The Vocal Tract: The Secret Singing MVP
I am so excited to write a blog post about my FAVORITE PIECE of the instrument that is the Voice: the Vocal Tract. Buckle up, buttercups, because this shit is going to blow. your. minds.
In my experience, having a deep understanding of the Vocal Tract and how it functions as part of your voice is THE key to singing in a way that is effortless, free, and dare I say, easy(!) - versus singing in a way that feels like you are continually fighting, struggling, and in our own way. So, let’s do this.
The Vocal Tract is a container of air that starts at the top of the vocal folds (or cords), and goes all the way to the edge of the lips. It is what helps the sound from the vocal cords resonate, or “re-sound.” It is comprised of SO many different moving (emphasis on “moving”!) parts + pieces. I typically like to think of the Voice as being this big apparatus of different moving parts, sub-divided into three different buckets: The Breath, The Vocal Cords, and our Resonator, aka our Vocal Tract. The breath powers the whole machine, the vocal cords are producing our initial sound, and our resonator is what shapes + amplifies the final product. The human voice is not the human voice without this resonator, pure and simple. Any sound we hear from the vocal cords has to pass through the vocal tract first. It’s what gives each of us our own unique voices, and it can be molded and shaped to highlight different pitches, tones, frequencies, colors, and textures. In short, it is the special je-ne-sais-quoi of the voice, and it is VERY COOL. Fascinating, really. Every instrument has a resonator - the piece of the instrument where the pitches that are played or sung resonates or “re-echoes” within. Think about an acoustic guitar, for example - the body of the guitar (the wooden piece with the sound-hole where the sound resonates within) is the resonator for the guitar. It’s picking up the note or notes (if in a chord) being played by fretting the strings, and causes that sound to resonate and amplify and travel out through the sound-hole. The air in the body of the guitar acts as a resonator for the vibrating strings. The thing about the voice that is different from every other instrument? Once the guitar is built, the body is fixed. As singers, our resonator is not a static, hard, set resonator - OUR resonator is the only one that can actively change shape.
I KNOW. How cool is that?!
Now, this brings with it both good news and bad news. The good news? That since our resonator is malleable, it is able to be adjusted and changed and shaped - even in the moment that we are singing. There are SO MANY muscle groups that can change the size and shape of our vocal tract. Any time this changes, it has a drastic effect on what aspects of the original sound are amplified, and which are filtered out. This means it is possible to change how well we are singing by simply making physical adjustments that change the actual shape of the space we are singing in. Changing the conditions of how the sound is shaped can make the difference between singing effortlessly, allowing the cords to do their job more efficiently, or singing in a way that is rife with strain and tension. This also means that the more advanced we get, we can literally change the overtones and formants of how we sing certain pitches, even different syllables within a line of a song. We can make our tone darker or brighter, for example by either widening or elongating our vocal tract, or narrowing it. This opens up so many possibilities for using your voice in an endlessly expressive, dynamic way. Much like a painter painting with different shades and tones, even “temperatures” of color - so, too can we with our voices. The bad news? The way you are shaping your vocal tract - and which specific pieces of it that are more prone to tension - can be what is getting in your way in terms of singing how you want to. Furthermore, feeling many of these muscles and muscle groups can be frustrating, as they are not muscles that we can feel very easily, it turns out. Many of these are either so deep within our bodies - or are so subtly-felt - that in our bids to control them, we may be making false bids with the muscle groups we ARE more familiar with, which only exacerbates the tension.
My aim in ALL of my vocal work is to get to the bottom of where a singer’s tension lies, and then working to re-condition these muscles or muscle groups to contradict their knee-jerk reactions to tensing in a bid to help the singer sing. This is why singing is a process of muscle memory - repetition, repetition, conditioning, fine-tuning, repetition - to ingrain the proper placement for each piece of the instrument so that singing correctly becomes the default. This requires trial-and-error, curiosity, and dedication from the singer - but I know y’all are up to the task.
First, let’s break down who each player is - and how we can use them to help us with our voice.
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The Vocal Tract: The Players
The Vocal Tract is comprised of the following pieces, all of which have their own muscle groups that are helping to control them. Say em with me!:
Lips
Tongue
Pharynx
Larynx
Jaw
Soft Palate
The Lips
Our lips are controlled by a circular muscle group that goes from the nose to halfway down the chin. Muscles in our cheeks (the buccinator muscles) can also move the lips. Have you ever started smiling or laughing when singing, and noticed how it changes the tone?
If our lips come forward (like when speaking your OH vowel), it elongates the vocal tract. The pitch of the air in the vocal tract then becomes lower, which can be perceived as darker.
When the lips spread (like when you smile), it narrows the vocal tract, making the pitch of air higher, and giving a brighter sound.
Lips are one of the easier pieces of our instrument to tap into because we can easily control them - it’s a pretty obvious physical direction to purse your lips, smile, or pout them (aka the famous Instagram Duckface). You can also see and touch them - they’re more readily accessible to us than say, our soft palate. So, next time you’re singing or speaking your vowels, really think about the shape you are trying to create - how does your mouth naturally shape itself to speak an OH vowel, as opposed to say, an EE vowel? You can pull from this directly to your singing-voice. When you’re singing, what is your mouth doing? Is it shaping your vowels as much as it could be, or is it sort of closed and stagnant, not really moving at all? Think about it: from a very simple standpoint, the space you’re creating in your mouth and vocal tract is going to set up your resonator to have MORE space and surfaces to resonate and amplify off of - or it will have less. Generally speaking, when singing, we want to create as much open space as possible for the sound to resonate - this has several different benefits, but one of them is that it gives a better feedback loop to both your ear and what you’re hearing, as well as to the vocal cords.
Tip:
Try to speak each vowel sound in front of a mirror and notice how you naturally shape your mouth and face to say that vowel shape. This is how you should shape it to sing that same vowel, albeit slightly more exaggerated.
The Tongue
Ahh, the tongue. This secret weapon (or culprit) has A LOT going on with her when it comes to singing. The tongue is one of the most complex pieces of the vocal mechanism.
Think about it: the tongue is this BIG muscle in your mouth (it’s actually comprised of 8 - my lucky number! -different muscles), taking up a bunch of room in both the mouth and at the back of the throat (top of the pharynx). The tongue, you may not know, is also one of the strongest muscles in the human body. That means that your tongue can either be helping you out (by getting the hell out of the way), or it can be this big, strong muscle that you didn’t even think about that is getting in the way of you singing like The Wilson sisters of Heart (or, ya know - insert your favorite badass vocalist here. But I mean - come on).
The back of our tongue is also connected to the muscles that are in charge of swallowing - making the tongue a minefield of potential tension that is taking up allllll of this room, can be hard to tame, and sometimes tends to have a mind of its own. The tongue kind of has the potential to be the bull in the china shop.
So, where do we want the tongue to be positioned? A resting tongue is simply that - resting forward in the mouth. We want the tip of our tongues to be resting against the bottom two front teeth. If the tongue is pulling back, several things about this are not helpful: one, remember it is this BIG muscle in your mouth, that now is pulling back and bunching up at the back of the throat. It’s also connected to our hyoid bone, so when it’s pulling back there, it’s also then contracting down alllll the way down around our larynx - making the free vibration that the larynx needs virtually impossible. So, how do we keep the tongue out of the way in order to free up the space that we need at the back of our throats? By keeping it resting forward, that’s how.
Tips for the Tongue:
Sing in front of a mirror, and check your tongue! What is she doing? Is the tip resting against the two (bottom - you’d be surprised how many people ask me whether top or bottom here!) front teeth, or is it pulling back and bunching up in the back of the throat, crowding things back there? Keep her out of the way and forward to get the maximum amount of space and to keep her relaxed.
If your tongue is especially big (go ahead and make those middle-esque jokes, I’ll wait. It’s fine, we all do it! Vocals are ripe for this, I get it), try something a little weird: try sticking your tongue allll the way out of your mouth, resting it over your teeth. Try singing an open vowel (maybe an AH vowel) and see if it tries to pull back. Try to vocalize here allowing it to release at the back so it stays resting forward.
Getting the tongue to behave can be a tricky one, and may take some time before it can stay chill. Be patient + consistent with striving to keep it resting (remember, “resting” isn’t an action - it’s just resting! You don’t have to do anything to allow a muscle to rest!), and eventually you will teach your body to sing without the tongue needing to respond in-kind.
Pharynx
Now we come to MY PERSONAL FAVORITE piece of the whole damn vocal mechanism: the Pharynx (cue angels singing). Pharynx is a fancy-sounding word for your throat, lest you get overwhelmed.
