Prospectus

INTRODUCTION

Thanks for joining us to read through our prospectus.

What I want to teach you through this prospectus, is that absolutely anyone can build their voice into something to be proud of. Even advanced singers can develop enormously through this process.

We’re going to start with the basics, then move into a more detailed primer which explains the principles underpinning our technique. Then we’ll conclude with some key take-home points for you.

 

 

Singing is sustained speech on pitch.

Your voice is an instrument like any other. Your vocal folds are two flaps of muscle, ligament, and mucosal lining, housed inside your larynx (your Adam’s apple). There’s also many other connective tissues and various supporting structures.

As a simplistic overview, the sound of your voice starts at your vocal folds. The folds generate a sound source having a wide frequency range. This sound then enters your vocal tract.

The vocal tract acts like a filter, which initially shapes the sound. The sound then passes through articulators and resonators (tongue, lips, teeth, mouth, nose, etc) that further shape the sound.

I’m not going to go into the full construction of the instrument here. Needless to say, there’s already lot going on. This presents a cursory overview of the critical components that are involved in singing. From there we can establish some basics of correct operation, and then identify and how we need to train those components.

Consider the piano…

Understanding that your voice is an instrument like any other, creates not just an interesting metaphor, but a very powerful explanation of what our voice is actually meant to do. On top of that, it tells us a lot about how the voice is meant to be treated.

Let’s consider the piano. I play songs on my piano, but I also teach with my piano. In sessions I provide musical instructions – i.e. scales and exercises – for your voice, using my piano.

But this is somewhat different to playing a song. Although scales and note patterns on a piano involve musical notes, they are not yet music. The notes played form musical instructions, where the notes instruct someone else what they should be doing. It’s much like giving a verbal instruction to elicit a particular response, but done using a piano and musical notes, rather me speaking words.

And yet, when I go to play a song on the piano, those exact same notes on the piano can be played and perceived as a piece of music. Something changes, between simply playing a scale as a collection of notes, and intentionally playing notes from a scale to form a melody.

In both cases, the piano itself remains the same.

Whether I’m playing a song, or hammering out notes to illustrate an exercise to a singer, the piano itself remains mechanically identical. Similarly, whether I’m speaking or singing, it’s still the same instrument at work. As such, the voice should still be operating in exactly the same way whether I’m speaking or singing.

When you speak, your voice is an instrument that functions fairly well in most cases, and operates free of tension and strain. You could hold a conversation in a quiet room for hours and hours without losing your voice… so why should it be any different when you go to sing? What might we be doing wrong?

We already have a tension-free road-map in our voices

The voice is an instrument for which we already have a tension-free roadmap, mainly because we’ve been using it our whole lives. Of course, some people do have pathological issues with their voice, but these represent a relatively small minority of people.

For the vast majority, the issue that people encounter when they go to sing, is that they actively choose to ‘switch gears’ and treat their voice totally differently. As such, they totally ignore that tension-free roadmap they already have, and encounter a whole host of difficulties as a result. This is not only counter-productive, but it can be damaging to our voices, and can also deliver a sub-par quality relative to just how amazing they could otherwise sound.

We need to learn to use our voice the way it is meant to function, and take our cues from the natural weight and calibration of our normal speaking voice. Through doing this, we can achieve a voice that is free of strain and difficulty, and range and power is easily accessed.

When we recognise that the way we speak and the way we sound is the natural calibration and weight of our particular instrument – we recognise that this is the tonality we should be driving towards. That our normal voice is the way our body is built to function without any manipulation.

Moreover, this is the very sound that your own psychology is geared up to accept and recognise as you. After all, you use your normal voice every day, so you are intimately acquainted with how it actually sounds and feels. This is a particularly powerful lens through which to view your vocal development, and ties in very strongly with step 1 of our primer, which is to establish your chest voice.

By working on the voice in this way we are tapping into a wealth of pre-existing muscle memory AND pre-existing psychology. If we can make your singing sound and feel exactly like your own voice, from the very bottom of your range to the very top, over a wide range, singing can become remarkably easy. This is a key philosophical component to our approach.

