Live Q&A with Mike Elson and Matt Edwards

[Music] welcome everyone to thursday night live.

Well, hey everybody. You go, you go. Yeah, okay. We're having some internet lag for some reason. So, um, but welcome tonight. We're here on thevoicelessons.com, uh, thursday night live. Uh, we, you know, alternate between special guests. We had special guests last week, we have special guests coming up next week. And then we also like to do these live Q&A's where we take questions that come in through the platform and we try to answer them with evidence-based answers, meaning we look to the science to what we know about how the voice actually works and try to give you a few tips to go try, just maybe a new way of thinking about the voice. And we always have a great time chatting back and forth and, uh, we learn something ourselves just from all the great questions that come in. So if you're watching, you know, live tonight and something comes to mind as you're watching us answer other questions, feel free to chop, uh, drop it over into the chat. We'll keep an eye on that and we can answer questions within the show as well. Mike, how you doing? Great. Good to be here. Yeah, I think my, uh, I got all four bars now, so we're good.

All right, awesome, awesome, awesome. Yay, yay technology. But hey, we're on opposite sides of the country and still having this chat, so can't beat that. Yeah, Denise, yes, thanks for that novel idea to look to the science. You know, part of the reason we, uh, for me, even voiceless.com was to really help get a lot of this knowledge and information out there because there's just some myths floating around. Um, and because we can't really see what's happening inside of the voice, um, we really wanted to put some knowledge out there. So, um, Matt, what's our first question? I want to jump on in.

Yeah, all right. So, uh, what does it say? How does posture affect head voice versus chest voice? So Mike loves his register talk, so, uh, we can dive in a little bit into that. So in general, you have to remember that your, um, uh, spine, which is these are the cervical vertebrae here, your spine lays directly behind your vocal tract. Our head is designed to move from up here, what we call a joint, and that lies in between your ears. So if you draw a line right between your ears, your ears, you would hit that AO joint, and that's where we really want to move our head, and that's where the weight of our head should be resting. Right? Singers, a lot of times end up trying to move from the bottom. So there's a, if you bend your head over, you'll feel a little bump in the back, right above your shoulder blades, and that's the place that your neck attaches to your torso. Okay? And people will try to move their neck from that place. And the problem is, is that when you move it from that cervical thoracic vertebrae connection, you start bending those vertebrae, and then those bend the vocal tract as well.

So let's, uh, do this real quick in case you don't know what we mean by the vocal tract. It's this guy right over here. And so on the left-hand side of your screen, you will see those little tan and gray circles. Those are the cervical vertebrae that I'm talking about. And then in front of it, you see the vocal tract. Uh, this one's got, uh, some nice, uh, labels on it, like we got there. You can see the layers. Let me take off this, uh, thing real quick. Jessica's question. You can see the trachea, then the larynx, and the vocal cords. That's where sound is produced. Then it travels up that tube and out your mouth. Could end up in your nose and your nasal cavity. That's usually not what we're aiming for. But essentially, if you look at that, that spine, if you put your hands on the back of your neck and start moving it forward and left to right, you're going to feel how much that can curve in and how much it can twist and bend. And every twist and bend that you make with that is going to, uh, end up impacting your vocal tract as well. So it's going to be changing the size of your vocal tract when you're moving down from that connection.

So in chest voice singing, it might make it harder. It might build up more pressure, but a lot of times, uh, you know, singers can figure out ways to still sing through it. So I could have my neck out like this, and if I'm not singing that loud, if I'm doing, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, on a mic, I can get real rock and roll and it's not going to bother me much because I'm not that loud. But if I try to sing breathy here, I'm not getting a whole lot of resonance because my vocal tract is so short. But if I get it to stand up and elongate, you heard how that resonance automatically shifted, right? And that's literally just shifting that vocal tract so that it's in its natural resting position.

So in head voice, Jessica, you may find that the changes in resonance really cause you a lot of problems, right? That if the tube isn't in its natural resting position, you're going to end up having troubles getting the voice to, uh, the vocal tracts to take on the appropriate shape for making that lighter mechanism where the vocal folds are not as pressed firmly together, to, you know, resonate, amplify. It's what we do with our vocal tract that amplifies those vibrations so people can hear them. Now, in, uh, amplified singing, if you write up on a mic, uh, it doesn't matter so much. So you could sing in that breathy head voice like this, and it would be okay. But the thing to remember is that they're also in the front muscles that connect up to our larynx. So as soon as we jut our chin out like that, you can put your fingers here on your Adam's apple, Eve's apple, and then fingers on your sternum. Then as you jut your neck forward, you're going to feel that skin stretch. Well, underneath, there's muscles stretching as well. Muscles like the sternothyroid muscle and the sternohyoid muscle. They connect up to where your vocal fold is, connecting up to your tongue. So if all of a sudden you jut your neck out like this, you're stretching and tensing up that sternothyroid muscle, which could try to pull back on your tongue a little bit, and you may find that that tongue tension starts to get even worse than maybe it normally is. Okay?

So in general, yeah, it affects both, Jessica. Um, in your chest voice, you might be able to kind of push through it a little bit. You might find that it helps you get gritty sounds, and as long as you're not, you're singing real loud, you can probably get away with it. But, uh, and your head voice is probably going to really get in the way, especially if you're trying to sing classically. And definitely if you're singing classically in any mode, you need to have your vocal tract in its natural resting position to get the optimal resonance. Otherwise, you may not be, uh, thrilled with the sounds that you get. Mike, your other thoughts to add on to that?

