It All Starts And Ends With Chest Voice

It All Starts and Ends with Chest Voice

One of the things that is often overlooked by singers is the importance of chest voice — the bottom end of the voice. It’s the place under-confident beginners tend to hide in, and the thing more advanced singers think they’ve “got sorted”… only to run away from it in every song chasing high notes.

I know what you’re thinking: “Yea yea yea Mark, we GET that chest voice matters.” Well, hold that thought — there’s more to it than we’ve covered so far.

So critical is the role of chest voice in full and total vocal development that it’s not overstating it to say:

“It all starts and ends with chest voice.”

OK Mark, that’s a little dramatic.

Maybe. But the concept is huge — and rather than squeeze it into a single post, we’re breaking it down into three core aspects:

Sonically
Technically
Psychologically

By the end of this, you should understand why chest voice shouldn’t be neglected — and how it’s the key to unlocking great tone across your whole range.

1. It All Starts and Ends with Chest Voice… Sonically

We are all “experienced” at hearing voices. Since birth, we’ve been listening to people speak — and where do people speak from? Their chest voice.

This creates a powerful unconscious sonic benchmark. We instinctively know what a normal, grounded voice sounds like. So when someone sings with tone that diverges from this benchmark — whether too light, too shouty, or simply disconnected — it stands out. It sounds off, even if we can’t articulate why.

When a singer hits high notes that still sound like their chest voice, the audience feels a natural continuity. It’s not about staying in chest voice the whole time — it’s about preserving its tonal integrity as you move through your range.

Congruency, consistency, uniformity. We’re hardwired to seek it. High notes excite us, but chest voice grounds them.

Once you depart from the true tonal quality of your natural chest voice — you lose quality, tonal connection, and the connection with your audience. The high notes mean nothing without that foundation.

2. It All Starts and Ends with Chest Voice… Technically

Sonically, chest voice sets the tone. But technically — how do we maintain that tone as we move higher?

In chest voice, the vocal cords are thicker and shorter — controlled mainly by the thyroarytenoid (TA) muscle. The sound we hear is, to a large extent, shaped by this contraction.

If a singer could maintain the same balance of co-ordination from chest voice as they ascend, the audience wouldn’t detect any shift. That continuity comes from preserving the same muscular function — primarily the TA muscle’s engagement — even as other mechanisms adjust to help navigate pitch.

Of course, taking full chest voice up is difficult — it can lead to strain if overdone. That’s where concepts like contraction and release come in. The goal isn’t to drag chest up but to preserve its integrity in coordination — even as resonance and effort adjust.

When you hear a singer hit powerful high notes that still sound effortless and consistent — you’re hearing a well-managed chest-dominant function, carried upward with finesse.

Everything good you hear in a voice can be traced back to this technical balance.

3. It All Starts and Ends with Chest Voice… Psychologically

This one’s less talked about. We focus so much on how things sound or work mechanically — but the psychological side matters just as much.

Put simply: if something feels weird, fragile or disconnected to you while singing, you won’t want to do it. You’ll avoid it, subtly or overtly — even if it technically “works.”

The goal is to train your voice so that when you sing high, it still feels like your voice. Not a dramatic gear shift. Not a different identity. Just an extension of the same instrument you use to speak and emote every day.

That internal consistency — how it feels in your head and body — is what gives you confidence and makes technique sustainable.

Conclusion

When done right, your upper range becomes a natural part of your voice. It’s not a trick. It’s not something you “switch into.” It’s just your voice — top to bottom — connected and consistent.

But none of that is possible without first anchoring it all in chest voice. If your chest voice isn’t solid, nothing else can really fall into place.

If you’d like to experience this shift for yourself, book a session using the button below. I’d love to help you build a voice that works — not just in sound, but in feel, function, and freedom.

January 14, 2016July 5, 2025

Can vocal technique fix laryngitis?

Or a sore throat? Or other vocal issues?

Laryngitis is an inflammation of the larynx, usually caused by a viral infection, but sometimes has a bacterial source. The vocal cords are typically swollen and irritated, leading to hoarseness, partial or even complete voice loss depending on the severity of the laryngitis. It typically takes around a week to clear, sometimes a little sooner, but often takes a little longer.

As a voice coach or singer, to contract laryngitis is not good. It not only means sessions with clients need to be arranged, but a great source of joy is basically off-limits to permit speedy recovery. If you’ve ever had issues like this, you’ll know how frustrating it can be.

Your instrument is essentially broken for a period of time, and returning to it too soon can result in prolonging the issue, or even causing some harm to it outside of the laryngitis-related swelling.

