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You cannot do it all. You cannot be an excellent high belter, a fabulous classical soprano, a great Broadway singer, a star cabaret performer, a great metal rocker, a sultry jazz chanteuse, and gravely-voiced country singer and someone who specializes in early music. So, how is it that classical music (repertoire) will make you miraculously good at any and all of these?

If classical training were enough, then anyone who had had classical training would automatically be a great classical singer who could do lots of the styles above with no problem.

This silly situation is assumed to be normal, OK, correct, etc., by many teachers of singing. We will only be taken away from this nonsense as functional training takes a foothold in the hallowed halls of academia, and the good news is, folks, that day is just around the corner. The tide is really, finally, actually, definitely turning, and halleluia for that.

In another decade, when electronic music has finally infiltrated modern opera and opera houses like the Met, La Scala and Covent Garden (!!!), and when young people finally find good reason to go into opera houses (so that Euro-trash scenarios can please go away, not a moment too soon), then we will have rockera singers and classicommercial singers and everything in between. I can hardly wait. In the meantime, those who get functional training NOW will be way ahead of the game and they, in turn, will be the teachers of the next generation. Our Somatic Voicework™ teachers are getting this training now. I will be sad to miss most of this transition in the music world and in the voice studios everywhere, since I will be long dead, but I hope to be able to get the vibes, wherever I end up.

Free singing is the opposite of manipulation. Anyone who teaches you to move your larynx on purpose is teaching you to manipulate your throat. No honest emotions will come through a manipulated throat position. Manipulation teaches you to hold on to the very muscles that need to move. Anyone who tells you to put your larynx in a specific place, or to move your false folds, or contract your “aryepiglottic sphincter” is asking you to do things with your throat that your throat was never intended to do. Anyone who tells you that belting is “singing through your nose or singing with nasal resonance” is just plain wrong. Anyone who tells you that you have to make a bright smiley face in order to belt is also wrong (it can help at the beginning, but once you get the sound, the smiley face can go away). You cannot belt decently if you do not have a good solid chest register. Nasality has nothing to do with that.

You were not meant to “vibrate your vocal folds” or “keep your larynx down low in your throat” any more than you were meant to “beat your heart” or “make your food digest”. Yes, we can get the folds to vibrate but we do that by making sound. Yes, we can hold the larynx down in the throat, by pressing the back of the tongue down and holding the jaw down at the same time, but then the larynx will get stuck and the high notes will go away, not to mention that the sound will get heavy and legubrious. Yes, you can try to “contract your false folds” if you know what they are and where, but why would you do that? What kind of a sound would that give you anyway? Cheech. You can make your heart beat by running up and down a few flights of stairs quickly. You can assume your food will digest, but I don’t think anything can hurry it up.

You have to know what the body does on its own, what can interface with the body and affect its responses indirectly, and what you just cannot make happen on purpose through any deliberate means. The throat is a responsive mechanism. Any kind of teaching that wants you to “get in there and do stuff” is counter productive and, potentially, harmful. It is, at a minimum, a good way to inhibit honest emotional communcation which suffers from any kind of restriction anywhere, but most particularly from restriction in the throat. Telling you to move your larynx is as bad, albeit in a different manner, as telling you to vibrate your forehead or send the sound across the room. Useless information that just makes it harder, not easier, to sing.

So, the next time you are busy digesting your lunch, don’t contract those false folds or keep your larynx “down low” while you practice those vocal exercises, just try to find a comfortable place to sing that sounds good.

Every sound a human being makes has some kind of resonance or it would be inaudible. Classical singing REQUIRES that a singer learn to stay in the pocket of 2800 to 3200 Hz in order to be heard unamplified over an orchestra. Very high sopranos may not need to do that, however, as high range of the average pitches sung can be enough. It is also necessary to be able to generate about 110 decibels in climatic phrases, which is very loud. That usually take years of training even in a naturally strong voice and body. There is no requirement, however, that the voice be beautiful while sustaining these resonance frequencies, and in point of fact, some voices can make these resonances sounding really dreadful. Maria Callas could always be heard but as she got older her technical problems got worse and worse and she sounded worse and worse but you could certainly always hear her. If you think she was unique, go over to the Met some time and see for yourself.

