11 Things You Don't Think Your Voice Can Do (It Can!).

I have been enjoying my time in the studio, and I always looking forward to the next day when I call it a day. I get to hear miracles take place with people's voices. These breakthroughs happen because of the power of your voice, So I decided to do a blogpost on it.

Here are 13 of the many surprising things your voice could do:

1. You can learn to sing without vocal strain. This blows some people away to realize. 

2. You can learn to sing on pitch. Most of the time it's not even your ear that's the problem, but if it is, it's amazing what a little pitch practice can do.

3. You have more vocal range than you imagine. You can sing higher in chest voice, without strain, when you learn to use mixed or middle voice to do it. You can also sing lower than you think. You enable low notes just like you do high notes by stretching, not crunching.

4. Your voice is capable of richer, more interesting tone than you think is natural to you. You find your full resonance by learning to open your 'voice cave' so that the vibrations from your larynx can reach all your resonators.

5. You can learn new vocal licks, and learn to use them appropriately to reach the heart of your audience instead of sounding fake. There are tricks good vocal teachers know to help you.

6. Even if you have breathing issues, you can have enough breath to sing. It doesn't take much when you do it right.You can sing long notes without running out of breath. The answer is to balance breath support and control. 

7. Your voice can get better with age. As long as your physical health is good, you can find even more resonance and ability, not less, as you get older.

8. You can learn to sing in the studio with the magic you get in live performance. You can also learn to sing live as well as you record, if you are a veteran session singer. Performance coaches can do wonders!

9. You have all the voice you need to deliver a message in any style except classical, if you just know how to "play your instrument". (Don't you know a singer whose technique is lacking but whose voice moves you?) 

10. You can sing "ee" and "oo" vowels (and all other ones, too) on high pitches without getting tight. You learn to modify the vowels more openly and vertically and no more squeaky highs!

10. You can get a handle on numbness and stage anxiety when you learn the psychological and body language secrets of making your performance about your audience, not you.

11. You can learn to speak more effectively...without vocal fatigue or strain. The lack of strain in the speaking voice can be life-changing for public speakers and teachers, but benefits your singing voice as well.

12. You can mend frustrating vocal breaks. I used to have the worst "break" I'd ever heard of. I conquered it and now I know how to help others do the same.

13. You can afford to train your voice. Even JC-RECORDS can help you.

Singing High Notes: 3 Quick Fixes To Make Them Easy.

Straining and squeaking on high notes is a common malady for singers. Here are a couple of tips to rescue you from high note frustration. They not only can make your high notes doable... but also sound better:

1. Stand tall with flexible upper spine
Instead of crunched, shoulders up, neck tight, upper spine stiff.
This will help you control your breath instead of pound it against your cords. 

2. Move your head slightly back, chin level.
This will open your throat channel. 

3. Drop and move your jaw.
Try a slight chewing motion as you hit and hold the note.
This can cause a huge difference because it allows the soft palate to lift.

Singing At The Piano? 7 Tips For Keyboard and Voice Synergy.

Depending on how you do it, playing keys can either help or hurt your singing. Here are 7 piano/singer tips for you:

Prepare by playing and singing separately.
It's extremely important to practice your voice and your keyboard separately so you can put your undivided attention to the task. When practicing the keyboard part, just sing very lightly if at all, going over to head voice on high parts. When practicing singing, sing acapella or to a piano track you've recorded, or just play "diamonds" or simple chord changes so that you can focus your attention on your vocal technique. When you get them both right and easy, start putting them together. If there are complicated rhythms in the piano, even this can become muscle memory as you carefully put voice and fingers together and PRACTICE.

Get your posture right.
Sit or stand tall, retaining a flexible feeling in your spine. Slumping, for any reason, is "smooch de mort" (kiss of death) for the voice. It will negatively affect your inhale, breath support and control of breath. It will also tighten your throat. Standing or sitting, do not lean forward in such a way that you collapse your ribcage at all. 

Get your mic right.
Make sure the mic is positioned close enough to your mouth so you don't have to lean over to sing into it. Also make sure it's high enough to encourage that tall spine. This will greatly improve your breath and open throat technique.
Get your power coming from your seat or your feet.
You need to center your power in your pelvic floor so you are not tempted to tighten your shoulders, neck, jaw- all of which tighten your throat and your breath. And absolutely yes, if you sit correctly, you can sing sitting as well as you can standing. But you must sit on the edge of your seat, not back into it, so that it feels the same as standing. Squeeze your butt against the seat for power. If you're standing, power from your heel.

