You Build It

If You Build It…

“If you build it, they will come.” – “Field Of Dreams”

1. You are born with a voice.
2. There are two routes to having one voice.
3. Accidental route is taken by people born without a true break in the voice.
4. My decades of teaching experience have revealed that Italian men have little or no break in the voice.
5. I’ve found that Italian men lose the break faster and easier than most people.
6. Building the voice is the other route.
7. It’s a variable procedure, which must be customized to the individual.
8. You can be taught exercises and be educated but that is not the total answer.
9. You may have heard of the 80/20 rule and we can pretend for a minute that it is true.
10. 80% of progress in building the voice is on the singer. 20% is knowing how.

Steps To Building The Voice

If you have never built anything, this may be foreign to you.

I have built and have been licensed in both architecture and in building. Design is design and building is building and like I have said, Leonardo Da Vinci, a singer, was also a designer and engineer and builder.

There are things about designing and building that broaden education beyond what one might imagine, who has never done both.

Cutting to the chase, there is a procedure to building a voice and there are procedures to building the rest of what make up a professional performing singer.

For now, let’s look at the voice. You may start here:

You want to get to here ASAP:

It is not ideal and is not the end game. The crack (or break or transition issue, or passaggio, or nemesis) must be handled, unless you are a yodeler, in which case, leave it alone.

If your larynx remains stable, not rising or dropping when you sing, the crack can disappear if the adduction of the vocal folds remains adequate for tone production.

A few methods exist for eradicating the crack:

1. Singing breathy temporarily throughout the range.
2. Using imposed-larynx exercises and raised larynx exercises the right way and in the right sequence.
3. Doing exercises which prevent “swallowing-type muscles” from engaging while singing.
4. Having an experienced “guide” to get you through the jungle to safety.
5. Can you do it on your own? I could not and had to have help.

Escaping The Filing System of Singing

Trombonists and slide whistle players and fretless wire choir members understand glissandos.

Glissandos are very valuable for “smoothing out” the function of the voice.

Do they work? It depends.

I stood back stage for about 180 shows while other performers were on stage and did glissandos with my voice. I started low and slid up and cracked and slid up from there. Countless times. Fruitless.

In the 1990s, I paid a vocal coach $175 per hour. She’s about double that now. Is it worth it to lose that stupid crack? Yes.

What worked for me doesn’t work for everyone, but there are other answers to the transition issue and one will work, or a combination of some.

I can help you to arrive here and the freedom is awesome: