Release And Flexibility part 1

Rainer Maria Rilke: ‘May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back.’

This is a great way to think about how we can experience our voices.

My goal for you with the material we’re going to explore over the next few weeks is that you experience greater freedom to use your voice, a deeper understanding of how to keep working with your voice, an array of different musical ideas to approach interpretation or composition, some tools to solve any vocal challenges you may find in material you want to sing, and that you develop your confidence and your skill. Give yourself full permission to explore and enjoy without limitation and premature judgement what sound and energy is released when you sing.

Part of this new understanding is going to be technical-you could imagine it like building a bike or a car, and getting the brakes/wheels etc moving, and how to get them moving efficiently, with minimum strain, all the parts supporting the trajectory you want to take. And part of it is going to be musical – so once your voice is working smoothly, you can travel around to whichever notes you want to sing.

Quite often, anxiety about pitch and uncertainty about what note is going to come out next means that we are hesitant about producing sound, and while the vocal apparatus is only going at half power, it’s hard to develop it or really learn how to fine tune it, because the physical feedback we receive isn’t clear enough. So don’t worry if unpredictable pitches come out when you’re here or practicing at home. Speaking of which – decide in advance when you’re going to fit practice in, and check out the ‘help no time!’ cheat sheet. (Check the ‘materials’ tab).

Objectives for session 1:

1. Warm up using slides; focus on moving the sound forwards and directing your attention more consciously to where the sound is vibrating.

2. Learn to identify the narrow ‘ooo‘ sound as a reliable way to get the sound vibrating in your head, and the broad ‘aaaa‘ as a reliable way to get the sound vibrating in your chest. You can use these sounds to help you if it’s hard to move from one register to the other. In time, this will get much easier.

3. Mark your register in on the diagram

4. Start your song list! Make sure you have some slower songs and some faster songs, and across different styles too. This tool helps you get ideas for song at different speeds: https://getsongbpm.com

Lower numbers are slower songs and higher numbers are faster songs.

5. Understand what to do between now and the next session. You can sing along with the audios below and it’s really great to record yourself singing them once a week or so. Think of these recordings as a log. You’re not aiming to ‘sound good’, you’re aiming to use your voice, track changes, and learn to listen for different things. While you’re singing, you have only a limited portion of attention available to simultaneously hear. When you listen back, you can hear much more clearly what changes the adjustments you might make to sound, position, resonance etc create.

To start noticing the different types of vibration and resonance you can create at will, go for an ‘aaa’ sound, like the word ‘bat’. These wide vowel sounds will tend to pull you into thick fold or chest voice. A lot of power can be found in chest voice. Now go for an ‘oooo’ sound. This is a narrower vowel and will tend to pull you into head voice or ‘thin fold’. 

These are two sounds to remember to help you get into the right part of your voice if you’re singing something and suddenly feel like you can’t go high, or that you’re losing power if you go low. Everyone has different unconscious habits with how they use their voice habitually and different parts of your singing voice will be more or less fully developed depending how you speak. 

Whenever you’re confused as to how to change your co-ordination, or the notes disappear, it could be that you’re trying to go high in chest voice or trying to go really low in head voice. Referring to these sounds to ‘reset’ you can be helpful. These sounds, the ‘buzzing’ (moving the vibration around) and using them to move up and down, is the important thing to remember from this session, along with how to think about the training that you’re doing at home. 

If you have not been singing much recently, your priority is to start using and flexing those folds and allowing the sound out. Notice where you feel vibrations. Notice any restriction. 

Our aim with developing your control and understanding of your voice is first of all to get you noticing things, then releasing and relaxing to allow the full sound out, then adjusting things on a technical level as your knowledge increases. 

Your home singing materials:

In your practice, you are aiming for a few different things:

1. To get a positive association with singing and making sound. You want it to feel good, so that it’s not a chore. Hence giving yourself time to really deliberately go through your body relaxing your head, neck, shoulders, rolling them, squeezing and releasing and allowing your breathing to settle into your abdomen.
2. To be in a state of exploration. Especially with all the sliding material, you’re aiming to get familiar with the physical sensation of where you feel the vibration, how it feels to release your tongue and your jaw. If you notice creaks or cracks in certain parts of your range, don’t worry about it – allow yourself to make whatever sounds come out. As you get a bit more used to the way the warm ups feel, you may notice different things – that you have tension in your neck, or that you are able to focus more on relaxing your tongue.
3. It’s always great to play around with the breathy/connected vocals cords too as this builds co-ordination and will eventually allow you to connect the cords with a minimum of effort. You’ll start to get a sense of the cords acting to move together and apart.
4. To bear in mind that you’re learning how to practice, not just what to practice-so although there are suggested exercises and backing tracks, the habits you’re creating will be useful even later when the focus of what you’re doing has shifted.

The sliding gets your cords into a routine of healthy stretching and flexing, but it’s important that you have enough mental bandwidth to be able to go through the steps of relaxing your face, jaw, tongue, shoulders etc – once you have done this enough times deliberately, it will be much easier to go into a relaxed posture straight away.

Backing Tracks For Session One

Here you can stream the backings for the slides with Ng, lip roll, Aaah-oooh-aah, and the slide where you hold your jaw down; as well as Nay Nay Nay. Only go as far as is comfortable.

NG Slide

Lip roll slide

Aaah oooh aaah slide

Slide backing only for any exercise (including chin hold)

Nay Nay Nay