Secure your pedals
If your feet have to slide forward looking for a slipping pedal, you will find your performance focus thrown off, along with a possible sudden posture slippage. Ducktape can be a keyboard player's lifesaver.
Lightly use your fingers on the keys to tip your balance over your tailbone instead of into the keys.
Don't press hard enough to cause tension in hands, wrists or fingers. Just lightly "intend" your fingers to keep you flexibly tall and open and not slumping.

Be a singer who is playing piano not a piano player who is singing
This one is a mindset issue. You have to put your priority on communicating your voice, and your playing HAS to be secondary when you're doing it at the same time. For an interim instrumental bridge, go ahead and focus on the keys, but when it's time to sing back to your voice and the message you're delivering.

Singing While Seated: 5 Things You Need To Do.

If you want to sing with good breath support and control, and also keep your throat open, you need to do the following:

1. Don't slump in your chair.
Sit on the front edge of the seat with one foot more forward to balance you securely as you sit tall. When you "go" for something, press your rump into the seat, and your forward foot into the ground. This should allow your spine to stretch freely and flexibly.

2. Make sure your upper back stays stretched and flexible.
Don't let the curve of your spine slump, and don't freeze in place, either.

3.. Be sure your head is balanced over your tailbone, chin down and floating.
It's "smooch de morte" (kiss of death) if you let your face drift forward while singing. If you do move forward, do it from your hips, not your shoulders. 

4. Use your eyes.
"Talk" with your face just as expressively as you would standing.

5. Use your hands.
"Talk" with your hands. If you are holding a mic, make sure you do that correctly. (Another post soon about that.)

Keep on reading our articles/posts, tell others to visit here at Jc-records blog, so that we can learn together.

The Vocal Booth: 7 Tips To Make The Recording Space Singer-Friendly.

What does a singer need in the vocal booth? More than just eye-friendly recording studio design. The voice is a picky, sensitive thing. If you want to record it, here are 7 things it wants:

• Lighting:

It wants mood lighting, OK? Twilight dimmed to pitch black - experiment to find the lighting that makes it the least shy. Sometimes a singer is not bothered, but if there are windows to the daylight, the voice may like you to cover them with something.

• Smell:

What the nose doesn't like, the voice won't either. It can affect breath, throat and focus. Save the incense candles for the smokers who sing. They are usually more used to the effect! One must be careful with perfume or room deodorizers, too. The plainer and cleaner the smell in the booth, the better.

• Orientation of mic to control room:

The voice doesn't like to be stared at. You can fake it out by not aiming your singer (yourself if you're the singer) eyeball to eyeball with the producer, engineer or anyone else. If at all possible, position the mic so that the singer is facing a corner or side of the room not the control room window.

• Temperature:

Try and get the temperature in the booth comfortable for the individual singer. It amazes me how many engineers don't understand the importance of this. Ever tried singing when you're shivering? It messes with your control big time. Ever tried singing while burning up? It saps your energy like a vampire, and the voice will sound tired, uncontrolled, numb. If the studio vents are not optimally placed, the people in the control room may need to suffer a bit to get it right for the vocal booth. Yep. The singer comes first.

• Furniture:

While not a deal breaker, it's nice to have a few simple pieces of furniture. Some kind of waist high table or ledge for water is nice so the singer won't have to bend over and then re-position at the mic. It can be helpful to have a tall stool for the singer who is fatigued. (And of course the vocalist will sit tall and flexibly from the front end of the stool, not hunched back into it.) 

• Music stand :

The last thing you want is for a singer to have to hold lyrics. This will, I promise you, affect optimum breathing. It's always best if a singer has memorized lyrics, but if it's a situation where the lyrics are needed, have a stand (or duck tape for securing the lyrics to the wall)

• Headphone box:

It's great if the "more me" cue box is on a stand instead of at the feet, so micro-adjustments can be quickly made from time to time. If, as I recommend, the singer is wearing headphones with one side half-off the ear, the headphone box should be set on "mono" instead of "stereo".

Vocal Health: The Most Important Nutrient For Your Voice.

As singers, we can buy throat sprays, suck on lozenges, drink special teas that are supposed to coat the throat. We can drink peppermint to calm jittery stomachs, or have a beer because we think it will relax our throats. We take vitamin and mineral suppliments and avoid dairy to keep from coating our throats. But do you know the most important (and most neglected) nutrient we need for our voices?

