Transcription
Is how can we improve? I'm Dr. Matt Edwards, a tenured professor, author, and professional voice teacher who has taught thousands of students, from beginners to established pros. My students have performed on American Idol and other national TV shows, on Broadway, and on national and international tours.
Over the course of my career, I have been a proud contributor to the development of a systematic, scientifically based model for teaching popular singing styles. I teach everything from rock to country, R&B and pop, jazz, hip hop, musical theater, and even opera. My mission is to deliver the highest quality training available in order to promote and foster vocal development, producing sustainable and repeatable results for singers.
This course is a result of distilling years of teaching at a university level and instructing professional singers. I draw upon historical traditions, scientific research, exercise science, vocology, and real-life experience to help you unlock the true potential of your voice. So, whether you are discovering your voice for the first time or you have worked professionally for years, this online course is a robust training toolkit that will help you understand both the biomechanics of your voice and how to use your instrument to produce the best results possible.
I'll also cover powerful exercises used by voice teachers to help you create your own routine. This course is a comprehensive series built for students of all ages and experience levels, covering multiple modules with hours of content and a suite of downloadable resources. It's the first of its kind, reduced to a professional standard, utilizing a variety of techniques to give you world-class vocal instruction.
We use anatomical models, images, animations, and other assets, revealing the physiology taking place when you sing. You'll also see exercises demonstrated with real students to improve your practical application of the techniques. Additionally, you will gain a better understanding of what your voice teacher is trying to accomplish in lessons, and if you don't already have a teacher, you will learn how one can help you and what to look for to make sure you find the right fit.
Best of all, the content is on-demand and viewable from any device. When you finish this course, you will have a comprehensive understanding of your voice and tools you can use for a lifetime to improve your singing, no matter your skill level. The only question is, are you ready to become a better singer?
Actually, let's unlike that. Unmute that. Welcome. Sorry about the little glitches there. Uh, trying out some new, uh, software tonight, and, uh, you know, anytime we do that, things can always happen. We'll take the glasses off since we got a little bit of a clear there. Well, welcome. This is Thursday Night Live. This is sponsored by voicelessons.com. It's our chat, our chance to chat either about things from a singer's point of view, a teacher's point of view, or both. Uh, and tonight, what we're going to be doing is taking some questions that have been coming in from singers from around the world. And so, to begin, I want to start off with, give me a second. Like I said, we have some new software here tonight. So, the first question, and they all got rearranged somehow. All right, there we go. First question comes from Miriam, and Miriam asks, "What does it mean to have good technique?" And this is a question that's come up before, uh, and, you know, various workshops I've taught and other things. And so, let's chat about, uh, in short, not much, right? Because we don't have any, uh, codified techniques for the singing voice. We don't have anything that we would say, "This is always, um, what somebody should be doing if they're trying to perform." And it varies a lot based off of the genre. You see, uh, it used to be believed that, uh, when performers were, uh, you know, singing, that they all needed to have this base foundational technique. But through the years, that's just gotten so distorted that we no longer can say there's any singular technique that's good for, you know, uh, and all kinds of singing.
So, a good technique is a technique that works for you, and it allows you to express, uh, the feelings, the emotions, the stories that you want to tell with your voice, and the vocal qualities you want. And ideally, not ideally, I guess this would be the thing that we would say counts as the good of the good technique: it shouldn't hurt you, you shouldn't lose your voice, and you should feel like you're continually growing and being able to do all kinds of new things with your instrument. So, a good technique should, uh, empower you to be able to sing across a wide range, at least two octaves of your voice. A good technique should enable you to make choices about whether or not your voice flips in certain spots, or if you want to smooth through in those spots. You should be all able to alter registration, which is another question we're going to get to here this evening, and be able to change the balance of your registration on demand. You should be able to freely switch the kind of diction that you use on demand. You should be able to sing more closed, uh, mouth vowels. You should be able to sing more wide open mouth vowels. You should be able to morph through the vowels of your song if you want, or if you want to sing pure vowels, you could learn how to do that. Although that's not good technique for everyone. Acoustic vowels were developed by teachers of classical singing who are trying to help their clients, uh, project their singing voice to the back of an opera house with no microphone. But in many commercial styles today, singers have microphones, so those pure vowels aren't necessary anymore. And on top of all that, the way that you can control your vocal folds, control your vowel, and, uh, control your diction and the choices with how you deliver the language, you should also start to learn how to, uh, feel comfortably inside of your body. A lot of times we call this posture, but I like to think of as body mapping, is making sure you have an accurate map of how the parts of your body work together so that you can get them into optimal alignment for whatever it is that you're trying to do. Because optimal alignment sitting and playing guitar is going to be different than optimal alignment sitting and playing piano, which is different than optimal alignment sitting or standing up and singing with a microphone, which is different than optimal alignment if you're in a musical and you're dancing and singing and acting the whole time. So, it needs to be alignment that's appropriate for what it is that you're trying to do. And then, of course, we need to make sure that you have the right power source underneath of all of this, and the power source is the respiratory system. And we have a couple questions about that tonight that we'll be able to address as well. But just like alignment has to adapt to the situation, so does your respiratory management, uh, choice, right? If you're singing up close to a microphone, what you need to do with your respiratory system is going to be different than what you're going to do if you're in an opera house singing without a microphone. And so, all those things together, uh, are what I would say would, uh, come up to good technique.