Now, with that out of the way, time to answer the question:

Can vocal technique fix laryngitis?

In a word, no.

BUT!! It can do amazing things in the recovery – let me explain.

In my experience of working with singers as they are getting over a bug, whether laryngitis or something else, a working knowledge of the state of their recovery can help a HUGE amount.

TESTING THE CONDITION
Firstly, we can test the extent of the swelling during laryngitis (or any other vocal trauma/illness) using simple tests. Swelling means it’s hard for the vocal cords to adduct and perform as they normally would. This normally causes excess air to bleed through, and head voice co-ordination to be hard to access without force, or even inaccessible. Trying to sing a simple melody in the head register (e.g. happy birthday as lightly as possible) tends to indicate whether any work can be done on the voice, or whether it needs to be a day of vocal rest. It’s important to note that sometimes this test is passed, but rest is still necessary.

DURING THE ILLNESS/ISSUE
Often the very swelling of the vocal cords causes the condition to last longer than the initial condition would suggest. Why? The extra thickness in the cords tends to result in a lower pitch of vibration for the person’s voice. Even with limited speaking/singing/talking, this can really grate on the person’s voice even during recovery.

This is where specific applied use of exercises can be immensely helpful. This is NOT something that an inexperienced person can do, it does require training and time spent regularly working with voices.

In a nutshell, the way that functional voice exercises work is to get the operational muscles of the larynx to co-operate correctly with one another. Specific stretching exercises done lightly and in an appropriate range/direction can help to *lift* the voice out of the heavy area it has been left to sit in. While this does not *fix* the condition (laryngitis, nodule recovery, etc), in my experience it DOES serve to neutralise the day-to-day symptoms of those conditions. This can aid in the speed of recovery, and in the cases of singers with bad habits that caused the issue, help them to form new good habits during recovery so that they do not return to that state so readily in the future.

So why did I ask whether vocal technique could fix laryngitis, if the answer is ‘no’?

Well, in short, while it can’t fix it – physical and vocal rest, staying hydrated and keeping energy levels up (like recovery for any illness) is best – the manner in which good functional vocal exercises work can aid massively, both in the diagnosis, and also in the recovery process.

Learn More: Related Articles

If you want to learn more about vocal technique and great singing, you may enjoy these related articles:
The Difference between Amateurs and Pros
The problem with trying to teach voice using ONLY voice science
Vocal Pedagogy: Past, present and future
Singers: The Difference Between Vocalists and Performers
Vocal Tessitura: What is it?
What is vocal fach?
The Key to Vocal Consistency

January 10, 2016July 6, 2025

Formants In Singing – What on earth are they?

So, let’s talk about Formants in Singing…

While I’ve taken a break from coaching and working on my own voice in general over the Christmas holiday (boy was that a good rest!), I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading on formants in singing. If any of you have any interest in voice science, I can thoroughly recommend Kenneth W. Bozeman’s ‘Practical Vocal Acoustics’. This is a helpful book covering the science of the voice from the perspective of the TEACHER and the singer, rather than purely from a voice scientist’s perspective. It’s this book that I’ll be drawing on for today’s explanation.

One of the things that keeps cropping up in my ol’ noggin is how critical the first bridge is… why? Because it’s crossing this portion of the voice that enables access to the rest of the voice… therefore, pretty important!

For many of us, we may accept that there IS this magical mysterious thing called a “bridge” or “passagi”, or as Kenneth W. Bozeman puts it, “where the voice turns over”… but…

What exactly is the first bridge?

Let’s discuss this. To do that we need to do a very quick (and very coarse) anatomy lesson.

The voice as an instrument consists of two parts:

1) the vocal cords; and

2) the vocal tract (the airway tube between your vocal cords and your lips)

The vocal cords

The vocal cords generate sound (acting as a source of sound), the vocal tract shapes the sound (filter). From here on in, please do me a favour – think of the vocal tract like a plastic water bottle, the squishable kind you can buy from any corner store.

The vocal tract

Have you ever blown across the top of a bottle that isn’t completely full? Have you ever noticed that the bottle has a particular pitch that it seems to generate? This is called resonance. Empty volumes (like plastic bottles) have distinct frequencies that they vibrate at when excited (e.g. by blowing across the top of it). You can spot the same effect by banging the side of a long cardboard poster tube and notice the pitch of the noise it emits, or even by humming down the length of that tube. These pitches are referred to as “formants”, and are a by-product of the fact that empty volumes exhibit resonance at particular frequencies.

NOTE: You don’t need to remember all this per se, I merely mention it so you respect the idea that empty volumes have an associated pitch they like to vibrate it, and that these pitches are called formants.

