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In order to create mix you have to have two equally strong registers that automatically cross in the middle. AUTOMATICALLY.

If you do not develop head register, it will not be strong in the bottom pitches. It takes time to make it strong and clear in a lower pitch range because of the vocal fold behavior. An easy way to get it to be clear is simply to squeeze the throat. That can work on a short term basis, but eventually, it’s not a productive functional behavior. You cannot get head register to be strong as long as the sound is breathy. A tricky situation.

Chest register is the normal mode of speech (modal) in most people, but not in everyone. And even in people who have a strong chest dominant speech, as the pitch range goes down, it will also get weaker, as the folds shorter and loosen to get those pitches. Therefore, you must develop strength in chest for most singers as well and the vowels must remain undistorted and natural.

The way to measure strength is through volume. When it is easy to get louder without doing anything else but get louder, the sound can be considered strong. WITHOUT DOING ANYTHING ELSE other than creating more contraction in the belly muscles underneath an firmly open rib cage.

If you do not work to make the low notes strong in chest register, without vowel distortion or laryngeal manipulation, you will not do well in mix. If you do not work to make head register strong and clear on upper pitches, without distortion, you will also not do well in mix. Head register strength takes about twice as much time to develop as does that of chest. You cannot skip this development. It needs to be about twice as strong as chest in the middle notes to counter the “down and back” pull of chest register.

Mix is only possible when you can control the volume of the registration without manipulating any other parameters except the volume. The vowel sound /ae/can access register balance but relying on the vowel sound as a destination makes for a distorted and skewed result. Volume alone will measure how balanced the registration is. When it is possible for the larynx to handle a solid exhale without being breathy and to ascend and descend in pitch without any obvious breaks, the vowel sound shapes should be easy to adjust without distortion or change in any other parameter.

People who sing only in mix have undifferentiated registration. That means they have an undeveloped chest register in low range, an undeveloped head register in high range and an indistinct and usually immoveable amount of both registers in middle pitches. While this generally does not create vocal health issues it is nearly impossible to change anything in this default except possibly, pitch and volume. It might be possible to open the mouth more and it might be possible to change the volume, but “resonance” or vowel sound shape will not, NOT, move. Chest, in this mess of mix, is often loudest at A, Bb, B and C above middle C (approximately), after which the sound either thins out considerably and dies off or just stops, as if it was “shut off”.

I continue to hear “my student doesn’t understand how to sing in mix”. No, you, the teacher, do not yet understand how to develop mix. You need to know how to use the exercises such that the student does not have to understand anything but will discover, in the lesson, that the sound emerges all by itself because you have created the correct conditions for it to do so. When the sound shows up, you say, “There. Now, this is mix. This is the sound we have been seeking.” The student’s eyes will grow wide and she will be surprised and delighted that this new sound has somehow come from her own body without struggle. Because you have asked her to do specific exercises over a period of time and THEY have developed a conditioned response in her vocal mechanism that would not have been there had she not sung them. Mix is not something you “do”, it is something that happens.

I have heard the comment “I think too much” many many times, coming from the mouths of singers, usually young.

This comment makes no sense. It goes along with so many others that are also nonsensical like “I like to squeeze my throat”, “I like to hold on to my jaw”, “I’m not usually on top of the pitch” and the killer-diller, “I listen to myself too much”.

I suppose you could say that a few people do like to squeeze their throats and hold onto their jaws. These people maybe get a weird pleasure from the squeezing……like someone who enjoys repeatedly clenching their fists. Or perhaps there are some singers who like to keep their mouths as closed as possible at all times lest a fly enter or someone put a few unwanted fingers into their mouth. And, then, of course, there are those odd individuals who refuse to climb up to those pitches, preferring instead to hold them high over their heads somewhere, forcing the vocal production to remain “beneath the note”. And there might also be folks who cup their hands to their own ears for hours at a time longing to hear their own dulcet tones as some kind of remedy for their ills.

Oh please.