I mean, I think you nailed all the points. It's definitely going to change the, the shape, shrink it down. Uh, you're going to wind up pushing and squeezing a lot for those head voice notes if you, if you're, if you're leaning forward like a turtle. So you want to keep that posture. And, you know, this goes if you're playing guitar or playing piano, just, um, as you're singing with that, um, for the singer-songwriters out there, just kind of be aware, like, hey, where was my posture in that? And, you know, if I go for that note again, and I, and I'm mindful of where my head position is, is it kind of floating up there? So, right. Yes, yes. Not good for belting those high notes.

So, next question. Okay, so when singing a song that has very long phrases, when do you breathe? From Katy? Maybe don't breathe. Right? Well, if you listen to a recording, that's what it sounds like, doesn't it, right? Sometimes, like, where did they get that? How do they sneak that breath in there, right? Exactly.

Well, so here's the first secret to know, okay? Is on every recording that you listen to, an audio engineer has gone in and they've clipped out the breaths. So you can see the breath, it's usually like a real big peak. And so what the audio engineer does is they zoom in and they can take that line that's, you know, one second long and they spread it all the way out until they find exactly where the inhale starts and they slice it. And then they go to where the inhale ends and they slice it. And then they take what's called room noise, or if you've got a bunch of instruments underneath, it doesn't even matter, but then they put this noise there so it seems like the mic is still on and you never hear that the person breathed. So you could go through an entire song and just chop out all of their breath marks, right? And, uh, so that's part of the reason, Katie, that you might think that when you're listening to these recordings that these people aren't actually breathing. They are. They're normal human beings. They just got a little bit of help from an audio engineer.

Now, the other thing, though, that can play a part in this is, uh, if you, sorry, if you're not getting, you know, manipulated by a recording engineer, then you gotta figure out for yourself. And so the first thing is, look at the punctuation, right? Because if there's a comma in there, a comma is a breaking up of the clause, so it's, or breaking up the sentence. So you can breathe and then complete the rest of the thought at that point in time, right? Anywhere that you have like a little teeny rest, that's maybe like an eighth of a rest, you can trim a sixteenth off of both sides, come in a little sixteenth later, cut the other one off by a little sixteenth, and take a breath in there. And then the other thing that I would just recommend is to try to work on really improving your respiratory control, uh, over time without even working on specific songs.

So what I would say to do is sit up tall or stand, ideally, and get your hands on the bottoms of your ribs. And what I want you to do is to inhale and feel how your ribs expand. Now, at the same time that your ribs are expanding outwards, you should feel some frontal movement, some backward movement, some downward movement, and some upward movement. We experience, uh, air filling our lungs in a 360-degree sphere, right? And so feel all of that move out. Now, the main thing that we want to remember, though, is to keep this what we would call keeping the expansion. But it's key that one of our guests last week, uh, or not last week, a couple weeks ago, Dr. Cary Reagan talked about that sometimes that maintain expansion ends up in rigidity. So everybody's like holding on tight. That's not what we're talking about. Yeah, we're talking resisting the collapse. Yeah, and keeping it. I like how Dr. Reagan said, keep it buoyant. Keep a buoyant rib cage, right? If you've ever seen those buoys out in the water, they just kind of bounce, they float, they bounce around. We want our rib cage, our respiratory system, to be able to just kind of flex a little bit, to bounce in with some air, let it out, in, out, as we sing, right?

So once you get that expansion, you're gonna start hissing, and you're gonna try to maintain that buoyancy and relax your abdominal wall. Now, as that hiss gets started, you should have plenty of air. But at some point in time, you're going to hear that that airstream starts to get a little bit weak. And when that happens, that tells you that your lungs have used up a fair amount of air and they're losing some of the natural pressure that exists when you take a full breath. So at that point, you're going to want to firm up your abdominal wall. And to start in the most basic way, is just imagine you're doing a slight crunch or you're doing a plank. You're just sucking in your stomach just a little bit. What happens when we, excuse me, what happens when we suck in our stomach is that there's a muscle that connects your pubic bone all the way up here to your rib cage, and there's other muscles that go up to the bottom ribs, and then they start to pull down on that rib cage. And as they pull that rib cage down towards the pelvis, that's going to help pressurize the lungs and send more air out. And then you're also squeezing all of your guts, everything you can see back there. This is Patty LeBon, one of my students named it that. Patty was a singer at one point in time, and they have now donated their body for us, uh, to be able to look at hypothetically. Um, so the bottom part in there, that viscera on Patty LeBon, that's what the muscles are pushing in on, and that pushes up into the diaphragm and will also help send air out. And you're going to sustain it until you're out of breath, and then you got to just let go and quickly inhale. You want to make sure that you inhale without tension, all right? So that you start that hiss, so then you contract your abs as you need to, S, and you keep firming them up, up, all the way to the end. I'll tell you how to breathe, and then you just drop those muscles open, and air should feel back into your lungs, and then you can start it again. And if you do those every day and try to start working up towards a minimum of 15 seconds, and see if you can't push closer to 13 seconds, right? You might not be able to do it on a hiss to get to 13. You might have to move over to a V, a Z, an E, a Val, or an Ah vowel, something that helps close off a little bit of the air. S lets a lot of air release, but start building up and like, time yourself, see where you're at now. And over the next six to eight weeks, you should see that number increase. And when you're doing that respiratory system training, it's going to help you get into a place where it's going to be easier to get through those phrases, you know, when punctuation doesn't really give you any options and there are no rests and you really are truly stuck.

