. Everyone needs bespoke exercises tailored for their voices… otherwise those pet regimens really are not guaranteed to be getting your voice where it needs to be, or at the very least are not up to date with where your voice is today.

When you work regularly with a knowledgeable coach (and I still get regular lessons myself with Master Teachers and others) you start to find a few exercises that REALLY warm-up, connect and co-ordinate your voice to do what you need it to do. These will change and develop over time. The better you understand and know which exercises work for your voice the more effective your practice sessions and lessons will be, particularly when you are short on time.

SOMETHING YOU SHOULD DO LESS

Not coughing habitually

This is something that it took me quite a long time to learn! You know those times where your throat is a little bit phlegmy? Not the prettiest picture, but we all have those days. The issue this often causes is that we then start to cough excessively to clear the throat… and we are capable of throwing a lot more force and pressure at our vocal cords than our vocal cords are capable of withstanding. In short, this is a recipe for damaging our vocal cords.

In a nutshell, when we cough to clear our vocal cords, we can often strip them of the mucous that they are MEANT to have (for protection purposes). This leads to the cords getting dry and sore. But then the body just sends more mucous to the cords to resume protection, which we then cough away as we think it’s getting in the way… and the cycle continues.

Do you get the picture? Habitual coughing, however light, can very easily lead to a vicious cycle of simultaneously dry and phlegmy throats.

Instead, try swallowing whenever you want to cough, and/or take a swig of water. I used to cough all the time – even when I didn’t really need to. It’s really hard to break that habit, but once you start to do so, your voice feels a LOT better for it. Not coughing habitually means that your cords won’t get as inflamed and you just might find that the effects of things like sore throats, colds or throat infections can hang around for less time because of this.

That about wraps it up!
So there you have it – three things that I think really challenge how most people approach their voice. that I’ve learnt over my time of being a vocal coach and receiving coaching on my own voice. I hope you find these vocal tips helpful and if you’ve got any questions feel free to get in touch!

OK, Why Can’t I Sing High Notes?

This is a question I get asked a lot. And by a lot, I mean A LOT!

Why? Because high notes are everywhere, they are used in every song, and in some genres or with some artists they are what ‘make’ the song come alive. The result? A lot of people want to know “Why can’t I sing high notes?”

We all want to sing high notes, and we all want to sing high notes easily…

Lets face it, we all want to do it. I can’t name a single singer I’ve worked with who doesn’t want some high notes. I’ve had so many emails about this I wanted to talk a little about what goes into getting high notes with ease, and all without strain.

Five Major Factors

Below are five major factors or ‘steps’ that we need to take towards developing great high notes, and to make them easy. Let’s go through them below.

First factor: Understand why we want high notes? – There are various reasons we want to sing high, because we hear them everywhere, so many of our favourite artists use them. From classical singers like Pavarotti, to contemporary singers like Bruno Mars, from classic rock singers like Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin through to modern rock singers like Brandon Flowers.

There are various reasons we want to sing high notes, but there is a big physiological component to why our ear is drawn to people singing high. When you understand the how and the why behind singing high, and you grasp how to use this in your own performances, you will really unlock the emotive power of your voice in song. I can’t go into this into detail now (waaaay too much info) but do keep reading.

Second factor: Build your voice as an instrument itself – OK, the voice is genuinely an instrument like any other, and to get the high notes, we need to make sure it is working properly. I’ve talked before about how the vocal cords of the vocal apparatus are the one thing that is responsible for generating sound, and that to sing high notes they need to make the right adjustments to hit the high notes. You need to stretch your vocal cords and thin them out to sing those higher notes – sadly you can’t voluntarily control those muscles, you need the right exercises to show you how to do it.

With the right exercises, we can introduce your voice to what it feels like to make those adjustments without strain, it just takes the right prescribed exercises to achieve.

Third Factor: Identify the two parts of your voice – There are two perceived ‘parts’ to your voice – these are chest voice and head voice. What is challenging about these two parts of the voice (other than actually accessing them in the first place!) is that we need to be able to access both parts of our voice to a reasonable extent before we can start negotiating and establishing range in our voice. The challenge is that we cannot approach these in isolation – they MUST work together. This presents a key issue in that these two parts of our voice often feel so alien to one another, that the singer struggles to even reconcile that these could be used to work together…. which leads us to…

Factor Four: Blend the two parts of your voice to get a ‘mix’ – BLENDING the two parts of our voice to create what we call a ‘mix’ is THE key to singing high notes with ease. Not only that, but to be able to move between different parts of our voice without tripping into one part or the next. The greatest singers in the world all sing using their ‘mix’, which is this critical blend of chest and head voice. The challenge is HOW do we do this? It differs for each voice, and though we can’t go into it all here, there are easy ways we can do this in your voice if you’ve not already experienced it.

Factor Five: Build power in your mix – Ahhh, the real kicker. Accessing those high notes often isn’t really all we want… for many of us, we want to hit those high notes with power and ease – without that, we feel like it’s all been a bit of a waste. In reality, we need to use slightly more demanding tools on the voice to build strength, but this is the key to developing a great mix. It takes time to do this part, but this is the final step.