Mostly to do with breath. Her mantra is “it takes no breath to sing”. It makes sense once you understand what’s really going on, but most people take in way too much breath, while she has singers take in very little. Took me a solid year before she was satisfied with how much breath I was taking. While my previous voice teacher never had me take in great gulps of air, years of a culture of “big breaths!” in literature and choral singing had developed that habit in me.
There are also significant differences in her approach to diction than anything I’ve ever encountered. It all seems really weird at first, until you do it and understand what she’s going for. I probably wouldn’t have stuck around (especially at those prices!) if I weren’t familiar with some of her students (which include one singer who recently premiered the role of Selena St. George in Delores Claiborne at San Francisco opera, and a friend of mine who’s gone from singing for small regional companies to covering Tosca at Chicago Lyric in about 5 years). I’m glad I did, though, because I’m making sounds now that I never would have believed.
Interesting, since those breath exercises were the one thing I absolutely hated with my private voice teacher I had before college. He said they helped him temendously. I’d always been self-conscious about how much breath I take in to sing.
Hope you eventually have time to tackle my memorization question!
It took me many years to have a vibrato; it just happened one day while singing in the shower (to a Patsy Cline CD). But it’s a very fast vibrato. How can I slow it down?
Ah. This is something that bothers me a lot in some singers: they can only sing when their breath is going out, rather than singing while breathing, so they take these big gulps of air and if they don’t time them right it’s “sonnngulpnng” (I like the song but want to smack the singer). I can’t sing worth shit, but I’ve heard so many times “it’s not a matter of having big lungs, it’s about being able to sing through your breathing”… I’ve heard it mostly about jota singers, but then, I hang around more people who sing jota than classical. These singers usually breathe to saturation before starting and may take a big breath before going for a sustained note, but gulping is considered bad form: during a contest, a singer who gulps at any time gets the same reaction as a figure skater who falls down.
I don’t know your style of learning, so it’s hard to give specific advice, but I find the biggest mistake that people make when trying to memorize is, basically, cramming. Not maybe in the traditional sense, but everyone tries to set aside long study sessions and do it all at once, which doesn’t work. In order to truly retain information, you need to be focused, and the brain doesn’t focus for very long. Try blocking out ten minutes at a time; choose a section–a verse, a phrase, whatever–and use the time deeply focusing on that bit. When your ten minutes are up, go do something else for a while. How long depends on the person, but after a while, go back and spend another ten minutes on the same section. The secret is repetition, but focused repetition is the key. Look at it several times every day for short periods.
Another thing people tend to do: start at the beginning; memorize a line, then memorize the next line, then practice the first two lines together. Then memorize a third line, and then practice the first three lines together. Then the fourth…
By this time they’ve memorized the first line four times and the fourth line once. By the end of the song, they know the beginning really well, but the ending is not nearly as strong.
So mix it up. Practice each line in isolation. Practice lines one and two. Lines two and three. Lines two, three and four. Three and four. Then all together.
Most importantly, don’t give up. When I’m memorizing something, especially an entire role, it seems at first as though it’s an interminable, insurmountable task. But if you keep at it, with focus and repetition, it will come together.
Another one that is difficult to answer without hearing you, but usually a fast vibrato is the result on an excess of breath pressure and subglottal pressure. Try singing a little less forcefully without changing the basic structure of your instrument and see what happens. It’s hard to explain in text.
That said, your vibrato is your vibrato, and it is possible that you simply have a naturally fast vibrato. There is a range to these things. My vibrato is relatively fast, although still within the range of “acceptable” (which is of course a completely subjective measure, but generally is considered to be between 5 and 8 beats per second).
Huh. What is really going on, then? Is it that it’s the action of the body muscles that produce the sound, not the act of breathing? Or that the action of breathing out sort of interferes with everything that has to stay relaxed? Or…?
Can you elaborate on this at all, or is it too complicated? It sounds really interesting.
To clarify: it absolutely takes air to sing. Air passing through the cords is what causes them to vibrate. It just doesn’t take nearly as much air as people think.
Basically the principle is this:
The actual amount of air passing through the cords is very little. Shockingly little, actually. Find an opera singer, and hold a lit candle in front of their mouth. Have them sing a full, loud note. The candle won’t flicker. I can actually expel all of the air from my lungs and, without breathing, sing a full note using just the residual air left over. Not for very long, mind you, but it’s there.