Now, let’s continue the analogy. If you change the shape of the empty volume inside the bottle (e.g. by squeezing it or adding some water in/taking some water out), then blowing across it, the associated pitches it wants to vibrate it (the formants) will have changed. The same effect can be achieved by cutting that long cardboard poster tube to a different length, then banging it again. The change in shape affects the resonance, which in turn affects the formants.

HALFWAY SUMMARY:
– The vocal cords generate specific frequencies (the singer’s pitch)
– The vocal tract resonates at specific frequencies (the formant(s) of the instrument)

In short, despite the chief difference where the cords generate the frequencies whilst the tract doesn’t actually generate those frequencies, both the vocal cords and the vocal tract possess their own particular sets of frequencies that are associated with them.

It’s the interaction between these two sets of specific frequencies that is an important phenomenon for singing.

Here’s the low-down…

The first bridge occurs when a certain frequency generated by the vocal cords happens to pass through a certain corresponding frequency of the vocal tract (a specific formant)*.

As you can see, this makes the whole concept of the first bridge *relatively* straight-forward to understand, but also results in the realisation that it’s a REEEEEEALLY complicated thing to get sorted in singers. If the first bridge happens as two frequencies cross each other, then what happens if they both start changing together? What happens if one suddenly changes during the process?

It’s a complicated system… it’s dependent on the pitch/frequency of the voice, the pitch that the vocal tract wants to vibrate it, which in turn is dependent on the shape of the vocal tract, but is also affected by the volume of the singer (as this affects excitation of the vocal tract).

*Deep breath*

Don’t panic.

This is all completely trainable, and completely manageable… but it takes more than just good exercises. It requires (in my opinion) a structured and logical approach to applying those exercises, so that singers are not constantly hyper-aware of bridges and essentially trying to control a million things at once all whilst trying to sing with emotion, but instead builds the required co-ordination into muscle memory, to thereby make easy connected singing automatic.

So… now you know where the first bridge comes from… What’s stopping you?

* – Specifically, when the second harmonic (H2) generated by the vocal cords passes through the first formant (F1) of the vocal tract. You DON’T need to remember this to be a great singer.

October 22, 2015July 6, 2025

Vocal “Sweet-spots” – Where does my voice sound best?

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.

July 9, 2015July 26, 2025

Why Can’t I Sing High Notes?

Why Singers Struggle with High Notes

Many singers hit a wall when reaching for higher notes. Here are some of the most common reasons:

Physiological Factors: High notes require the vocal cords to stretch and thin, which demands technical control.
Voice Registration: Smooth transitions between chest and head voice are key to avoiding vocal breaks.
Mix Voice Development: Learning to blend registers creates a stable, accessible mix voice for high passages.
Strength Building: High notes become easier as singers develop strength and coordination in their upper range.

Want more on building high notes? Read how pros practice to truly master your range.

Bonus: Join discussions on this topic on Reddit’s r/singing — lots of great real-world insights from other singers.

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.

January 10, 2015July 6, 2025

Learn to Sing – Muscle Memory and the Experience of Singing

How do we learn to sing? Well, it comes down to Muscle Memory

Before we get to how to learn to sing, Here is a fab clip from one of my favourite movies, Inception… I’ve set it to start at the relevant bit of the clip:

Remember that explanation of the circular dream creation doodle that Leonardo DiCaprio does, as we’ll come back to it later…

Back to learning to sing

How we learn to sing is an extremely important question. Can anyone learn to sing is also one of THE most asked questions I ever deal with.

Today I want to focus on a certain aspect of that question.

I was teaching a lesson recently with a lovely singer from the local area, and the topic of conversation came around to how quickly they should expect the sound to change. They recognise that when they are in lessons the sound DRAMATICALLY changes, but when they get on stage, they felt like they had slipped back a few places – what is up with that?!

IMPORTANT NOTE:
This is a very valid question and one that needs to get asked – if you don’t feel comfortable asking your teacher why you are where you are, then there’s a problem!

In this singer’s case, he is employed to sing for approximately 8-10 hours a week, if not more. He has also been singing this much every week in the way he always has done for a couple of years at least. What this results in is a level of ingrained muscle memory that we need to strip out and overwrite with new and more *correct* muscle memory. It’s the development of new muscle memory that enables us to depart from the old ways of doing things and become consistent in the new ways of doing things – it’s how we learn.

However, when I am asked this kind of question, it shows (to me) that they need a glimpse of a DRAMATICALLY different “experience” of singing. I don’t mean that in ‘how much experience do they have of singing’, but I mean that in terms of ‘what do they physically experience whilst they are singing’… they really need to experience singing in a way that fundamentally takes them away from what they are used to feeling and hearing, and help them to witness it in a new light. I.e. not just ‘that feels different’, but to recognise how MUCH the feeling differs to their normal experience.