Okay, so let's go, like I mentioned, and talk about this idea of what we are talking about with chest and head voice. And, uh, unfortunately, I grabbed this model here, forgot to grab it, but go ahead and pick it up. What's happening when we're singing is we're learning to coordinate the action of several muscles within this, which is the larynx. Now, this model is about four times the size of what an actual larynx feels like. If you want to feel what an actual larynx feels like, just put your fingers down here around your Adam's apple, your Eve's apple, and feel around, and you'll get a good sense of the size of your instrument, your larynx. At the top of the larynx is what's called the hyoid bone, and the hyoid bone attaches to your tongue. So, when we swallow, uh, this will get moved around a little bit, and when we are articulating different vowels and consonants, this can move a little bit. And as this moves, everything underneath it can move as well. This part underneath that hyoid bone is what is called the thyroid cartilage, and the thyroid cartilage is a lot like a Roman shield. It's solid in the front, but it's opened up in the back. And you can see that there are horns that extend upward and horns that extend downward. The horns that extend upward are called the superior horns, and the ones that go down are called the inferior horns. The superior horns connect up here to the hyoid bone, and the inferior horns connect down here to the cricoid cartilage. The cricoid cartilage looks a lot like what's called a signet ring. And a signet ring is one of those rings that you wear where it's got a nice, like, circular, square-like, uh, surface on the top, and then the band narrows down and comes underneath your finger. So, the wide part of the signet ring is back here on the back part of your larynx, on the cricoid cartilage, and then it narrows down into the front. And this is the bottom part, the part that would go underneath of your finger, uh, is up at the front, right underneath of the Adam's apple, Eve's apple. And it's the connection between these inferior horns and the cricoid cartilage that allows your larynx to tilt. And when your larynx tilts, what happens is we move and adjust the length of the vocal folds. Now, the vocal folds in here are represented by this pink and white. The white represents a ligament. There's a ligament that runs through the vocal folds, just like we have ligaments in the rest of our body. And then this muscle is called the thyroarytenoid muscle. And that name, we can break down into two parts: thyroid and arytenoid. And the muscles inside of the larynx, once you know their names, they will also tell you how they function, how they move. So, the thyroarytenoid muscle begins at the thyroid cartilage, it inserts into the arytenoid cartilage, and when it contracts, it tries to pull these arytenoids towards the thyroid cartilage. And when that contraction happens, it shortens those vocal folds and it also thickens them up a little bit, which changes the vocal qualities we're capable of producing.
Now, the last little cartilage I want to touch on, and then we're going to go back to those vocal folds. Uh, the last piece is down here. This is called the trachea, and the trachea are the rings that go down into your lungs, and then it splits like an upside-down Y, having one, two, that goes into your left lung, one that goes into your right lung. And that's how you move air in and out. So, let's look at these muscles a little bit more. Inside of the vocal folds, as I mentioned, that's the thyroid muscle, right here. Then, in the back, you have a set of muscles, these guys called the interarytenoids. And the interarytenoid muscles help hold these vocal folds together. So, the thyroarytenoid muscle helps shorten those vocal folds, and as it shortens them, it bulks them up a little bit. And then the interarytenoid muscles help pull this guy in here and pull them together to adjust thickness of what we call medial compression, which is how much pressure there is on this midline. Now, at the same time, those two muscles are functioning, we also have a muscle called the lateral cricoarytenoid muscle, which is seen right there. It starts from the arytenoid cartilage there, and it goes down and forward into the cricoid cartilage. And when it contracts, it helps swing those arytenoids together. And again, that helps regulate this medial compression. And then, finally, we have these muscles in the front. These are called the cricothyroid muscles. And these cricothyroid muscles start down here at the cricoid cartilage, insert into the thyroid cartilage, and when they contract, they tilt the thyroid cartilage forward on that cricoid cartilage. Now, that seems like a lot, but it is easy to learn how to work with these elements. We do it through sound qualities that we call registers. So, when we want to really bring those vocal folds together and strengthen them, uh, we're going to use chest register. And now, this is kind of like, which comes first, the chicken or the egg, right? So, we can identify the register sound as well to get the muscles to work, or we can, uh, you know, train the muscles through time to work more efficiently to give us the sound quality we want, if the vocal folds are not actually producing those qualities. So, chest voice is a vocal quality where you have a lot of buzz to it, and those vocal folds really come together. And so, it sounds a lot like this when you're in that chest voice quality. The vocal folds are in a full wave of motion. Air is coming up from the bottom, moving them apart, and then they come back together. Now, when you're in head voice, you're on the opposite end of the spectrum. And on the opposite end of the spectrum, you're going to be on the thin upper edge of your vocal folds. As air passes through, they're going to barely touch together. Sounds like this. So, we have full chest, and then everything in the middle is what we call mix. So, the chest vocal folds, just dominant registration, the vocal folds are more of a thick, rectangular position. And when you get up into the head voice, they're in a more triangular, thinner shape. And mix is anything in between. And we develop these parts of our voice to start training those, what we call intrinsic muscles, which are those thyroarytenoid muscle, the lateral cricoarytenoid muscle, the interarytenoid muscle, and the cricothyroid muscle. I think we covered four from there. And it brings those vocal folds together to help produce sound. And so, as we develop them independently, it's going to give you the tools available for you to learn how to mix. And once you master these actions at the vocal fold level, it's going to open up your voice so you can basically do anything that you want with your voice and not have to worry about it too much. Lots of technical fun over here today, aren't we?
All right, so let's go to our next question. All right, so the next question comes from Vivian. We'll touch on this, which is, "Are pop and classical techniques interchangeable?" And this question comes up a lot. And I remember when I was told, uh, when I was first starting to sing, that I wanted to, uh, I should be using, you know, classical technique to sing my rock songs. And while that was something that a lot of people believed a long time ago, we now have science and research to back up the two are not related. Essentially, what we're dealing with is acoustic singing strategies, or on the other side of it, we're dealing with amplified singing strategies. When you are an opera singer, a classical singer, you do not have a microphone. So, everything that you're learning to do with your instrument is based around the fact that you have to acoustically, uh, project your voice acoustically in whatever venue it is that you're singing. So, what that means is that you really have to tune up your respiratory system so that when you take a full breath, you're going to be able to get enough air in your lungs to power the vocal folds and give enough harmonic energy, which is this energy of frequencies that comes out from those vocal folds, to put through your vocal tract, which is everything above the vocal folds, and send it out into the performance hall so that people can hear you. Now, that also requires that you figure out how to fine-tune the position of your soft palate, fine-tune the position of your larynx, and then fine-tune the position of your articulators. And that takes a lot of work. But the thing is, is over on the amplified side of singing, you don't have to do any of that. You just got to get your mic, or your voice, to project enough up to the microphone. And once your voice is picked up by the microphone, the system then takes care of the rest. So, all of a sudden, we don't need the same respiratory management strategy as you would need if you were in an acoustic setting. You also don't need to, uh, you know, worry about fine-tuning every movement of your vocal tract because those movements that we're fine-tuning to get pure vowels, that certain resonance characteristics, are solely for the purpose of projecting your voice acoustically. And once we take that out of the picture, and you're no longer trying to make your voice just carry and letting the microphone do it instead, then you can drop a lot of that out of the way. Then you can let your vowels follow your natural speech patterns. You don't have to worry if your larynx moves up and down like it does in natural speech. You don't need to worry if your soft palate moves up and down like it does in everyday speech. You don't have to worry if some of your words are a little bit humbled, or some of them are really well pronounced, because that again, is what happens in everyday speech. So, in short, the answer is no, they're not interchangeable. You will find some teachers who have techniques that will set you up in whatever style it is that you're singing to be able to transition over to the other styles, right? But a lot of that also is going to depend on what your goals are. If I have a death metal singer who's coming in to work with me, and we're working on growl techniques, and that's where the main focus is of our work, is getting those growl techniques to be comfortable for them, they're not going to easily transition over into being an opera singer because the tours are so far apart. But if I have a musical theater performer who's going through a BFA musical theater program, and they're learning how to sing what the industry still calls "legit," which are these golden age shows that have a lot of classical voice characteristics to them, and that student later decides they want to be an opera singer, then the transition is going to be a lot smoother because then they are transitioning from an acoustic style of singing, which is this legit musical theater, over into another acoustic style of singing, which would be classical voice. So, you know, it's very rare that you're gonna find that those things, uh, you know, interchange smoothly. Uh, but again, if you're, you know, looking to just get your voice to fit one specific style, that shouldn't be your goal anyway, right? You want to be good at the thing that you want to do. And if you are going into music education, or if you're going into music theater, or you just love the human voice and you want it to do everything possible, then by all means, explore all the options in between.