Mike, other thoughts on this? You know, you, you mentioned at the beginning, I'm a huge registration fan. So it's kind of like, if you've got the valve, you know, we'll say the vocal cords of the valve, if, if you've got the right registration for that given size valve and pitch, um, that you're on, uh, for the intensity level that you're at, you're gonna have really good closure, right? When you've got really good closure, you're not gonna have extra air escaping, right? And so where I see a lot of singers will run out of air or have breath management issues is really because they might not, they might have too big of a vibrator for that specific note. And so that's just going to basically have all the air escape. I think you've, you've done the thing with the balloon before where it's like, all the air goes out, right? And so that's really where, you know, not to oversimplify singing scales, but there's a reason if we look at some of the bel canto era, there's a reason they sang the scales over and over for years, right, with their, uh, with their maestros, is simply because you mentioned doing it on the hissing, I think that's great, but also think doing things with staccatos and actually just five-tone scale or the nine-tone scale and just doing those scales again and again. And, um, you know, we used to have some fun contests in singing studios, right? So it's like, well, I can do the five-tone one time. Great. Can you do it 10 times in a row on a single breath, right? And trying to extend how long you can do it. I definitely think that will expand your capacity. And then taking the same pattern and doing a broken, a broken arpeggio, one, three, five, eight, um, pattern. And so just kind of using those to extend that and keep it elastic where it's not going to get stuck. And that'll help build that kind of car shock effect that we're looking for, where you've got a really good closure at the registration level and you've got some nice buoyant air beneath that, so you can help the singer's phrase. And then when it comes to phrasing, I think you nail it with the punctuation, right? Look at the punctuation. And, you know, make sure you're not gulping air, right, right. That's obviously going to, someone's going to hear that. And you wanna be making sure that you can just open, release, get that air in, and pick up the next phrase. So, and if you hear that sound, a lot of times it means your tongue is pulling back. So one of the things you can do if you're getting loud inhale is to stick your tongue on your bottom lip and get used to the feeling with that. That gives you, when you start getting used to what it feels like to breathe in without your tongue retracting, then see if you can't rest your tongue back in your mouth, but still maintain that, right? Because that, uh, that sound definitely, it's all your laryngeal muscles tightening.

Now, you know, the next question, I, uh, we have in here is from Seth, and he mentions, how to sustain the upper register and develop vocal endurance and strength? So you were talking about something a minute ago, like these are the scales. So going through, so what were some of the skills that you learned for increasing the stamina?

Yeah, absolutely. So, um, for sustaining the upper register, um, you know, one, one big one is repeating the top note. Now, a lot of people will use like a nay, nay, or nah, nah, nah. I don't have a piano in front of me, but if you repeat that [Music] and repeating that top note, right? And then leaning into it, you can begin to create some medial compression, right? And narrow down the resonance so you can create something to lean against, right? Um, so, you know, repeating the top note, um, and then I would like to do kind of the, uh, another little trick from the, from the bel canto era, but the nasty A, right? And so doing some semitones, um, to really engage that pharyngeal and really kind of pressing down from the top, you know, taking the top down approach, but pressing the, the falsetto to engage a little more depth of it, um, to get the, the middle register engaged. Um, and, you know, starting that around, uh, F above middle C, you know, and really getting that, uh, it really kind of engages, gives you something to lean against, right? And you'll take that up to, um, you know, maybe a B or an, um, but yeah, that's really where I noticed, um, when I started doing those exercises, it really gave me a whole another level of like resistance, like something to lean into where you wouldn't go for a high note and go, oh, well, that just, that just fell apart. Like, it, it helps strengthen those muscles to give you something to brace against, right?

Yeah, I like that. This is good. Um, one of the things I do is before I even get some like the bigger nine tones, is literally just have my students do that one, three, five, eight. Now, like you said, when I'm first trying to build, I'd like to think of the no, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's starting to build up strength because they're trying to like get it over and over again, and each time you re-attack, those vocal folds kind of come together. So I think that is getting strength. And then I start sustaining just that high note. Right? So we do, what I tell my students to do is to hit that high note and hold it until they feel it's starting to close up on them. And the second that they start to feel it closing up, get off of it and come back down because we don't, excuse me, don't want the body ever to learn the same tension. So the second that you feel tension, try to come in and get off of it. Now, the higher you go up in the range, the, um, uh, less time you're gonna be able to sustain some of those notes. So if you're hitting six, seven, eight, you know, seconds of sustain on a D above middle C, it's okay if you're, you know, high A doesn't have that. But we want to do those exercises over and over again to try to get that to improve. Then we can go into nine-tone scales. So those old fashion. And so these are going more towards like, uh, you know, Katie's question about when you have a long phrase. So the mama, mama is really teaching you to sustain a pitch. This exercise is teaching you to sing over a really long phrase where there's lots of movement that includes a lot of high pitches, right? Right. And even that on that nine-tone, sometimes you try to do it in one breath, but then you can also do it, slow it down, half the speed. Yeah, you ha, so, you know, you're going to run out, you know, you're going to run out somewhere along the way. You're going really slow, like, all right. And, uh, and then work on the phrasing that way. And a lot of times you'll take the breath right after you get, you know, you come off the high note, uh, on your way back down. So, yeah. But, you know, do those. And when you're doing those nine, start off just with one turn. Then after you've gotten that done, do two turns. [Music] After you get that done, start just pushing it up and see if you can't get five or six, right? So to get to the point, we'll see how it goes today, but we'll do the low version of it. [Music] Right? But just kind of taking to hit it over and over and over again. Of course, you know, I'd be standing up when I'm really practicing, that can regulate my respiratory system some. So Seth, you know, don't do what I did, just sit in a chair and play piano, but, you know, get yourself up, stand up, go through those things like that, and start taking it up in your range. And, uh, you should find that week by week, it gets easier and easier to get through those things. And why I like to build up stamina and vocal endurance with exercises is so then when you go into a song, you're not worried about it. If you're constantly sustaining out Fs for five to seven seconds, and you all of a sudden come across a song that has an F for four beats, like, whatever, I warm up much longer than that on that note. Whereas if your vocal exercises only touch high notes, then you come along to the sustained pitch in a song, you're like, oh, and it can, you know, freak you out because now you're worried about singing this thing. We want you worried about telling the story.

Yeah, and I think the one, one last thing we mentioned is you take these exercises and move them up. I think the other thing I think about in sustaining the upper register is knowing the, the right shape of the vowel, right? And I don't really talk a lot about vowel modification because I think the vowel should modify itself or should be allowed to modify based on kind of thinking it. But that said, the size of the vowel at the top is not the same at the bottom, right? You can't just carry that up because it's going to be too big. So, and that's where working where coach, sometimes we're like, well, I don't really know what they're even saying. There's kind of a focus, there's a focus and a resonance. And so you have to change the shaping of that vowel that's going to sit on top of that pitch and that register. So, um, if you're guessing, you know, sometimes you're going to go up there, it's going to be too big, it's going to be white. People will say, oops, sorry, so you sound like you're yelling. Um, so you're going to want to round that vowel. And so there's different, there's different ways to go about approaching that. But I really just say that's hard to kind of talk about without showing and demonstrating and have you do it the right way, do it the wrong way, get the feedback. But you do need someone to help you guide that. So you know how to round and that you make sure you keep it open up to a certain point. At some point, we called, do not like to use this nasty word, the passaggio, but, you know, as you go through that, the, the part from the bottom of your voice to your top of your voice, you are going to have to, to change the resonance. You just can't get around that. You have to change the internal shaping. And, uh, as you develop that as a singer, you'll start to, at least for me, I imagine and I can, I don't want to say I can see, uh, the size of it, but I have a feeling in a sense that I've developed, like, oh, well, that's going to be this size of a vowel that I'm going to sing on that note. And if I try and sing too big of a vowel, it's just going to splat, right? And, uh, so yeah, what do you, what do you think about that?

Yeah, definitely. Yeah, you gotta, like you said, I like the idea of allowing the vowel to take care of itself. And it's also gonna be different. I mean, for every style, you know, I mean, if you're singing something that's got a warmer timbre, you're gonna modify your vowels differently than like 80s rock where you're trying, right? You know, it's gonna be a little more forward versus. And then we've talked about, you know, you, you using different, um, like the blowfish and adding a little more, um, back and, and warm depth to the sound. So some of that's gonna be based on how you're gonna style things, of course. But I think the most important thing, if you're new and you're kind of going, well, you know, how do I strengthen that top, um, sometimes, you know, just working with a coach and trying to get understanding of, oh, well, that's why I can't get that top note out. But if I do these exercises a certain way, you have one of those epiphanies. So I always love to see that happen with a student. Um, you know, it's, it's really great part of being a teacher.

Yep, I agree. It is. This is what makes it all fun. All right, so what's our next question?

Okay, is the way I belt hurting my vocal cords? And I don't know, did you send us a recording? Did we hear the video? I know that's so, yeah, um, that's the kind of thing that we'd have to like hear you to really answer, Claire. But I wanted to pull this question when I saw it, um, because I thought it was worth like talking about how people get hurt.

So let me pop this up. This is what the vocal folds look like under a microscope. And so what you're seeing is this on a black line on the surface. Now, mind you, these are teeny tiny. These vocal folds are so small, we're talking millimeter and less in thickness. Um, you have the epithelium, which is a layer of skin cells, basically, right? And that epithelial layer is the surface layer. And right underneath of it is what's called the superficial layer of what we call the lamina propria. Now, these two layers do not have scar-forming fibers in them. So when these two layers come together when you're singing, you're usually fine, right? Like if you get really dried out, try to sing on your voice anyway, you might agitate this tissue, but there's no scar-forming fibers. So it might swell up on you and just quit working. The problem is, is that if it swells up on you, which can happen if you're fatigued, uh, can happen if you're dehydrated, it can happen if you're singing wrong and you put too much pressure on them. But once that fatigue kicks in and you start pushing your vocal folds together, harder and harder, you start to agitate the intermediate layer and the deep layer of the lamina propria. And those layers do have scar-forming fibers. And what happens is, as you agitate those scar fibers, then they get activated and they'll start reaching up into those upper layers. And as they reach up into those upper layers, they can start to form things like cysts, nodules, polyps, all kinds of bad things that we don't want on your vocal folds. And that is the way that people actually get hurt, right?

So here's what the vocal folds look like in real life. It's one thing to look at that drawing, but here's the vocal folds, and you can see that real nice mucus layer, mucous membrane. So if you're anybody who's ever had phlegm where you get that sensation that you need to clear your throat, it's those little white pockets right in the center of your screen are the phlegm. Okay? And the phlegm can cause you lots of issues. We want these vocal folds to vibrate freely. Let me show you what I mean. So, uh, unfortunately, the sound's gonna cut out here, and there is no sound on this video. This is a, uh, video that was taken in super slow motion, that way we can see the full movement of those vocal folds. Yeah, yeah. And so you're gonna get to see exactly what's going on. Uh, then after it plays, we'll turn it off and we'll talk a little bit about it. So here we go.

Great, great. So cool. They're amazing, right? So what you got to see was the mucosal wave of the vocal folds. That motion is what sets, uh, your voice. That's is your voice being set into vibration, and that's what creates the buzz in your sound. That ah, that we hear is pitch, timbre, all those things. And so that was just some pretty smooth vocal fold closure. But if you saw them really smacking into each other, then that would be agitating those lower layers. And like we said, it's when you start agitating those lower layers, Claire, that you're going to be more likely to cause damage.

So how can you tell? So you shouldn't have any raspiness in your voice. If you start hearing a sound in your voice and it's there all the time, and not just because you're trying to talk like Kim Kardashian, then it is a sign that something's not going in the right direction. So what I would do in that a moment is tell you to go see a laryngologist. Now, there are ear, nose, and throat doctors. Ear, nose, and throat doctors are generalists. Laryngologists have done another two to three years of intensive study on vocal disorders, and they're the specialists. So if you're in a small town, you may have a hard time finding a board-certified laryngologist. So you might need to go to an ear, nose, and throat doctor. What you want to ask is if they have video stroboscopy capabilities to do video stroboscopy, to do a laryngeal exam. If they say no, but they have a mirror, look for a different doctor. A mirror can show you what's going on in the throat, but it does not allow you to see the vibrations in the vocal folds. And if the doctors rely on a mirror alone, it usually indicates that they don't deal with a lot of voice disorders. So you don't want to go to that office if they don't even have the, the core basic equipment that's considered necessary for identifying a voice disorder. But if you find the doctor's got a stroboscopy, they're going to be able to go in through your mouth or your nose, turn on a strobe light, which will slow down the motion of the vocal folds, kind of like you just saw in that video, and they'll be able to look for any abnormalities. Now, if there is an abnormality in there, there's a really, really, really strong chance that it's not a big deal, and they're going to just give you voice therapy and teach you to re, uh, coordinate the way that you use your vocal folds, and you'll be all better. Okay? And in a worst-case scenario, then you might have something that's going to need a little bit more attention, and they have all kinds of treatments that they do. But most voice disorders are fixable, right? There's only rare instances where somebody does so much damage to their voice that it's really hard to get it back to where it was. But, uh, you know, you would want to go get that exam by the laryngologist, Claire, and let them make that determination. Because there are people who have voices that have some of that raspy quality to it, and they actually don't have any problems on the vocal folds, it's just kind of how they are. And then you have other singers who have beautiful voices that are crystal clear, and they go to get scoped assuming that everything's good, and they're just checking in with their doctor because they were told they should, and they discover they have huge honking nodules on their vocal folds. All right? But when you listen to them sing, you never know. So that's why, you know, we can go by sound, but we really got to go by what we would see on a stroboscopy.

Yeah, I mean, sorry, go ahead. I'm going to say, and then otherwise, any other gaps in your voice, if you're going up in your voice, ah, that's a sign you also need to see a laryngologist. So any dramatic voice changes, raspiness, huskiness, loss of your upper range, loss of volume in your voice, or a big gaping hole as you try to go up and down your register, those are all signs that you should see a laryngologist. And if you're ever in doubt, go see a laryngologist. It's great to go get to see what's actually in your throat and what you're using when you sing. And, uh, they should let you take a nice little cell phone shot, and then you'll have some great social media footage. Sure. Yeah. And I would just add, I don't know if everyone's running to the laryngologist right now during COVID, but definitely put that on your list, yes, when we get to the other side. Um, and the other thing I would add is, it doesn't physically hurt, right? So, you know, you want to know if the belt thing's hurt. Sometimes I say, the majority of times, if you feel any kind of pain, stop. That's a giveaway, right? And if someone says, oh, just sing through it, I mean, I've heard in studios, you know, we call it like, uh, you know, put, you put your vocal cords through the meat grinder. That's probably not a good thing to do, right? Um, and so definitely stop if you get any kind of pain. That's just like, run, run for the hills, please. You don't need to go through that. That means you're definitely getting some tension that's not going to be healthy. And other than that, I'd say, I mean, if your friends are saying and people around you are giving feedback and saying it sounds great, then it, you know, go back to what Matt was just saying. Do you have any of those types of things that we would hear? And still, if you're just wondering, like, wow, it's like, this is great, then just do an annual checkup. You know, I can't suggest that, uh, to everyone. I think that that's great, and more people should do those. Absolutely. And if you got a deal, if health insurance has given you a hard time, tell the doctor's office when you call that you're having voice difficulties that make it difficult to talk sometimes and to do your daily job, and sometimes you're not sure, but it feels like you might have a little something stuck in your throat when you swallow. Those are all keywords that the insurance company will pay for, uh, a stroboscopy to make sure you don't have any kind of, uh, acid reflux disorders or other words, I mean, all growth, the cancer, I mean, there could just be a lot of different things that we don't know. So if you just called it after you said, I'm a singer, I just want to see my vocal folds, your insurance company maybe like, no. But if you say, um, I'm noticing some voice changes that concern me a little bit, and I feel like they're affecting my happiness and my daily life activities, then they're more likely to see them. And then when you see the doctor, explain what your daily life activities are, and they'll code it from there.