Don’t ask me why (okay, actually, I have LOTS of ideas about this so that’s not true, totally ask me), but the Pharynx is just my favorite part of the Voice. It’s so nerdy, but I get irrationally-excited thinking about and talking about the Pharynx. Maybe because it’s fun to say (say it out loud - fun, right?), or maybe because it’s at once (in my opinion) THE most important piece, as well as THE most tricky piece - the Pharynx is really the gateway between your vocal cords and the rest of the resonator’s parts. There’s also something to me so….what’s the right word? Primal? Human? Raw? about the throat… it holds our vocal cords, it’s the gateway to how we consume food, breathe, literal life-giving sustenance. It’s also sensuous and earthy and, to me, just a really powerful portal to our emotions and human experience. I don’t know about you guys, but I feel A LOT of emotions in my throat. Think about all that it symbolizes. Anyway. That’s part of it.
Another reason why I find the Pharynx so cool is that it is has several different “chambers” that stem out from it. We have the Laryngopharynx (where the pharynx connects to the Larynx, or our “voice-box”), the Oropharynx, the part that connects to the back of the mouth, and finally, our Nasopharynx, which feeds into our nasal cavity. Think of it like your little highway of sound, with several different off-ramps. It’s so cool, right?!
So, check it out. When we’re talking about the throat and singing, I find that the #1 issue I see in people who describe vocal issues is more often than not the Throat. If you think about it, the Throat is where our vocal cords are housed (technically they are housed in our Larynx, which is juuuust beneath the Pharynx) so we feel the vibrations of our cords in our throats. This is typically what trips us up. Since we feel and therefore experience our voices in our throats, what is the most obvious physical thing we can manipulate in order to feel a sense of control over our voices and the sound that is coming out of our mouths? Squeezing the throat. Squeezing the throat is a pretty easy physical sensation that we can both see and feel - naturally, our brains sort of “fill in the blanks” so to speak, and tell us that if we can juuuuuust muscle our voices out a little more, work just a litttttle harder, we will hit that note. Then - spoiler alert! - we either don’t hit it at all, or it comes out not the way we want it to, and then we….resolve that we must not be working hard enough. So we try again - squeezing, tensing, pushing, trying our damndest to muscle our voices out to no better results, left only with a tight-feeling throat, fatigue, or hoarseness and a very discouraged feeling. The problem with this is that the throat is not actually supposed to be working for us in singing at all! The throat needs to be this open channel that allows the vibrations from our vocal cords to travel through to out - you got it - resonator so that the sound can bounce off of allll of those surfaces and travel out of our mouths. Therefore, we want our throats to TAKE A DAMN SEAT.
Our throats are mainly used for swallowing and breathing, right? We’re very good at doing these reflexive actions all day every day since….well, that’s how we survive! That’s how we LIVE! The throat is controlled by a series of muscles whose only job is to constrict. When we swallow, it narrows and constricts to push the larynx up to allow food to pass through the esophagus. Now listen to this, because it is crucial: so much of learning how to sing properly + training the voice is learning to not engage this swallow/tightening reflex. However, since we are obviously very good at doing what the throat does best - constricting - it now makes a lot of sense why singers tend to tighten and squeeze their throats (either consciously or unconsciously) in a bid to sing and add power to their voices. But, as you can see, this is the opposite of what we want the throat to be doing.
Since the only muscles that control the size of the throat are aimed at constricting, then the throat is actually at its most open - i.e. what we want for singing - when it is at rest. I know - wrap your mind around that one for a second. Remember, we want our throats to only be this open channel that the sound can travel through from Point A (the larynx) to Point B (the resonator). If it is tightening, this will choke our sound, keep us just out of reach of so many notes, mess with our tone, and add so much tension, physical strain, and fatigue to the entire instrument, which is having to now work harder to get sound out under compromised conditions. This can, over time, lead to vocal injury.
To add to allllll of this, the pharynx is one of those pieces of the “machinery” that is really hard to feel and have a direct experience or sensation of. Typically when we are “feeling” our throats, it’s a tension - we feel it squeezing or tightening as we sing and this is how we experience it. So, the trick? When your throat is simply at-rest - when you’re just hanging out, doing nothing - is when your throat is at its most open. And what does it feel like when you’re just hanging out, doing nothing with the throat? Well….like - nothing. It’s a feeling of “nothingness” or “emptiness.” You can see why chasing after a feeling that isn’t really a feeling, and is “nothing” can be a hard thing for people to wrap their heads around. But, truly understanding this concept - that you simply want to allow your throat to be free and neutral as it is when you are just hanging out, doing nothing! - is the key to getting your throat to stop engaging when you’re singing as a false bid to help you produce your sound.
