No Blender
You have no blender or food processor in your throat.
The so-called middle voice is not a mixture of head and chest voice.
Stick a nice Kaye laryngeal scope down your throat and take a look.
It actually just goes in your mouth and has a wonderful frequency-measuring microphone to stick on your neck to get your strobe light flashing appropriately.
While you are looking about, you won’t see anything mixing and you won’t see middle voice.
Most all of my Italian male students have had little or no problem whatsoever singing with one voice and it’s not about meatballs.
Meatballs ostensibly are a Swedish thing, Prutta!
So let’s get real.
Italian males are apparently born with something that allows them to more easily and more quickly eliminate the break in their voices, as has been my experience in working with them. How lucky they are!
Pavarotti had no issue handling his crack. I, on the other hand, had to work long and hard to eliminate the crack in my voice.
Why would anyone in their right mind want to blend chest and head voice when they can just have a connection throughout the entire range without dropouts or silly problems?
Free Voice
When you have one voice, regardless of the range, pitch, or dynamics, how does it feel?
It feels easy and free and you don’t think about technique, you just sing and it works.
The Crack
There is not a crack-sealing epoxy currently available and if that’s not bad enough, you cannot repair what is not there.
You do not have a crack or a break or a glottal stroke or a flip or a flop or a “bippity boppity boo”.
You might have an out-of-control voice, acting like an untamed beast.
You sing from low to high and your wild larynx suddenly jumps up in your throat; the vocal folds panic and fly apart and then come back together.
What would happen if the vocal folds didn’t part like the Red Sea?
Got Nodules?
If you force your way through the so-called passaggio (passageway), you may be hyper-adducting the vocal folds, bringing them together too hard. Over time, you may develop blisters that turn into blood blisters (hematomas) and then turn to calluses, that are properly called vocal nodules. So, that is not the solution, nor the safe solution.
If your crazy larynx doesn’t fly up like a jack-in-the-box, that would be a big help.
How do you handle that? With fish hooks and rubber bands tied to your collar bones? No. Neat idea, but no.
Why Do You Have Vocal Folds?
1. The Habit of Swallowing
When you swallow something, the epiglottis closes over the vestibule of the larynx and the vocal folds seal off the trachea from an invading bolus, the thing swallowed; then it safely makes its journey toward your stomach. Your backup “anti-drowning-system” are the vocal folds.
When you hold your vocal folds shut, build up air pressure, and blast them apart with the air, you call that a cough.
Lowering your air pressure, doing essentially the same thing, is how you clear your throat.
Isn’t it marvelous?
Coughing and throat clearing are not only irritating to hear, they also irritate the delicate tissue of the vocal folds.
2. Phonation
Phonation is not calling everyone in your country. You make vowel sounds and phonated consonants by making the vocal folds vibrate. So, you use the vocal folds for speaking. The primary purpose of the vocal folds is to save your life when you eat or drink and to not have to use the Heimlich Maneuver.
Natural Singing
People are not born singing. I’ve witnessed three births. That was plenty. People cry when they are born.
Singing comes easy to a very slim minority, but most have to tame the wild beast in their throats and this has nothing to do with talent, or the lack of it.
The solution to the freedom of singing is doing specific exercises at the appropriate time (every singer is unique) and knowing when to move on to continue the development of one free voice.
Some vocal coaches can help with this and some cannot. It depends on what they have been taught and how it is applied, and if the technique is both workable and a proven, successful one.
Old habits can come back, until they are a paradigm of habits which work, coupled with doing the exercises long enough to have a stable, working, and dependable voice.
It is time worth spending, if you are a singer and want the freedom of one voice.
You can have this, if you are willing to learn and practice the one voice system. Ending pain and frustration is what I wish for singers who have the artistic prowess and desire, to share their aesthetics with the world.
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