All right, uh, the next one's Eliana. She's asking a question that's kind of comes into the same idea. Is there a way to carry chest voice up high without damaging my vocal cords? And the answer is yes, it's called mix, right? Mix. You want to talk about mix registration, man?

You know, I, the first thing when I saw this, at the, oh, well, don't carry your chest voice up too. I mean, in the right dosage, it's got to be the right doses. Now, what's the right dosage? Um, if you don't have enough of those arytenoids bracing against that antagonistic pull of the cricothyroid, which is the stretcher, then you're not going to be able to sustain high notes. You're going to go up there and they're going to get weak and fall apart, right? So you've got to have a certain amount of chest voice to anchor down, um, the, the, the stretch, right? Um, now, what's the right amount? It's really hard to explain on, on a live, and we'd have to hear your voice. Um, but there, there's definitely a safe way to do it. And at times, there's only certain ways to create growth in your voice. I can remember in my training that we couldn't get certain things to happen unless we went up and we, Matt uses the term overload principle, but sometimes you do need to overload in certain cases, the, the upper part, um, the mix, and that the register up there to cause the growth to happen so that your muscles can learn to, oh, well, this is a normal kind of level or intensity that I need. I need to gain, right? And for me, being a lighter tenor, unless I have a right amount of chest voice engaged, it's just not going to ring. I'm not going to get a certain amount of resonance unless I have a certain chest voice, right? Um, but don't do too much. That's all I can say. It's like the, the dosage. And that's really where if you're kind of getting into this more of an advanced question, you, you got to have the outside feedback of a coach to really tell you, hey, that's too much, that's not enough, here's, here's where you add it, and here's where you subtract it.

Yeah, I think that's great advice. Um, what I would say, Eliana, is that, you know, it also differs person to person. You know, I've got some singers that I've worked with who can carry a full chest sound up to this high F, F sharp, and they can sing that way for hours and it doesn't bug them. And then I have other singers, so I'll hit that note once and be like, oh my god, I can't do that anymore because they're so sensitive to it and it just doesn't feel good. And, you know, you listen to the lightness of their voice, it's like, yeah, I can get it. And then they prefer to mix through here. So I think that it's going to really vary. And this goes for men, to any gender. I mean, you got to remember that belting essentially is carrying up the thick fold dominant production, firm vocal fold closure above the E F above middle C. So any gender, anything that's going up above that break is belting. If they're doing it with like bright vowels, it's exciting and straight tone, all those things. Sure. What belt is, is even debatable. There's a whole lot of definitions about that. But, um, you know, when you're going up into that upper part of your range, you'll know that you're hitting a ceiling when the vocal quality starts to change, right? So let's say that like, I'm really a baritone, and we'll try this tonight, but I can do ma, ma, ma, ma, ma. You can hear the sound comes out. But once I jump up to here, you're going to start to hear a squeeze kick in where you start to hear a change. That's because I'm getting towards the top of my range. If I try to push it up higher, mama. Well, that's an indication that you're at your physiological max. That's as high as your voice wants to go. That's a B flat for me. There are plenty of other singers who can do those sounds on B, C's, D's consistently over and over again, but they're freer. So they can still have that strength, but it's free. They do that B, C, D all the time. That's the difference between them being a tenor and me being a baritone, right? I can hit the note, but I can't sustain it, and I can't live on it. And I can tell you already, just doing it for the third time, I'm going, okay, I need to stop trying to be attacked, right? It's not, it's not really there. I can get it there, but it's not really there. So you have to be honest with yourself when you're working on developing your belt voice. And if you're hitting a C and you're like, it's there, but is it really there? Then that is your current physiological max. And what you're going to do is go back, Eliana, go back and watch some of this talk we were talking about stamina. Instead of trying to get stamina on the C, what I would say is improve your stamina on the A flat, the A, the B flat, and the B for several, uh, weeks. And then as the A flat, A, B flat, and B get better and better and better, and then start hitting that C again. And what you're going to find out is either the C is getting easier because your body is capable of doing it, it just needs to build up some strength below it, or that C is still going to feel like you're hitting the top. And if it still feels like you're hitting the top, you're going to slow down and just keep working all around in that area. And what's going to happen is it's either going to just stop, like with me, no matter how long I sing B flats, they never get better. I'm a base baritone, I'm not a tenor. So you may find out that the A flat is not a test builder that carries a C, and that's okay. There's plenty of stuff you can sing, right? There's plenty of singers out there, millions of them, who don't do that. Or you're going to find that that note gets easier and easier and it starts to open up and open up. And if that's what happens, then you're going to try the half step above it, right? And you'll see what's going on there. Now, anytime that you start hitting one of these ceilings, you're gonna have to start then mixing a little bit. And if you go back in our archives, you can learn more about what your mixed voice is. Your mixed voice is when we don't sing in the thickness of the vocal folds, but we start to thin out and get somewhere in the middle, right? So we don't go all the way up to head voice, which is the thin usage of the fold with not a lot of closure, but we don't go all the way to chest, which is the thick fold with a lot of closure. We find the middle ground. And, you know, and the middle ground, it can sound really chesty, really belty, and feel pretty easy to you. I have a singer I'm working with right now, I want to do, uh, some auditions for some rock things. She was an opera singer for a long time, and when she gets a really rocking mix belt, it feels like it's in her head voice to her. But when you go back and you listen to it, she's working on like Barracuda, and it sounds like Barracuda should sound. So your perception might be different than the result, and you have to keep that in mind as well. Is that a lot of people thin out on the top or they back off on the top, and to them it feels like they're weak, they're not quite getting that note. But then if you have somebody listening on the outside, like a teacher or a coach, they sit back and listen and go, that's actually really good, right? So it's.