Tips for the Releasing the Throat:
Remember that to keep your throat relaxed isn’t an action - just keep it free and relaxed! You don’t need to do anything to relax or expand your throat - it’s just at its most open when it’s at rest. Try to just retain that free-throated feeling (or non-feeling? I know, it’s a total trip, don’t overthink it!) as you open your mouth to sing, allowing the sound to simply “spill” out.
Drink in the air. Pretend you are drinking a glass of water, but just “drink in” some air to feel what it feels like to have the throat open. You’ll notice a release behind the tongue.
This can be a bit of a confusing concept that I like to tread very carefully with, but find somewhere else you can direct your focus towards in terms of where you are powering your voice from, or where you are singing “from.” Rather than thinking that your voice is coming out of your throat, and you have to push it out from here, can you direct your attention towards feeling it powering from the chest, or from mouth-level around your front teeth, or in the bones of your face, or from your forehead/temples, even coming from outside of your body? This is a bit of a mental visualization exercise but I know that the way we visualize and picture our voices has a direct impact on how we physically respond, which has a direct impact on how we’re shaping our vocal tracts, which has a direct impact on our sound! So, try different visualizations, or try to see if you can “sense” where your voice is “placed” in your range - does it feel like it is vibrating/resonating in your body, or higher-up, maybe above your head? Any of these different visualizations can be helpful to redirect and give a replacement action for the overly-involved throat.
The Larynx - aka the Voicebox
Ahhh, the Larynx - I like to picture the Larynx like a 1960s Shangri-La-esque mansion, lush and beautiful, and surrounded by a halo of golden light because - this is where your vocal cords are housed. Cue angels singing again!
Yep, what is commonly referred to as the “voicebox” you now have a fancy word for, that you can lord over your friends when talking about the voice so that you sound that much more cultured, learned, and intellectual. You’re welcome.
The larynx is a series of cartilages (here’s a fun party trick guaranteed to elicit horrified gasps: put your fingers - gently! - on either side of your throat and move it from side to side. This is apropos of absolutely nothing, I just like to do it sometimes. Go forth) that sits above your trachea (another fancy word for your windpipe) that your vocal cords (also commonly referred to as your vocal folds, FYI) sit in. Here’s another cool nerd-fact: the larynx is connected to one bone, the hyoid bone (all of these are so fun to say, seriously), which is the only floating bone in the entire body(!!). What does this mean? This means that the whole damn thing is very mobile. Don’t take my word for it! Check it out: look in a mirror and check out what your Adam’s Apple does when you swallow. It hikes up! How about when you yawn? It depresses down! And yes, to answer your question: those who are assigned female at birth do also have an “Adam’s Apple.” The Adam’s Apple is just the tip of the larynx, actually, which sits front-to-back in your neck (imagine looking down your throat, it doesn’t sit up/down, but rather front/back). The only difference is that in those of us born female (we are LGBTQ+ allies here at Caveness Voice, if you take issue with this then….well, kindly see yourself out) have a smaller Adam’s Apple because our larynx is smaller. That’s all! More fun random trivia for ya.
So, as you can see, the structure which houses the vocal cords is also a very mobile structure. It can go up, down, and move all around. However. You should know by now that there is usually a “however” when it comes to the voice; what do we want the larynx to be doing while we are singing, aka while the cords are vibrating and adjusting their tension to make higher (more taut cords = higher the pitch) notes, or to make lower (more loose cords = lower the pitch) notes? If you guessed that we want the larynx to be staying pretty much steady, then YOU ARE STARTING TO GET IT! Ding, ding, ding!!! We want the larynx to be staying relatively steady as we are singing. Why? I like to use the analogy for all of this of one of those fun-houses you see at old-timey fairs. Millennials, if this doesn’t mean anything to you then….well, Google it. They’re cool. So think about hose fun-houses, right, the ones where there’s all those weird mirrors and such, but also - there’s all those uneven floors, sometimes different moving panels that make it totally hard to keep your balance and walk and you end up falling around like an idiot? Think of it like that: if every single piece of our instrument is allowed to move all over the place, then what is stabilizing? What is steadying? If the cords are doing all this moving, pulling to different tensions to make different pitches, then maybe we’d like the place where it is housed to be….steadying, right?