You have to think when you are learning something new. You think about it or you don’t learn it. People who do not think, do not analyze or assimilate what they are doing well enough to comprehend it. So, if you don’t think, you won’t learn. AND, self-consciousness is not necessarily about “thinking” at all. It is about lack of thinking. Lack of something specific to focus on which counteracts self-consciousness. It is about lack of concentration on a particular set of thoughts.

You cannot skip steps when learning a physical skill but sometimes you have to learn two things at the same time that are both crucially important and they are quite oppositional to each other. All highly skilled motor activities take time to develop and singing is certainly that. You must cultivate strength and stability at the same time you develop flexibility and agility. Guess what? Those things are opposites. You must learn to “let go” but you CANNOT DO THAT if you do not have strength and flexibility in equal measure and that can take at least two years to emerge. In the meanwhile, as you study, you will be uncoordinated, uncomfortable, disorganized and quite often frustrated, but you will also occasionally be coordinated, comfortable, organized and satisfied, and occasionally completely frightened and absolutely ecstatic. If you skip these stages while training, lucky for you, but don’t count on the idea that they will never arise, as you may find that the career you end up with provokes the very vocal things you were able to avoid at the beginning of the journey.

The unwanted behaviors that arise during training are normal. Sometimes, in stimulating changes and growth, a side effect of the development is that some things get better but some things, unfortunately and temporarily, also get worse. You have to learn to live with that until you have been at the process for quite some time (years).

Quite often, students do not know any of this. Quite often, the teachers tell them “you are…………” in an effort to “help” the student find out what it is they do that is “wrong”. And, quite often, it is the teachers themselves who are at fault, as they may have asked the student to do an exercise that was so hard, so much out of their range of execution, that the student is left struggling and straining just to make an attempt.

Deaf people do not sing. Deaf people who learn to speak through vibration never sound like hearing people. If you do not listen to yourself, you don’t know what you sound like. If you are on a plane, in a loud restaurant, or in a noisy crowd, you will raise your voice because it is harder to hear yourself. These are facts. If you do not learn to hear yourself consistently and objectively, you cannot possibly sing well. You cannot sing “on top of the pitch” (with solid intonation). If you do not think about how you sound, you will not know what to listen for or why it is important. And if you sing things that are too hard for your throat and body to manage, you will collapse in your throat (squeeze) and that will cause your larynx to rise and your jaw to be unable to drop. Indirect responses that indicate physical imbalance. Some of it may be neurotic, but most of it is probably functional.

You can become narcissistic about your own voice, thinking you sound better than everyone else. In that sense, you can “listen to yourself too much” but mostly, if you want to learn to be a good singer, you had better listen and listen and listen until you hear something that you like and want to share. The same can be said for thinking, feeling, and singing.

Recently, I had occasion to listen to students being taught behind the closed doors of a studio in a building where there were many studios and many people singing and playing music.

I have had this experience numerous times. Whenever I hear someone singing nicely I enjoy walking by, listening and taking in the great sound and music that I hear. When I hear something dreadful, however, it feels as if I am listening to someone being tortured and it makes my blood race and my stomach knot-up.

If a student is screeching some thin, pinched high notes, or yelling some terrible pseudo belt, or trying to maneuver her way through an exercise that is agonizingly slow, all the while struggling over and over and over in the same horrible pattern, it is hard to stop myself from pounding on the door of the studio and yelling “STOP!!! What are you doing?? Don’t you realize the damage that is being done here?”

Of course, I DON’T do that, because I know what would ensue if I did, but I surely want to say, “Don’t you understand that repeating these sounds and these patterns continuously, as if they will somehow magically just go away in good time, is insane?” I want to say “Who hired you?” I want to say “What kind of an approach to teaching singing do you have, to allow a student to sing like this in a lesson? Aren’t you supposed to be giving instruction here on what is CORRECT?”

Really, that people are being paid to conduct such “singing lessons” is shameful. Nevertheless, it happens every day, in lots of places, all over the world. It will continue until we have enough people trained in vocal function who are willing to speak up and speak out and protest. That, unfortunately, will take a very long time, because the amount of ignorance in regard to singing is still enormous.

You cannot overcome darkness with anything but light.