Not a game of how much muscle you use. It's a game of freedom. When you go up into that top, you gotta find freedom. Yeah, I think that's all right. I think, you know, for me, the most important thing is you're not gonna take your chest voice to your highest note. You just, it's not gonna be that the high note. Right, you're definitely going to have to switch gears. But there's a certain part, like Matt said, it's individual for different voice types. And if you don't know what we mean, there are definitely, just like everyone's different shapes and sizes, there's different lengths. I think we have a talk on this on the different lengths. And so, really, with chest voice, you do have that full depth, right? You have the full mass. Um, so you can't really carry that. You can't really play the highest note on the piano with the thickest, longest, fattest string. It's just not going to happen. You have to have a shorter, thinner, tinier string. But you do need to learn how to regulate that registration and when to let go, when to shift. And there's definitely advantages, strategic advantages through your training where you are going to want to, you know, for for a lady, I like to say everyone should learn to have the same technique like a tenor. But you're going to want to learn to turn the top and you're going to want to learn to take that the chest voice up to probably C5 or so and have a good strong chest up to the bottom, you know, through the middle. Um, but then be able to let go of it and get into your mix. So, and I think if you don't have any chest voice training, you're you're singing with half your voice. You've got to have some chest voice, but you just got to know how high and safe to go. And again, some of stuff is, I'm not, I'm not a lady. Matt's not either. That's for some of our female coaches on the platform or for any coach that out there you might study with, um, where you're going to want to have someone model it and then give you feedback on, you know, where does it work for you.

Excellent. All right. We had time for one more question. That's a little bit related. It's the follow-up to this, and that is, how do you correct vocal cord damage? It's expensive. It's, you know, you need some, you need a team, right? At that point, you probably have already gone to the doctor. You've got a speech language pathologist, uh, and the many people that are trained and licensed in dealing with correcting, uh, pathologies. Uh, and then we've got, you know, a lot of great instructors that aren't necessarily the licensed. And Matt knows more about how to how to talk about that. But, you know, we've got some great teachers that, um, some of them have more have more experience in dealing with how you help it for a singer with correcting. And I don't want to use the word rehabilitating, but essentially you are going to retrain and and help somebody through that. So myself, I'll just be honest with you, I definitely on that last question, I'm one of the ones that took the chest voice a little too high, a little too loud, right? So, um, I didn't actually damage my vocal cords, but I did damage some of the muscles around those and dislocated my arytenoid. And so there are some things you can do. You got to be careful when you're doing this. You definitely need to get help from a coach. If you think you have any damage or something's not clicking right, definitely get scoped. Definitely don't be embarrassed. I think Matt, didn't you say it's like a third or thirty-three percent? Yeah, there's a big chunk of us singers out there that, whoops, we didn't know. I mean, sometimes you don't feel it till it's too late. And, uh, it's just, it's part of the game, but you can't correct it. I'm living proof of that. I'd say on the other side of an injury, actually have a better voice and more control of my voice than I did before that, um, because that created the need to go seek out the truth. And if you are a truth seeker out there, I would just say, you know, part of the reason why we're taking a very evidence-based approach is I'm very committed to making sure that people out there in the audience and singers and teachers that want to know the truth about how things really work and function. It's, it's part of the science. There's a science to the art of singing. There's definitely an art to it, right? But you can't, you can't ignore acoustics and you can't ignore physiology. And there's certain things to us being human that that's just how the muscles work and that's how sounds travels and everything. And if if you don't obey those laws, right?

So how do you correct it? Um, what I would say, a lot of enterprises, it's gonna be sincere. You're gonna need to work with somebody who's got experience doing this, right? Um, ideally, I would say get some sessions with a speech language pathologist. And most speech language pathologists can then recommend a voice teacher in the area who is qualified to help you retrain, right? So rehabilitation is what speech language pathologists do. And habilitation is what voice teachers do. A lot of the lines are real blurry. But what we want to do is to make sure that whatever damage you have is, uh, you know, something that is just normal, right? It's very, very rare to run into some of the more extreme things. And it usually happens to older adults. But, you know, Jackie, my wife, had an uncle who noticed a voice change. And he went in, he's in his late 50s, uh, and he went in and it ended up being a cancer spot on one of his photovolts. So it is possible. It is usually older, 40, 50 and up. But that's why we don't want to frog around. If we hear that change, you ought to go get scoped. Um, 99% of the time, it's gonna just be either acid reflux or one of these other small lesions that you're just gonna get some voice therapy for, right? So don't be freaked out about it. Um, but you wanna go in there and have them look at it to see what you're working with. The speech language pathologist, knowing what you're working with, will then give you specific exercises to help overcome it. Ninety percent of the time, those exercises are about reestablishing, uh, vocal fold vibrational patterns that live on those upper two layers of the vocal folds, right? And so if you didn't see this already, Cynthia just popped this back up, is that we have multiple layers of our vocal folds. And in that epithelial layer and the superficial layer, the lamina propria, we don't have scar-forming fibers. So we don't have to worry about causing damage. Uh, that's when you start agitating these lower, uh, layers that you're gonna start running into trouble. So a voice therapist is gonna be working with you to help make sure that you're singing on the upper edge and not pushing all the way in, that you're not getting too much hyper function as you're singing along. And then, um, if for, uh, you know, during their work, they look at the vocal fold vibration and they say, actually, there's a lot of throat tension that's in the way or tongue tension that's in the way, they might address that. They might do some massage. There's actually now some certified massage techniques that are proving to be really, really good for helping people get their voice back after an injury. And they feel pretty decent after you get it done and you get that tension to let go. And so they might do some of that with you as well to get your throat to relax and then hand you off to a voice teacher who's going to be going through and, uh, you know, helping you reestablish yourself as a singer after the speech language pathologist is just reestablish you to a baseline that's going to serve you well even in speech.

