A Small Adjustment to Unlock Your Voice

The creation of this week’s video was prompted by my observation of many singers struggling with high notes and a beautiful, resonant sound.

And yet, sometimes all it takes is a small adjustment to have a big impact on the quality of our singing!

 

Watch the video to learn more:

 

 

The Power of Persistence

While natural talent plays a significant role, there’s one quality that can make all the difference in achieving vocal excellence: persistence. Just like any skill, becoming a good singer requires dedication, commitment, and consistent practice. In this newsletter we’ll explore the importance of persistence in practicing vocal warm-ups and how it can transform your singing abilities.


Building Vocal Strength and Endurance:

Much like athletes warm up their bodies before a rigorous workout, singers need to prepare their vocal cords and muscles for the demanding task of hitting challenging notes and sustaining melodies. Regular vocal warm-ups not only improve the overall flexibility and strength of the vocal apparatus but also enhance endurance, allowing singers to deliver flawless performances without strain.

Persistence is key in this process. By incorporating daily warm-up routines into your practice sessions, you condition your vocal cords and muscles over time, gradually expanding your vocal range and achieving greater control over your voice. It’s through consistent effort that your vocal strength and endurance will soar, helping you conquer even the most complicated melodies effortlessly.


Improving Vocal Technique:

Beyond mere physical conditioning, vocal warm-ups are an opportunity to refine your singing technique. The repeated practice of various exercises, such as scales, arpeggios, long tones, and so on, allows you to focus on specific aspects of your voice, such as breath control, pitch accuracy, and resonance. Persistence in practicing these exercises helps develop muscle memory and trains your vocal instrument to perform with precision and consistency.

By persistently working on your vocal technique, you can address any limitations or challenges in your voice, gradually eliminating weaknesses and enhancing strengths. Over time, this meticulous practice will mold you into a well-rounded singer with great vocal control and a magnetic vocal presence.


Expanding Vocal Range and Flexibility:

One of the most sought-after abilities for singers is the expansion of their vocal range. While some individuals may have a natural inclination towards a wide range, others may need to put in more effort to develop it. Here, persistence plays a vital role.

Through consistent and focused warm-up exercises, you can gradually extend your vocal range, reaching higher notes and delving into lower areas of the range (yes, don’t forget your low notes!). Persistent practice enables the vocal cords to stretch and become more flexible, allowing you to access previously uncharted territories in your voice.

Please do remember that pushing too hard or attempting to force your voice beyond its current capabilities can lead to strain or injury. Persistence should be balanced with patience and the guidance of a knowledgeable vocal coach to ensure healthy progress and avoid potential damage.


Cultivating Confidence and Performance Skills:

Persistent practice of vocal warm-ups not only enhances your technical abilities but also nurtures your confidence as a performer. The more you practice, the more comfortable you become with your voice, allowing you to express yourself fully and authentically during a performance.

By consistently engaging in vocal warm-ups, you train your mind and body to overcome performance anxiety, enabling you to deliver your best even in high-pressure situations.

Remember, persistence is not about instant results but about the long-term journey of improvement. Embrace the process, enjoy each milestone, and celebrate the progress you make along the way. With unwavering dedication and a commitment to daily vocal warm-ups, you’ll unlock the full potential of your voice and embark on a transformative journey towards becoming an extraordinary singer.

Happy journey!

What Do You Do Right Before a Performance?

What do you do and think about right before a performance?
 
Generally, the hours and minutes before getting on stage are spent going over some last minute details, warming up the voice, making sure we look presentable, maybe dealing with some stage fright and trying to calm ourselves, making sure we’re staying hydrated, and so on. Right?
 
Basically, our focus is on ourselves. That’s understandable: we want to be ready and to give our best, and that’s obviously good.
 
However, I’d like to suggest that we also spend some time thinking about the people we’re about to sing for. Take a real, genuine interest in them.
 
