Transcription
Hi, I'm Mike Nelson, founder of voicelessons.com. Matt, we're so good to have you with us again.
Thank you. Shows are, yeah, they're the, the highlight of my week is getting on, getting on this meeting with you and jumping on here and going over some questions. So, um, we get questions coming in all the time from students out there eager to learn. We have hundreds of, uh, teachers on our platform now, thousands of students. So it's really fun to be growing. Um, let's just jump right into some of these questions that we've got. So as I'm clicking around this program, I'll start with the first one here from Rob. Okay, Rob writes, "It, how do I sing high notes without cracking my voice?" Yeah, great question, Matt. What do you got for me?
So, yeah, so this is a common problem that a lot of singers run into. And so, uh, male singers, we use what's called, uh, chest voice a lot in our singing. So chest voice is what you hear me talking. And now it's this heavier quality that has a fuzzy sound that's different than the opposite register, which is head voice. Head voice is the falsetto voice. And what we really need in order to make sure that we can get high notes without cracking is, uh, our instrument to utilize both of those qualities together. So I'm going to pull up a model here so we can kind of walk through and explain some of this stuff in a little more detail. We have multiple muscles within our larynx that are responsible for regulating pitch and that register quality of our voice. And the primary muscle, uh, near the vocal fold itself, is called the thyroarytenoid muscle. And it's this guy right here. It starts down here at the thyroid cartilage, where your Adam's apple would be, Rob. And it goes back up in here into the arytenoids. Now, this is the same, male, female, any biological gender, it's still going to be the same structure. And that muscle runs through the vocal folds. And when it contracts, it helps thicken up those vocal folds. And when it contracts, that's what gives us that, ah, that buzzy, edgy sound. Now, at the same time, we're bringing those vocal folds in that thicker position to get that extra buzz, we do need to also be able to kind of elongate them a little bit to get high notes. So you always have this tug of war, this little pulling back and forth. And the other muscle that's doing that tugging is this guy here, which is called the cricothyroid muscle. And it starts down to the cricoid cartilage and inserts up into the thyroid cartilage. And when it contracts, it makes your larynx tilt like that. And when you tilt that larynx, the vocal folds on the inside are elongated. Right? But at the same time that that cricothyroid muscle is trying to pull your vocal folds along, that thyroarytenoid muscle is trying to pull them short. Now, that's complicated enough to work out. But unfortunately, we got two other muscles.
So with that, is that, would you say those two muscles are antagonistic?
Yes, exactly. They're antagonistic muscles. They're working again. They're there to balance each other out. Okay. So, in the back, we have what are called the interarytenoid muscles. And they crisscross in between these arytenoids. And when they contract, they help bring them together, which helps hold your vocal folds firmly together. It limits airflow. It gives you some more buzz in your sound. And the other muscle that also helps do that is this guy on the side, which is called the lateral cricoarytenoid muscle. So what ends up happening when you crack is you're going up and your vocal folds don't make the proper adjustments necessary to get over that break. And you end up carrying a really thick vocal fold production all the way up into the upper part of your range. And your body's just not designed to do that. So eventually, that thyroarytenoid muscle gives up. It lets go. The cricothyroid takes over, and you get that big crack in your sound. Right.
So if you, uh, first can help a lot of times understand vocal fold motion. So if we put our vocal, or hands together like this, this is a model of the vocal folds. And air comes up from beneath. And as that air comes up from beneath, it parts the vocal folds, opens an air puff comes out. Then the folds come together at the bottom, and they keep vibrating like this. It's a really beautiful waveform. If you've ever seen the stroboscopy, it's pretty amazing what's going on in your throat. And that's how we get the buzz that we then turn into a nicer tone quality with our vocal tract, which is everything above those vocal folds. So what ends up happening when you hit that breaking point is you, if you, sorry, let's restart that. If you want to train your voice to not crack when you're going across that breaking point, you have to start learning how to lighten up and let some falsetto qualities come into the voice. So instead of going up with just this pure edgy, edgy sound, that, ah, where it cracks on you, you have to learn to thin out. Ah. And then depending on your voice type, we're going to find the better balance of that sound for you. Right. I'm a low male voice. So somebody who's more of a high male voice or a high female voice, you're all going to sound a little bit different, but the same mechanics are happening inside of your larynx.
So how do you train your voice to do this? The first thing I would do is just start with single pitches. And on a single pitch, you want to start training the muscles to let go because right now, I think your muscles are probably trained to hold on for dear life. So what you're going to do is you're going to start off with that edgy sound. And you're going to feel like as you hold the pitch out, you exhale more and more and more. So your voice gets really breathy. It's going to be something like this. Ah. And then you're going to practice going from that breathy to the really edgy. [Music] Then you're going to merge the two together. Work that up and down through your range. Not going to the extreme high notes, but in the comfortable part of your voice. That's teaching your vocal folds how to thin out, which is what we need to do as we go for high notes in order for our voice not to crack. So the next thing we're going to do is we're going to glide along a pitch range of around a fifth or an octave. And we're going to thin out as we go up. So not thinning out would sound like this. It's real shouty as we go up. That's just carrying four finger vibration all the way up, all the way down. Instead, we're going to want to feel like we thin out, then we come back together. It would sound like this. [Music] And we're going that real breathy sound, not because that's what we actually want as the end result, but we really want to train our voice how to take it to the extreme, how to really lighten up. Because then what we can do is instead of lightening up all the way, we can lighten up until we find the spot that we like. So I'm just going to find a random spot. This is where a coach would help you, you know, work around until you find what's optimal for you. I'm just going to show you some variations. So here's one variation. Didn't get as light. Got a little lighter. Didn't thin out as much as I could because I was going up into their range. I want to put some extra strength on it. But if you take just these little nuggets of information, these are the core ingredients to starting to train those vocal folds so that they don't just let that cricothyroid muscle take over, but rather all those little muscles that I just introduced you to have to work together to get those vocal folds to gradually thin out. And the more that you do that work, the easier it's going to be for you to get up into that upper part of your range and not have your voice crack along the way.
Great, great. I was going to add to that. Sometimes when the voice is cracking, we have what, what we sometimes call the mixed registration, where you have the registers are doing, you know, they're not behaving correctly as you would normally expect them to. Right, right. So the other way I would add to that, sorry, spotlight. Uh, look, hold on here. I'm trying to figure this program out. There we go. Is that, uh, Rob, sometimes you may have to reduce intensity almost completely on both registers, right? And go through a process with a coach. If you're, if you're cracking a lot or you can't control that, or some of the exercises not mentioning, you may reduce intensity, then just work purely on your falsetto, purely on your chest voice. And once you get everything kind of unscrambled, um, and you purify a little bit of the registration, then you can start to work on, uh, some of the messages of ocean mass exercises are combining both intensity changes and pitch changes together. Sometimes we have to take it down to where we just focus on just intensity only and just pitch only. So, sorry, just breaking it down one level down. Uh, yeah, right. Cool, cool. Awesome.
So next question, we're going to go on. Yep. Oh, is that Rocky Lockridge making an appearance? Right. Okay. So next question, "What are the voice exercises for strengthening the mix voice?" This one comes in by James. So great question, man. Take it over.