Folks — repeating something that sounds bad over and over does not make it suddenly get better.

If it’s bad, fix it. If you can’t fix it, change what you are doing. If you don’t know how to change it, DON’T TEACH. Do not teach.

It is easy to take some kinds of information for granted. We all assume that “everybody knows that”.

Of course, nowadays, even basic assumptions are often wrong. Things like “all graduates of public high schools in the USA are decently educated” and “those who hold high government office know how the government was formed and how it works” and “anyone who is openly dishonest and convicted of a crime will never be able to live it down” are all blatantly untrue. There is so much general ignorance in the world that being dumb is somehow a badge of honor. Being dishonest is the same. It is often so that if you are a crook but a CELEBRATED crook, the world doesn’t punish you, it offers you a book deal and a reality show.

We have a TV network that calls itself Arts and Entertainment (A&E). Some people who are in the fine arts or in high art (Met Museum, Met Opera) would chafe at being labeled “entertainment”. Some people think that entertainment takes in the likes of “Jersey Shore”, “The Real Housewives of Okefenokee Swamp”, “Lock Up” and “Raw”. We are in a time when enormous amounts of violence is put forth as so-called entertainment on all the visual media every day. All manner of sexually explicit behavior in is now seen on mainstream media and is taken as being very acceptable by a large part of society. Twenty five years ago some of the dance moves on “Glee” would only have been seen in strip shows. Things change.

When it comes to training for singing, we can try to assume that those people who are working with singers know about singing, but that is a risky assumption. Whether it be a record producer or a parent of a kid who sings or a music director or someone who is teaching singing, we really can’t know what any particular person knows. We can’t even know that he doesn’t know he is uninformed. The entire realm of singing is so vaguely defined, poorly understood, and completely disorganized, and without any shred of external measurement or definition, that finding anything at all about singing that is consistent is a miracle. Yet, every day, we have the talent shows. “American Idol” is still doing well. We are about to have the “X Factor”, a new one, and there are all kinds of small competitions throughout the world for singers of various kinds. What gets judged? By what kind of judges? Who decides what is worthy and what is not –the same people who decide what kind of dancing is OK for “Glee” or what songs are acceptable for “American Idol”? Who decides what kinds of skills a judge needs to have? Does the judge sing? Did the judge ever sing? Did the judge ever have a career singing? Did the judge study singing? Did the judge ever learn how anyone makes sound? Think of all the assumptions here and how absolutely unknown they are.

Things are the way they are, often, because someone says so. If the person is someone who has made an effort to be knowledgeable, perhaps what that individual says seems to make sense and, therefore, credible. But not necessarily. There have been some really nutty ideas out there that have garnered millions of followers who do not question. It is more common to find a herd of sheep than a sheep herder. We take for granted that someone who says they know, does.

We take for granted that going to college to learn to sing makes you a better singer. This is a risky assumption. We also take for granted that all those who teach singing in these colleges know how to teach. Same. We take for granted that all good singing has similar parameters. Ditto.

If someone is writing about “vocal pedagogy” (or the study of teaching singing), it would seem fair to assume the writer has conducted a comparative study of various approaches to teaching singing, with plusses and minuses of each digested, weighed and measured and is presenting this information for evaluation. If someone were teaching any kind of “vocal pedagogy” it would seem fair and reasonable to assume that the person teaching had investigated all kinds of teaching of all kinds of musical styles and many different teachers. These, too, would be risky assumptions.

All this leaves you with one thought. Question everything. Do not accept anything anyone says without your own thought process running it through your life. In the end, we are all responsible for what we accept. If we never ask any questions, if we never challenge our assumptions, and just take things for granted, we will surely find that doing so is a good way to fall into a deep, dark hole.

I have written previously about talent. My definition is being able to do something very well with little effort and hardly any training. Singing is something that some people can “just do” and do “well”. Some people just have “good voices” and a few lucky individuals have “exceptional voices”. Some people can easily sing with great expression. Some people are just very gifted.

