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Human beings produce a range of sounds based on our size. None of us are going to have a throat as long as a giraffe’s or as small as a bird’s. The range of formants human beings create when they make vocal sound is limited. Also, since we sing with a “bent pipe” and that, too, is limited by anatomy, even the biggest  (8 feet tall or so) or the smallest adult (about 2 foot or so) is still not going to be a giraffe or a bird. Big, long throats with long thick vocal folds make low sounds, like the big pipes on an organ. There may be exceptions to that, but they are exceptions.

So, no matter what kind of sound a person makes, it is highly likely that someone else, somewhere, has also made that sound. If you look on YouTube you can find all sorts of “extreme” vocal examples, both musical and not. There are strange sounds in various languages and oddball effects that people can create through the voice.

If you look at teachers of singing, however, you will find a high number of them who believe they have “discovered” some sound no one has ever made before and who feel compelled to name it or label it as their own. It’s a bit like going to a remote beach and deciding that you are the first person to be there and giving it a name when, in fact, it already has one, it’s just that you don’t know what it is. “Screlting” is a new word people want to use to describe high screamy belting. Doesn’t work for me. I would say high screamy belting. There are other terms like “weightless belt”, “super belt”, “voice lean”, “position 2”, “larynx tilt”, etc. that float around and mean something to the person who came up with the term but nothing to anyone else (except their own students).

If teachers of singing were willing to deal with the fact that sounds are basically organized by pitch (and range) and vocal quality (from clear to breathy, nasal to swallowed, and noisy) and that we mostly sustain vowels, the way we describe vocal sounds to each other would get a lot simpler and we could actually get somewhere in conversing about them. These folks should realize there is nothing new under the sun when it comes to human sounds. Thinking otherwise is just a form of ego. To quote the song, “let it go”.

One thing you can be sure of, singing teachers will always be interested in the exercises. Present moment attitudes regard them with greater understanding than did previous generations but the basic underlying and widely pervasive attitude is that the exercises will magically make you a better singer.

So, we have books of exercises or pages of the special exercises of teacher X or Y. We have the prescribed syllables on the specific pitches and the required dynamics. We have exercises to develop “correct” breathing. We have exercises for everything.

The problem with this idea is that it is simply a new version of the old saw: if you sing these exercises in this sequence on these pitches and syllables, using this kind of pattern in your body to “breathe”, sooner or later your singing will get better.

This is simply not true. No matter what exercise you do, no matter what patterns of pitches and vowels or syllables, no matter whether your breathing is consciously “hooked up” or not, if you do not know what it is you are striving to accomplish by doing the exercises, they are worthless. If you want to develop “chest register” (or modal voice, or TA dominant production, or lower register, or heavy mechanism, or whatever you want to call that same function), you need to understand what that function is and how the body and throat are responding when that function shows up. That’s the key: when it SHOWS UP.

The voice is a reflex that occurs as a response to a stimulus from the mind. It is not something that we do, it is something that happens. The impulse to make out loud sound is a deliberate choice, albeit most times a spontaneous one. We do not decide to “vibrate our vocal folds” or “resonate our sinuses”. We decide to sing a pitch on a sustained or quick (staccato) sound, typically on a vowel, but not always. Exhalation is almost always involved, but you can make a pitched sound on inhalation, even though this is not what we would do unless we were surprised or startled. You can minimize the amount of air that passes out over the closed and vibrating vocal folds but you cannot make sound while holding your breath. Sound making and exhalation occur together. It is impossible not to “sing on the breath”. If you do not do this, you are dead.

The musically based vocal exercises given without regard to the responses that should arise are almost limitless. You do them a certain way because someone you trusted told you to do them that way. If they work, good. If not, too bad for you or your student.

If you gather a group of experienced vocalists in a room and ask them about any exercise, “What should this exercise elicit from a human throat/voice?” you won’t get very many answers. And, for every answer you do get, a high percentage of them will be incorrect. What we feel when we sing isn’t always what the throat is actually doing. Perception isn’t the same as response within the system.

Exercises used as a means to an end (free and complete singing voice function) can be very helpful. One single five note scale, done in various ways, can take you very far to having a highly functional, professionally viable voice. Dozens of exercises, done mindlessly and/or incorrectly, can waste your time, cost you money and even cause you harm.

It’s not the what, it’s the HOW. It isn’t the what it is the WHY. You cannot know what these elements are without also putting them into a very specific context. The principles upon which the exercises rest have to do with a teaching philosophy. The context has multiple parameters including vocal health, personal ability, musical expectations, and other related factors or goals.

Singing training is never about the exercises. It is about what it done with those exercises. This is not a mystery. If you do not know, and you sing or teach, find out!!!!!

Someone said that success is 10% talent and 90% perspiration. I would say that about sums it up.

There are some few great geniuses in this world who can “just do” but even the very successful will typically state that it takes a lot of work to look like you are hardly working.

When you are young you are striving to learn, to get better, to achieve. When you are in the middle of your life, you are seeking to deepen your expertise, broaden your experiences, to stay fresh while remaining grounded in the past. As you grow older you work to keep what you can, to maintain rather than lose, to reduce expectations of the physical body but to expand the philosophical and spiritual aspects of your art as you, hopefully, pass your acquired wisdom on to the next generation. This cycle has ever been and will always be, and it is to be honored by those who are seriously on the path of artistic expression as a life choice.

There will always be people who “get by”. They do the minimum required to carry on and spend much of their time in other pursuits. There isn’t anything essentially wrong with this but it cannot be so that these individuals deserve accolades in the same way that those with greater commitment should command. It is always distressing when someone who is famous gets an opportunity just because of that fame even though that particular recognition has nothing to do with the opportunity.

Years ago I saw a production of “Damn Yankees” which starred Joe Namath of football fame. He had just retired from playing. His knees were shot and he could barely walk so he surely couldn’t dance, he couldn’t sing, he was no actor, but there he was, the lead in the show, alongside Donald O’Connor, one of the greatest musical theater stars of the 20th century. Guess what, Joe sold tickets. He was lousy (to be nice) but he was a NAME. Maybe Joe perspired when he was on the football field, but as a music theater performer, not so much. He would have had to work hard to get a damp brow. Is this still kind of thing happening? Every minute of every day.

If you are one of the people who spends 90% of the time perspiring, don’t be down. You are in the best company. Your colleagues appreciate your efforts and they know how much you invest in your art. We honor each other even when the world doesn’t return the favor. It is in this consciousness that we carry on the elegant lineage that has come to us and will go on when we leave. It is a noble task.

 

The ground upon which something sits is important. The context, the  principles, the atmosphere, the point of view, matters. You can plant the same seeds in two different kinds of soil. One might grow while the other might not.

Two experts could know exactly the same information. They could be familiar with the very same facts and statistics, knowledge and experience. If one of those experts, however, was mean, arrogant, condescending and verbally abusive and the other was patient, compassionate, kind and flexible, who do you think would have the most success? It would be wonderful if I could write that the kinder teachers always do better, but I have no statistics to quote to prove that. My guess is that some people would not necessarily like the condescending teacher but would still learn, perhaps shaking in fear, perhaps feeling that the teacher’s fierceness was a sign of strength. I have heard of instances in each case.

When you are a novice at something or when you are unexposed to a topic, you have no way of knowing whether or not the information you are being given by a teacher, a book or any other resource is good, bad, right or wrong. You have no way to evaluate which experts are really experts, which are frauds, and which are not quite either. In fact, you have to go through life via trial and error until you have been around the block enough times to know what’s what on any topic.

The world is full of information now. You can use the internet and find virtually anything, but it’s just as easy there to find mis-information as not and to find so many conflicting opinions that you still can’t tell what to trust. And, there is so much “spin”, so much that is deliberately skewed to make you think or feel a certain way, regardless of what other effects it may have, that you can never really trust anything until and unless you experience it for yourself or you know from a very trusted personal source that it is safe to place your trust in it.

If we all have a viewpoint about life — if, in fact, we all have many viewpoints about life (and we do), each idea, each memory, each experience colors how we take in the next situation. As adults we have so much life behind us that we arrive to each new situation with a carload of baggage and it is very difficult to approach something in an open, neutral and evaluative manner. It’s not impossible, however, and it is more likely to happen when you deliberately choose to do that.