Resonance is NOT a cause, it is a result. So much singing training confuses cause with effect. It asks for singers to do things deliberately that are not meant to be deliberate. What we do deliberately is make sound, that is, when we choose. We can also choose to be silent. We also can breathe in a deliberate manner and do other things such as open the mouth, smile, and frown. Most people, with normal voices, can also get louder and softer (without understanding any special kind of breathing), and go up and down in pitch (if that was not possible no one would be able to ask a question or make a statement). None of that has anything to do with resonance or beauty of tone, or being musical, or being an artist, or having motivation.

Singing training is meant to increase and enhance function of the areas of the body that effect sound-making. The source of the sound is the vocal folds in the larynx. The folds control both pitch and register quality. The amount of air in the lungs and the pressure on that air as it crosses the vocal folds determines volume (decibels or sound pressure level), and the shape made in the mouth and throat coupled together as a tube (the vocal tract) determine what we hear in the vowel as it is sustained. There are all kinds of ways to produce resonance in the human voice and the specific resonances that group together at the frequencies mentioned above (2800 – 3200 Hz) are called “The Singer’s Formant”. A formant can be thought of as a resonanting frequency of the vocal tract. There are five that are significant. The first two determine the vowel, the other three determine the resonance factors. The front part of the mouth and tongue determine which vowel we hear and the back of the mouth and throat, down to the level of the vocal folds, determines what we would call the “timbre” or “color” of the tone, and much of its resonant quality. When resonance lines up with harmonics there is a “boost” in the sound, giving it a “greater energy”. If you want to learn more, go read one of the many excellent books on voice science. Scott McCoy’s book is very good.

None of this has to do with beauty of tone, that is a separate issue. Nor does it include learning how to do this is in a sensible, reasonable manner in any kind of codified approach. AND in CCM, we have microphones for carrying power, so resonance is a very arbitrary capacity. I wonder how much resonance Peggy Lee or Mel Torme had? Wonder how much Willy Nelson has or Tom Waits? Does anyone care? Michael Jackson’s voice was so light that you might not have been able to hear him 20 feet away when he was singing. No one knows. Were any of these artists striving to be resonant while they sang? You would have to had asked them, but my guess is that they were not. They had other goals in mind.

This is one of the many reasons why classical training is often NOT a good idea for those who want to sing in CCM styles. Learning to sing “Caro Mio Ben” does NOT help you sing “Good Morning Baltimore” from Hairspray. Learning to sing “An Die Musik” by Schubert does not help you sing “Being Alive” by Stephen Sondheim. Classical training that teaches you some kind of useful breath support skills, helps make your voice stronger, have more pitch range, keeps it comfortable and helps you sound NICER can be useful, but you have to get a teacher who knows what to teach and how to adapt it to you and your particular voice and career needs. Learning to be more resonant can be helpful if you have a very weak voice but, if you are a budding Peggy Lee, maximized resonance ain’t what you want unless you also want to end up sounding more like Sarah Vaughn. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

You cannot separate the mind, the body and the voice. The idea that they are separate is false. There is no voice without a mind to direct it to emerge. The voice has to come from a living body. The body can exist without a voice, but it is very difficult for it to exist (not impossible) without a larynx. It cannot exist without a throat.

The biological responses wired into the body through the Central Nervous System in the brain have a profound effect upon the throat and larynx. When we are frightened, our flight/fight mechanism kicks in, sending adrenaline out into the bloodstream and that sets off a chain of reactions. The throat tightens, the breath slows and then stops, the blood flows to the core, the fingers and toes get cold, the forehead sweats. If we live with low-grade stress (who does that?) it causes us to live in a constant state of tension in the body and, ultimately, specifically in the throat muscles. Emotions, too, cause the same kind of stress reaction. If you are enraged, or if you are grief-stricken, and you do not have a way to release those emotions (and sometimes they must be suppressed in order to survive), the tension in your throat required to keep the emotions contained causes trouble. We have lots of words to describe what happens in these circumstances: lump in your throat, words got caught, couldn’t spit it out, all choked up, “cat got your tongue”, lost for words, struck dumb, swallowed the words, etc. These are real phenomena that happen to everyone, regardless of sex, age, religious persuasion or race. You cannot override these reactions. If you get food or a foreign body caught in your throat your body will cough to eject it and that coughing can be very, very strong. The vocal folds, after all, existed first to protect the lungs from foreign bodies, not to make sound, which came later. The gag reflex is one that cannot be stopped through conscious will. If you get anything in your throat that should not be there the body will do its best to get rid of it right away.