Tips for the Larynx:
Place your finger gently on the tip of your Adam’s Apple. I know - it’s a very disconcerting feeling. Take a second. Swallow, and feel where it goes when it goes up. Mimic a yawn and feel where it goes when it goes down. Now. Take a breath and come in on a sung note, somewhere comfortable in your range. What did your larynx do? Did it pull up, press down, or - sometimes this wild card - did it sort of “disappear” and sort of shrink back into your throat? Now, again - I don’t like to do a ton of “larynx positioning” because I think it’s confusing and is pretty hard to really map. But, I will say that a good general rule of thumb is that while your larynx may rock back and forth a bit, or it may adjust a little bit, that generally we don’t want it moving a whole lot. We want to keep it relatively steady against our finger wherever we are singing.
The less-than-stellar news? It is not really possible to feel the muscles inside the larynx (the ones that are pulling the levers, so to speak, of the vocal cords, tightening and loosening, abducting and adducting them). The good news? By striving to keep our old friend the pharynx relaxed and neutral, the same muscles are also keeping the larynx steady. That swallowing reflex we are trying to teach ourselves not to go into will address both the throat staying free AND the larynx staying steady - remember, the throat narrowing is what raises the larynx up for us to swallow. So, focus on that free-throated feeling and the larynx should behave itself, too.
One way to maintain consistency between our notes is to think of breathing in the shape of the vowel we’re about to sing on our first note. If you’re prepared for it right before the note, then the larynx won’t suddenly “jump” into action when coming in on your first note.
The Jaw
Let’s get right to it: much like we talked about with the throat, or pharynx, let’s think about what the primary job of our jaw is. To chew, right? So, when singing, it’s very important that we check in with our jaws to see if they are - can you guess it?! - relaxing, as opposed to tensing a la the chewing reflex. Luckily, this is one of the pieces we can see quite clearly when looking in a mirror. When you go to “drop” the jaw, does it actually drop, or hang - or are you holding it open? Try to just let it hang and see the muscles on either side of the jaw (the masseter muscles) release. This is a relaxed jaw position. Another piece to watch out for is the chin. Is the chin jutting up and out? Is it crunching down and in? Or is the chin staying steady, like it is when you are just resting and holding your head in your normal posture? We don’t realize it, but again the chin can be reaching out and up or crunching in and back in an unconscious bid to “help” us “reach” our high or low notes.
Tips for the Jaw/Chin:
Try checking in with the chin and jaw to see what they are doing - if the chin is sneaking in to help, reposition so it’s steady. Sometimes it might help to even put your finger on your chin and look in a mirror to keep yourself honest here. As a reformed chin reacher-and-tilter (yep, I was all off-kilter!), I can attest to the counter-conditioning of teaching my chin to stay a litttttle bit “tucked” to counteract its tendency to want to jut out. Just don’t crunch it in so that you’re squishing it down onto our larynx.
Is it the jaw, or the tongue? Sometimes, the tongue and the jaw work together like little co-conspirators (rude, I know). Again, since evreything is so interconnected in here, and there are A LOT of muscles and muscle groups all working in coordination with one another in a relatively small space, tension in one piece can beget tension in another. Make sure that the tongue is relaxed forward (quiz time: where?! Against the bottom front teeth!), and notice if, when dropping the jaw, the tongue pulls back. Try to drop the jaw AND release the tongue so both are relaxed. Now we’re talking. Look at all that space back there!
Use a mirror and notice if, when you go to sing a different vowel, or a different note in a scale or phrase, if your jaw makes a sudden move similar to chewing to compensate. Try to keep the jaw free and independent of getting over-involved in the singing process. Again, the mirror is your friend! I don’t know why it is that whenever I tell a student to take a look at themselves in the mirror, they act as if I’ve asked them to cut off their pinky or something. I get it, it can feel awkward or weird to look at oneself but you’re beautiful! Make friends with your reflection <3
Remember: a relaxed and free jaw will feel like….nothing. We’ll do another post and/or podcast episode about the existential questions of chasing a feeling of nothingness…. talk about an existential crisis!