Before you decide whether or not a teacher, a method, an approach is right for you, spend some time with it. Do some research, talk to people who are more familiar than you. Find out what you can but be open to having your own, unique experience. What is good for me, may not be good for you and that’s what matters.

No matter how good or experienced the teacher, no one is right for everyone. No matter how kind or nasty someone may be, what matters is the ground upon which you approach that experience. In the long run, each of us is responsible for searching until we find that which we are seeking. Then, you are standing on firm ground, with deep roots, and you become a resource yourself if you want to be one.

The traditional point of view in classical vocal pedagogy was that you could not start training the voice until after puberty and that after about 30 your voice was set and could not be changed.

We know now this is false. It is possible to train a child to sing well (as long as you train the child to sound and behave like a child and not a mini-adult). It is also very possible to train an adult of any age, even a “senior citizen”, and get very good results, provided they understand you, are healthy, and practice. Over the decades I have worked with many older singers and in every case, with the above criteria in place, seen them improve in their singing. Willingness, persistence and a positive attitude are the most important ingredients. In fact, younger people with less life experience can be much harder to teach, in that they can have a limited understanding of process-oriented work. Learning to sing well takes time and older people know that many things in life work that way.

Obviously, someone who has singing in their background has an advantage, even if was decades ago that they had sung. The muscle memory is there, somewhere, and also the mental awareness, and that can help when “restarting” the engine. Someone who has never sung, however, but who is highly motivated can make progress if they are consistent in their studies. In fact, even people who have been told repeatedly that they “can’t sing” or are “hopeless” have done well with me, slowly, and over time. Why? Why would it be that they make progress with me when they have been written off by another teacher, sometime several other teachers of singing.

This can partly be blamed on the lack of underlying structure within the profession that would allow a broad dissemination of information that could benefit everyone. If someone has the capacity to teach people who are not at all able to sing, to sing, there must be something going on there that was not available to the other teachers. What that something is ought to be of interest to virtually everyone involved in singing. Sadly, that’s not the case. People who don’t know that they don’t know (and there are many) are often suspicious of information they have never seen. Crazy, cyclical thinking, I know, but a real circumstance.

So, if you have been told that older people can’t learn to sing, or if you believe that you can’t start singing training until after puberty, there are new things to learn that should change your mind. If you think that there is just one way to teach someone to sing (your way) and that you can’t find a way to work with someone who is motivated, sane, and willing such that they learn to sing and enjoy singing at almost any age, there are new things to learn that should change your mind. Look around. Read. Talk to others. Open up your world.  Age is not a factor when teaching singing or learning to sing.

The truth can sometimes best be expressed through paradox. We are all unique, we are all the same. The hours of the day and night are always the same, but how we experience them is continuously different. I can love you and not like you. I can like you but not love you.

Love, a word that we hear a lot, is total acceptance. Love at its highest level is nonjudgmental. Many are familiar with St. Paul’s letter:

If I have all the eloquence of men or of angels, but speak without love, I am simply a gong booming or a cymbal clashing. If I have the gift of prophecy, understanding all the mysteries there are, and knowing everything, and if I have faith in all its fullness, to move mountains, but do not have love, then I am nothing at all. If I give away all that I possess, piece by piece, and if I even let them take my body to burn it, but am without love, it will do me no good whatever. Love is always patient and kind; it is never jealous; love is never boastful or conceited; it is never rude or selfish; it does not take offence, and is not resentful. Love takes no pleasure in other people’s sins but delights in the truth; it is always ready to excuse, to trust, to hope, and to endure whatever comes. Love does not come to an end.

If you love something or someone, and you love in this way, you are truly blessed. If you come to love singing in all its forms as a life force, an expression of the Higher Power made manifest here through human beings, you will experience great joy and satisfaction while you sing or if you are in the presence of someone singing. It takes a lot to encompass all that singing is or can be, but the expansion is worth the striving.

If you teach and you accept everything a student does in a lesson — the good sounds, the not so good sounds, the attempts both failed and successful, the movements of the body and voice, the expression of the music, as if all of it were gifts, and if you treasure those gifts as they come to you, only good can come. It does not mean that there should be no correction or evaluation, no learning of “right” from “wrong” but when these things are done in an atmosphere of loving acceptance, the possibility of growth opens for both teacher and student.

