Posture:
spine erect ( think of the spine as an upwardly moving energy and feel your connection with a continuum that goes right down to the centre of the earth and right up into the stratesphere)
chest elevated (lift arms above head then bring them down slowly keeping chest in the same place. Feel how heavy the shoulders are and as far from the ears they are)
neck relaxed (as if on a swivel)
jaw and tongue relaxed (‘drunk jaw’, imagine you’ve been watching sport on telly for 16 hours straight)
Breathing:
Holding breath when holding breath during exercises or performance, suspend the air and keep it in the belly. DON’T block or hold it in the throat. It should be floating there, supported with an overall feeling of expectation and ease, not rigidity.
Use the whole body. Always relate breathing to the whole body. Let the ebb and flow of breath touch all you nerve centers
Allow the inhales to inhale themselves
Breath through both nose and mouth – 60% nose and 40% mouth
Vowels:
- These are the ‘river’ of the sound. They are the emotion of the voice too.
- We have to sing the vowels in our own voice in order that they be ‘true’
- Allow them to have as much of their specific character as possible: allow the tongue, mouth shape and lips to help out and be as fluid as possible in the shaping of the vowel. i.e. really make an ‘oo’ an ‘oo’ with a puckered mouth.
- Think of the consonants as the flotsam, twigs and leaves that float on the surface of the water, the vowels themselves are the river that must continually flow.
- This ratio is like 99% Vowel to 1% consonant
- Try to make the consonants as light as possible, feel the tip of the tongue and the teeth do all the work – easily.
- Don’t muffle or swallow vowels as they are the sounds we actually sing with. Keep the mouth well open
Registration
eg, Chest/head voice The ideal is to be able to sing any pitch with either a light or heavy tone. It’s an attitudinal hitch that has us singing higher notes differently than (supposedly easier) lower ones. Use sirens and keeping the entire range in the head and focused through the ‘ng’ point in order to blend the registers and keep the range unbroken.
Resonance:
There are two types of resonance:
spacial and
sympathetic resonances
For
Spacial Resonance, we have to open up widely as many cavities in the body to the sound to make it deeper.
Sympathetic resonance is when we direct the sound to the hard surfaces of the body (the forehead, cheek bones and hard palate) rather than the soft surfaces like the nasal cavities and tongue. This is like singing in the shower rather than singing into a cushion. Soft surfaces absorb the sound – hard surfaces amplify it.
We also need to balance the forward resonance (ring, ping, twang) with back or deeper resonance (open throat, back of mouth chest and the rest of the body). Experiment with all the moveable parts of the body and head that create ‘space’: play with the bass (openness, resonance in the lower body) and treble (Twang). Think of these as the knobs on an old fashioned valve amplifier and mix them according to taste. They may not all be nice sounds!
Getting the throat open allows the sound to go to any places it wishes. Experiment on one pitch on the vowel ‘e’. Direct the sound to different parts of the body to change its tone or colour. Feel the lower resonances by saying ‘buzz’ then open up your mouth wide onto an ‘ah’ and keep the buzzing sensation
Merely relaxing doesn’t create space. We don’t just relax the chest, we open it (with stretches and elevation), we don’t just relax the throat, we open it (with a giggle).
Ping! Head brilliance exercises
The head is what we sing with, not the throat. To guide the sound into the right place and navigate onto the right notes with ease, use the ‘Good Onset’ device ‘ng’.
Hearing a forward placement in the voice is like a focussing of the sound. It gets a ring to it that can be likened to a ‘zzzzt’, a ping or a buzz (that can be felt as well as heard) in the forehead.
Use the forehead as the voice’s ‘steering wheel’, ‘control panel’ and primary ‘outlet’ for all sound.
You should be practicing the Good onset exercise and working towards head resonance and brilliance throughout the warm up tape. Use….
a) exaggerated forward (‘i’’e’) vowels
b) feel tongue buzzing when doing humming exercises (mumumumum)
c) high exclamations on ‘Ma! Me! Mi!
d) motorboats, raspberries & buzzing lips exercises
e) sing ‘hung-ah’ (carry the ring from the ‘ng’ into the ‘a’ vowel)
Absolutely, positively Swelling tone swell a sinle note on ‘kah’ from soft to loud then soft again very gradually and evenly crescendoing and decrescendoing. DON’T push the tone, keep it open but controlled. Use twang, openness and resonance, not push or breathiness.