Yeah, so you kind of touched on that a little bit with your last name. So let me clear off my keyboard here. Uh, we're gonna come back to that model in a minute, but we'll use the keyboard here and walk through a couple of what these look like. So as we mentioned, we're going upwards. So the middle part of our voice is where we're gonna spend a lot of time mixing, right? We're rarely gonna carry just pure chest or pure head up into that. So, so we're gonna take those pitches. And I hear, I have Logic Pro running in the background. Let me shut that off, otherwise we're gonna be getting logic throughout. And here's a keyboard was recording a little bit earlier today. There we go. So you're gonna take that note, that, ah, and then like I said, thin out as you go up, right? You'll work that up until you reach your highest pitches. Now, it kind of sounds anemic. That's okay. The goal is not to get to a finished product, right? The goal is to train those vocal folds to do what you need. But you can only train bottom up. You need to train top down as well. So to do top down, what we're going to do is we're going to start in that, uh, falsetto voice. And we're just going to carry falsetto down as low as it'll go. [Music] Now, this seems real simple and, uh, like, you know, an exercise that's training you for sound, you're not necessarily going to sing with. And that's true for a lot of styles. But what it's doing is it's teaching your throat to let go. It's teaching your body not to work so hard. And most of the time when singers are struggling with their mix, they're working harder than they need to. So by doing those exercises that are really breathy, you're teaching your body that it doesn't take that much to be on a pitch. And once we get your body comfortable with that freedom, then we can build back up from it. So then the next part of this falsetto down is to let it slowly blend into your full voice. So I'll start here. [Applause] [Music] [Music] Then we can land into a more usable sound. Then we'll take that more usable sound and then carry that up. And we can carry it up with speech-like sounds. We can glide it and play around with it any way we want. I'll use speech-like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Love. [Music] So we'll play with it that way. Then again, we'll go back down to the chest voice sounds. And we'll do some glides. We'll take that all the way up into the upper part of our range. Had a little blip in there. Posting her blip. But you would glide that up until you get to your uppermost part of your range. Then you bring your, uh, head voice down again. And you're going to work that. And as you can see, I'm out of shape. Right? I don't practice that much anymore. I spend most of my time teaching and researching. So I need to go back if I want to be singing well again and do that fine motor work to get those muscles to play nice together because as you can hear, they're not doing it right. Because even if we know that's what our body's supposed to do, we still have to train it. It's a motor system, right? Just like any athlete has to do drills to get their body into optimal peak performance, that's what a singer has to do as well.
Now, the one other thing that you can do with, uh, trying to discover your mix is to start from speech. And so we can take like a little word phrase like, "How are you today?" And, uh, just speak it with a descending pattern. "How are you today?" And then start to put it on exact pitches. So first, let's just go back to that random speech. We're gonna go, "How are you today?" "How are you today?" "How are you today?" "How are you today?" All of those sounds, especially as I went up, I'm starting to mix just by using that speaking voice. Then I put that on pitch. "How are you today?" "How are you today?" "How are you today?" "How are you today?" "How are you today?" "How are you today?" "How are you today?" "How are you today?" "How are you today?" "How are you today?" And we can just play around with that. If we combine those speech-based exercises along with that registration balancing exercises, that's what's going to start to tidy up the mix. Now, as you'll notice, I'm not really paying much attention to the quality of my voice as far as the vowels being bright, dark, warm, neutral, any of the above. That's because mixed voice has to be coordinated at the vocal fold level first before you can really get the rest of the vocal tract to help out. Now, if you read around on voice science, you're going to find out that there are vocal tract interactions that affect the vocal folds. And yes, all that exists. But that's hard to talk about in generalities. And it's something that you more have to work on individually with a coach because it's a lot of fine tuning. But after you get the ability to just use your regular speaking voice, try making it a little bit warmer sounding and see if it makes anything easier. So if, uh, my starting place was, "How are you today?" I could warm it up. "How are you today?" "How are you today?" "How are you today?" "How are you today?" I could brighten it. "How are you today?" "How are you today?" Play with every shade in between. I could do those sounds with the open mouth position, what we would call a megaphone position. "How are you today?" "How are you today?" "How are you today?" "How are you today?" Or I could try them with the reverse megaphone position. And in the reverse megaphone position, I'm going to get like a one-finger mouth opening and make everything on the inside in the back room have to open up instead. Should I start here? "How are you today?" "How are you today?" "How are you today?" I take my finger out. "How are you today?" "How are you today?" "How are you today?" And we could try both versions of any word phrase and see what happens. "How are you today?" "How are you today?" gives me two different sounds. So that's when you get to the more, uh, intermediate and advanced part of training the mixed voice and you want to start playing around with some of those variations as well. But take chest up into the middle by and thin out. Bring head voice down through the middle and let it get a little bit more solid. Once you get to a solid place, take that place up and down. And then also play with speech and variations of, uh, vocal qualities within a speech-based sound.