The Soft Palate
And, we’re here! The soft palate. Another one of our little-known secret weapons that can make a HUGE difference in your tone. Here’s a hot tip: if you struggle with a too-nasal tone, your soft palate is likely the culprit. Let me explain. Put your tongue on the roof of your mouth, right behind the two front teeth. Run it back along the roof of your mouth. Feel that hard bone? That’s your hard palate. Now, if you go all the way back, you’ll feel a ridge, and then you’ll feel where it starts to get soft and squishy. That soft, squishy part is your soft palate, and the soft palate moves up and down and adjusts while you speak to form different vowel sounds; it’s also the thing that rises up right as you’re about to yawn, giving you that big streeeeetch feeling. Mimic a yawn (I’ll wait while it inevitably gives way to an actual yawn), and notice that feeling of it rising up. It’s verrrrrry subtle, but you may have a sense of it. You can also imitate a snoring sound to feel it vibrate, or shine a flashlight into your mouth and check that baby out in a mirror to see it moving up and down.
The soft palate, as you can see, is very close on the roof of your mouth to where your nasal cavity starts - thus, it is typically thought of as the gateway to the nasal cavity. Simply put, when we hear a too-nasal tone quality, it means that the soft palate is too low - forcing the sound and trapping it in the nasal cavity. If the soft palate is raised, the resonance and acoustics stay in the pharynx and the oral cavity, which results in a more resonant, warm tone. Lowered, and the tone will be dampened by the wet nasal cavity resonator. Sometimes singers will unwittingly send too much sound through the nose since it gives them more volume that they can hear - but this is a misguided attempt to get more volume that we want to open up to more resonant sound instead.
Tips for the Soft Palate:
Remember, the soft palate can be hard to feel on its own. So many sensations described in singing are less about obvious physical sensations (like pinching your arm, say), and are more about a felt-sense. Does that make sense? Mimicking these sensations through easy-to-relate actions, such as yawning, are there to simulate these sensations - it is then up to you, when doing them, to get quiet, introspective, and really curious: what do you notice? What feels - or do you sense - is slightly different when you yawn, versus, when you’re just resting? Describe it in whatever language, metaphors, images, or adjectives occur to you, without worrying about being “technically correct.” Mapping these sensations in the way that makes sense to YOU helps you to start to build your very own, personal vocal language and bank of images that you can and will rely on as you’re trying to ingrain the proper muscle memory into your voice and body. This goes for all of the pieces mentioned above, or any vocal concept you are working on.
Don’t mistake raising the soft palate for tensing the tongue, or squeezing the throat. Think about when you see a singer absolutely belting it out - you know how you can almost see back to their tonsils? Think about being THAT open, channel the feeling of right-before-you-yawn as you’re coming in to lift the soft palate. That feeling of “gasping in” - as if you got startled - can also be an indicator. You’ll feel a little cold pocket of air at the back of the throat where the roof of the mouth meets it - that’s it.
A Final Word
Whew, I know that was A LOT of information! Thank you all for being wonderful vocal investigators with me and taking all of that in. I know that this was a deluge of information, but spend time with each individual piece and concept and take your time with it! The more thoughtful and curious you can be about YOUR voice, and your experience of your voice, including any underlying insecurities/fears that you can pinpoint that might be contributing to some of these physical tensions that you identify in your voice, the better. Again, I am a huge believer in the mind/body connection + correlation to our voices: what we think about how we sound, that mean thing your classmate said to you in 6th grade choir that you can’t un-hear, our fears about hitting the right notes - ALLLL of that directly relates to the physical tension and striving we do, either consciously or unconsciously, to try and produce our sound.
One of the very cool things about mastering our voices is that we can ultimately use all this knowledge about our vocal tracts and how sound is created/resonated to start to play with our sound and tone and formants - eventually, you’ll be advanced enough to darken, lighten, open, close, brighten, and otherwise color your voice in the ways you want. It’s really pretty goddamn cool.
This vocal tract stuff can be frustrating and overwhelming, which is why I feel that voice, more so than other instruments, really benefits from a knowledgable vocal teacher who knows their stuff, and can look at YOU as you’re singing, and identify what YOUR specific tendencies and tensions are. Yes, there are good rules-of-thumb for singing, of course - but there is never a one-size-fits-all, cure-all approach. Anyone who tries to tell you so is selling you something. Singing is so unique to each individual person because we are all literally shaped differently in our bodies and faces - we all have our own unique hang-ups and fears and places we store tension in our bodies - and we all learn in our own unique ways. Finding someone who will collaborate with YOU and YOUR voice is key.
Embrace the messiness that can come with building your voice: we have to identify the things that aren’t working so that we can reset them and uncover your voice in its whole, natural, effortless, and free state. Be kind with your self, be curious, and be consistent.
