Not this:
Not this:
This:
What Singers Want
You want to just sing and to not worry about singing.
You don’t want to pick a range and stick your voice into it, like filing documents in a folder.
You just want to sing!
Singers want to just sing and express themselves artistically without worrying or thinking about technique and also to have full use of the entire range, without breaks or cracks or other issues.
That’s not asking for much, is it?
It is, if your voice is not working correctly.
Methods And Madness
You have been lied to. So have I. There were reasons.
We were told that we have chest voice and head voice.
Technically, these are ranges in the voice and are named head voice and chest voice simply because we can feel the vibrations from the sound in the head or in the chest. You can place your hands in these areas and feel the vibrations through your fingers.
In speaking, we spend most of our days in chest voice, the lower range of the voice.
Mechanics Of Tone Production
You have two working vocal folds (they used to be called vocal cords).
You don’t have a separate set of vocal folds for each vocal range.
Many untrained singers have head, chest, and break (crack, break, glottal stroke, disconnection, flip, passaggio, etc.) and that is a dysfunctional voice, not useful for singing in an extended range.
Wait a minute! Some people crack and some do it on purpose. If yodeling is your forte, so be it. You don’t have to have one voice. You also don’t have to be a singer. The world still needs plumbers.
There’s more to this, but you don’t need to know a thousand things or to think about a hundred things every tie you sing.
Middle Or Mix
If you can get your voice to not crack, you may have what is called middle voice, or mix, or mixed voice. Nothing is mixing. It is not a combination of chest voice and head voice. You can look at it that way, if you want, but that’s not how it is.
Combining medical science and physics, using stroboscopic imaging, it is easy enough to see nothing is actually “mixing” in middle voice. If you feel like it is, that is your perception, but it is scientifically inaccurate.
How To Arrive At The Destination
Incremental and continual progress toward the end goal of having one voice are made by monitoring the development of the singer and knowing the exact right next step to take.
The axiom of you don’t fix what ain’t broke applies here. You do not need to use high or low larynx exercises once the passaggio or register transition area is no longer a problem. It can take weeks, months, or years for true stability to be achieved. I sill occasionally do low larynx exercises to maintain the voice. I never do high larynx vocal exercises.
Every singer progresses differently from every other singer. Over four decades of working with singers has revealed this to be true. A “one-size-fits-all” approach will be detrimental to any singer’s progress. Teachers and vocal coaches should know better than to teach like a machine working on a machine. Such is not the case. There are people involved.
You must know the starting place, the road map, the landmarks, and the destination or you will be lost.