Vocal Advice

(I’m 15) I have trouble breathing every time I sing and because of that, every time a note is supposed to be sung and sustained long, I can’t hold the note because of my breathing.  Is there a way to improve my breathing when I sing?

Answer: Your question is a perceptive one.  At your age the problem may not be entirely with your breathing aparatus.

There are actually two components to the answer of your question.  One is respiration-related, and the other is phonation-related.  Breathing and making sound.  It will be helpful for you to learn to breathe for singing.  Make sure your posture is erect and your chest buoyant.  Breathe deeply so that the area around your waist is the part of you that expands the most.  Then learn to “stay expanded” and only release small amounts of air as needed for making clear tone.  To get the feel of this do the following exercise:

1) Inhale deeply, setting things up by dropping your jaw as if beginning a yawn,
2) sustain the breath in your body for a slow count of three – keeping your throat open,
3) sustain an “S” very softly, slowly metering out the air aiming to sustain the soft “hiss” for 30 – 60 seconds.  Maintain tall posture throughout the exercise.  Practice this repeatedly, daily.  This will help you learn what is involved for the body to breathe for singing.  Memorize these sensations and apply them when you sing.  Your upper chest should remain fairly still, “quiet” while your tummy area (epigastrium) in particular will stretch and expand on inhalation, and steadily contract on exhalation.  Place one hand just below your collar bones and the other just below your breast bone (sternum) for this exercise.  This is described in more detail in texts in vocal pedagogy and identified as “diaphragmatic-intercostal” breathing based on the use of the primary muscle groups involved.

The second part of the answer to your question is that you will need to cultivate the ability to produce very clear ringing tone – not breathy tone.  When excess air escapes, so does the breath.  This is a function of your voice (vocal cords) – and it helps to “think” clear tone too.  Your ability to produce very clear tone (efficient phonation) is in part dependent upon your age.  Since you’re in your mid-teens – you may need to allow yourself time (a few months or years) for your voice to mature, while you sing without trying through tension to sound like one who has a mature voice.  If you were in your twenties or older, you should be able to produce a clear ringing tone without unnecessary tension.

Having said all this, you need to know that your best progress will be while studying with a qualified and competent voice teacher.  Best wishes to you.

Answer: Hi Jameson,

Good question!  There are good reasons for what you feel.  As a voice teacher who often records the lessons of his students, I run into the same thing frequently with my students.

As singers, we hear but a fraction of the sound we produce coming to us from the “outside.”  Sound from our larynx (voice box) travels instantly through our Eustachian tubes directly to our ears (inside us), plus the vibrations and sounds travel through both bone structure and muscle tissue to our ears.  So, much of the sound we hear from ourselves comes to our perception from the INSIDE.  Therefore, a significantly smaller fraction of the whole is what we hear “bouncing off the walls of the room” in which we’re singing and comes to us from the outside.

Here’s the clincher that we as singers have to reckon with: we don’t hear ourselves the way everyone else hears us!  Guess how everyone else hears us? …  They hear us the same way a good recording of ourselves reveals.  The kicker is that since we never (or rarely) get exposed to how we sound to the world, when we hear ourselves recorded, our very frequent response is: “Oh no! That’s not me is it!?”

Part of our struggle is that over the years, all we know about our own sound is what we ourselves hear while singing.  This means that when we strive to make “beautiful and expressive” sound we’ve arrived at our aesthetic judgments based almost entirely as we hear ourselves and our impressions of ourselves - which is NOT how others hear us.

In the process of studying voice, student singers quite literally have to relearn how they listen - and re-educate themselves as to what “good sound” is - because on first exposure they often think of it as “ugly” “harsh” “edgy” etc.  You may not be studying voice, but you’ve experienced what many voice students experience when they hear themselves recorded.

If others like what they hear when you sing - you have a lot going for you - but your ears may still need to be “educated” as to the “real” sound coming out.

I hope this has been helpful.  Best wishes.

When singing, how can you open your throat?

Answer: Hi Crystal,

My guess is that “open your throat” is the dictum of someone who is coaching you in voice.  I know when I was a teenager a vocal coach said something off-the-wall to me that made no sense to me - until years later when more data “explained” everything.

“Opening the throat” is what enriches, warms and amplifies the sound produced by the vocal cords, and it doesn’t need to be a mystery to you.  Let me see if I can help.

You can find what it FEELS like to open your throat by doing the following three things.

1) Pretend that you’ve just opened the door into your home and you’re SURPRISED by an old friend you haven’t seen in two years.  You automatically “gasp” in surprise.  Go ahead and do the “surprised gasp”.  Now, do it again and see if you can hold that feeling. Then, keeping that feeling, say “Hi! how are you!?”

2) Again, using your imagination, pretend that you’re holding your favorite flower (perhaps a rose) in your hand and you’re taking in the wonderful perfumed scent with a deep breath.  Go ahead and pretend that you’re smelling that rose.  Notice what happened to your jaw and throat when you did that!