But some people are over six feet tall and do pretty well at basketball without much training. And some people can discern the various tastes in food without being able to explain why. Some people can draw well, just by trying. There are all kinds of things that human beings do well for no particular reason. Sometimes they do something with their various kinds of talent and sometimes they don’t.

What about the rest of us? What if we are not the “greatest”? What if we are just pretty good? What if we are just OK? What if we aren’t that good? What if we are hardly any good at all? Should we not bother?

Many people who have a decent amount of ability decide to learn more and see if they can get better. In the hands of a good teacher, getting better would be a given, particularly if the person did what the teacher suggested. And, anyone who has the time, the means and the desire, at least in the USA, has a right to try. Sometimes a person with less natural ability will surpass someone of much greater talent just by working harder. I have seen it happen many times just that way. It has been said that success is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration, and I think that is true.

Why should singing be any different than basketball? Why should it be that someone who wants to sing can’t learn how? Isn’t it so that we should be able to teach anyone to sing if he is interested and willing?

The answer, of course, is yes. Unfortunately, however, there are still plenty of people out there with some of the ideas I wrote about in the previous post. Either you can or you can’t. There was a woman, I think she was named Mary Small, who used to advertise in Back Stage, our trade newspaper here in NYC, with an ad that said: If you can’t sing, no one can teach you. If you can sing, you don’t need lessons. If you are someplace in the middle, I can teach you. [] Every time I read that ad, I cringed. She really believed that and she was absolutely not alone.

What’s worse, I suppose, is singing teachers who have a rigid idea about what singing is and make everyone try to fit into that preconceived mold. Either you sing the way they think singing should be or you don’t have what it takes. Yikes. I’ve seen this too, at conferences and even asked the teachers about it. Yes, I was told, one has to have a preconceived idea because that’s what the students need. I think the teacher needs an idea about how voices function, but not how the person should sing. They are two different things. How can you discover what you want to sing if you don’t have a chance to also discover what your voice is and how it wants to grow and develop?

Natural talent is a good place to start the journey but it isn’t an end in itself for most people. Even the great artists of all time had mentors, teachers, influences and guides. Sometimes talent emerges through training. Sometimes people don’t really know they are going to become great singers for quite some time. Natural ability can be hiding.

Stay open minded about “talent”. It’s relative and it is subject to positive influence. Everyone who wants to sing, ought to sing, and everyone who sings ought to be able to improve and have fun doing so. Don’t forget.

Think of the complexity of most human endeavors. Think of what the brain has to do to coordinate swimming, or skiing or translating freely from one language to another in a running conversation or speech.

We are beginning to understand the cosmos and what we are finding is that it is far more complicated than we thought. We could say the same about singing, too.

When we thought that singing was “either you can or you can’t”, either you “have a good voice” or “you can’t sing”, either you sang “classically” or you were “making awful noises”, either you could “carry a tune” or you were “tone deaf”, and when we had only “nasal resonance” and “diaphragmatic breath support”, it was perhaps easier. The talented found a teacher who was at least sane and learned music. Away we go winning competitions and getting jobs!!!!!!!!!!

Now, however, we are beginning to see through the Hubble telescope of singing. I have recently seen ads for “holistic singing” and for “bodywork” directed at singers in national publications. Hmmmmmm. Not seeing so much for “nasal resonance” development any more. Awwwwww.

Since scientists are actually looking at styles of music that include all kinds of vocal production, including belting, they are discovering that singing is actually far more complicated than had previously been thought. The various parameters of not only vocal production but style are at least as complex as swimming or maybe even a galaxy. It’s great to know that we are living in a time when all the parameters are opening up to investigation and that we might even find quite a few valid, scientifically acceptable methods of vocal training that were different but compatible. Wow!!! We might be able to stop fighting over “belly in” or “belly out” breathing and work on solving what students need what exercise at what moment for what reason.

[Small silence here.]

I know there are still people who say the world was built in 6 actual 24 hour days and that dinosaurs walked the earth with humans, so there will also always be people teaching “bel canto” with “diaphragmatic breath support” that uses “nasal resonance” because to do anything else would to them be heresy. I know. But they are getting to be outnumbered by the rest of the singing world and it will very soon be these folks who are in vocal museums. If you look through the Hubble telescope of singing you might just see a whole new world.