WATER:

I know, you've heard this before. However, we all need a reminder to not just KNOW something, but to DO it. So here's your water pep talk:

Water is what over 2/3rds of our body consists of. I could be thought of a sack of water with some extra stuff in it! Water affects some things not readily apparent, like headaches and tendencies to overeat. Sometimes we think we are hungry when we are actually thirsty, but the body gets the signals mixed up. Paradoxically, water is a natural diuretic; if you don't drink enough you will retain excess fluid and become edemic. Water, like most everything, has a dark side. You have to take in enough so you don't retain too much.

According to Free Drinking Water website, 

"The human brain is made up of 95% water, blood is 82% and lungs 90%. A mere 2% drop in our body's water supply can trigger signs of dehydration: fuzzy short-term memory, trouble with basic math, and difficulty focusing on smaller print, such as a computer screen. (Are you having trouble reading this? Drink up!) Mild dehydration is also one of the most common causes of daytime fatigue. An estimated seventy-five percent of Americans have mild, chronic dehydration."
(Read more facts about the importance of water to the body by clicking on their website link above.)

The human voice is very dependent upon water. Dehydrated vocal cords (folds) are not as flexible and able to thin as hydrated ones. These folds are so small and their operation so exact (or not), a little dehydration can result in a large dent in your vocal ability in any given performance. And the very use of the vocal cords causes them to lose moisture to the air.

As an extreme example of the vocal cord-water connection, a friend had a very bad case of laryngitis and a very important gig. He literally could not talk but had to lead a background vocal group in two days of sessions. He discovered that if he drank huge glasses of water with a little pineapple juice added, he could sing, even in my head voice. He ended up drinking about 18 mega glasses of water a day, and really didn't pee more than usual. The moisture was being used and evaporated from his vocal cords into the air.

So how much is enough?
He recommend following advice he was given by medical professionals: Take your body weight and half it. That's the number of ounces you should drink a day. So if a person weighs 120 lb, they would drink 60 oz of water, which comes out to 7.5 8-oz glasses a day. If you are particularly active or out in the heat, use common sense and drink a little more.

Do other drinks count?
Nutritionist advised that if you drink 75% water and no more than 25% unsweetened natural juice, it counts as water. If it makes you drink more water, I say add that orange, pineapple, apple, tomato or other 100% juice.

Herbal teas count. Coffee and caffeine in general are less healthy, but there is a lot of controversy about their addition to necessary water intake. The dehydration effect seems to be a diuretic effect. Possibly you pee out more than you take in? Caffeine has other detrimental effects, though, from jittery nerves (affecting pitch and vocal control), stomach problems (affecting breath support and control), and sometimes affecting other health problems present. It's best to at least limit caffeine. Be wise and notice how caffeine affects you before drinking it when you need to sing.

Freshly juiced vegetable juice counts. It also ensures mineral additions to your water, and balances overly-acid ph levels in our bodies. I try to juice every morning.

Sugary drinks, artificially sweetened or flavored chemical-laden drinks and alcoholic drinks most definitely do NOT count. These are poisons to be diluted by you guessed it... drinking more water.

Especially great additions to water:
ceyenne pepper and lemon juice
ceyenne, lemon and honey
throat coat tea

Bottled, tap or what?
I highly recommend getting a good water filter for your tap.
Plastic leaches into our bodies easily, and of course pollutes the environment. Only drink from plastic if there is no alternative available, such as in the airport where you are not allowed to carry your own.

What temperature should water be?
Most experts I've talked to say it's best at room temperature. They also concur that in the end, if it's hot or iced, the most important thing is that you get it down the guzzle! Sometimes iced water causes throats to tighten a bit in some people, but again, notice how it affects YOU.

How can you make yourself drink enough?
I like to decide how much I'm going to drink and measure it out. That helps me when I get sidetracked to actually get enough in. Some people set a timer to periodically go off and remind them. This post will hopefully give you the will to go to the trouble to find out what will work for you.

Taming Tongue Tension:
This is a very common problem. Tongue tension equals soft palate tension, equals throat tension.

Tongue tension happens when you use the wrong end of the tongue too much. The tongue is said by some to be the strongest muscle in the body for it's size. It is literally connected by the hyoid bone to the top of your larynx. Tensing the root of your tongue raises the larynx uncomfortably. NOT GOOD. You need to be able to keep the mighty base (or root) of the tongue relaxed while you use the tip and front sides of the tongue to articulate.