3) This time, still using your imagination, think of yourself in a meeting being lectured by your principal - and you suddenly feel the need to yawn.  Of course you don’t want to make it obvious, you submerge it instead.  Now, go ahead and “BEGIN A YAWN”.  See if you can stop there without going all the way into the yawn.  If you can learn what it feels like to only BEGIN A YAWN - memorize what that feels like.

I should tell you that there are teachers that will go into a great amount of detail differentiating between the three examples praising one and warning against the others.

Nevertheless, it will be evident that in each case you’ll notice that your jaw drops downward (and your voice box does too slightly), your throat expands slightly and if you inhale with your mouth open the air feels cool in the back of the throat and the air goes in you easily and quietly.  THAT FEELING - of the jaw dropped down and the throat slightly expanded is what is known as the “open throat.”

It may take some practice and getting used to before you can reproduce it without always ending up yawning.  The full yawn is TOO OPEN and TOO STRENUOUS - and that’s not what you need to get to. Memorize the feeling of “the beginning of a yawn” or “smelling a rose” and start making sound without being critical of what you hear.  You may think of the sound as being “bigger” “more mature” “dramatic”, etc.

Learning to do this may not come instantly, but, with practice you can become very comfortable with it and allow ALL YOUR SINGING to come through this “open throat” feeling.  Listen to and watch Stephen Costello, tenor, and Jessye Norman, mezzo-soprano (among a host of wonderful singers).

To help your jaw get used to dropping open freely, you may want to add an exercise like “Yah-oo, Wah-oo” purposely allowing your jaw to “fall open” freely.

Now, having said all this that sounds positive toward the idea of the “open throat” I must issue a warning. There is a very real danger of artificially opening and/or over opening the pharyngeal space creating unwanted tension, a darkened tone and even a compromised resonance that lacks brilliance of the singer’s formant.  The concept of the open throat does not extend to expanded tension, but rather easy “relaxed” openness that maintains freedom of movement.  It is at this point that sound is enriched, amplified into a timbre listeners greatly appreciate.

I hope this helps.  Best wishes.

I sing from my diaphragm but the air flushes out real quickly & I am out of tone.  Do I have to harden my stomach to trap the air?  Is there any exercise to control exhaling air from the diaphragm?

Answer: Your questions are good ones.  Your notion that the diaphragm is vitally involved in the breathing process is right on too.  However, there are at least two prongs to the answer for taking care of air that flushes out too quickly. One IS related to breathing and support, the other is related to using your voice efficiently – turning all the breath into clear ringing tone.

Concerning breathing and support

Here is an exercise that may help you learn the feel of breathing for singing: Be sure you are standing or sitting with good tall posture.  Place one hand open-palmed on your “tummy” and the other just below your collar bones high on your chest.  What you should notice is that the hand by your collar bones stays quite still, while the lower hand on your epigastrium (tummy area) moves in and out constantly.

a) inhale deeply – feeling the “middle” of your body expand all around (the lower hand).

b) immediately after inhaling, suspend the breath inside you, keeping it there by staying expanded and without closing your vocal cords.  Yes, you will probably notice that the surface of your tummy does get “tighter” with expansion.  Hold it there for two or three seconds just to learn the sensations of maintaining air inside you for a moment, then

c) very lightly produce an “s” (hiss) while metering out the air very slowly.  Stay expanded as far as possible.  Aim to make this last 30 – 60 seconds.  By the time you need to inhale again, you should feel (with the hand placed on your tummy) that those muscles have contracted – but that it was a gradual process.  Do 10 repetitions of this exercise in a row.  Singing well requires the expansion in the body, the sustaining of that breath in the body, and the slow metering out of the air.  It is a learned skill.  Note, the upper hand high on the chest should have remained relatively still.  The hand on your tummy-area (epigastrium) will have moved out on your intake of air and slowly moved in as you metered the air out.

Concerning clear ringing tone (efficient use of the vocal cords)

The other half of the equation is that the sound you produce must be very clear – that is, not breathy.  The essence of a breathy tone is tone that is letting out air too quickly.  Let me suggest the following exercise as an introduction to finding some clear sound.  You’re going to sigh several times.  The first time, sigh letting all the breath out easily and quickly and without any voiced sound, just a gust of air released.  The second time sigh again, start somewhat high in your range with just a little sound.  It’ll be something like a voiced yawn and very breathy, and pitch will descend quickly.  The third time, increase the amount of sound you are giving the sigh.  You’ll notice that it sounds a bit like a siren going down in pitch and it was louder than the second repetition.  On the fourth and final time, make it your aim to still “feel” as though you’re sighing, but turn ALL the breath into clear ringing sound.  You’ll notice that the sound is a good deal louder than ever before and the downward siren lasts a good deal longer than any of the previous “sighs.”  What you’ve done is to use your vocal cords increasingly more efficiently.  You’ve made increasingly clearer tone.

To sustain long musical phrases you need to cultivate the skill of breathing for singing such as is described above as well as maintaining tone that is very clear – both at the same time. This takes concentrated practice on a daily basis – and usually most effectively under the guidance of a good voice teacher.  Still, the two exercises I’ve suggested above can get you started.  Best wishes to you.