Great, awesome. So let's keep going. James, hopefully that helps you out. Uh, gives you plenty of exercise ideas. Um, moving on to the next one. We have, oh, this is a good one. "Why do I feel the need to cough when I sing?" This comes in from Ari. And we've all had it. We're singing or we're training or working out, and all of a sudden you get the little tickle. What, what is that? Can you break that down?
Yeah, so it can be two things usually, right? Uh, there's always exceptions to anything. And there's always plenty of ways people find to cause constriction, is what we call it, in their vocal tract that ends up causing them these kinds of problems. Back here are those arytenoid muscles that we talked about. And they're surrounded by flesh, which you can't see on here. But if you ever look at a stroboscopy, an image of the vocal folds that they take with a medical camera, you'll see that there's pink flesh that lines that whole area around those arytenoids. And that pink flesh is just chock full of nerve endings. And the reason you have so many nerve endings down there is that your esophagus is right behind here. You can't see it in this, because it would be this extra little tube that would block our visual of these muscles. So this model doesn't include it. But when we swallow food, this epiglottis covers down, that's what this guy is, keeps food from going down into our vocal folds. And it guides it behind these arytenoids and down into our esophagus. But sometimes food tries to go down into the wrong place. And it tries to go over into the vocal folds. And if that were to happen successfully, and food got into our lungs or liquid got into our lungs, we'd have a big problem. So our body is designed to have a bunch of nerve endings right there that can detect any extra, like pressure or touch that's not supposed to be there. And it kicks in that cough reflex, where we then try to start coughing because as we cough, these guys bounce, and as they bounce, puffs of air come out. And any puffs of air that come out will help kick the food back up out of the way in the place it's supposed to go. Huh? The problem is, is if you're singing with a lot of firm vocal closure, a lot of chest dominance, you're pushing these guys together. And what can end up happening is you can start agitating all that tissue in the back. And as you agitate that tissue, you're going to start to feel a tickling sensation. And it's going to make you want to cough. So if that's happening, that's a good indication that you're using too much chest voice. Now, if you're working with a teacher or coach, and you've never sang in chest voice before, they might say, you know, "Let me hear your chest sound." You might get a little tickle cough. And they may say that's okay. We're, you know, first discovering your chest. And in that instance, it'll be okay as long as you're not carrying up a sound that tickles above the E and F above middle C. And as long as you're not doing it for more than like three to five minutes. But, you know, anytime we try something new, we're not often going to get it right. And in stumbling around to try to get it right, you might feel a little tickle in there. That should go away in a week, maybe a week and a half tops, right? We don't want to see it dragging on too much longer. If it is dragging on, it means your body's not ready to put that much vocal closure into your sound. Or it means that, you know, uh, and that sometimes means that you just need to train to get to that point. Or it just means your voice type doesn't lend itself to being that chest dominant. And if your voice is a lighter speaking voice, something more like this, that might be the case, versus if you have a heavier speaking voice like I do.
Now, the other thing that's important is to know that around your larynx in your neck are a whole lot of different muscles. Alright? So this is the Adam's apple or Eve's apple. And the vocal folds are right behind that. And remember that this thyroid cartilage has to tilt on this cricoid cartilage in order to give you high notes. And as this is trying to tilt, sometimes these muscles start locking up, right? They are muscles that are really important for swallowing. And a lot of times when we sing in a chest dominant vocal fold production, where we have thick vocal folds firmly pressed together, our body thinks we're getting ready to swallow. Because one of the first steps of swallowing is to close your vocal folds closely together. And when your body thinks it's time to swallow, it's going to try to engage these three muscles that help pull the larynx down, as well as the seven that pull it up. Because when we swallow, our larynx kind of rises up and then it tilts back down. And if these muscles start fighting with each other, which is what often happens, uh, when you're getting that tickle cough sensation, it's squeezing in all around your larynx and it's binding it up. And so what can end up happening is again, those muscles, not only the internal muscles are not the only ones pushing your folds too tightly together, but all of what we call the extrinsic muscles in your neck are also starting to clamp in and pushing things together too tightly. And either one of those causes, whether it's from too much chest registration or if it's too much extrinsic muscle activation, uh, can agitate that tissue and get you a dose of the tickle coughs.