I have had some people come to my studio over the years with all manner of tension and distortion in their sound and vocal production and when queried, “How was that?”, the answer is “Fine.” I might have gone further,”How did it feel?” (Looking at a distorted neck, overly tense jaw, and a distorted mouth shape.) and get the response “Fine.” If I asked “Do you like how it sounds?” I might have been told “Yes, it sounds OK to me.”

In this situation, particularly since many of the people I see here are professionals, you have to ask, “What is going on here?”

Is this just my perception, that the voice is skewed and the production off? On what do I base my evaluations? Maybe, since I am human and quite fallible, I am just wrong in what I see and hear. Maybe the sounds are actually better than I think.

First of all, I try to ascertain why the person came to me. If you are completely satisfied with your sound, you usually do not seek a vocal technique teacher. Secondly, I ask what kind of singing the person does and under what circumstances. There are exceptions to everything, so perhaps this person is one. Third, I ask if the singer is healthy. Does the voice stand up to stress, performances, travel, colds, and other environmental factors or is it not strong enough to do its job consistently? Then, I ask what kind of a sound the person thinks he or she would ideally like to make. Sometimes, although the sound as he produces it is acceptable to the vocalist, it isn’t the sound he really wants.

Then, with all this information, I check range, volume, and adaptability. Can the sound change? How much control is there over it and how freely is the sound being made? If there is only one primary sound, no matter what it is, why is that the case?

The vocal folds are always the driving factor in the sound. If you are vocally tired, no amount of “breath support” or “resonance” is going to make up for being tired, but it might help you “get by” if you have those tools (at least). On the other hand, if the muscles in the neck, throat, mouth, face, and lips do not move, you are not going to be able to make much impact on the sound and that can have an impact on what the vocal folds can do. It is a two way system, with the folds first and everything else second, but the secondary stuff is not nothing.

Posture is important, breathing is important, resonance is important for opera/classical singers, articulation is important in some styles, but different things are important in different styles and there are ways to sing well, maybe very well, without some of these things. There are all kinds of variables involved in singing but the one thing that is never left out is the vocal folds and their ability to change pitch and quality.

If you never sing for anyone else who is a respected expert and you never get honest feedback about what your sound is, could be, or even should be, you don’t actually know if you sound “good” or even acceptable. If you teach, you have an obligation to let someone tell you what you sound like from time to time, and not just your best friend. And, if the news is bad, you really have to seriously address sounding better by going to work on your voice with that goal in mind. If you do not understand that everyone can and should sound good in whatever style they choose, shame on you!

Don’t be someone who doesn’t sing well and doesn’t know or can’t accept that this is so. Ask.

How do you mix if you don’t “just mix”?

What do you think of to get a mix? Is it lighter or brighter or both? What is lighter? What is brighter? How do you know when you have either sound? How much lighter is the right amount? How light is too light? Is that possible?

What’s the difference between full and heavy? Is full good and heavy not so good? How do explain a voice like Rene Pape’s (present moment operatic dramatic bass or “basso profundo”) which is big, full, loud, heavy and expressive? Should he get lighter? Isn’t light better?

If it is better to mix, shouldn’t there be a specific way to know how and what mix is? What about the people who say, “The voice is one unified thing.”, “There are no registers.”, “Every vowel has it’s own ‘place’ on the roof of the mouth.”, and “There are different registers on every note.” What would they make of “mix”? Are you mixing resonators?

Let’s see: 50% sinuses with 35% hard palate, with 15% pharynx. How’s that? How about: 75% eyebrow vibration, 10% cheekbones, 10% sinuses and 5% soft palate lift. Maybe it’s not the resonators, maybe it is the larynx and the breathing: 65% low larynx, 30% lower abdominal pushing out, 5% thinking of “across the street”.

Hmmmmmmmmmmmm.

If you do not understand register function, separate from vowel sound shape, you will have no means by which to mix anything. It is not “just resonance”.