The next question is, "How do you breathe when you sing?" And I think that what we want to talk about with that is, first of all, what's happening inside of our body when we sing. So, we have our anatomical model over here. We're going to use, we're going to talk a little bit about what happens. Okay, so when you inhale, air comes in through the mouth and it travels down through the larynx and then into the trachea. And as I mentioned before, it splits into the lungs, which are hidden behind the rib cage. We'll pop this rib cage out real quick, and then you'll get a better idea of how it comes down and it travels into the lung. And on this side, if we remove this, we will be able to see the other one. Maybe there we go. So, there are two lungs. So, in the lungs, they're full of these little teeny sacs called alveoli, and there are several hundred million of them inside of your lungs. And when you inhale, they fill up like tiny little balloons. And then, as soon as they're filled up and stretched, they're going to want to release all the pressure and the energy that they've built up. And that energy is going to release. The sides are going to collapse in, and your lungs will expel air outwards. Now, there are several other muscle groups that you want to be, uh, aware of that are involved in singing and respiratory control management. For, um, there's a bunch of little muscles that are in between the ribs, like these guys right down here. And there's an outer layer and an inner layer. They're called the internal intercostal muscles and the external, uh, intercostal muscles. The external intercostal muscles start on the bottom edge of a rib and then they insert into the upper edge of the rib below. And when they contract, what they do is they draw this lower rib upwards towards the upper rib. And when that happens, and you breathe in, you're going to feel that rib cage expand outwards like that. Then, what happens is when you let that air go, and those alveoli try to release, your body ends up engaging what are called the internal intercostal muscles. And the internal intercostal muscles start on the upper edge of each rib and they insert into the lower edge of the rib above. And when they contract, they pull that upper rib down towards the lower rib. And what effectively that does is it works as like a bellows. If you've ever started a fire, you use those old bellows things, you got two handles, a bag in the middle, and it blows all the air out through a little metal valve. And so, that's the same thing that's happening with your voice. Those rib cage muscles pull open the bellows, and then they try to engage and push air back and out. And it just keeps doing this, and this, and this, the whole time.
Now, there's one other muscle, and it's a muscle you've probably heard a lot about, but I think it actually receives way too much attention. And that muscle is the diaphragm. And the diaphragm is this little guy right here. It's this muscle that runs on the underside of the lungs. So, here it is in this. You can see how it connects right here, connects to the lungs through what's called a pleural sac. A pleural sac is a liquid membrane. It's very similar to, uh, what would happen if you took a, a plastic bag from a retail store, you put a little water on it, and then you slapped it up against the window. When you put it on the window, you'd be able to slide it around, but it's still going to stick to the window. So, this pleural sac allows everything to slide around in here, but it still keeps the two sticking together. And what happens is when this diaphragm contracts, that pleural sac, because of its suction to the lungs, ends up pulling down the lungs with it. As you pull that lung tissue down, as the diaphragm contracts, it draws air in because that contraction and expansion is going to open up those alveoli. And all of a sudden, your body draws in air. And then, after that diaphragm is fully contracted, it's going to try to release. And as it releases, it's going to allow those, uh, lungs to just let go of all the air, let go of all the, you know, the alveoli take over with their, uh, whatchamacallit, with their elastic recoil at that point in time. Then the singer has to make some choices, and they have to then figure out what to do to manage all the air they just took in. And that brings us to Xavier's question, which is, "How can I get better breath control?" You get better breath control by learning how to manage the muscles I just talked about, along with the abdominal wall muscles. The abdominal wall muscles have connections to the rib cage, especially the rectus abdominis, which goes from this little guy here, which is called the xiphoid process. You have the rectus abdominis that runs from the xiphoid process down to the pubic bone. And when this muscle contracts, it tries to pull this towards that. And that is, if you're working out a lot, you're working on that muscle to get a six-pack. Now, in addition to that, you have transverse and oblique abdominal muscles that wrap around the side. And essentially, they create a girdle that keeps your insides from falling out of your body, gives you some protection, but also when these muscles contract, they help bend your body and move it in all different directions. So, to get better breath control for singing, what you have to do is learn to control your inhalation so that it's smooth. That means we got to start training the body to coordinate the action of the diaphragm and the external intercostal muscles to swing that rib cage up and out as the diaphragm