Another thing that can happen is if you are way out of shape and you haven't been singing for a while, and you try to jump into it like a 45-minute set, your body's not used to doing that. You may not have the stamina you used to have. And those muscles may get agitated from that as well. So that's another good reason that we want to make sure that we're practicing every day, every other day at the least, if you're going to be actively singing, because you do need to build up stamina. Otherwise, those muscles forget that it's okay to be doing what you're doing, and they can become a little hypersensitive and start making us think something's, uh, happening that's not. So, you know, play around with both of those things. Look at the mix exercises we talked about, bringing the head voice down, putting a little bit more air through your sound, reducing the intensity, as Mike mentioned. So instead of trying to do "Frank will thank the bank," which is pretty intense, has a lot of buzz, could lead to a tickle cough, we want to put some, put some kazoo in it, okay? So you could sing that phrase with a kazoo, what we call a blowfish, and then put that air through those holes. "Frank will thank the bank." And that will help you reduce some of that intensity and should take the pressure off of the arytenoids.
And hi Tracy. Hi Kathleen. Great to see both of you here tonight. Thanks for stopping by and checking it out. Awesome. Great.
So did you, uh, you mentioned obviously the, the vocal cords before, but these are singing is a superimposed function, right? The vocal cords were not designed for singing. They would actually keep things out of your, your lungs, right? So the most basic thing is you might just have some film in the way on your cords. You might just need a cough to clear it off, right? Obviously. But Matt brought up many, many reasons on things to take a cough seriously. If it's happening a lot, please don't just blow it off. If something more serious could be going on.
Well, and that's another good point. And, uh, we could talk about some of the medical conditions that can affect this as well. Acid reflux is the prime thing that tends to cause some of that sensation. Uh, what happens is that, you know, the, um, here, we'll use this model instead. So this is a bisected head. If we were to remove your head and then cut it in half, don't decapitate the students, we need them. We don't, we have cadavers, but instead of bringing the cadaver in here, we use a model instead. So the esophagus is this little tube right here. And that's the larynx, right there. All right? So number 61, vocal folds, right there, right? And so that, uh, when you're sleeping at night, you're laying on your back or sleeping on your side, laying on your stomach, let's say you're laying on your stomach, stomach sleeper, all of a sudden you had a little bit too much food, a little too much alcohol, and it'll start to work its way up your esophagus. And once it gets right over to the top of the arytenoids, there's nothing stopping it. And it drips right down into your larynx. And then your vocal folds end up trying to close to stop it from getting into your lungs because it can cause a lot of problems as it does that. The acid burns that flesh, right? So if you've ever had an acid burn of any type, you know how bad that hurts. Any kind of chemical burn on your skin, uh, it's not good. So you end up burning the tissue that covers those arytenoids. And when you burn that tissue, you agitate those nerve endings. And you are going to feel a sensation like something's caught in your throat, like you have to clear your throat constantly, or you have to cough constantly. And that is an indication that you're battling acid reflux. So that would be a great reason to go see your primary care physician and talk to them about some options. They may refer you to a laryngologist to get a stroboscopy where they just hold your tongue out with a piece of gauze, they stick a little teeny tube into the back of your mouth, you sing "ee," they look at your vocal folds, and they can tell if you have acid reflux or not, right? Harmless procedure, it's just done in the office. It's an easy thing to do. And you get cool photos and videos of your vocal folds to go show all your friends. Um, and then another thing that can happen is dehydration. So if you're dehydrated, that tissue gets dried out, it can become more agitated. And then of course, smoking. So smoking anything, especially the stuff you can buy in California, in Colorado, that can definitely agitate that back flesh inside of your larynx and could lead you to getting that tickle cough feeling. There you have it.