Some things I suggest that have helped singers loosen tongue tension:

1. Wake up the face and do tongue tanglers, trying for clarity and not allowing the voice to "fall into the gravel" at the ends of phrases. Act like you are speaking to deaf people, make your lyric show in your face. This gets it out of the back of the throat and stiff jaw.

2. Speak or sing with the jaw moving in sort of a slight chewing motion. Tongue tension and jaw stiffness go together.

3. Put your knuckle inbetween your molars (not the front of your mouth) and sing. It will sound weird, like trying to speak with the dentist's hand in your mouth, but your jaw and tongue will experience having to relax.

4. Sing only on the vowels for a while, again allowing the back of the mouth and throat to fall open. This is harder than you think, you have to concentrate on NOT forming consonants. Then allow yourself to slightly let the consonants sneak back in, but keeping the back of the tongue feeling the same and letting the jaw relax flexibly.

5. Put two fingers under your chin. You are feeling the base of your tongue. Speak or sing, telling yourself not to tense there (bunch the muscle up).

6. DO NOT OVER-WORK the tongue in specific vocal exercises. Sometimes I find that exercises designed to stretch out and loosen the tongue can have the opposite effect. If you do these, be sure and note how they actually affect your tongue root's ability to relax.

By the way some people can do tongue trills and some people can do lip trills and some people can do both. Just like rolling the tongue, forming French or German syllables, for some people it is easy and some hard, because there is a learning curve that makes it easier in childhood, and I believe, subtle muscle coordination differences in people. It doesn't matter if you can do these things or not. The main thing is to get your articulation out of the back of your throat, and there is more than one way to accomplish this goal.

Singers: Bored With Your Song? How To Make It Fresh:

Songs you sing over and over again can get boring. One of the best wishes I can give an artist is: I hope that song is such a hit you get sick of singing it, haha! Actually, this can be a problem.

Here are some thoughts I'll share with you as well:

Caution before we begin: no matter what you do, you must take care to use good technique when you sing. Don't tighten your throat or relax your breath support/control and strain your voice, no matter what.
Rehearsal is NOT necessarily performance. You can rehearse a song, just trying out some different phrasing, style and licks and making sure you know it. You can do this all day long.
This is different than rehearsing PERFORMANCE. When you do this, you have to "go on stage" and physically, emotionally & communicatively act as if you are. Don't do this more than a couple of times per song in a day. Give it a break.

In the studio: Go for it the first time, or sing the song a time or two until you feel warmed up to it and the engineer is ready with levels. Then go for it.
Don't expect to do take after take, however, and stay fresh. After about 3 or 4 good vocal tracks, I like to just start punching the bad lines. If it takes too long, come back another day instead of singing the life out of the thing.

On stage: James Taylor once talked about this issue, he said when he and the band rehearsed it, they would all cut up and have a good time making light of the old standard. But each time he sings it to a live audience, he said it still feels like the first time.

How? Because he lets the audience be a part of the equasion. He sings TO them, and their reaction feeds the freshness of his delivery. I'm paraphrasing him, but you get the point.

Remember: Don't just sing. Communicate like it's the first time you ever said that to anyone. Know who you are as the deliverer of the song, know who you're talking to and why you're having the conversation.

Passion rules. Keep the fire in your heart for your music, and it won't let you down.

MUSICAL DIRECTOR:

This service is for live performances, including musical theater productions. This person is not only in charge directing not only vocal but also instrumental performances.

BACKGROUND VOCALIST or "BGV":
Also known as "BACKING VOCALIST", this person sings a vocal arrangement behind the lead singer. It is a specialty field in professional singing which requires absolute excellence in blending, intonation, subtle tonal color changes and the ability to exactly mimic the recording or live singer's articulation, style and tone. Sometimes an artist does his or her own background vocals if they are good enough at hearing "parts" to do it, but even then it is best to decide if that same voice is what is needed or if a different voice would add necessary texture to the resulting sound.

VOCAL ARRANGER:
This service is most often associated with background vocals. Unless the project is very complicated, a vocal arranger can usually quickly create the arrangement at the recording session, and is in fact usually the VOCAL CONTRACTOR who suggests and calls the background singer(s) after consulting with the producer.