No one has ever commited suicide by holding their breath, either. Your body is programmed to get oxygen in and carbon dioxide out no matter what. You can only live for minutes without breath. Anything that tightens the throat muscles will pull the larynx up and make it harder to inhale and exhale. This causes the head to come forward and to jut out. The tighter and higher the throat and larynx, the further up and forward the head goes. You see this in bad rock singers. They don’t do that posture on purpose (mostly), they do it because they have no training to not do it.

In Somatic Voicework™ we work WITH the reactions of the central nervous system, not against them. We work to eliminate constriction, not cause it. We work to keep the throat relaxed and open, not just because it sounds better to do so but because we can breathe better when the larynx is in a comfortable place. We work to keep the tongue loose and flexible because tension there can lead to tension in other places and all that can interfere with posture and with vocal production.

When there has been chronic constriction in the throat for any reason (from faulty singing or from some kind of emotional or psychological trauma) it can take time to get the muscles involved to release, let go and start moving again. In the case of someone who has been silenced (either deliberately or unconsciously) the throat can be very tight and immobilized. Releasing the throat will also release the emotions that the throat muscles are suppressing.

Singing teachers, therefore, are GOING to encounter emotions during the training process. How they deal with those emotions is VERY VERY important. I don’t refer here to the emotions of the lyrics or of the music, I am speaking of emotions of the person taking the singing lesson. Sometimes the person doesn’t even know why they are emotional, they just are. Allowing the throat muscles, especially the constrictors (the muscles that swallow), to move when they have been held in check, brings up intense anxiety, even in very normal people. Once the anxiety is confronted and accepted and the throat lets go and begins to move, that anxiety turns into excitement and enjoyment, both for the singer and for the audience.

Teachers of singing who scold singers who are emotional are doing damage to the psyche of the singer. Let me say that again: Singing teachers who are judgmental of those who become emotional during a singing lesson are doing emotional damage to the singing student. The purpose of singing is to liberate the emotions but that cannot be done without also liberating the muscles of the throat and breath. When they are being stimulated to move after years of not moving, unexpected emotions and psychological and physical conditions (memories, confusion, fainting) will occur. They are NORMAL reactions. If the student is allowed to release in an atmosphere that is safe and welcoming, the emotions will subside and take care of themselves, never to be an issue again. If they are not, they will remain stuck in the muscles of the body and throat and it will be much harder to get them to let go subsequently.

If the student has events or issues that need to be addressed that arise in a lesson, and those issues interfere with the lesson process or singing on a prolonged basis, the teacher MUST refer the student for professional counseling of some kind. Unless the teacher is trained in psychology or psychiatry, or is a minister or counselor, he or she should NOT try to address the issues directly other than to be kind and make a referral. These things are not arbitrary, rather they are of the highest priority in terms of ethics and professionalism. They are also part of being a human being, a compassionate and conscious person and of being aware of the unity of mind, body and voice.

There are many studies that prove muscles respond to exercise no matter how old one is. People in nursing homes can get stronger by doing exercise. Extremely obese people can exercise and when they do they not only lose weight they get stronger.

It is unfortunate, then, that so many people who sing do not really understand that a lot of their “vocal issues” are simply lack of physical strength in the intrinsic muscles of the larynx, the mouth and the tongue. Because they do not understand that singing requires a high degree of neuro-muscular responsiveness, they also do not understand that you can’t just “think yourself” into the correct sound. They incorrectly believe that simply finding the sound is enough to make it “stay”.

I do find frequently that people will say things such as “I can’t sing high anymore” rather than say “my high notes are really out of shape and so are my breathing muscles”. They also say things like “I used to have a lot of power but it seems to have gone away” only to follow that statement up with another that is “of course, I haven’t practiced, taken lessons or sung professionally in 5 years” without making any connection between the two. Even the people who are physically strong because they work out and can breathe pretty well can’t compensate with breath power alone if the vocal folds are only used in conversational speech. They behave as if the singing voice hangs out in limbo whether or not it gets any kind of attention. Often these people do very well with just a little bit of guidance about what and how to sing as vocal exercise. Show them what’s needed and how to do it, let them go away and practice it for a few weeks, and they get better. And they are surprised that this is so.