All right. So I would say you start there. There's a whole lot more that goes into all of that along the way. We've had people on the show before. If you want to go look up Wendy Laborn, she's been a guest on our show before. So has Marcy Rosenberg. Two excellent speech language pathologists who can really fill in, uh, all kinds of information for you, uh, in their talks. And that you can find plenty of other talks with them online as well. And that brings us to the end of this evening's question. It's over. I know for stopping by. Uh, always good to see people here. Yeah, as Ed Gary says, it takes a team. She makes a good point. I didn't go into the voice care team, but ideally, if you can, anytime you can. Audrey makes a good point. Anytime you can, you want to get to a voice care center. And a voice care center, like Duke has got one, the Cleveland Clinic has one, Johns Hopkins has one, NYU has one, Emory has one, Vanderbilt has an amazing one. I know UCLA's got one, um, Miami's got one. Uh, there's lots of great, great, great, uh, voice care centers. And in that voice care center, they're going to have a whole team, a laryngologist, a speech language pathologist, and a singing voice specialist. And then usually a voice teacher on the outside who all communicate on a regular basis to help guide you through this process. And they'll even have contacts for, you know, a massage therapist that they feel like you need some massage work done or physical therapists if they feel that's what you need. Uh, you know, sometimes you'll get in there and find out that you actually have TMJ issues that are locking things up. And they'll know TMJ specialists to refer you to. So yeah, anytime you can, you want, you're going to need a team, uh, in a lot of situations. Try to get to one of those voice care centers where they can help you, uh, identify, find those team members to help you out.

Now, for the stuff that we've been talking about with you tonight, sounds of interest to you and you want to learn more, I just want to real quickly recommend my new course. Mike helped put together. It's called How the Voice Works. It was produced out in LA. It was all shot in 4K. You get four hours of video content, a hundred page workbook, uh, full of information about how the voice works that'll answer a lot of these questions that we've had tonight. You can jump on over to howthevoiceworks.com to check out the whole offer. And there's a special launch offer going on right now. It's not going to last, but you can pick up this whole package for only $47. So, you know, get it while it's, uh, cheap. The price will be going up. This is more like a $199 plus dollar course, but, uh, we just want to get into the hands of people as we are getting ready to do our official launch. And so, uh, if you've tuned in tonight, you're one of the lucky people who can jump on over, pick it up at howthevoiceworks.com, $47. And, uh, you're gonna learn all kinds of things, get some x-ray vision of what's going on when you sing.

Mike, any final thoughts? You know, I just, I love doing these talks. The questions you guys have asked us, again, keep them coming. Um, our goal is to help create, you know, share as much, um, information as we can, answer the questions. Obviously, if we can give you all one-on-one lessons here during the live, we would, but we can't. So we're just trying to put it all out there, um, the best that we can to share as much knowledge. And, uh, you know, if you want to learn, we've got a great, uh, platform and hundreds of coaches, uh, you can, we can connect you with. So if you're curious out there, you want to learn more, just fill out a form and let us know. Drop your questions in. And, uh, thanks everyone. And like Audrey said, it takes a team, it takes a village, and we're happy to be part of that community. So thank you all so much.

All right. Well, thanks everybody for tuning in tonight to the voicelessons.com Thursday night live. Uh, join us next week. We have a special guest. And I'm blanking off my head. I looked at the calendar earlier, but we'll get the posting up here soon. Gosh, it has been quite the semester. If any of you are in the academic world and teaching, I'm with you right now. It's been, uh, it's been a long, long, long, long journey. You know, super excited for the holidays that are coming. It's almost, uh, uh, was Halloween's coming up, right? All right. So probably no trick-or-treating this year. But, um, you know, and our guests next week is, I just found and pulled it up. It's Heather Lyle, who wrote the book Vocal Yoga. So we're going to be talking about how yoga can help make you a better singer. I have almost zero yoga experience. And as I'm getting older, I'm sure I probably with a volunteer and stretch me in multiple directions and open up my rib cage like it's not been open ever before. And that's how I met her, pinned against the wall. And so I am very excited to have a conversation with her about her book and all the great work that she's been doing. So should we bring our, our Lululemons and our spandex and our yoga mats? I, I don't have any of that. But Mike, if that's what you want to bring to next week's show, join us. That'll be crazy. I can't wait.

Alrighty. Well, thanks again to everybody who tuned in tonight. And we will see you next week. See you guys.