Now this IS what we do with every exercise with the intention of promoting new muscle memory (the only true way of ingraining new behaviour), but sometimes we need a different angle of attack.

Instead of the idea:

Develop new muscle memory –> leads to new experience of singing

We can adopt the approach of:

Give them a new experience of singing –> leads to faster development of muscle memory

It’s circular. Exactly like the analogy in Inception. One side feeds the other, which feeds the other, ad infinitum….

And THAT allows a good voice coach to get RIGHT in the middle of the process and guide it.

I don’t believe you can skip straight to that second approach without a solid level of the first approach, as the tools are far less forgiving on a completely inexperienced or untrained voice, but sometimes what would otherwise be a “quick fix” for a song/difficult passage can provide them with a remarkably different snippet of what the future will hold when they stick at the exercises. that are creating the muscle memory.

The two synergise together in a way that is only fractionally as effective when approached separately.

OK Mark, so what are you trying to say?

I guess what I’m trying to show here is a glimpse into how we have to approach training voices. That it’s not just doing one thing over and over, and it’s not purely about the student receiving from the teacher… it’s about having a dialogue, a two-way street. About having one experience feed another, and to be able to get right into the middle of that to guide the process.

In the above case, by the student raising his concerns and questions, we were able to give him a HUGE shot in the arm for developing his voice.

On top of that, I also wish to point out that even with training it’s normal to see some disparity between what you see in lessons and what you see on stage. It takes time for that muscle memory that is oh-so-controlled in lessons, to manifest in the way you want on stage. It requires both new muscle memory, AND for your body to adopt a new experience of singing to make that the norm.

August 29, 2014July 6, 2025

How Long Does It Take To Learn To Sing Well?

I often get asked ‘How Long Does it Take To Learn To Sing Well?’… the answer is not just simply ‘how long is a piece of string?’, but it is dependent on your goals and many other factors.

So rather than answer the question of ‘how long does it take to learn to sing well’, I want to talk about how long it takes to become exceptional at something. I want to do this to cast light on how long it takes to learn to do anything, but also to help readers realise it’s a long process to become truly great at something.

Time waits for no man…

In today’s culture, we are often confronted by *successful* people around the world aged 21 or under. Having titles like ‘The Top 100 Most Influential Teens’ on magazines doesn’t help with this. Seeing ‘The Top 10 Richest Under-21s’, or how the pop-chart is populated by people who are all under the age of 25 or even 21 depending which week you are talking about, really doesn’t help with this.

And I think this is a fundamentally flawed world-view, because it propagates the cultural lie that the prime age for achieving success is somewhere between 18-25… and that if you miss *success* or critical acclaim in that period of your life, you have failed. If you haven’t learned to do something to an exceptionally high standard by the time you are 26, you may as well give up.

This is a flawed world-view, and fundamentally untrue.

How can I say this? I refer to exhibit A…

Da Vinci

Leonardo Da Vinci is one of THE defining men of the last millennium. He is credited with countless paintings, inventions, great artworks and had one of the greatest minds not just of his generation, but of the last 1000 years. He truly was what is known as a ‘polymath’, someone who is exceptionally clever to the point of genius, and to be such a genius across multiple disciplines.

Now, for the gut punch. Da Vinci was not known by the world for ANY level of success until he was 46. That’s right. 46. Not 40. Not 30. Not 20. Not 18. Forty. Freaking. Six.

Bear in mind that people regularly died of illness and disease by the time they were 40 at the time Da Vinci was alive, so to not have accomplished anything of note by the time you were 30 could easily have been interpreted as a sign of *nothing will ever happen for me*, and in a far more severe way than we could ever comprehend in the Western world today where we regularly live to 70 years old and then some.

If you fancy an interesting read, go and find a biography of Da Vinci – you will be ASTOUNDED by how much of a failure in terms of critical acclaim he was for much of his life.

This is also consistent with another bit of information that is worth discussing…

The 10,000 hour rule

In multiple books, there is referenced something called the 10,000 hour rule. Without going into extreme depth on this, what this means is that experts in their field are generally found to have become experts by spending a minimum of 10,000 hours of focused practice on their chosen discipline. Studies in specific areas known to be truly difficult have found that there is no-one who becomes known as an expert in a given area who managed to get there without spending that requisite time focusing their mind on that task. Violinists, chess players, songwriters (namely, the Beatles) all got there through an incredible amount of hard work.