It is also so that people think that any activity at all in the throat is bad. That is not true. Your throat has to be active or you can’t sing. The muscles have to work to keep the soft palate up, to stretch in the back of the mouth, to change the shape of the lips and the amount of drop in the jaw. They have to move in the throat to change the vocal quality or timbre of the sound. I have encountered people who have been taught NOT TO MOVE on purpose. To keep everything still. Crazy idea.

Muscles have to move to get stronger. They have to stretch and contract and they have to be stressed to go past what is comfortable, and stressed repeatedly over time. The muscles of the ribs and abs have to work, too. Keeping the upper chest quiet is correct but in beginners this often means that they just don’t inhale much air, and that’s not correct.

Yes, when everything is working well, one doesn’t feel anything in the throat. A full-throated singer with a good sized voice can learn to track his or her sound through bone vibration sensation alone. A jazz vocalist or a folk singer, however, might not generate enough power to create a lot of bone vibration. Such singers must learn some kind of kinesthetic tracking or else they have nothing at all to go by when calibrating their singing while they sing. Movement in the vocal muscles reads to singers who are well developed and coordinated as “free singing” or “singing on the breath” or “singing with more flow”. Lack of movement and/or lack of muscle tone and responsiveness in the vocal or breathing muscles causes the sound to feel “stuck”, “like there is a ceiling”, or “cut off”.

Any kind of exercise that helps the body breathe, that helps increase control of the movements of the ribs and abs during exhalation, or that helps release the face, lips, jaw, mouth, tongue (front and back) and the neck, is a good exercise. But it is possible to pick an exercise that is too hard for the capacity of the muscles to execute reasonably. I can lift a 5 pound bag of flour and carry it home from the store with no problem, but if I had to carry it for miles, it would get pretty heavy. If it was a 50 pound bag of sugar I would have to stop and rest on every corner and even then, by the time I walked the uphill course of the 4 blocks to my apartment, I would be winded. But if I had to carry a 100 pound bag, I wouldn’t get out of the store. So it is with singing. If the teacher does not know not only what exercise to do but how long to do it, in what pitch range and on what vowels, and at what volume level, he or she might end up causing trouble for the student rather than getting rid of it.

It is never too late to wake up your “vocal muscles”. The better shape they are in, the easier it is to sing, sing well, and enjoy the whole process. All you need is a good teacher to tell you how to begin and keep an eye on the process over time.

It is very hard to incorporate your own default into teaching singing.

What is your default?

If you have sung all your life with one kind of instrument (which is true unless you do something radical, like voice change surgery), you make the sound you make. Your sensations and experiences are natural to you and you take them for granted. The amount of effort it takes for you to breathe, to sing softly or loudly, to sing high notes or low ones, to make a warm sound or one that is bright, is whatever it is. Even if you have worked diligently and for a long time to make something out of your voice that was not originally there, once you get used to it, it more or less blends into whatever you do and stays that way as long as you keep singing regularly. What you do without thinking is your default.

What is not so good about this is that everyone is different. What you can do falling asleep might take someone else more effort than climbing Mt. Everest. What they can do whistling Dixie might be completely out of your grasp. If you assume that everyone else has the same experience that you have……….uh-oh.

Even if the person who is working with you is very much like you in terms of the kind of voice he or she might have, the person might still not EXPERIENCE their voice the same way you experience yours. So many factors are involved and so many things influence what we perceive, it’s probably a good assumption that, in fact, the amount that you have in common is probably less rather than more. That is why studying pedagogy is very important if you are a serious teacher of singing. How can you address or compensate for your own default? You need to know and understand a variety of approaches based upon vocal function.

And, if you are a student with a small light voice studying with someone who has a big dramatic voice, how do you emulate that? Even if you try not to, the person teaching you is your AURAL MODEL. You have to copy their examples, unless they are totally silent (and I know at least one teacher who refuses to sing at all). How do you imitate the sound but not what the person making the sound is doing? It takes skill to sort that out and, if you are a student, you don’t have that skill. The teacher has to know the difference between what is happening with the sound and the instrument itself. Functional training is the same for everyone, THE SAME, but how one teaches it, how one experiences doing something functional is always unique. If you know you have a small light voice and your student has a big dramatic voice, one thing you can do is remind the student that your own instrument is not a good role model and that the student should go out and listen to people who are more similar to them. It’s probably more the rule that teachers have students with lyric voices, which are not only common, but typical of young people, whereas dramatic voices are much rarer. Dramatic voices, however, have a much better chance of getting work (especially in classical music), and, therefore, are more likely to end up as teachers because they have had careers. Catch 21.

If you have a background as a jazz vocalist, you most certainly will take for granted that chest register is easy, available and part of natural sound making. If you have a background as a classical soprano, however, you might have no real experience with singing comfortably in your chest voice and find getting one to show up and using it comfortably quite a task. And, if you are a classical vocalist who has never sung rock and roll you might not understand how to “get rid of” your classical sound while singing rock and roll so you don’t sound silly. But if you are a rocker then you might wonder how it is that anyone could produce so much resonance as to fill a room without electronic amplification. How would it work teaching across these defaults? Not impossible but very very tricky.

Best to know your own instrument (are you a piccolo or a tuba?) and understand its plusses and minuses before you assume that you can teach others to do what you do when you sing.

Much is made of “being talented”. What, exactly, is talent?

No one has been able to nail that down. To me, talent is the ability to do something with little or no training, and do it well and easily. Talent for singing is not hard to find. There are many people (Judy Garland comes to mind) who were excellent singers at a tender age (Shirley Temple sang sweetly at 5 or 6. Tanya Tucker was a star at 13). Some of the people who are famous had no formal training in either singing or music (Billie Holliday) but it might have been because they were not trained that they were unique.

This becomes a particularly tricky situation in formal education. Schools of any kind at all levels are aimed at giving the best information possible to a broad range of students. In any subject, this generally means that those individuals who are “not particularly good or talented” and those that are “extremely talented” are not the target of the educational materials. In the case of singing training the idea that someone could be trained to be OK rather than exceptional, especially if that training is in high school or college, doesn’t much get discussed or addressed directly. College students who are accepted into training programs that give applied degrees in voice are usually assumed to be “talented” or they wouldn’t get into them in the first place. If these degree granting programs are aimed at helping the students get work singing after graduation, then that ought to imply that the graduates are, in the end, both talented and qualified to be a professional singers, but that may or may not be so, depending.

Some kinds of “acting training” actually take whatever natural talent a student has for performing and/or entertaining and beats it out of her. I have seen kids with natural ability to “sell a song” [move naturally and relate to an audience] be told to stand still, with arms drooping at their sides, while they search for “motivation” for their character. In the case of a song that was written during the heyday of Vaudeville, to be sung by the likes of Eddie Cantor or Bea Lillie, who certainly had never heard of Stanislavski, this is just silly. I once had a student work on a song (“Let’s Do It” by Porter) that had been assigned to her in one of her “performance” classes in which she had to build an entire “inner scenario” in order for the song to “accepted” by her teacher. I had to remind her that the song is about sex, it was meant to be tongue in cheek, flirtatious and ENTERTAINING and that no deep “motivation” was necessary. After that, she did much better on her own resources. Unfortunately, her training was guiding her to be very “unmusical” and that, in turn, was actually making her “less talented”. How does someone with not one shred of musicality or talent teach someone who has it naturally in their molecules? Badly. This is not so rare an event as one might think.

People who do not have natural ability CAN study, they can learn the mechanics of acting, singing, dancing, piano, etc., They can become proficient and can do a good job, and they have every right to pursue whatever course of training they wish to investigate. But when these people end up with master’s degrees or, worse yet, doctorates, and they have had no real success in the real outside world [instead of in the ivory halls of some college], they can be quite deadly as teachers, unless they understand their own limitations and honestly know that they never had that “special star quality” that comes with natural talent. That, at least, makes it possible that their teaching will at least be honest. And yes, people who are talented cannot always get by on talent alone. Skill is skill and you have to develop it. Life experience can take you a long way, but it has very definite limitations. I have known really talented performers who would or could not be disciplined in developing what they had, and who, in the end, did not go as far as others who started with less but worked hard to expand their abilities as much as possible.