I don’t mean in a personal, one-on-one way. Be sincerely interested in helping them have a deep and inspiring experience through the music you’re about to share.
 
If you’re sincere, and you’re sensitive enough, you can actually tune into what some of those individuals’ needs at this particular time may be. This awareness might even lead you to choose one song over another, or change the order of the songs, or the kind of interpretation you give them, because you feel that that’s what your audience needs.
 
This can happen only if you look at your audience as if you were looking at a group of friends, instead of strangers. I say this because in the performance world there’s often the tendency to separate the artist from the audience, almost as if they were from two different worlds.
 
This is absurd: without an audience, the “showbiz” would cease to exist!
 
Whatever you can do to create any kind of psychic connection with your audience will help you be a more effective and impactful performer. Smile at them, invite them into your world of music, beauty, and art. That’s what they’re there for. If they had the skill, they would do it on their own. Instead, they need you to be the “conduit” of that inspiration for them.
 
If we ever lose sight of what performing is all about, let’s remember that the bottom line question should always be, “How can I help and serve my audience better?”
 
If you do that, you will always be in demand as a singer, not by hysterical fans, but by hearts that need upliftment and healing.
 

Exploring the Vocal Range

If you’ve ever done any singing (which I’m sure you have), you’ve probably noticed that, as you move from low to high notes, you reach a point where the voice seems to hit like a ceiling, and in order to continue, you have to push your voice out, or it will break.

This happens because the voice has reached the end of that register, and in order to go higher without strain or tension, you need to know how to shift to another register.

Otherwise, it’s very much like trying to drive faster and faster without shifting from first gear: the engine will be on high RPM and won’t work properly.

There are two main registers in singing: chest register (also called “chest voice”) and head register (or “head voice”).

Most people use their chest register when they speak and when they sing in the lower range. That’s the area of the range that usually everyone is comfortable with. However, the chest voice alone doesn’t allow you to cover your whole vocal range, just like the first gear doesn’t allow you to drive at any speed the car is capable of.

If you want to extend your range, and sing all the notes that your vocal cords can produce, you need to transition to your head voice. This transition happens at the top of your chest voice, right where things start to get hard. Tension building up in your throat is a signal that it’s time to transition to your head voice.

How do you make that transition? In general, the two most important factors in learning how to transition from chest to head voice are:

  • Keep the throat open and relaxed (the natural tendency in this area of the range would be to tighten the throat instead)
  • Pull back and sing a little softer (again, the natural tendency would normally be to sing louder in the attempt to “break through” that ceiling I was talking about).

Usually, in the beginning the head voice will sound weaker and breathier than the chest voice. That’s completely normal and it’s just a phase. Also, initially the “break” between chest and head voice can be very noticeable. This is because the muscles whose function is to stretch the vocal cords (which allows you to sing higher notes, just like when you stretch the strings of a guitar), aren’t well coordinated and developed yet.

As you practice, it will gradually become stronger and fuller. It’s a sign of good vocal technique when a singer is able to transition seamlessly from chest to head, without any change in the tone. When it’s completely developed, your head voice should have the same tone quality, fullness, and strength as your chest voice.

Goodbye

Vocal habits to leave in 2022

At the end of 2022 I was thinking about various vocal habits that I acquired over the years: some good, some not so good.
 
In this newsletter I’d like to go through some bad vocal habits that are detrimental to good singing and that I recommend letting go, if possible.
 
 
1. “Pushing” the voice
 
This is a very common habits When things get hard, when the voice doesn’t respond the way we want, when we’re nervous (like during a performance), or when we have to sing high notes without knowing the correct technique for doing so, the most common tendency is to tighten our throat and push the voice out, hoping for the best
 
The sad reality, though, is that the more we push, the more we need to push! And if we’re not careful, pushing can become a chronic habit. So even if we improve our technique later on, and we no longer need to push the voice, we still have to work on getting rid of the habit of doing it.
 
Once you’ve developed a good technique, you’ll be amazed at how little effort it takes to sing! The voice will project out loud and clear without effort on your part, whereas pushing the voice will make it actually softer and less able to project far from you. (Ironic, isn’t it!)
 
 
2. Singing/performing without warming up
 
Don’t underestimate the importance of warming up your voice before singing. It may seem like you can do without it when you’re young (just like you can run without first stretching your muscles), but even so, warming up will ensure longevity of your vocal instrument, no matter your age. The voice is the only instrument that’s part of your body and you carry it with you everywhere. You don’t get to store it in a protective case and put it away until the next usage! So do your best to take care of it.
 
You should warm up 10-15 minutes at the very least before every performance; better still 20-30 minutes. If you don’t know any warm ups and want to learn some, you can sign up for my free monthly warm up sessions.
 
 
3. Singing absentmindedly
 
Singing on autopilot, without any awareness of what you’re doing, is a great disservice to your audience, the music you sing, and to yourself as well. It can turn even the most beautiful song into a kind of a dirge! Music is alive and fresh. Every performance is a new experience, and your job as a singer is to infuse the music you sing with new inspiration every time you sing it.
 
If you’ve sung a song many times and you feel bored by it, don’t sing it! But if it’s a meaningful song, I suspect that the reason why you’re bored is not because of the song, but because you haven’t gone deep enough in it. Ever-deepening attunement with a song keeps the inspiration alive and fresh.
 
I hope you find these suggestions useful.
 
I wish you all the best in 2023. Happy New Year!

How Stage Fright Affects the Voice

Someone recently asked me to share something about stage fright and how it affects the voice when singing. So here you go…

Stage fright can affect your singing voice in many ways. While good vocal technique can make up for many of them, there are some workarounds to help you at least minimize the effect of performance anxiety.

When you’re nervous in performance you may experience some or all of the following:

  1. You forget words
  2. Your voice is shaky
  3. You have less breath
  4. You get lightheaded
  5. Your body gets tense
  6. Difficult passages give you the jitters!

1. Forgetting words is very common. There’s a lot going on in a performance, and a lot has to happen before the performance even starts. Often, by the time the concert starts, you’ve been running around quite a bit, figuring out last minute details and going over things one last time. So it’s not unusual to feel a bit flustered when the actual performance starts.

Besides the obvious suggestion to sing the song MANY times before the performance, to ensure the words all well etched in your mind, I recommend spending a few minutes sitting down and doing some deep diaphragmatic breathing right before the concert, to help your nervous system calm down and your mind to get centered and focused again.

 

2. When you develop a solid vocal technique you will be able to control a shaky voice. Make sure you engage your belly muscles, in order to have good and strong breath support, which provides a steady flow of air through the vocal cords, and, therefore, a steady sound.

 

3. The faster heartbeat, caused by stage fright, is often responsible for decreased breath capacity. You may find yourself running out of breath a lot more often, and in places where, in rehearsal, you didn’t need to breathe. If you know that you get performance anxiety, I suggest you plan on taking more breaths, during your songs, than you feel you need to. That way, you’ll be prepared and you won’t run out of breath during the performance, which would be distracting.

 

4. & 5. Spend a good amount of time doing some diaphragmatic breathing. Take long, deep breaths expanding your belly out, then exhale pulling your belly in. Diaphragmatic breathing helps you relax, lowering the harmful effects of the stress hormone cortisol on your body. It lowers your heart rate. It helps lower your blood pressure. AVOID caffeine before a performance! Besides making you dehydrated, it also increases your heart rate, which is what you’re trying to slow down with diaphragmatic breathing.

 

6. Take your time! The natural tendency, when facing difficult passages, is to speed up, probably because of the faster heart rate. Relax, sing consciously one note at a time, even to the point of almost slowing down. Often, it seems to you like you’re slowing down, but you’re not. It’s just that your brain is hyperactive and is moving faster!