Singing is sustained speech on pitch.

Although the volume and range demands are somewhat different, the operation of the instrument when singing should be functionally similar to that of a healthy speaking voice. This is in order to elicit smooth and easy operation of the voice, as well as great and free singing tone that is congruent with the way your particular voice is meant to sound and operate.

 

 

What makes OUR vocal system quintessentially unique?

I once went to a seminar in a relatively complex martial art – Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. As part of this seminar, the coach tried to boil down the philosophical essence of the martial art into FOUR simple statements.

Note: There is far more to the every day action of performing this martial art than just the mere statements he listed, but here was the point. The instructor wanted to try and present something very complex as a series of premises that:
a) identified the unique attributes of the art; and
b) could give people at least an overview of what steps the art is trying to move through (even if a beginner couldn’t fully grasp all of these steps before starting).

I’m going to try to explain our vocal system and technical framework in a similar way. We’re going to try and present our technique as a series of basic premises, such that you can broadly grasp what we are trying to achieve in our voices, and in turn understand what sets our technique apart from others.

Here is the basic breakdown of what needs to happen:

1. Establish chest voice
2. Connect the registers
3. Cluster the vowels
4. Sing songs

This is what we are looking to achieve. Nothing has been omitted that could not be more appropriately included or clarified within one of these four categories, though each of the steps has a lot of overlap and sub-points we need to tackle with each unique voice.

I may well find in the future I add/subtract or re-evaluate what I’ve written here, but for now, I do believe that this set of statements summarises the broad trajectory of what happens in our vocal system.

 

 
If you’re not familiar with chest voice, just place your hand on the boney bit in the middle of your chest (your sternum) and give a big, deep, manly ‘ahhh’ (as in the vowel sound of the word ‘Bach’). Most of you will notice a vibration in that boney part of your chest. Not all of you will, but most of you will.

This is the part of the voice that most of us speak for most of the day, and it is the sound of the voice that we each relate to as our normal speaking voice. Similarly, most people we speak to will perceive this sound as a normal speaking voice to listen to.

What this means is that chest voice is the foundation of the voice. In a nutshell, the way any normal human voice speaks is generally in their chest voice. This is our sonic identity where we feel like it’s our voice, and therefore the sound with which we most closely identify. Think about those times your voice has felt just plain wrong to you, e.g. maybe after a cold, or when you’ve lost your voice after a loud party. Think about when your voice just hasn’t felt “normal” to you…

But ask yourself, what exactly is that sense of “normal” to which you’re comparing your voice? What makes us differentiate “normal” from “not normal“?

Generally speaking, that self-identified sense of “normal” is your chest voice. It’s the natural calibration of your voice and the weight with which you use your voice, and this must come first. Before we can worry about extending range, or building power, the base of our voice must come first before anything else.

Remember, singing is simply sustained speech on pitch.

Balance is critical.

Too little or too much chest voice for a given singer is a problem. Similarly, an inappropriate or inconsistent quality of chest voice for a given voice (compared to normal for that singer) is also a problem. All of these will cause a voice to fail. Not necessarily instantly, but certainly progressively over time. Without establishing someone’s true chest voice, we are not going anywhere.

On a functional level, establishing the sound we hear as chest voice also functionally activates the fullest length, depth and thickness of the vocal folds in relation to that specific voice/singer. This activation is extremely important. Insufficient/inappropriate levels of activation will lead down a vocal dead-end. This is our number one priority. Therefore, we start here.

 

 
While we must start with chest voice, this is only step one. There are multiple registers to the voice, each connected to one another by bridges. Bridges exist due to interactions between frequencies generated by the vocal folds interacting with frequencies associated with the shape of the vocal tract (harmonic/formant interaction). These lead to timbral shifts and resonance changes as one ascends/descends in pitch, and our goal is to blend these together so the bottom matches the top, and the top matches the bottom.