Students can survive bad training, and especially talented students will sing, no matter what obstacles get in the way. In fact, sometimes such students do best when they have something to overcome. Wouldn’t it be great, though, if we could always have talent breeding more talent?

Being a professional singer is not a destination. It is an open-ended journey that will go on until you choose to take a new pathway.

If we approach singing as “something to accomplish” or “something to achieve” we miss the point. Singing is indeed athletic, in that it requires a high degree of physical conditioning and responsiveness, but it is also a skill, with parameters both musical and stylistic, and it is also an art — an art that is about sharing very personal insights, feelings, thoughts, ideas, and emotions with others, through a personal and unique perspective that cannot be replaced by anyone.

If we approach the teaching of singing as a discovery process — one of exploration — each moment in every lesson is an opportunity to find something new and exciting both in the student and in yourself. Sometimes we discover that we did not know, or we discover that we knew but did not understand, or that we understood but did not apply the understanding in a meaningful manner. Sometimes we discover that we are able and that being able is joyful and that being joyful is something that effortlessly moves towards sharing. Sometimes we discover that we struggle, and we are unhappy with having to struggle because we want to have things be easy and fun. Sometimes the struggle becomes monumental and we give up…….but we might also realize that one CANNOT give up because the thing that we were investigating will not go away. It will leave behind its presence, its memory, and sooner or later it will arise again to remind you that it lingers until you face it and go past the struggle to victory.

All of this is the gift that lives in your body. Your voice, here and now, is always there as your companion, your partner in your journey of life, your marriage of that which lives inside and outside at the same time.

To be a good teacher is to also always be a good student. If you have nothing left to learn the teaching becomes stale, the methods become rote, the approach becomes heavy and joy no longer lives in each moment. If, however, you learn from each moment of singing and of teaching singing something more about how to be alive, how to feel life at its fullest, how to be one with the singer, the singing, the sound and yourself, you have garnered great souvenirs in your travels.

Somatic Voicework™ teachers carry these messages in their hearts. This is the process of bringing body, throat, mind and heart together in song. We honor the process and trust that the results will be there. We know that we are guides and facilitators not infallible experts who cannot make mistakes. Remember, O Guides Of The Voice, we are here to serve, putting the welfare of our students over our own. Take great solice in that and also great satisfaction.

Lots of people now know and understand what goes on in the throat and body when we sing. Lots of folks have read the scientific literature and understand vocal production and acoustics. Many of them have written books and articles and are teaching. And many of them can’t sing well.

Tenors with no high notes. Baritones with constriction. Sopranos with big wobbles. Mezzos with massive vibratos.

What good is the science if it doesn’t help you sing better?

Who cares if you “know” the larynx must remain “low” when you are a tenor and you cannot easily sing high. That makes you a baritone by default but without the heft. Who cares if you “understand” that there should be a “singer’s formant cluster” at 3000 hz or so if you cannot yourself make tones that carry without sounding like a goose? Who cares if you “realize” that our Western ears like vibrato rates of 5.5 to 6.5 cps and an extent of about 1/4 pitch above and below the fundamental frequency if you sound like Bert Lahr in “The Wizard of Oz”.

What good is the science if it doesn’t help you sing better YOURSELF? How can you presume to teach someone to do something you yourself have not mastered and cannot accomplish? What kind of hubris is that anyway?

The idea of being a good teacher is finding out HOW TO APPLY the exercise to the person who needs it. It’s not enough to explain it and demonstrate it, it’s not enough to talk about why it is doing what it is doing (you hope), it is not enough to wait for the person to figure it out……..you have to observe the student and if you don’t get results in a relatively short period of time, you must assume YOU are missing something. You must change what you ask for, because that is what the student is paying you to be able to do. If you get stuck and blame the student, you are dead in the water and so is the student.

The secret to good teaching is finding out (usually by asking) what the student is making of what you have asked her to do. If you have problems you have to say WHY the exercise isn’t working. You have to ASK what the student doesn’t understand. You have to adjust the thing you are asking for and the way you are asking for it. You have to modify your expectations about what it will do. You have to be present, open, non-judgemental but also aware, willing and creative in the process of using exercises to stimulate vocal change.

It is in the application of the exercises that we are either master teachers or not. Knowing something is only great if you use it. Otherwise what you have is simply information not wisdom.