Actually, crossing head register down and chest register up requires that you have a relatively separated or isolated chest register and head register to begin with and that’s not something that you find in most voices, so you have to cultivate it. Then, you have to strengthen it, with each register in it’s home base (chest/low and head/high), so that it is strong, steady and itself. Then, you must bring head down and chest up.

Head register down (sung on lower pitches) is odd because we would be in the “normal mode” on low pitches (modal) or chest register, if we have a normal, functional voice. It takes skill to take head down. Making it louder on the low pitches takes time. Taking chest up, once it is firmly established, isn’t too hard if it is freely produced and easily loud, but it always has a place where it “gets harder” and either doesn’t want to go further or flips into head. If fixing this was easy, singing teachers could make everyone sound great in three lessons, but it’s not easy, it is quite difficult, for many reasons. Just because someone can do one way doesn’t mean they can do the other, and some people can’t do either.

The training process, done properly, strengthens the middle voice (which varies depending on whether you are dealing with males or females) but functions the same way for both. It is in the middle where you have to negotiate mechanics, and if you do not know what that means, and you do not have conscious choices that you have worked to develop, you will never really be able to do anything beyond what your throat wants to do naturally. In other words, the training won’t teach you to do anything new, it will just teach you to do the same thing with a different approach. If you don’t learn to do something you couldn’t possibly have done without training, you are not being trained, you are wasting time. The most basic thing to learn is how to take head down and chest up. You must learn what that means in terms of sound quality and physiologic behavior, which is very important. It is only when you can cross head down and chest up with equal strength and ease that mix will emerge, whether you expect it to or not. When it does emerge, you could think of reading the phone book and it would still be there, as it has almost nothing to do with memory or thinking or imagining. It has to do with a strong, cultivated responses from both the vocal mechanism and the body that are a result of pitch, vowel quality, and volume. You could not never know you were in mix and be there easily and well. Many people who sing well do just that, without lessons, but with “self-training” over time.

Keep your head down and your chin up? Keep your chin down and your head up? It depends. In a pop belter you will see the head forward and up (hopefully only a little) and in a classical singer you will see the reverse (but hopefully with some freedom to move any which way). If you are singing well in head register, the larynx will drop and rest loosely low all by itself. If you are singing well in chest register the larynx will probably go up a bit, unless you force it down, but only a little. The PERCEPTION of the sound, however, will be the reverse. Head will seem like the sound vibration goes “up” and chest will seem like it goes “down”. That’s why you can’t teach by subjection impression alone. It is frequently counter-intuitive and backwards.

Mix is whether all factors converge or, said another way, no one factor is predominant. You could call it coordinated (Cornelius Reid) or blended, or balanced, or middle or homogenized or even “chiaroscuro” but the determining factor would be whether the middle pitches were chest dominant or head dominant. You wouldn’t really be able to tell in a well-balanced voice at moderate volume in middle pitches. And that is the point.

No one gets paid for low notes unless maybe he is Amonastro or a Russian Bass.

People like high notes. Over the decades the fascination with high notes has grown. Higher and higher. No note is too high. No upper limit. We like to hear that “excitement”. My late colleague and nemesis, Elizabeth Howell, used to call it “bullfight singing”. In some ways, she was correct. The public only knows that the sound is thrilling (like a scream), they don’t know if it is costing the performer to make that sound. Can you scream over and over and over and not hurt your voice? It seems like you can’t but really, no one knows for sure.

Common sense says this is a bad idea but there are famous people who specialize in extreme vocal sounds who do things that would scare most singers to death and they survive, even thrive, doing so. I don’t know how they manage, as it would certainly kill my little silvery soprano, but in my years of dealing with singing, I have seen and heard all kinds of things that would raise the hair on your head and not all of them were easy to explain, but they exist and people do them.

Since I still have an easy high voice, my students usually end up singing higher as they work with me, often quite a bit higher. I teach them to do what I do. Since most of them want to work, having their voice extend into a higher range gives them more options and allows them to get those jobs and be healthy in them. This is part of what they pay for. This is crucial in rock shows, as rock music doesn’t generally consider SATB at all. You just sing and you go up and get loud, and then go up some more, as needed. The “rock scream” is a necessary reality in many styles and, since we have just acknowledged that most humans don’t go around screaming for hours every day, this in itself is a very outside the box vocal behavior.