Okay, so moving on from the tickle cough. The next question we have from Tony, "How do you sing without nasality?" Yeah, this is something a lot of, uh, early beginner singers sometimes get told, like, "Hey, sounds like you're a little nasal." So, yeah, let's break this down. Like, why would it happen and what can you do is to, uh, start to train, uh, untrain this habit.
Great. We'll go ahead and use this other model instead. Um, so let's look at what actually is causing nasality in the first place because once you understand what's causing it, it's a lot easier to fix. So this in the back is the uvula. And if you look inside your mouth, you'll see it dangling down in the back, right? That little dangly thing looks, uh, hangs down. If you run your tongue across the roof of your mouth, if you start up behind your front teeth, you're going to feel that there's a hard surface, and then it softens up. And so we divide that into the hard palate and the soft palate. And the uvula is part of that soft palate. When we go to sing and our voice has some nasality to it, what's usually happening is that this guy is hanging down a little bit. And it leaves open a little opening right here. And this is what we call the velopharyngeal port. It is the opening between the pharynx down here in the mouth and the nasopharynx, the oropharynx and the nasopharynx. We call this for short, VPO. When we have VPO opening, it messes with the resonance of our vocal tract in a million weird sound that has nasality to it. Okay? So that's when this guy is down. Now, experienced singers learn how to lift this up. For some people, it happens naturally. Other people, it comes just with training. And other people have to consciously learn how to lift it up. When you consciously learn how to lift it up, it blocks off your nose and you get a clear sound. All right?
So let's go through three, uh, soft palate positions to give you an idea of how it can move around. And, uh, you can try these on your own, Tony, and it'll give you a better understanding of what's happening inside of your mouth. First, I want you to do an "ng" sound. I want you to go, "ng." And then as you sustain that "ng," you're going to pinch your nose. Now, did you notice as soon as you pinch your nose, the sound stops? That's because in that position, the tongue is blocking sound from exiting the mouth. It's going up into an "ng" place. And then sound can only exit through the nose. So that's pure nasality, sound only coming through your nose. Now, the extreme opposite of that is when the soft palate's all the way up and nothing goes through your nose. And to find that, we're going to use a "p" and an "m." We're going to use the "p" because the "p" builds up air pressure inside of our mouth. And when we produce that "p" sound, the soft palate naturally lifts. So we're going to go, "p." And pay attention to the lift in the back. Then you're going to sustain it. And as you sustain it, pinch your nose shut. Nothing happens. That's because then your soft palate is lifted all the way. Now, there's, you know, plenty of variations in between. I call the middle zone, "French nasal." Low to find a "French nasal" low, you need the sound to go half through your nose, half through your mouth. Sounds like this. And if I pinch my nose shut while I sustain that, some of the sound will stop, but it doesn't all stop. Huh? If you feel like your voice is nasal, you are going to want to work on the "p" end of the spectrum. But it might help you to do what's called negative practice, which is alternating between what you don't want and what you do want, which is why I introduced both extremes. So what you would do is build yourself a set of exercises going back and forth between "p"s and "ng"s. So for instance, we just do a simple one, three, five, three, one pattern. And we would do, followed by, and take it up. [Music] Now, if the "ah" vowel isn't working well for you, because sometimes "ah" has a lot of tension in it, try "o" or "oo" or "e." All right? [Music] I have an eight-year-old, three-year-old in the house. I hear that all the time. And then you could also go to the "p-p." So some unfortunate vowel, uh, consonant combinations there. But the reason, there's strategic reasons. The "e" gets your tongue up and out of the way, and it's not going to drag down because when our tongue drags down, it can pull the soft palate with it. And of course, the "p" is going to help build up that pressure of your palate up. Now, you could also substitute and get the, all right? So any combination of a vowel and a "b" or a "p" should start training that soft palate to lift up. And just keep alternating between the soft palate down and the soft palate up. And soon your body will learn the difference and you'll be able to control it in any song that you sing. Sweet.
