Tongue Tension in Singing: Why You Might Sound Like Kermit For most people, singing (at first) tends to involve unnecessary tension – especially tongue tension. Sometimes this is extremely obvious, e.g. veins and tendons popping on their neck. Sometimes it’s moderately obvious, e.g. the vocal tone sounds strained. And sometimes it’s downright invisible. I’ve seen […]
“Amateurs practise until they get it right, a professional until he can’t do it wrong.” Extract from “Psychology for Musicians” by Percy C. Buck, circa 1944. I’ve talked before about the importance of putting in the reps. To be honest, I feel like I should have multiple articles devoted to this very topic. That way
A year or two ago I delivered one of my vocal technique workshops to a choir. During one of the vocal technique discussions someone raised a question regarding older singers’ voices. I’m paraphrasing for the purposes of this article, but the question was broadly seeking confirmation to the idea that: “Do you find that voices
As a vocal coach, I hear a lot of very similar comments from singers and aspiring singers. In my many years of teaching singing, the most common self-assessment I hear from people discussing their own voice and who want to improve their singing, by far, is: “I think I’m doing a good job, I just
Many of my vocal coaching clients have had past vocal coaching with other singing teachers before ever starting singing lessons with me. But I’ve noticed over the years in my studio that there’s certain things that most singing teachers get WRONG about teaching voice. In terms of starting with other coaches, this is fairly normal.
One of the most common questions that comes up in sessions, workshops, etc, is “Mark, what does YOUR practice routine look like day to day?“. So that’s what we’ll cover today. This also extends to “what should anyone’s practice routine include day to day”. The general answer works for most voices, but the specific exercises
This week I had a client in touch about preparing a set of songs for a wedding they were singing at. Amongst other things, they wanted to know how best to prepare themselves for singing through a lengthy set of songs at a wedding. This is a great question, so I thought I’d share my
Today I want to talk about descriptive vs prescriptive teaching methods We had a workshop recently, and one of the participants commented on how they had once been told by a singing teacher to “put the sound in THIS cavity” accompanied with a finger pointing to somewhere in the head. The main reason he brought
