by Ramesha Nani

In 2007 I was hired as a music teacher at a spiritually-oriented, alternative college. I enjoyed teaching there; the class was small – around ten students – and they all seemed special people to me. They were exceptionally centered and wise, especially for their age.

My assignment was twofold: teach them about the role that art, and music in particular, has to uplift humankind, and teach them to sing as a small choir. We focused on learning simple songs. At first we all sang melody, then progressed to two-part songs to get them accustomed to singing different parts.

One of the students (whom I’ll call Chris) seemed to have a particularly hard time carrying the melody on any song, which became even more evident when we started to sing two parts. I tried to encourage him, but I didn’t have much hope that he could ever learn to sing. He wanted to sing so much, and he loved the music so deeply that I felt I had to do whatever I could to help him.

We decided that we would meet thirty minutes before the beginning of each class, at the end of lunch time, to practice together the songs that we would be singing later with the rest of the class. I gave him some tips for how to better use his voice and corrected his pitch every time he lost it (which was very often!). My overall plan was to make him feel more comfortable using his singing voice. We discovered that Chris had a beautiful bass voice, so we worked on enhancing those gorgeous low notes while also accessing his higher range. Amazingly, he managed to accomplish this almost immediately. Expanding his vocal range made him capable of holding the pitch more and more often, which gave him the confidence and belief that yes, he could learn to sing!

By the end of the school year, Chris had made so much progress that he started to lead chanting sessions, learned the bass parts to many songs, and even sang a small solo at a concert. During the time that we worked together we developed a deep and lasting friendship.

As his singing improved, his love for music grew, too. After college he took cello and piano lessons.

A few months ago I was deeply moved when Chris got married and asked me to be his best man. He and his wife sang together a song that’s part of the wedding ceremony.

Chris’s story helps me remember that everybody has a voice! Sometimes it’s buried under bad vocal habits, tension, or emotional fear of using it (if someone in our past was critical of our singing or even speaking up, it can makes us unconsciously hide our voice). Chris expressed this beautifully in a testimonial that he wrote for me after college:

“Ramesha has helped me to develop as a singer. He has supported me and continuously encouraged me, without which I might not have been able to uncover the joy of singing.

Over the last couple of months we’ve been working with our choir on Christmas music. The Christmas concert is one of the highlights of Holiday Season here at Ananda Village where we live, and a lot of energy and many hours of rehearsal go into it.

This is also the only concert throughout the year where we don’t perform only Ananda music, but we branch out to other music, especially Haendel’s Messiah. For those of you who might not be familiar with it, the Messiah is a monumental masterpiece that tells the story of Christ’s life in music. We usually perform only two or three songs from it, and people love it.

Unlike most Ananda music, which we’re used to performing, the Messiah songs are more challenging, vocally. There are more high notes, rhythmically challenging phrases, and the choir is often required to sing forte (loud) for extended periods of time. For this reason, we spent a lot of our warm-up time working on how to project the voice without strain. What’s the difference between projecting and pushing one’s voice? Is it possible to sing loud and project the sound without pushing?

Projecting the voice implies good placement. You place the voice correctly – which means that your sound is full, resonant, but relaxed – and then increase the air pressure by actively engaging your abdominal and diaphragmatic muscles to support the air flow. No extra tension should be placed on the throat by squeezing or tensing it. If the voice is not placed correctly, however, and you increase the air pressure, you will still get a louder sound, but because of the lack of a stable placement, the sound won’t be pure and you will have to tense or squeeze the throat to adjust it.

It’s like a radio that is not perfectly tuned to a radio station. You hear some music along with static. If you want to hear the music better you can either increase the volume (=pushing), or fine tune the radio to the radio station, until all the static is gone (projecting through correct placement).

Long Tones Exercise

One of the best ways I know to improve the quality of your sound is to practice long tones:

Pick a low note in your range that you can hit easily and sing any vowel (ee, ay, aah, oh, oo); hold the note long enough to give yourself time to gradually relax your throat more and more as you keep singing.

Experiment with how much you can relax and still be singing. If you relax too much, your voice will sound weak and “breathy”.

Practice with different vowels and different notes; go up a half step at a time and repeat the same procedure.

As you hold your notes and relax, you might notice that your voice will wobble a little. This happens because you’re gradually releasing tension from your throat and relying more on your diaphragm for support (this is supposed to happen).

Practice this exercise in different areas of your range.

In general: don’t try to sing very loud until your vocal placement is really good. When your sound stays consistently full and resonant, whether you’re singing high or low, softer or louder, then you’re ready to work on “turning up the volume”. As you do so, make sure to not tense your throat, but work with increasing the pressure from your belly muscles.