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What, exactly, is training for the voice anyway? We all learn to speak by listening to our parents or caregivers by the time we are about two. Our genes determine our anatomy — how long the vocal tract is and how wide it can be, the length and thickness of the vocal folds, the size of the jaw, and mouth, etc. Some people grow up in circumstances where the voice is used energetically and some don’t. Some families are musical, some are expressive, some are performers — it varies so much. Why does anyone need training anyway?

It depends. If we speak about training in the sense that it coaxes the voice to go beyond its own natural tendencies, and prepares it to stand up to doing things no one’s voice was ever meant to do (like singing 8 times a week in a Broadway show), then we are discussing an atheletic development. It seems that music has always taken the voice somewhat beyond speech, although exactly how much has varied widely. Theatrical speech, however, also used to demand a lot from the voice that wasn’t exactly the same as conversation at dinner, but much of that kind of skill is disappearing, since virtually all professional (and a lot of amateur) theater is now amplified.

Based upon science, loud sounds and high notes need more air to be produced. The only way to get more air is to take a bigger (deeper) breath. If the air pressure inside the lungs isn’t sufficient, it needs to be pressurized so that it can be high enough to get the job done. Seems pretty simple, then, to figure out that a person needs to find a simple, easy and quick way to breathe in a lot of air and use it judiciously while sound is being made. The two parts of the body that logically would be involved with this process are the lungs and the belly. One could include the chest/ribs and the entire abdominal area, but the further away we go from those areas, the less direct the activity becomes. It also stands to reason that if the chest cavity is collapsed due to poor posture, not much air is going to go into the lungs. So posture figures significantly into the inhalation process.

If we decide that making continuous sounds is unusual (speech starts and stops), and if we also conclude that making continuous sounds primarily on vowels on specific pitches and volumes is also unusual, (that’s what vocal music does) maybe even very unusual, then we would have some good reasons why we would need to do something to acclimatize the voice to executing these tasks comfortably. If you just kept making such sounds, over and over, at increasingly loud volumes, you would be training the voice, and indirectly the breathing. That, in fact, is what self-taught singers do and in a lot of cases it works very well.

The problems come, then, when the above doesn’t work well, doesn’t work fast enough, or actually causes a set of problems. For instance, one could just lose one’s voice doing the above, and keep losing it over and over, unless you figured out something about what you were doing to cause the problem. Some folks can do that, and some can’t. It isn’t so much that there is just one way to train the voice, or that one person has found “the” answer, it is that the body (voice and breath) seem to like a certain way of working and not like other ways. Understanding how to take the voice beyond its natural boundaries and tendencies in a way that isn’t going to cause problems isn’t effective when it is just a random process of trial and error. In the case of quite a few singing teachers that is exactly what it turns out to be. Figuring out that you really cannot force the body to do anything that is not in its best interests, because sooner or later it won’t hold up, is just a question of common sense.

A great deal is known about exercise physiology. We know that straining the neck happens frequently while doing stomach “crunches”. Many atheletic trainers have modified stomach exercises in order to avoid this negative side effect. A good singing teacher is going to do the same thing with vocal exercises, so that the student will understand how to go beyond the normal demands of speech and simple singing, and into vigorous vocal expression without strain.

Because that is so, many people can teach singing effectively, with or without an organized method. For those who haven’t had time to figure out a variety of approaches and test them in order to see what kind of results they produce, learning about effective methods that someone else has developed and tested over time seems reasonable. As long as the exercises and attitudes work, as long as they are useful, as long as they get to the goals of the singer and do so without violence or harm, to the body or mind, the proof is in the doing.

Training that prepares the voice for any extended behavior is good. Training that is directed towards helping the singer do whatever kind of style they choose is good. Training that takes the voice into only one kind of sound or one way to breathe, is not.

Do you think that babies are afraid to cry really loud, lest they lose their voices? Perhaps infants do get laryngitis, but I have read also that vigorous crying is necessary for lung development and for strengthening of the muscles of the throat and mouth. Do you think that children on a playground generally worry about the sounds they make? It is true that children can and do injure their voices, but many children just play, making various kinds of noises and sounds, and end up just fine.

At what point does really using the voice fully and freely begin to engender fear? When does the fear of making some kinds of sound override the spontaneity and joy of just letting sound go?