As such, while chest voice is the foundation, it alone does not equal extended range, quality of tone over that range, nor does it equal ease of access. Connecting the registers through the bridges is the next required step.

Each register that makes up the voice must be traversed – across the bridges that connect them – in order to build the voice. When I say “in order to build the voice“, I mean both in terms of range AND quality. This can only happen once there is a true and appropriate chest voice at the bottom end.

This is to provide stability and a constant reference point for checking the tone and vocal ‘feel’ we are generating for the singer. We are essentially going to extend the range of the singer, but then start to tone-match the new top end to the bottom end (i.e. chest voice) and be absolute certain that it matches.

Why is this?

Not only will it sound good and like your voice, but consider this…

If we can make upper notes that once seemed high or a reach start to feel just like your chest voice, then they start to lose that sense of ‘high-ness’. If they feel congruent and identical to your normal singing range, well, put simply you won’t notice you’re singing higher. You as the singer will feel like those new higher notes are now part of your chest voice.

We’re integrating the top of your voice where you once felt uncomfortable, into the bottom where you do feel comfortable, in such a way that you no longer notice the higher notes as being high. Once singers start to experience this, true vocal freedom starts to manifest. We start to access effortless and easy range, all without the singer even realising they are singing high.

Specific exercises coupled with maintenance of an established chest voice will enable us to climb through each register in turn, but this must START from a true and appropriate chest voice for each singer. Many vocal systems now tout this as a key feature of their technique whilst omitting the critical nature of chest (whilst others are completely unaware of such things), but, either way, this order is critical from day one.

 

 
To grasp this, we must get a bit more technical.

Think about those times you’ve sung a song, and one line feels and sounds great, but another line with the same notes sounds awful. In fact, you may not even be able to hit the same notes on that different line, even though the melody is the same. What is the cause of this? We’ve all been there, but why does this happen?

What you are experiencing is a problem with your vowels and your vocal tract. Here’s how it works.

Vowels are controlled by the vocal tract, and are actually a result of your vocal tract changing shape. This change in shape alters how the sound (generated by your vocal folds) is shaped, and creates perceivable quality differences in your voice that we recognise as intelligibly different vowels.

Broadly speaking, your vocal tract is the length of your oesophagus between your vocal folds and your lips, and the exact contour and posture it adopts at any given moment is what shapes your sound into any given vowel. Incorrect shaping of the vocal tract is a massive problem for 99% of most singers, even the great ones.

Cluster the vowels

When we say we are trying to cluster the vowels, we are trying to articulate every vowel we will ever need, but by keeping the shape of tract for each vowel as similar as possible to each other.

This results in far less muscular activation to change from one vowel to another – yielding a smoother sound and singing experience – and also creates an acoustically more efficient instrument – again leading to maximum tone production and a much easier and enjoyable singing experience for you as the singer. Often when people experience this they remark that their throat feels more open, but in reality it’s typically fairly narrow. What they are experiencing is the acoustic efficiency of a well set-up instrument.

This whole approach ensures a smooth sound and easy transitions through bridges no matter what the lyrics are, and allows further depth to develop, but it is not immediately easy or instinctive. This is a crucial characterising feature of what we are looking to achieve in sessions.

This emphasis on vowels is a key distinction

Even many other successful technicians in the contemporary world of voice fail to grasp the importance of getting their vowels closer together in this very particular way. Their careers and vocal longevity are often much shorter as a result. We want everything to feel easy and connected, and to SOUND easy and connected. This can only happen when the vowels (i.e. the different shapes you need your vocal tract to achieve) are not only controlled, but adjacent to one another, overlapping, even, and contiguously clustered together.

This might seem abstract or even easy to do, but it really isn’t. You need to hear it and experience it to understand this, but once you’ve hard it and felt it, you won’t be able to unhear it.

 

 
Given the point of singing and development of singing technique is to sing songs, this is essential. It’s a non-negotiable. This is where the rubber meets the road. What was the point of all of the above, if you’re not going to sing songs? How can you truly test your voice out?