All right, so I always love, I always love these because it really is helpful, even if you know this information, to try these things over and over again because you can never understand this too much. So, man, thanks for breaking that down on the nasality. Um, last question we have for tonight, and we'll see if you have any, uh, questions anyone's dropped in there. Um, final question, "What is the gagging sensation when I try to sing high notes?" This is, this comes from Jennifer. So female. Okay, great. Let's break it down.
All right, so the larynx thins out. So we can kind of see on this model over here, um, maybe, yeah, we lift up a little bit and see this model. You can see that the larynx is positioned inside of the neck. So let's see if we do it there. So the larynx is here. And if you put your fingers on the Adam's apple or Eve's apple and glide, you're going to feel that it goes up and down. So we're going to get, you should feel that this guy bobs up and down inside your neck, okay? So when we go to sing, that's naturally gonna happen, that bobbing up and down. But sometimes what ends up happening is that carry chest register too high. And as we do that, that larynx travels up too high. And there's a reason that this happens, okay? What happens is in chest dominant registration, your vocal folds are close firmly together. And when you close those folds firmly together, air pressure builds up beneath it, right? Especially if you're taking a big full breath before you go to sing. As soon as you breathe in, you fill up what are called alveoli inside your lungs. There's about two, three hundred million of them inside of your lungs. And they're these little tiny baby balloons. And they stretch just like a balloon does. And just like a balloon, if you're not holding on to that stem and you just let it go, it's going to collapse down. Those alveoli collapse down to help send air out of your lungs. So when you're singing, you fill up those alveoli. And then you put folds in this firm closure position to get some chest registration in there. All that air is trying to come out, but it's being blocked. And what ends up happening then is that air pressure pushes that larynx up because it's pushing underneath those vocal folds. And as that larynx goes up, it starts butting into your tongue. If we go back to this model, we can see that the tongue takes up a huge part of the space in our vocal tract. So vocal folds, larynx, tongue. When this larynx starts to move up, this hyoid bone, that is this guy right here, the hyoid bone, starts moving up as well. And it starts butting into the bottom of the tongue. Then the tongue starts going, "Something's wrong." And a lot of times it will try to push your larynx back down. Because if something doesn't stop your larynx from moving up, it technically could disconnect from your trachea. And then you just have a flapping trachea inside of your lungs, right? Trachea is right here. Now, that's not going to happen when you sing, but your body is trying to make sure it doesn't happen. And so it starts to shove that tongue down. You also have to understand that singing has a lot in common with swallowing. When we swallow, we close our vocal folds firmly together. When we're closed firmly together, as we mentioned, air pressure builds up. That air pressure lifts up the larynx. The tongue pulls back and it sends food down into our esophagus. So when we're singing in this chest dominant registration with closed vocal folds, air pressure builds up, it raises our larynx. And our body thinks it's time to swallow. So all of a sudden, our subconscious mind is trying to kick into the swallow reflexes. We're trying to focus on singing. And the result is a gagging sensation in here. And part of what's causing that are what are called the constrictor muscles. So the constrictor muscles, you can't see them great in this one. There's one of them there, that's your, uh, medial one. But we have a superior, medial, and inferior constrictor muscle that line around your vocal tract. So we can help you feel these by having you go, "Goo goo," and then after you've done "Goo goo," right now, doing "Hah hah." So you should feel that the "Goo goo," if you're going up for high notes and you're getting a gagging sensation, those constrictor muscles are probably kicking in and you're getting that good sensation. And what we need to do is shift your body back towards the silent laugh position, that "ha" position. So just like we did with the soft palate, we're just going to build exercises around opposites, right? One of the best ways to train your body how to be a better singer is to introduce opposites and then play with everything in the middle. So we would take that "goo goo" sound, go, which is really narrowing