Think about this. If you want to sound like an opera singer you must not let yourself do anything to disturb your set-up. (If you are a pop singer, you don’t have a set-up available that will let you authentically sound like an opera singer, so that’s not an issue.) If you are a popera singer (a la Bocelli or Sarah Brightman), you can’t really sing classical or pop music full out. Isn’t all of this odd? Some sounds are better than others because of how we have accepted them and labeled them culturally.

Fear isn’t a good basis for any art. Art implies that there is creativity at the bottom of the process and that anything could or can happen. Fear of being spontaneous or creative seems to be anti-both. On the other hand, since being afraid occurs frequently on the road to being a vocal master, it is something useful to look at, explore, investigate and absolutely face. The fear is within, it is real, it is a block, and it is a useful teacher.

What frightens you most as a singer? When? Why? What have you done about it?

Tonight I watched a few kid belters on YouTube. Some of them were 9, 10 and 11 years old. The singing was impressive, but pretty pressured, and to me, anyway, troublesome. I would love to know what happens to these kids over time……I mean years. I was also troubled by the fact that these little girls were singing love songs. Should a 9-year-old be singing “I’m Telling You You’re Not Going”?

Our society likes loud, pushy singing, not just in kids, but in everyone. We really don’t think as much of the silvery angelic girls voices as we do of the kids who can belt to the rafters. I want to know what happens to the kid belters when they grow up. Do they turn into Whitney Houston? Look at her voice and her life……….

Belting isn’t automatically damaging, but it is stressful in what it asks for from the throat if not done well. For the same reason that the old traditions didn’t ask a child to make an adult operatic sound, we need to ask if letting a young woman belt without any limit at all is good for the voice over time. Andrea McArdle survived really well, but she sang more than she screamed.

I don’t have an answer here, just questions. There is so much we don’t know.

In a perfect world children would always look, act and sing like children, not like little adults. I think maybe this statement dates me, but that’s how I feel. How about you?

Physical skills, which singing is, must be learned by doing. Most skills, like dance, but sports, too, are taught by those who have become experts at doing the process themselves. They impart their wisdom, in one-to-one sessions, and in classes. They teach what they know from life experience. I can’t imagine a golf pro who didn’t golf or a dance teacher who had never actually danced. Somehow, though, singing seems to be treated differently and I wonder why.

It is true that just because someone has done something, they may not understand how they do it. It is true, also, that knowing what one does, doesn’t mean that you can relate it to someone else such that it helps them do it in the same manner. But not to have experienced it at all and still teach it……how does that work? On the basis of observation alone, what is the criteria for deciding how to coordinate the necessary behaviors and attitudes? It seems to me that such teaching adds to the considerable confusion about what’s going on, most especially in the case of singing.

“Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach”. An awful aphorism, but one that turns up anyway. I suppose that a lot of people who never had careers, or had them but not at a very high level of public acclaim or financial recompense, “retire” into teaching because, what else can they do? Being a professional or professional-level amateur singer doesn’t much prepare you for anything else. What does one do with all those years of making musical vocal sounds? Let them go to waste?

On the other hand, people who play piano in singing studios often go on to teach singing, even if they have never sung themselves. This has been accepted in singing since its beginnings. No one has ever studied if such teachers are better, worse or the same as those who teach from having first been singers themselves. It would an interesting study.

In my opinion, one of the key ingredients to effectively teaching Contemporary Commercial Music, or pop, rock, jazz, country etc., is to be willing to make the sounds of those styles oneself. My Institute at Shenandoah requires that everyone who wants to pass the certification exam be willing to make the sounds, (at least in a small way) not just talk about them. The reason I did this is because some sounds that are pretty harsh can be made without vocal stress and some sounds that are pleasant can be made with a good deal of tension that is covered up by acoustic patterns that please the ear of the listener. The best way to tell the difference is to learn to feel the process of sound-making at a subtle level. Interior musculature differences can be perceived, although not by a beginner, and not by someone who has been taught that to “feel” anything in the throat is bad. The ears can be fooled, if not backed up by some keen kinesthetic awareness. The eyes, too, don’t always have anything to look at that seems signficant.

This brings me to the following. Why are classical singers so afraid to disturb their vocal production? What is the level of fear that makes them hold on so tightly to what they have learned? This isn’t an unusual attitude, although I grant that not everyone feels that way.

Here is my answer. If you have invested thousands of dollars, years and years of time, and both mental and emotional energy trying to make your voice do something it was never intended to do (remember science says the vocal folds were evolved to protect the lungs from foreign bodies, not for sound making. That came later), you get very invested in the results you have produced. Your voice becomes a “Ming Dynasty” vase or a Rembrandt painting…..you don’t want to do anything that might “damage” or disturb it. Then, of course, your voice and your singing become a museum piece, and energy has to be expended on maintaining it “as it has always been”. This isn’t the greatest mindset to be in if you are teaching. One has to assume that the majority of time the people being taught are youngsters or beginners. Do they want to learn how to be a “museum quality replica” or do they want to know how to sing “what’s happening now”? Answer that yourself.

Example: I have a bunch of students who do experimental theater. One of them was creating a piece that called for all sorts of sounds….grunts, inhales, squeals, noisy exhale, growls…..you name it. When he had an occasion to work with opera singers his reaction was “what’s wrong with these singers? Why don’t they want to make the sounds I am asking them to make?” I explained that growling was likely not on the menu of preferred sounds for someone who might be singing Mozart after this particular work was over. An understandable attitude to me, but perhaps not to him.

Conversely, when this artist was asked to perform a simple Broadway show tune, he was hesitant. Not his expertise, not his world. Not so different, then, the position of the opera singer who was also reluctant to go away from operatic sounds.

If, however, we aren’t willing to continue to be open to new sounds and new patterns of making sound (or new styles of music), how do we expect the students to be open? Aren’t we supposed to be role models? A cardinal rule of leadership is: Never ask anyone to do something you yourself would not do. If you don’t “walk the talk” (sing the sound) then how can you expect your student to do so and do it well? Where are their auditory role models — the ones who know how to do it properly who are acting as the guides of the voice?

Are you afraid to let go of “your sound”? Are you afraid to sound like a rock singer, lest it ruin your voice? Then don’t teach rockers. Have the integrity to teach from what you have at least attempted to do (it doesn’t mean you have to earn your living singing rock songs), or say that you just don’t go there. Face your fears, but overcome them. Voices, like people, are resilient and adaptable, especially in an atmosphere of joyful experimentation. If you treat your voice gently, with respect, and go slowly, fear isn’t necessary. To paraphrase the saying…..”Be the sound you want your student to become.” But please don’t teach what you can’t or won’t even attempt to do. The world of singing doesn’t need more of that attitude.

We all learn, I hope, from mistakes. Doing what we do, however, means learning by working with a student, who gets to be the recipient of those mistakes. Not so nice. We all mean well and do the best we can, and we all have to experiment, to “tinker”. As long as these experiments are small and non-violent, they are appropriate. As long as we “seek to do no harm” (a quote from Oren Brown), we are within ethical bounds to try things, but it does mean that the student has a right to know that. We don’t want to hide the fact that we are experimenting. If a doctor can make adjustment on medication, then a teacher can make adjustments in vocal exercises.

When I had been teaching for a little while in New York City I went through an “animal sounds” phase. I don’t know why I went this way, but I had students barking (I’m so embarrassed!) and mooing (sad), and chirping (tweet tweet). I don’t think I did any vocal harm, but I can only imagine what they thought of me…….I look back and hang my head.

I remember being perplexed about why some students just could not sing a recognizable [a] (as in father). I can recall telling one student, “Look, you just have to find a way to get an [a] out of your throat, as I can’t make it come out for you!” She was so desperate to sing, that it did just literally pop out in one class, suprising all of us, and causing her to burst into tears of joy.

Another time, I was bound to untie the vocal knots I heard in a different woman’s voice, and I set about doing so very vigorously. I didn’t realize that in taking her voice apart, I was also taking away her ability to sing and leaving her with nothing. She came to me and said, “Before I started working with you I knew I wasn’t singing all that well, but now, I can’t sing at all.” She was right. Fortunately, she wasn’t really angry at me, but she did stop studying. Also fortunately, I saw her a few years later and was able to apologize. She was OK, as she went on to other things that she actually found more satisfying than singing and I offered to have her come back to straighten things out, but she said she didn’t need to, that she was fine. I was truly chagrined, but I never again attacked a vocal problem so straightforwardly, nor without warning, and was always careful to make sure that there was enough vocal function left so that the person could get through a song, no matter what.

Then there was the student who was the daughter of a famous movie star. She wanted to be a pop singer. She came twice a week. I did every exercise I could think of, I demonstrated, a explained, I questioned. She said she was practicing, but we got nowhere. Absolutely, positively, nowhere. I kept trying because she was so determined and she had people hounding her to “make a record” (before the CD was around) because she was who she was. We worked consistently for well over a year and there was no evidence whatsoever that this young woman was learning to sing. She sounded bland at best, and had no connection to what I was trying to do. I finally told her that I thought she should try someone else and she did. Her next teacher is an older man I know who has been teaching successfully for many years. He had slightly more success with her, but he told me subsequently that she had been doing cocaine off and on and that was effecting her, as one might well imagine. DUH. You think I might have noticed something like this. Not me. Little Aries Ram the determined doesn’t know the symptoms of drug use. I gave up because I had failed to get her to be able to sing. Later, I heard a demo that she had done. It was unrecognizable. Turns out that this was at the beginning of sampling and over-dupping electronic digital effects in the studio. The demo sounded great…..just not at all like her. She got to where she wanted to go but it had nothing to do with my ineffective teaching!

The hardest part of teaching someone is knowing that singer has left in midstream. This isn’t really a mistake, but it operates in the life of the student as if it were. I had a woman come to me saying that she was a dramatic operatic soprano, but that she wanted to sing jazz. I didn’t agree with her that her voice was truly a dramatic soprano but I went about working on her voice and pulling it over to a chest-register based, speaking voice place. It was tough, as she was in her mid-40s, and had been singing a long time, but she seemed willing to practice and she did get better. At just about the point where the instrument was turning around and beginning to balance, she stopped coming. I called a few times to see what was going on, but she never called me back. I didn’t know if it was me, the lesson process, or something else, and that is very frustrating. It was like eating a meal and having the waiter take the plate away before you are done……

Years passed. I forgot about her. Then, quite by accident, my throat specialist and I spoke one day because he wanted me to suggest someone who worked with “ear issues” for a singer who could no longer “hear the notes”. A patient of his had asked for a referrel like this. She did not have actual hearing problems, he said, but had been told that she wasn’t singing the notes when she thought she was. The vocalist had told him that she seemed to have “forgotten how the notes sounded” because she couldn’t match them exactly any more. This seemed very odd to me, like nothing I had ever heard of. I asked for more information, thinking that this sounded like someone who was experiencing a form of muscle tension dysphonia, causing the voice to go flat. I asked who it was, just in case it was someone I knew, thinking perhaps I could speak directly to the person. Guess who it was? Yep. Ms. “Now I’m Outta Here”. I immediately wondered……what happened? My guess was that she was had gotten stuck in chest register because she hadn’t stayed through the process long enough to balance out the newly aquired bottom with the middle and the top. This always causes pitch issues. Since I had called to no avail, I opted to suggest a teacher who specializes in a method that positions every single pitch and vowel in a specific place on the hard palate. I don’t know what happened after that. I wonder if the vocal problems had anything to do with the fact that she left in what I would call mid-stream. I think about it every now and then and have no answer.

Remember, this is a helping profession. It is a relationship profession. Like all relationships, some work better than others and sometiimes things just don’t work out at all. No one is to blame. Mistakes may or may not be part of that. As long as we take responsibility for our own actions, that’s all that’s necessary.

In my work as a teacher, I have always done better with experienced students. Not that I don’t work with beginners or singers of average ability, it is just that people who have been around quite a bit seem to respond best to what I have to offer. My list of such students is longer than I can give — singers of all styles who have been to 4, 5, 6, or more singing teachers for 5, 10, 15, up to 35 years (yes!) with no success in solving specific, persistent problems. Sometimes those teachers are themselves well-known and experienced, but have been unable to unlock the issues these dedicated vocal artists are striving to address.

Singers who sing well, in spite of limitations, are sometimes aware that they aren’t doing their best, but can’t seem to get out from behind their own problems. It undermines their confidence and prevents them from going full out toward their own career success. They report to me that they have been told “there’s nothing to worry about”, “your problems aren’t so bad”, “no one is perfect”, “it’s no big deal” or even “there’s nothing wrong”. The singers are left to feel like vocal hypochondriacs, narcissistic babies, or super perfectionists. They feel like frauds. In their work with me, however, I can often find the not so tiny places where the vocal machine has a couple of “knocks” that are causing trouble, and with work, get them to disappear. The statement I hear most with these singers when that happens is “Why couldn’t the other teachers do this?” My answer is always they same: “Because they don’t know how.”

Think about it. You have a group of people who believe that all one needs to know is wrapped up in classical vocal technique. Fix the support, or fix the resonance, fix how you do the vowels, or let go of something (by osmosis, of course), or else just know that “your voice just doesn’t do that”, and stop trying.

Fixing “support” is good if the person has issues with inhaling sufficient amounts of air, or of not having enough strength to keep the ribs up during exhalation or has no control over the abdominal muscles. It isn’t good if the person has an issue that isn’t about breathing. Fixing “resonance” is good if the person is an opera singer and needs to sing over an orchestra unamplified, but useless (really) if they are singing CCM, as an end in itself. Fixing the vowel sounds so that they are “placed” differently, fixes the vowels so that they are “placed” differently. It will not change the registration, it will not give the singer a way to handle constriction, or tongue stiffness, or anything else. It will change the way the vowel sound is shaped and thats all, folks.

It is any wonder that when I address the musculature deep within the throat itself that things change? Is this a mystery, a miracle or is it something akin to “pyschic healing”? No. It’s none of these. It is skill, based upon experience, garnered from my use of my own throat in every and all vocal styles, and in working with those muscles until I understood them from the inside out.

Any decent teacher can work with a decent singer and help them improve. Any person with eyes can see external tension and with ears can learn to hear squeezing and swallowing. Only someone with experience can undo negative non-volitional non-visible vocal behavior. If you are a teacher, the place to begin is with your own throat, and if you aren’t willing to do “bad” things with it, so you can learn, you needn’t bother at all.

To those teachers who think there is nothing more for them to know because they know it all, I say, how many kinds of music can you sing authentically? How well do you understand how to sing BADLY? Can you replicate any sound your student makes? Could you go from Mozart to Motown, or from John Larson’s RENT to Puccini’s LA BOHEME? Why not? (and you can hear me saying now…….I can, and there ain’t nothin’ special ’bout me!!)

Everyone who has taken even one singing lesson has encountered some form of useless terminology. There is an endless list of terms that don’t mean anything, and new ones are coined every day. While this may be a show of creativity, it certainly isn’t helpful to anyone wanting to learn how to sing, or to improve their singing.

Think of the list! “Support the tone from your diaphragm”, “Spin it out”, “come down from the top”, “Cover over the back”, “Lift that more”, “Expand the lower space”, “Buzz the cheekbones more”, “put it higher into the skull”, “use more support”, etc. etc.

What is “it”? How do you control “it”? How does one make the cheekbones buzz? What is coming down from the top of what? No matter what kind of phrase you use, how can it be understood if the average person, with no background, has no idea what it means.

This is where the profession got lost. The idea that the larynx must always remain in a low, unchanging position, costs us beautiful, shimmering high notes. The idea that the sound should “be big” makes everyone strive for volume for its own sake, instead of as a means of expression. The idea that the sound has to be positioned or placed in an unchanging “focus” makes for uniformity, but for the wrong reasons. The idea that vocal sound couldn’t be nailed down in simple, basic ways, gave teachers license to make up descriptive phrases that conveniently avoided any connection to physical reality.

In the same way that teachers who do not understand vocal function and mechanics use “breath support” changes as a “fix-all remedy”, so do teachers who do not understand basic acoustic or physiologic response use “placement and resonance” issues as a teaching tactic. It isn’t uncommon for a teacher to “like” or “prefer” certain resonances as being “better” than others, regardless of whether or not they are produced freely and efficiently or with struggle and excess tension.

I remember attending the master class conducted by Alfredo Kraus a few years ago……the auditorium was huge and the audience filled every seat. Mr. Kraus had a long and illustrious career as an operatic tenor and was much esteemed due to his artistry and longevity. What he did during this master class, however, was nigh on to unbelievable, and he got away with it.

He began the evening with a discussion of “voice science” announcing that the vowel [i] (as in free), “has the biggest and most resonance”. He said other equally bizarre things, and, of course, no one stopped him or questioned him, since most people probably didn’t know that this statement is false. He went on to tell the lyric soprano who sang “Signore, Ascolta” from Turandot that she wasn’t “singing in her head register” or something similar (what, she was belting?) Kraus was looking for a “foward, pointed sound” and this voice was round, full and lush. Of course, she was singing a head register dominant tone, but her vowels were not so much bright as “chiaroscuro”. Her issues were that she had no way to interpret the deep emotion of the character. It was astounding that he didn’t help her where she needed help and that he didn’t know enough to leave her beautiful singing alone.

Next, a young tenor came out and sang one of the arias from William Tell (it has lots of high Cs and C#s), which Kraus had also done when he was young, Kraus told the young man that “his vowels were all wrong”. The French of this artist was just fine, but his tone was so heady, it bordered on falsetto. It was “too light” to be really commercially successful in a mainstream opera house. Since Mr. Kraus had inaccurate words as his tools, he could not distinguish between the vocal tone (ultra light) and the vowel sound (just fine) and kept harping on the tenor for “the wrong vowels” while making vocal examples that had the exact same vowels but were considerably heftier in tone quality. You could see the young man straining his brain trying to figure out how in the world his vowels were different from the ones that he was hearing Kraus produce, and you could hear him desperately trying to imitate Kraus’ chestier sound unsuccessfully. Finally, after an agonizing few minutes Kraus announced that this young singer “would never have a career” and sent him away. I was ready to throw things at Kraus, but no one else in the audience seemed to be the least bit perturbed.

Perhaps if Mr. Kraus had had accurate words to assist the singers in understanding what he was trying to convey, the entire evening would have been different. Perhaps, if the profession of teaching singing had some STANDARDS about what the terminology means (not impossible at all), the audience wouldn’t have sat there like a bunch of sheep, listening to a good bit of nonsense and gobbledegook disguised as instruction. Perhaps if we had terminology that related to vocal function rather than vocal effect these two singers would have left the stage as stronger, wiser artists rather than vocalists who had been made to feel bewildered in front of several hundred people.

Does the buck stop here? YOU BET!

Please tell me what it means when someone instructs the student to “release the breath” or “sing on the breath”. Is that not what we do all day long with every breath we take? If you don’t release your breath, it’s called being dead. You have to sing on the breath, as there is nothing else to sing on.

What teachers want when they utter these words is for the student to release tensions in the throat, and essentially, in the larynx at the level of the vocal folds, since THE VOCAL FOLDS CONTROL THE AIRFLOW. They want FREEDOM. You have to let go in the throat itself and, of course, this isn’t so easy. The phrases above also confuse the student, because releasing the breath (throat) will allow the sound to be breathy, which is often not a desired end product.

Real life example: Recently, at a master class, I heard a “master” singing teacher thoroughly confuse a young (15 year old) soprano by asking her to “release the breath”. This was not only ineffective, since the young lady was singing a Handel piece with melismas, it was counter productive. What the student needed to be able to negotiate the song was to conserve breath, not expend more. The teacher didn’t get it.

The teacher had begun the master class by having the student count while falling forward to “release the breath” (which the student did well). Then, when she did the song, the teacher was asking her to “release the breath” when what the student needed was greater control over her exhale, (think breath retention) and articulation of the musculature in the tongue and mouth. When I queried the teacher, saying that “release the breath” was confusing to me, she responded by saying (this is the truth) “I have been thinking about this for over a year. I really don’t know how you can have the student release the breath and not sing breathy”. I was so fried. Right in front of me was a singing voice specialist, a senior speech language pathologist who could easily have answered her question, but the “master teacher” didn’t even know where to go to get an answer for her stupid, but significant to her students, question.

Further, in the audience of teachers who were observing, one man observed that the student had “forgotten her warm-up” and was no longer doing what she had been doing when she was falling over. There was nothing to remember. She was doing exactly the same thing, but the warm-up was completely inappropriate to the tasks of the song. The second observation came from another man who said to the student (who was poised and appeared centered throughout the session) “You are nervous. We will close our eyes while you sing it again and it will let you feel free”. I was stupified. Of course, the student tried each time to do just what she was told and agreed with each comment made to her. How would she have had enough knowledge or courage to disagree?

A song which requires rapid roulades and flourishes requires both flexibility and strength in the vocal mechanism and the breathing muscles. Freedom is antithetical to stability. Stability requires that the body and voice are strong enough to remain relatively quiet in an unsqueezed adjustment. Freedom requires the entire system, voice and body, be able to respond quickly and with very small movements, which requires a high degree of neuro-muscular acuity. No beginning student of average ability has these two skills balanced together and releasing the breath is NEVER going to put them together.

I left chewing on my sneakers, as is my wont. If only I were a more placcid person!

In order to use any vocal exercise effectively, several things have to happen. First of all, the person singing or the teacher has to decide what direction to take….we call this in Somatic Voicework™ “diagnosis”. We have to decide “what is going on here?” with the voice from a functional place. The first decision must be about registration. Is this a voice with two strong, functional registers? Do they seem equal? Are the low notes solid and the high notes easy? Is the middle undistorted and natural-sounding? How does the sound connect to the body? What is the posture like? Where and how does the person breathe?

Addressing these issues alone can be a very big task. If one register quality is missing, how can it best be coaxed into existence? If one or both registers needs attention (likely), which one is weakest? What would strengthen it? What else is out of balance due to this situation? (jaw, tongue, face, mouth, head, neck, upper chest, torso?) Is the sound nasal or breathy? Is it squeezed and held or flabby and under-energized? How do we address these issues with exercises? (That’s the first course of action, but not the only one).

And if the goal of the sound is not to make “resonance”, which in SVW it is NOT, then what should be the goal? What is a functional voice anyway? In order to measure disfunction, you have to recognize function first. One can never be too familiar with functional sound and its application to style. Health first, style second. When that is organized in the voice, the process can be reversed. That means that a singer with a really healthy, functionally varied voice, can adapt the voice to the style at hand without causing vocal distress. That happens only after the singer is skilled and experienced, and has the voice fully developed and available, a process that takes from 2 to 5 years of regular, disciplined technical work.

The exercises are simple. How we use them can be varied in multitudinous ways. In order to evoke the desired response from the vocal mechanism, we need to know what the result is before we ask for it. That’s the intention for the exercise — stronger high notes, a brighter vowel, a clearer middle voice, etc. After that, things get easier. If you need assistance, go to the Solution Sequence (for those who have completed Level II of my training), and look up the references.

I have run into this phrase quite a lot: “I don’t understand mix” or “I don’t understand how to mix”.

This makes me think the student regards mix as something one does rather than something that is created as a response in the vocal mechanism. It implies that the student can “think” the voice into a mix. This also goes along with the statement: “I don’t know how to mix” which I also hear frequently. My reply to this is: “How do you speak?” Mix is speech (in most people, not all). The implication is that mix is model register (chest) and that we speak there. The problems arise when the chest register is weak or inactive, or the speaker is a head-dominant speaker (not so unusual as you might think), or when the speaking voice doesn’t go up very high because there is pronounced break at a certain pitch.

In dealing with mix, you need to have both registers present. Taking a light speech sound higher isn’t so hard, especially if you allow the sound to go towards head as it rises (chesty/mix to heady/mix with no break). If you want to take a heavier quality up, you have to do more work both on strength at the bottom of the range and on flexibility of the tongue and jaw, and on the coordination of the body in terms of the ribs and abs. True mix goes to chest when it is louder and head when it is softer, on any middle pitches, without disturbing the vowel. Mix that doesn’t go to head smoothly, on the way up the scale, isn’t mix. The purpose of Somatic Voicework™ is to create this response in the voice. It’s the teacher’s job, not the student’s. The student shouldn’t be trying to “understand” mix, but should be discovering it and using it as it arises.

If mix doesn’t happen, go back to register isolation and development and spend more time there. Watch the main break for changes and adjustments and keep tabs on the speaking quality as the bridge.

If it doesn’t work, something else is stuck………..another discussion!