Most people have a lot of programming about “not being good enough”. We don’t need to deepen those thoughts by making our students feel like they “can’t sing” or “can’t be good enough”.  Always hold your students in an atmosphere of loving acceptance.

Acceptance and acknowledgement make for safety and affirmation. In this atmosphere, the paradox of singing is found. All singers sing, every singer is unique, every song is just a song but every song is special. Don’t forget.

The idea that the larynx should never move and that, in fact, nothing should move while singing is simply silly.

When we are singing everything that can move should move and move freely. The movements should be smooth, coordinated and not unpleasant to do or to watch. Keeping everything absolutely still will cut off expression, make it impossible to change the quality of the vowel and deaden the vocal production so that the voice becomes uninteresting or even unpleasant.

Why would anyone teach such an idea? Why, indeed? This, and many other ideas like it, are out there and sincere students seeking to learn how to sing run into them every day. In fact, doing anything deliberate with the larynx is a bad idea, as the larynx isn’t something we should be trying to feel, let alone move. And, if you can’t change your jaw position, you can’t change the formants very much. If you can’t move your face muscles, you can’t change the vowels much, and that, too, limits formant “adjustments”. If you can’t allow the larynx to adjust (indirectly) you will have a terrible time singing high notes or soft tones. Bad ideas every one.

The larynx is a joint. What joint in the body does better when it can’t move? Smooth movement of a joint depends on flexible muscles and coordination. Muscles develop flexibility through stretching, but in order to stretch them you have to move them — to pull on them repeatedly.  What happens when you deliberately don’t move? They get stuck. They atrophy. Then it gets nearly impossible for them to do their job in supporting the joint to carry out its primary function, whatever it may be. Trying to “unlearn” that is quite difficult, especially if you do not have a teacher who knows how to give you help.

Attempting to control the things you should not be trying to control  and not controlling the things that need to be calibrated deliberately is like standing vocal training on its head. This is where the inexperienced teachers have no clue about what is cause (the vocal folds vibrating) and what is effect (the vowels we hear as acoustic response) and the purpose of airflow (moving across the vocal folds as they vibrate). You can’t teach at a high level if you are busy telling people to do things that (a) are not under direct control, (b) are best left alone.

How many times over the years have I had someone come to me for lessons who has been taught and who has deliberately practiced behavior that was detrimental to both the voice and the heart. Singing training like that closes you up, cuts you off from your body and makes you sound like a machine.

If you are studying with someone who tells you not to move, you need to ask why. You need to LISTEN to your teacher sing, throughout his or her range, and LISTEN to how they sound overall. You need to look at his or her face and body while they are singing. If it looks awful and sounds pretty bad, change teachers.

Communication is a two-way event. You say something, the other person receives your communication. Both people are equally responsible for that interchange.

I can be unclear in what or how I say something. You can misunderstand or misinterpret what I am telling you. Sometimes this causes great problems. We think we are being clear. We think the other person is understanding us. We think we agree. But maybe we don’t.

If you are teaching singing, aside from using the sound itself as an example and a form of communication, you have to use words. The precision of those words matters. The only way the student can grasp what you are saying is for you to be extremely clear in not only what you mean, but what you imply. The literal words and the meaning of the words must match. And the impact of the words has to be accounted for in the exchange, because they count as much as the words and their meaning.

If I stick to simple, well-known words that most people know and most people will agree upon without argument, I am relatively safe. If I use poetic language, unless I am careful, I can begin to be obtuse and my listener could get confused or lost. If I use a jargon that only I know, or perhaps a few select people know, I am perilously close to talking in a way that most others cannot possibly understand.

Most of us are sloppy in how we communicate and don’t really notice if the person with whom we are communicating gets what we are saying or not. We can’t, after all, ask continuously, “What do you think I mean when I say this? Do you understand me exactly? Please say it back to me.” The way we typically find out that there has been a mis-understanding or miscommunication is to bump into the problems that arise from it after the fact.

The more serious the issue, the more carefully you must select your words and think about their impact before you speak. You can’t take them back after they are out. The more the impact of what you say matters, the more you need to think of that impact prior to opening your mouth. And, if you are in a position of authority, and you speak from that position, your words and their impact have greater weight or potential within them, and you must consider even more carefully how you say what you have to say.

Communication is at the heart of what we do as teachers, as artists, as singers but also as human beings. If I am to trust you, you must tell me the truth. (The whole truth, the complete truth, so help me!) If you tell me only some of the truth, perhaps the part you “think I can handle” and I find out later that you held something back, and that something was important, I might never really trust you or what you say again. If we tell the truth with compassion, no matter what it is, it’s better to get it all out. Holding back always has a cost.

Trust, which is necessary in a teacher/student relationship, is built on honest conscious speech, backed up by consistent action, personal integrity, and a desire to honor and respect the person who is your partner in communication. The root word of communication is commune, which means to join with or bring together. True communication will allow you to align comfortably with another. Anything less will ultimately come back at some later date to cause trouble.

If you expect to communicate with your audience, you must know exactly what it is you are singing, what it means, what you want its impact to ideally be, and you must be as emotionally committed to that truthful communication as you can be as it is sung. Nothing else will substitute. If you feel vulnerable in doing this, and you will, the audience will repay you by trusting you completely and giving you its communication in return in the form of generous applause, or a standing ovation, or, occasionally, tears. Then you will know that you communicated well and that what you wanted to share was clear, true and well received. You and the audience will have shared the sublime experience of “communing” with each other —  heart to heart and mind to mind.

 

What happens when a person is trying to get out of a bad vocal habit and doesn’t yet have a really strong new habit to replace it with?

If you are a process-oriented, rather than goal-oriented, teacher, this happens frequently. If the person is motivated to get better and is already out in the world singing, he wants results. He wants to get better fast and know what is necessary for that to happen. He wants to be told do this and don’t do that, and he wants to have whatever you give him work right away. Unfortunately solving vocal problems is rarely a fast or short-term thing.

Habits, whether consciously developed through training, or acquired along the way in life, rarely go away immediately. In the case of unconscious (not deliberate) habits that interfere with vocal production, they have to be brought to the level of conscious awareness before they can be remedied and that can take time.

Teacher: Your throat is very tight. It closes and tightens when you go up.

Singer: I know. I thought that was what everyone did.

Teacher: No. That is a habit. We need to teach your throat to change pitch without doing a bunch of other things that aren’t necessary.

Singer: How do we do that?

Teacher: Let’s start like this………..

T: Your throat is tight. It causes your tongue to retract and your vowels to sound muffled.

S: It does? It feels OK to me. I think it sounds sort of warm and round when I sing.

T: Well, most of the sound isn’t getting out because of the way your throat is functioning. 

S: But I am supporting the tone the way I was told to and I am keeping my larynx down, too, just like I was taught. How could my throat be tight? I don’t understand.

T: Let’s experiment with some other exercises and see if we can get a new or different response from your throat. Try this………

S: I have an awful time in my mid-range. I can’t seem to keep the pitch accurate and my volume control is very unpredictable. I think it’s my breath support. It interferes with my placement. It’s making me very anxious.

T: Your mid-range is weak and it sounds as if you might have a vocal fold issue there…..perhaps some bowing of a fold or a partial paralysis. Have you ever had your vocal folds examined by a laryngologist? 

S: No.

T: Well, the first thing to do is get you examined by someone who knows how to evaluate professional singers. When can you set up an appointment with your laryngologist? 

The exercises provoke movement and the movement provokes awareness and the awareness grows both kinesthetically and auditorily over time. As the function returns to a more normal response, and as the reflexes of the throat are restored so that breathing is easier, the singing will get also easier but not necessarily more consistent, and therefore, musically speaking, better, right away. Freedom increases but stability decreases.

This trade-off is necessary but it is difficult for both the singer and the teacher. If the teacher does not pull in two ways at once, the problems will not go away, but the student can end up confused and frustrated. If the student can’t live with some vocal messiness and disarray the process cannot happen at all. You then end up flipping back and forth between two kinds of problems that both persist.