Muscles are supposed to stretch and contract. That is how they function when they are healthy and by doing so, they maintain good muscle tone or tonicity. Muscles that do not stretch are very tight and muscles that do not contract are very weak. Neither situation is a good one. In order for the muscles to do the job(s) they were intended to do (and there are many) they need to be activated. In order to develop greater flexibility, they must be stretched. In order for them to develop greater strength, they must be stressed. In other words, you have to go past their normal comfort zone either way to develop more flexibility and more strength.

Muscles are also supposed to be able to do their job my moving independently of other muscles that do nothing to contribute to that job. Everyone who is in good condition ends up working until each muscle does its own job without interference from other muscles. This articulation of muscles is what people who want “ripped” abs are going after, and it is what body builders seek, in that they want each individual muscle to be visible when they contract them in various poses. It is what gives dancers expressive control over every moment and it should, in singers, give us a wide variety of tone qualities, vowels, consonants, pitches and volumes when we are technically skilled. It SHOULD…..but

Muscles do not always work independently and in fact, in those individuals who are less than “toned”, they often do not work much, period. Getting the individuation takes time. The muscles may be getting a message from the mind instantaneously but the response they make to that message could be so small as to be unnoticeable. This is where clarity of intention is important and patient repetition cannot be substituted for something else. Asking your throat to make a louder sound or a higher pitch is what it is. Substituting one request for the other won’t help get either thing to be more available or correct.

If we remember that it takes about 55 sets of muscles to make a voiced sound, and that there are 35 muscles in the tongue alone, we can understand why it takes a long time to get a fully developed, free, strong vocal instrument. Every one of those muscles has an impact on what the vocal ligaments can accomplish. Even though the vocal folds are the source of the sound, the muscles in the pharynx, the soft palate, the tongue, the jaw, the face, the mouth/lips, the neck, the shoulders, the upper back, the belly and the diagphragm (inside) have an impact on how the sound is made and controlled. Who can coordinate all that over two octaves or more right away?

When any muscles have not been actively energized, they can get “stuck” to the muscles nearby. The fascia, or connective tissue, should allow the muscles to “slip and slide” over each other, moving smoothly, but there can be adhesions preventing one muscle from moving without being restricted by its neighbor. In essence, the muscles are stuck together. The bodywork practioners who move the fascia (deep muscle massage, myofascial release, structural integration, etc.) help to “unstick” one muscle from another through manual manipulation. In an area where there has been little or restricted stimulation or movement, activating a muscle, in isolation, could be almost impossible without intervention of some kind. You can’t stick your fingers in your throat to pull the muscles fibers of your tongue apart and make them work independently. You can’t make the muscles of your soft palate lift and stretch by holding them up with your fingers either. How do you get these muscles to move and how do you get that movement not to pull other muscles along for the ride?

If you work on producing resonance with breath support, opening and closing your mouth and pronouncing clear consonants, you could work for most of your life and not get very far, at least technically, from a purely physical place.

This complicates singing and learning to sing. The muscles of the tongue, for instance, don’t move much in an untrained voice. When you seek to get the tongue muscles to move you must do so by asking for some kind of change in the position of the tongue and couple that with some kind of sound. In the first responses the singer gives you, there may be a bunch of other chaotic movements at the same time, many of which you do not ideally want. So the sound improves in one way but gets worse in another. [Common occurance.] Over time, the muscle response one is seeking can become strong enough to pull the targeted muscle away from any neighbors, freeing it to operate as it should, on its own. This is the only avenue available to us for the muscles deep within the throat and neck. Said a different way, the only available intervention for those deep inner muscles is the sound itself. Making the sound go where you want it to go ends up making the muscles that influence the sound go there easier. In the end, the movement makes the sound and the sound creates the movement. When you realize that all of this is indirect, except for muscles that you can see with your eyes and touch with your fingers on the outside of your body, it is amazing to realize that we can accomplish what we do with vocal training at all.

The single most direct tool in this journey is the cultivation of separate vocal registers, and accuracy of undistorted, unmanipulated vowel sounds.

As the muscles involved in making voiced sound become “individuated” or “articulated”, they allow the singer to have greater responsiveness and greater control, even if the person singing has never heard of or thought about the complex musculature that produces what we call “voice”.