 

If you catch yourself getting nervous again during the concert, before singing a certain song, do more diaphragmatic breathing. Deep breathing is your best friend in times of stage fright symptoms.

But overtime, the best weapon you have to counteract stage fright is a solid vocal technique. It gives you confidence and makes you able to hide or camouflage anything that might go wrong in performance.

 

Christmas Choir

It’s not too late if you start now!

If you’re like me, you’re probably going to have a fairly busy holiday season with concerts, various performances, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year celebration involving music, and who knows what else!

Even though this happens regularly every year, it took me a few years to “get it together” and start gearing up (vocally speaking) to the holiday marathon early enough, so that my voice would be strong and resilient throughout the whole season.

I’d like to share with you what I do with my preparation (which is starting now), so that maybe you’ll feel inspired to do the same and avoid any vocal problems that may come from putting your voice under stress without adequate preparation.

First of all, if you haven’t been doing regular vocal warm ups, I suggest you start now. Spend at least 20-30 minutes every day doing some vocal exercises. Circle through various kinds of exercises: scales, arpeggios, long tones.

(If you don’t know any vocal warm ups, you can check out my Youtube channel, starting with this playlist. You can also join my free monthly live sessions of guided vocal exercises).

Go easy for the first 5 minutes, then start going higher and higher in the range, until you cover your whole range with each successive exercise.

After doing this daily for a week, sing a song or two after each warm up session. Warm ups are like the stretching exercises marathon runners do to prepare for a run; singing is like the actual running.

Gradually increase the amount of time you spend singing after each warm up session, until, about a week before the beginning of your holiday performances, you can easily sing for the same length of time as your performance.

If you don’t have enough time to sing for this long every day, you can break down your practice time into 2 sessions. But remember to warm up again at the beginning of the second session.

Another factor in singing during the holiday season – at least for those living in the northern hemisphere – is…cold.

Make sure you protect your throat from cold air, especially right after singing, when your vocal cords are warm. If you have to spend time outdoors, or even sing outdoors, wrap a scarf around your neck. Avoid breathing through your mouth when you’re outdoors, so that the air can get warmer before it reaches your bronchi and lungs.

Ok, I think I covered all the basics! Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions.

Have a wonderful preparation time!

Embrace Your Uniqueness!

Do you know what slows down aspiring singers’ progress the most? (Drumroll please…)

Lack of self-confidence.

You may think, “Well, after all, how can one feel confident about their singing when they’re still learning the ropes and they don’t sound so good yet?”

But what I’m talking about here is lack of confidence in our potential and the general tendency to think that our voice isn’t that great, and that we’d rather sound like this or that singer.

It’s completely unfair to judge our voice and to put a label on it while we’re still working on developing it. It’s really like comparing apples and oranges: our voice (a work in progress) and an accomplished singer’s voice (the finished product).

But then ultimately, why compare at all? Each voice is unique, like our fingerprints. If we put down our voice because we don’t like the sound of it, or because it sounds different from so and so, we’re putting down our uniqueness, our individuality.

Your voice expresses the qualities of your soul and, as such, defines you as an individual more than you may think. This is why, when someone undertakes some serious work to improve themselves as people, you always notice an improvement in the quality of their voice, even their speaking voice; it becomes smoother and sweeter.

As singers, we should learn to accept how we sound, while we work on improving our technique. A better technique doesn’t make you sound “different.” It just optimizes how you use your voice, so that your true, innate sound can surface. And you don’t know what that will be like until the job is done.

When you feel judgmental toward your voice, try telling yourself a different story. Remind yourself that this is the voice you were given, it’s part of who you are, and you’re working on improving it so you can use it to express your soul qualities. You don’t want to sound like someone else; that’s their unique sound and their individual soul qualities they’re expressing, not yours.

Once your voice is completely developed, and you’ve sung for a while, you will see that there’s no other sound you’d rather have, because your own consciousness is imprinted in your voice, and no other sound could express it more perfectly.

Here’s to your uniqueness!

Practical Tools for Choirs and Ensembles

In one of my recent newsletters I talked about singing in an ensemble and the importance of tuning into other singers and blending.

As I promised, here are some practical exercises to help you do that effectively by expanding your awareness to include not just your own voice, but everyone else’s singing with you.

I suggest you practice these exercises with your group or choir, maybe at the beginning of your next rehearsal.

  •  Stand in a circle; practice a warm-up that you’re all very familiar with. It can be something very easy like 1-2-3-4-5-4-3-2-1. Start by feeling that you’re singing THROUGH the person on your left; feel that their voice is actually your voice. Then do the same with the person on your right.
  • Do the same with the person ACROSS from you in the circle, and ask them to do the same with you.
  • Pair up with another singer in your group; sing a song together and ask your buddy to meticulously match you: same tone, same volume, same breaths, everything. Basically, they should pretend like they’re you. Then switch roles and do the same with them.
  • Stand in your usual formation and sing a song; ask each section to focus their attention on another section. They should be keenly aware of the part that the other section is singing, while singing their own. After some time, ask them to focus on a different section, until everyone has had a chance to focus on every other section in the group.
  • If you’re a religious/spiritual group, spend some time praying or meditating together before your practice. Ask that each one of you be guided to perform the song according to God’s will. Then, as you sing, let the song lead the way, so to speak. Try to feel and follow what’s trying to happen, instead of imposing your idea of how things should be done.

When you learn to sing this way, you feel great freedom inside. You realize that you’re not in charge, but you’re part of something bigger. It’s exhilarating! More and more, people in the audience will tell you how your performance has transformed and uplifted them.

I hope you’ll find these suggestions helpful. Try them and let me know how it goes!

Keep singing!

–Ramesha

Teamwork ⚽

A while ago I was listening to Beethoven’s 9th symphony, one of my favorite pieces of classical music. In the 4th movement there’s a section where 4 soloists sing together. They all had amazing voices, but I couldn’t help noticing how not connected with one another they seemed to be.

When I asked a friend of mine who’s an opera singer, he told me that in that genre of music the beauty and uniqueness of the tone is the most important thing. Singers aren’t interested in “blending.”

That’s well and good, if you sing Beethoven’s 9th, but if you sing in a choir or a small ensemble, one of the most important things is to BLEND!

What does that mean? It’s obviously impossible to sound exactly like another singer, because each voice is unique.

Here are some things that have worked for me over the years in terms of blending in a group:

  • Tune into other people’s volume; make sure your voice doesn’t stick out, making it sound like you’re the soloist accompanied by an ensemble!
  • Don’t impose your dynamics on the group, but tune into where the group energy is going. Dynamics – in case you don’t know – are variations in loudness between notes or phrases. Of course, some of these things get discussed and agreed upon ahead of time. However, a piece of music is a living thing, and very often dynamics happen unexpectedly, and your job as a singer is to tune into it and add your energy to what’s happening.
  • Expand your awareness to include the whole group! This is probably the single most important piece of advice for singing in a group. Sharpen your ears and be aware of everyone’s part, or where everyone takes a breath, or anything else happening in the group.
  • If there’s a designated leader, follow them. This might seem obvious, but many people want to be independent and they’re “allergic” to following others! 😊
  • I should have put this first, but…If you’re a religious/spiritual group, pray before you sing. Why? Praying helps every group member to tune into the same source of inspiration (God), and that, actually,  makes things a lot easier, because everyone then is following the same guidance. When everyone sincerely tunes into a higher consciousness, very often the song literally takes on a life of its own, and you end up singing it in a way that can be new and unexpected. Later you might learn, from people’s comments, that those unexpected “turns of events” helped them have a particularly deep and powerful experience.

In a future newsletter I will suggest practical exercises to develop some of the above skills to help you and the members of your ensemble to feel more connected as you sing.