everything in. And then we would show our body what the opposite is and laugh through it, right? So as you notice, my pitch got a little off on the top because I suddenly let go of a bunch of tension. That's going to happen with you, and that's fine. Getting accurate pitches is not the point of this exercise. The point of this exercise is training your body what the constriction is and what releases. So we're going to run that exercise. [Laughter] [Music] After playing a lot of that around, you starting to get the opposites, uh, lined up, you should start feeling some release. Then you take a phrase of a song that's bothering you, and you just laugh through it. Laugh at first, then put your words inside of it and see if you can maintain some of that laughing sensation in the actual lyrics. And if you work on this enough in combination with balancing out your registration, like we talked about at the beginning of today, you should feel a pretty significant release of that gagging sensation. If you're still finding yourself struggling with gagging, then we're going to want to focus in on tongue tension and jaw tension because if your jaw muscles are tightening up or your tongue muscles are tightening up, that can lock up your throat. It can make that gagging sensation even more prominent and cause all kinds of other issues as well. And, uh, we'll talk about that another time.
Great. So I think we covered how to be aware what's causing the gagging sensation. And we talked a little, we didn't get too deep into the registration today, but we maybe we'll do that again. It's probably time for, you know, my favorite things, registration. So, yeah.
So the, you know, there's two points of view on all of these things. And there's the point of view that issues with the vocal folds, uh, at that registration-based level, are being caused by, uh, constrictions of the vocal tract. And there's another point of view that constrictions of the vocal tract, such as a gagging sensation, are actually caused by an imbalance of registration. They're both right. What matters is the person in front of you. And so you have to look at each individual person, pick one of those two paths, because either could work. And, um, you know, when you're playing around with those, uh, you know, opposite things, uh, you will, you know, eventually find what works best for you, whether it's a registration imbalance or whether it's a vocal tract constriction issue. Um, if you want to try the registration balance, do what Mike said. Take down the intensity because think about it. And this is why understanding how the voice works matters, because when you understand how it works, you can come up with exercises to fix every issue that you're having. If we know that the gagging is coming because your vocal folds could be too firmly together, then introduce the opposite, which is head voice, right? So a lot of vocal training, introduce the opposite behavior, find the middle. So if we're getting, "Hey, yeah," and I'm getting a gagging sensation, well, it could be all the things I talked about, but as Mike is saying, it could also be a registration thing. "Hey, yeah," he's got a lot of chest in it. So instead, if I started getting, "Hey, yeah," some of that lightness and breathiness, and then built back in from that, "Hey, yeah," "Hey, yeah," that feels a lot better on my throat. And I fixed all of that constriction in that gagging sensation, not by addressing those muscles in the vocal tract, but by addressing registration and getting more flow through the folds, which then released the vocal tract for me. So yeah, both of them are totally, uh, you know, valid pathways to go that can give you the results that you're looking for for sure.
So I think you hit the nail on the head when you know how your voice works. When you, when you really start to dissect it and understand it. So thanks for pulling up the models. Um, let me check the chat if we have any, uh, questions. They're always causing me problems. Hi, Jan. I know I haven't seen you. I'm sorry, I can't help you. When I first, when I lived in upstate New York, Jan helped me fill up my voice studio with students. I'll forever be grateful to Jan D'Angelo. Yeah, okay, awesome. Yeah, that was that was just so funny. So Jenna, thank you so much for writing in. Um, Tracy, Kathleen, thanks for joining us today. If you guys have any questions, drop them in. Um, we'll hang out for another minute or two. But, um, gosh, this was a great show, Matt. I'm, I'm so looking forward to getting next season underway. I think the summer's almost over. So I know we've got some cool plans for next season. So thanks everyone for tuning in. And, uh, we'll see you guys next week. Good luck. Thanks for stopping by. Good night, everyone.