Let’s do the maths on that…

5 hours a day for a year, accounting for holidays, sick days etc, generally equates to about 1000 hours of workable time per year. That means to acquire 10,000 hours of focused practice, one should generally expect to spend about 10 years on a given task to be considered an expert in their ability. Obviously, if you work to spend more hours on a task, you will get there quicker, but it must be quality practice.

Either way, we are talking about YEARS of focus and determination to get to that level. Not ‘6 months and I STILL haven’t been successful’, or ‘2 years and I STILL haven’t got a record deal’… we are talking YEARS. In Da Vinci’s case, we are talking DECADES of dedication to his chosen craft (or crafts, even).

The Slow Road

We are surrounded by a ‘fast-food’ culture. Where stuff happens fast, and NOW. People don’t like waiting for things. Even movies are now ‘on-demand’. Amazon offer guaranteed next day delivery. Food shops are 24/7.

I’m not saying that you need to spend 10,000 hours in to learn how to sing. You can become a good singer pretty quickly with the right work. But the better you want to be, the loftier your goals, the longer it takes. The reality is, the road to success in ANYTHING is slow going. There may be moments where you speed up, moments where you slow down, but there is no substitute for putting in the time.

For those of you feeling a bit down at the moment…

… maybe you feel like you are getting nowhere, take a moment. Consider how old you are. Consider how long you’ve been doing what you’ve been doing. Consider how focused you have been on the task. Then realise that the road IS MEANT to be slow. It’s never been fast. The idea that you can become an expert in something within 2 hours of trying it for the first time is a cultural lie that we are led to believe.

Lasting ability is worth pursuing, but it does take time. It comes slow. It takes time, dedication, constantly renewed focus, and – I would say – an inner peace that this is the way it must be. Take heart, and keep going!

July 25, 2013July 6, 2025

How to get high notes? Is your volume knocking you off balance? Demonstration courtesy of Circa Survive

How to get high notes?

This is possibly THE most common question I get asked ‘Mark, how do I get to those high notes? can you make it easy for me?’

The answer is ‘I’ll show you’ and ‘yes’, but I want to talk a little about a common culprit and little known issue that often prevents students getting there.

The Issue is often ‘Volume’

So, I often get students come in who sing waaaaay too loud… I often get get students who sing too quietly, but far and away the most common issue is singing too loudly.

Now, it is not that singing loud in itself is a bad thing, but often when singers sing verrry loudly they are knocking themselves off balance. Let me explain…

The voice is a very complicated instrument, but at it’s heart it’s a wind instrument. The sound is generated by your vocal cords, which is stirred into motion by you blowing air through them.

If you play a wind instrument or know someone who plays a wind instrument, then you or they will know that all wind instruments require a certain amount of air to ‘get going’. It’s not about having LOTS of air, nor very little air, but a decent moderate amount of air makes it the easiest way to start learning to play an instrument.

Wind instruments players will also tell you how you CAN increase the amount of air/air pressure, but it requires an increase in skill as well to control the instrument, otherwise you can lose control of pitch or the tone.

The same is true of the voice. Once you leave that comfortable ‘moderate’ amount of air flow, at a comfortable volume level, it requires skill to keep the vocal cords behaving themselves with that increased pressure. At this point, other muscles surrounding the larynx go into ‘panic’ preservation mode, and tense up to protect the larynx and the delicate muscles within the larynx… unless the skill of the singer permits the vocal cords to maintain appropriate behaviour even under that extra pressure.

Here’s an example by a band called Circa Survive. Their lead singer Anthony Green sings pretty darn high, but sometimes sounds like he’s tearing his throat apart in this electric amped environment:

ELECTRIC SONG
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GAkOd6vOEQ

But in this acoustic enviroment, while he still strains, it is FAR less noticeable. By simply knocking his volume down 10-20%, he has verrry quickly entered that ‘optimal’ amount of air flow and suddenly the tension he is experiencing (and that we’re hearing) is far more manageable.

ACOUSTIC SONG

THIS is a prime example of where adding volume before the skill is there results in strain and tension. Now these guys are a great band, and I’m not trying to knock them, but the strain he is experiencing is visually and sonically evident throughout the first video.

So, if you’re finding it tough to maintain control, try knocking your volume down just 5-10%, maybe even 20% on those notes that are causing a problem, and see how that tension alleviates itself. It may not sound as strong to you, but that muscular co-ordination of your vocal cords is far more balanced… we can then build strength into that co-ordination so that it FEELS that easy, but SOUNDs absolutely massive.

It’s absolutely possible, just drop us a line to get booked in and we’ll show you how.