descends. Then you got to teach your body to maintain that expansion and then allow the air to slowly escape, being regulated by your vocal folds. Because at the end of the day, the vocal folds act as a valve on the respiratory system. If you hold those vocal folds really tight together, that means air can't get out. It's as if you went to your garden hose, you just turned it all the way off. But if you just open up your vocal folds all the way, you'll just exhale out. That's as if you turn the garden hose knob all the way on. But when we're singing, we want to make variations somewhere in the middle. If we are in a chest-dominant mix, that means our vocal folds are more firmly closed together than if we are in a head-dominant mix. More than likely, in that chest-on mix, you're going to have a little less airflow coming through those vocal folds than if you were in the head dynamics. So, what we have to do then is start learning how to resist the collapse. And what resisting the collapse means is learning how to engage those external intercostal muscles to keep that rib cage up and out so that air slowly releases from your voice instead of quicker. If we get a big jump, a burst, you'll get almost like a little shouty sound, or you'll find that it's just really hard to mix. You'll find that it's hard to transition through different parts of your voice. All those things aren't good. So, the first thing to do, Xavier, is just to start getting your hands on your outer ribs. What I have dusted, I think, for picking up the model off the bookshelf, but, um, put your hands on your bottom ribs, breathe in, and then I want you to just maintain that, uh, external, external intercostal engagement. Just hold your breath for a second. So, we would get, and then hiss. And as you hiss, what you're going to do is try to keep your rib cage elevated. And at the same time, you're going to try to relax your abdominal wall. You want to be careful not to contract or engage this rectus abdominal muscle because if you do, it's going to try to pull down your rib cage, and you're going to end up sending out more air than you want. You're also going to want to make sure that your side abdominal muscles do not engage for the same reason. They attach to your bottom ribs, and if they engage, they're going to pull your rib cage down, and they're going to give you more exhalation pressure or flow than what it is that you're looking for.
So, short Q&A tonight. It's the middle of the summer, plus we've had a couple of little, uh, technique, uh, technique technical issues here. My first time using our new broadcasting platform. Um, great. And for some reason, I'm not even getting any, uh, comments tonight. So, if you've tossed in some comments and I haven't grabbed them, I apologize. I have not seen anything pop through on my screen tonight. Uh, like I said, it's summertime, so we're just trying out some new things here. But, uh, I want to thank you for joining me tonight. If this approach to voice is of interest to you, I want to encourage you to head on over to how-the-voice-works.com and check out my newest course. We'll pop this up, uh, voice, there we go. Pop that up on the screen there. That's the new website. And, uh, because we had a little bit of problems with the video at the top of the show, I'm going to go ahead and see if we can't pull it back up. There we go. And see if we can't run it again. It's gonna run. Nope. We're gonna try one more. We're gonna open up a different video here and see if we can play it and give you a sneak peek of how the voice works. Thanks for tuning in tonight. We go live every Thursday night at 7 PM. Look forward to seeing you next week.
How can you be a better singer? Whether you're building your career as a professional singer or you're just passionate about improving your skills, but the question we all want to know is, how can we improve? I'm Dr. Matt Edwards, a tenured professor, author, and professional voice teacher who has taught thousands of students from beginners to established pros. My students have performed on American Idol and other national TV shows, on Broadway, and on international tours. Over the course of my career, I have been a proud contributor to the development of a systematic, scientifically based hub for teaching popular singing styles. I teach everything from rock to country, jazz, hip-hop, musical theater. My mission is to deliver the highest quality training available in order to promote and foster vocal development, producing sustainable and repeatable results. This course is the result of distilling years of teaching at a university level and instructing professional singers. I draw upon historical traditions, scientific research, exercise science, vocology. So, whether you're discovering your voice for the first time or you've worked professionally for years, this online course is a robust training toolkit that will help you understand both the biomechanics of your voice and how to use your instrument to produce the best results possible. I'll also cover powerful exercises used by voice teachers to help you engage your routine. This is a comprehensive series built for students of all ages, covering multiple modules. We use anatomical models, images, and animations. Additionally, you will gain a better understanding of what your voice teacher's trying to accomplish. And if you will have a comprehensive understanding of your voice and tools you can use for a lifetime to improve your singing, no matter your skill level. The only question is, are you ready to become a better singer?