This is more than just a final stage that exists as ‘the end of the line’ – on the contrary. The demands that you uncover at this stage actually loop right back in to the beginning of this process.

When you sing songs, it forces you to re-examine and re-evaluate everything you are doing at each previous stage: singing songs helps you realise where your chest voice as a foundation is failing, it helps you realise where your bridging process is weaker than necessary, and in turn makes you realise where your vowels are not clustered sufficiently.

This thereby helps you to improve your overall vocal approach and technique so that when you re-visit this final stage, everything is more appropriately setup and accessible for you. The process repeats again, and again, and again… wash, rinse, repeat. It’s a cyclical process where each subsequent step reinforces everything that went before, and challenges what comes next.

The dilemma with lots of information

The hardest part of the voice being so complex is not that people cannot comprehend each piece of it. It’s that people can obsess over one component at the expense of the others. Worse still, they can over-emphasise the one “piece of the truth” they’ve found most helpful, and forget to keep everything in balance. There are many components that need to be worked on, and they all need to move along together and work in concert with one another.

As such, there ARE other vocal systems out there that talk a LOT about vocal fold co-ordination but not about registers or the like. Still others talk a lot about vowel modification to make things easier, but not the overarching system of why this works. Arguably worse still, some prescribe permanent vowel modification on a song by song basis, rather than training the voice to seek that essential clustering of vowels within the instrument itself. We need automation of all these precepts to have that great ease of singing we all seek.

I’ve also seen plenty advocates of excess chest voice who get you to yell as hard as you can in the pursuit of more chest (appropriate amount and quality is what we’re after). I see plenty who wax lyrical about the importance of registers and how the vocal folds play into that, but never go further than this. And I see plenty who seek to fix the voice in isolation, with no application to song to enable a true road/battle testing of the voice to feed back in to the earlier stages on the next cycle.

I’ve worked with and observed quite a few of these coaches in person, and it’s coaches who can take all of the above in and adopt a more holistic approach that leads to the most organic and intuitive experience for the singer. One analogy is that we are trying to build an engine – a quite complex engine – but then we’re going to stick a simple dashboard with an intuitive user interface over the top for you to drive without thinking. Once the engine is built and humming along nicely, however complex it is under the hood, you simply don’t need to worry about how it works. You just get to have the pleasure of driving the thing… and I cannot convey how much fun it is to get your voice to that stage.

 

 
Let’s revisit our simple 4 step process and draw some take-home points so you understand how we apply this in lessons:

1. Establish chest voice
2. Connect the registers
3. Cluster the vowels
4. Sing songs

Anyone can build a voice to be proud of

The voice is an instrument like any other. It can be built and finely tuned just like a car engine, and can be developed like any person working smart at the gym – it just takes knowledge and time.

I’d also add that with the precision of the technique we apply, immediate results are the norm. But do not be deceived into thinking you will become a great singer overnight. It takes time. Bodybuilding is a great example of something that no matter how strong you are when you start, to build a body (or in our case, voice) takes time and dedication. In the same way, you will go through this process again and again to develop that powerful voice with lots of range and expressiveness with great ease.

Everyone can develop their voice using this process

No matter how great someone is, their voice can be tuned even further using this process. We can’t start at step 2 of connecting the registers without first addressing step 1 of establishing chest voice. You can do all the same stuff, but it won’t yield the same results without first addressing the step before.

I’ve even had clients who are seemingly doing great on steps 2-4, but if chest voice isn’t established, we simply must go back and address step 1. Each step is listed that way because one must follow the other. A key element of this that so many try to get past is, trying to improve your bridges/range before establishing chest is a waste of time. We’ve GOT to get your chest voice sorted. This makes the short term registration harder, but the long term tone and quality benefits much easier to acquire.

Anyone can build themselves a great voice by working through these steps with a knowledgeable ear, it just takes deliberate intentional practice every day.

 
If you’re ready to get started on your vocal journey and are serious about building your voice, then just click the button below to be taken to our booking and initial consultation from. We look forward to working with you!