Hey friends! Welcome to The Singing Studio. This is a review episode for episodes 16-19. I hope you enjoy it. Hey you guys and welcome back to The Singing Studio! Today we are going to continue our adventure with strengthening our voice by strengthening our breath support. I’m really excited about today’s video because we are going to be talking about different voice styles.
Episode 16: Keep Breathing
So why do I focus on breathing so much? Well first off, breathing helps us relax just in general. If you’ve ever taken yoga or any sort of dance class and other forms of exercise, they focus a lot on breathing. Breathing puts oxygen into our bodies and our brain. We don’t want tense muscles and we don’t want our voice to be stuck or really tight and straining. Today I’m going to specifically talk about vocal breath onsets. I’m going to demonstrate what these different onsets sound like, but our main goal through it all is to have a nice, even, and consistent sound. We don’t want to have too much breath, but we also want to have enough breath. We don’t want to be short of breath. So if we have too much breath this is what it might sound like. Hear how it’s a lot of breath and it’s not really even? This is what it sounds like if I don’t have enough breath. Oftentimes this is called a glottal. We are going to make sure that the muscles in our face are nice and relaxed. This is my big face. This is my small face. And back to big face. And this is my small face. Like I said, I love this exercise. It reminds me to have that good breath support. One thing to keep in mind is that we are jumping an octave. So we are going from one note all the way up to the same note but just an octave higher. That can be a little bit intimidating for our voice because sometimes we are going to be jumping from our lower register to our upper register, so that can be a little tricky. Just make sure that as you are jumping the lip trill that you think of that fountain analogy that I use sometimes – that nice and open, nice and forward and it’s flowing out. So basically I’m going to be doing three different variations of these breath onsets. The first one will be breathy, the second one will be that glottal, and then the third one will be just right. It’s a really fun exercise. This one definitely takes a lot more time because we are just focused purely on those onsets. And obviously, like I’ve explained earlier in this video, it’s our goal to have that third example where it’s nice and even. So basically we don’t want to have too breathy of a sound and we don’t want to really punch it.
Episode 17: Finding Your Voice
We are talking about how to find our voice and everything that goes along with that: feeling confident in our voice and loving our voice. So, finding our voice! I have a few tips for you today that I hope you enjoy. As you implement these tips, I can promise you that you’ll feel a greater appreciation for your voice, you’ll be excited to strengthen your voice more, and you’ll be excited to do more fun exercises. Let’s recap those tips. One, choose different styles of songs. Ones that you love and ones that are challenging. Two, don’t copy cat people on the radio or your peers. Three, listen to recordings of your voice. Four, sing spontaneously- in the shower, in the car, and karaoke. Sing spontaneously! And finally, practice every day.
Episode 18: Vocal Styles Part 1 & Episode 19: Vocal Styles Part 2
So you’re probably wondering what does that mean – voice styles? I thought I just had one voice. Yes, our voice is capable of many different styles of singing. So today we are going to break down the voice and hear different examples of these different styles. Our voice has a lot of layers to it and if we just learn about these different parts of our voice then we will be able to pull it out of our pocket and be like, “Yeah I can sing that in a classical way” or “Oh I can sing that in a contemporary way.” So I’m really excited and we’re going to jump right in. Chest voice – lower register. Head voice – upper register. Here is an example of chest voice. Twinkle twinkle little star. Here is an example of head voice. Twinkle twinkle little star. Next we have something called our mix voice and our legit voice. A mixed voice is essentially a mixture of our head voice and our chest voice. A lot of times when we use our mixed voice it’s most often done in that bridge where we are trying to smooth out between that chest and head. On the other hand, we have our legit voice. Our legit voice can also be a mixture, however, it’s definitely more in that upper register in our head voice. A legit type of singing is a lot more classical sounding. You can think of belt as a healthy projection of our chest voice going into our head voice. So it’s almost like we’re extending that chest voice over the bridge into our upper register and we’re using good breath support and a nice projection. All of these styles that we’re talking about, we will definitely go over in more detail in future episodes, but I did just want to touch on that. I know that a lot of us have heard that phrase of belting. Here is an example of mix voice. Twinkle twinkle little star. Here is an example of legit voice. Twinkle twinkle little star. I will, in the future, do another video a little bit about belt and how to do it healthily because it’s really, really important that our voice comes first. Our vocal health comes first and if we belt incorrectly we will run into a lot of issues. That is belt! Here is an example of belt. Twinkle twinkle little star. So the reason I wanted to touch on these styles is because when we can utilize all of these styles there’s so many things that we can do with different songs. We can utilize these different techniques to express certain phrases or to show certain emotion in our songs. And I think that when we practice really hard and we learn about these things we’re just adding more tools to our vocal tool belt to use when we are singing. I look forward to digging deeper into some of these styles in future episodes so stay tuned for that.
That is all for our video today. Be sure to like it and see you in our next episode!
I do these videos every other week, but if you still want more musical theatre, check out my newsletter! It’s called “Beyond The Score”, and it just takes a closer look at musical theatre history. You can find that at jskstories.com.