Just as you cannot will a plant to grow faster, no matter how much plant food or water you give it or how much sun it is exposed to, so, also, can the voice not be made better “right away” without paying a price. When fixing a voice that is in some way “broken” or less than optimally functional, zigzagging between two temporarily better alternatives might seem like a way to get nowhere in a hurry, but in the hands of a skilled teacher who knows how to address and resolve functional vocal issues, this is the  most productive direction in which to work.

 

“People who are famous have to be good at whatever they do because they are famous”.  – J. Q. Public

Really?

There are famous people in every profession. Famous lawyers, doctors, Indian Chiefs. There are many famous performers, famous painters, famous composers. There are people who have been famous for a few hundred years and people who got famous last week. We are as a society enthralled with fame and the people who seem to be famous.

Fame isn’t, unfortunately, an indication of anything. Some people get noticed and others notice that someone else has noticed so they notice, too, and the story rolls along on its on, growing moment by moment. A new self-reinforcing “word of mouth” (called these days “going viral”) becomes an end in itself. Particularly since the emergence of the web and the incredible impact it continues to have  on virtually everything, fame is easily and quickly associated with “followers” or “views” on the internet. (Not necessarily with anything else.)

Getting to be famous is a great way to sell stuff. You can have “merchandise” and make lots of money just because, being famous, people will want to buy anything associated with you. The reason why you are famous doesn’t seem to make much difference to many people. Just ask Snooky and Kim Khardashian.

There quite a few people who teach singing who have methods for sale on the internet. They convince you with their promotional videos that you can learn to sing really well if you just buy their CDs, videos  and books. They tell you about all the famous people who have studied with them. They tell you how famous THEY are.

In the professions of law and medicine, it used to be that advertising was not allowed. It was considered unprofessional. There are now “ratings” available on-line and certainly hospitals advertise discreetly, saying how excellent their care is and how successful  their surgeons are. It was also so that singing teachers did not advertise as it was considered unprofessional. A “listing” was OK. Saying that you taught was OK. Making claims about yourself was not. There was no law about this. There isn’t one now. Those who “advertised” were viewed with suspicion. This isn’t so true as it once was, but it hasn’t disappeared entirely either.

Most of the very famous doctors, lawyers, and other professionals still do not advertise. In fact, they do not need to advertise (even with just a listing). The “fame” they have is not generated by the internet or advertising in magazines or any outside source. These experts are known and recognized, not just by their patients and clients, but by their peers. That recognition doesn’t come easily but it is significant. Some few lucky people are recognized by more than one group of peers. You can be recognized for your acting, recognized for your philanthropy and recognized for being a champion horse breeder. All of these recognitions are not self-generated.

I know of at least five singing teachers here in New York (and I would guess there are more) who wouldn’t hesitate to tell you that they are the best teachers, above and beyond everyone else, in the world (never mind just little old New York). They will tell anyone they meet how much better they are than virtually every other singing teacher on earth.  That doesn’t stop these teachers from convincing their students that these statements are the TRUTH. The teachers truly believe that they are better than everyone else. The problem with this is, of course, that this opinion is not shared by their peers, or, actually, anyone else who is knowledgable.

Therefore, if you are studying anything with anyone and that person tells you how FAMOUS they are, and how much more they know than everyone else in their own profession, and how many others don’t know what they know, be alert. Even more significantly, if these teachers are selling their books, tapes, CDs, t-shirts, coffee mugs and pens, please, please WAKE UP. No one who has standing in their own profession has reason to behave in this way. (This always reminds me of the old greeting card that said on the front, “Congratulations to someone who is outstanding in their field” and inside showed a person standing in a field of wheat.)

Every legitimate expert recognizes that other experts have valid, if different points of view. All bona fide experts realize that there is disagreement amongst those at the top of any profession, but that the disagreement is normal and often helpful to the profession at large, fostering broader discussion in the greater community. Everyone who has strong opinions is going to conclude, sooner or later, that they know some things uniquely, but if they discount that others will also know other different things uniquely, they are off-base.

Beware narcissistic, self-absorbed, self-declared “famous” teachers. If someone tells you that their studio is “the best in NYC” or anywhere else, run away. There is no such thing. Learn to look at what’s below the surface before you buy the fancy label!!