Most of the youngsters who come in are trained at school to fit into the soprano, mezzo, contralto, tenor, baritone, bass mold, regardless. There is little formal training to become a “baritenor”, even though that is the most common category for a male voice on Broadway at the moment. [A baritenor is a high, light baritone or a chesty, full tenor]. Same with the women — there are few roles for very high soprano [Christine in Phantom was probably the last one]. And there were never a lot of roles for mezzos or contraltos, so that hasn’t changed. [I guess “Gary Coleman” in Avenue Q is a contralto, but s/he is a belter, so that’s not the same thing]. The young people are relieved to have training that is geared towards making the sounds they hear on recordings but they also like the idea of keeping some of their more formal vocal production (just in case). Why not? It isn’t necessary to choose until and unless you get a role in a show that asks you for a specific sound, and even then, you can vocalize one way in the morning and a different way in the afternoon before the show, and survive very well. Life experience talking there, not theory.

There are also people who want to sound bad. It is, to them, some kind of a signature sound. There are people who have no choice but to sound “bad” as they have vocal injuries that are permanent. There are people who can sing high but don’t because they don’t like it. (Beats me, but true).

The current necessity for most singers, male and female alike, is to belt and belt high. It is absolutely possible to train someone to do that, most especially a student who has a good sturdy voice in the first place and who also has a nice sturdy body to go with it. Other people can learn but they are the easiest ones to teach. How high is high? What is the correct range? What is appropriate? The answer is, whatever the person can manage.

High notes always were money notes. They still are. It’s just that mostly, they sound a whole lot different than they did 50 years ago.

It’s very hard to be kinda sorta good at something and also kinda sorta good at something else.

At some point, it is easier to be good at just one thing. Really good. If you accomplish this, then, maybe you can also learn to get very good at something else. Being good at several things at once slows down learning both things and makes maintaining the two skill sets harder.

But, maybe not.

Maybe if you learn the two things as a kid, slowly, over time, and you don’t get told that doing so is hard, perhaps it is quite possible to be good at more than one, maybe even more than two.

Here in NYC, on Broadway, we have some of the finest dancers in the world. In the current production of “How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying” which stars Daniel Radcliffe and opens next weekend, the dancers are called upon to do several ballet sequences, some pop/rock jazz, tap and traditional theatrical dancing. All of it is beautifully choreographed. Most of the dancers are young. How did they get to be so good at so many kinds of dance? I’m sure it was because they were exposed to them early on and worked at each of them for years. When you get here, and you go to auditions, you find out quickly, they want you to bring your jazz shoes, your character shoes and your ballet shoes to the same audition. If you don’t do all of those styles, you go to classes and learn to do them, or you go home.

Our choristers in the Brooklyn Youth Chorus (www.brooklynyouthchorus.org) sing in a classical head dominant sound (with the Philharmonic and other groups), they sing in a mixy sound (with people like Brandy, Michael Jackson and The Grizzly Bears) and they sing a kind of belty mix with Elton John and other rockers. We train them to do this by teaching them to do various register balances in mid range on purpose. We have not had any health problems and we have not have anyone develop vocal pathology in 20 years. That’s a lot of kids. We don’t tell them this kind of versatility in singing is hard or potentially damaging, we just make sure they learn correct physical and aural patterning and we make sure they get the best information about vocal production they can understand. It seems to be working.

The people who sort of sing classical music and who sort of sing other styles don’t sing any of them well. Perhaps that’s OK, especially if it is just for their own enjoyment. If, however, the person has professional aspirations and they come here to NYC (or go anywhere else where there is high level professional music) they find out quickly what kind of standards singers are expected to have. It’s a kind of school, the world of professional singing, but not one that has books or grades, just opportunities to succeed or fail.

If you want to dabble, that’s fine, but don’t come here thinking that will be enough to give you a career.