Basic physiology tells us that when you take air in, your body wants to get rid of it. So if you take a giant breath, your body wants to get rid of that air, but you can’t. This leads to tension and the tendency to drive breath against your cords.
Any excess air left when you are done with a phrase needs to be expelled when it’s time to take another breath. If you have a great lungful of air when that time comes, you need to get rid of that before you can breathe again.
If the pharyngeal space and torso structures are sufficiently open and relaxed, you will have access to the small amount of air that you need. If not, it will never work. But that’s what practice is all about. I ca
Hopefully I’ll have time to answer in more detail later (show in a couple of hours), but basically she is all about vowel, when most people these days are all about consonants.
Here’s one: what’s your exact range? I gathered from your profile that you are a baritone. (I was checking to see if you were a soprano, since soprano vowels are always hard to understand.)
Sometimes on TV I’ll see a voice coach tell a singer to “Breathe with your diaphragm.” What the heck does that mean? Don’t all of us breathe with our diaphragms with every single breath we take?
Well, you really can only sing when air is going out. You have to inhale to sing, you just don’t need to gulp great big lungfuls of air. A little air goes a long way.
I suspect that when people say “sing through your breathing” (which I’ve never heard), it’s much the same as when people say “sing on the breath” which is a little abstract, but basically means that the air is doing the work, rather than trying to muscle things through.
People who breath in the middle of a note or phrase are guilty of either poor technique (failing to completely adduce the vocal cords while maintaining open resonant space) or poor planning.
I’ve more or less been a baritone for 20 years. There’s always been some question about my being a tenor, but it’s never really come to fruition. My new teacher, however, has finally figured my voice out and now I seem to be coming into my own as a legitimate tenor. It will be a while before it solidifies and I really settle into my real voice, but it appears to be some brand of dramatic tenor. She has brought up the “Helden” label a couple of times as well, but that will be a few years I expect.
My exact range is hard to quantify, since it can vary day by day. I have a decent low range as a result of years of baritonality. Generally my useful range would be from about F[sup]2[/sup] to C[sup]5[/sup], although the Cs are new so I don’t entirely trust them yet. I’ve been known to be able to rumble a low C, but it’s pretty rare, and I don’t have much use for them, so I don’t really worry about it.
It’s a bit of a silly thing to say, but I understand why they say it.
Yes, fundamentally we all breathe with our diaphragms. However, for a variety of reasons, singers often end up breathing by lifting their clavicles and rib cages. That takes your torso all out of alignment and makes it difficult to impossible to control expiration. So teachers emphasize diaphragmatic breathing to compensate.
To me, this is treating a symptom rather than the disease. The disease is a combination of trying to take in way too much breath (which itself is a symptom of not knowing how to access and control the breath you have) and getting in your own way; trying to control a process over which you really don’t have control. Rather than focus on the diaphragm, which after all is a (mostly) involuntary muscle, I focus on taking small, controlled breaths in the context of the proper resonant space and achieving the proper onset which will allow the air to do its work. The key is to allow air in, rather than taking it in.
It’s not something specifically my voice teacher has ever said to me, but that makes a heck of a lot of sense and I think maybe she’s been trying to tell me in different words (“Don’t get high on your breath,” “Your body should be doing the work”) because I’m pretty sure she sings like that. (She is opera-trained.)
Ah, that makes a lot of sense too. My teacher likes consonants fine, but my vowels are the bane of her existence and if I ever got them right it would help me so tremendously.
Speaking of which, another question: do you get students who have a lot of trouble with vowels? (Both my parents are non-native English speakers, and although I was born in the US and speak only English natively, my vowels apparently bear an effect – and I have a lot of trouble hearing some vowel distinctions that apparently most US people would hear easily.)
Wait, wait! So the way you sing doesn’t involve conscious control of abdominal muscles (or is that what you mean by “proper resonant space” and “proper onset”)? Does the fact that my abdominal muscles are sore after I sing a lot mean I’m doing it wrong, according to your technique?
Your core muscles (abdominal and chest) should be doing the bulk of the work. They will be tired after a long bout of singing. (Intense singing is physically exhausting, but that exhaustion should manifest itself in the body, not the voice.)
But, in my view, it’s not a conscious thing (or shouldn’t be). Those muscles will react to the demands of your voice, but consciously controlling them leads to tension and pushing (in my opinion). That said, in order for that to work, everything else needs to be in place. This is, of course, one of the many areas in which there are tons of differing opinions. As far as I can tell, mine is the minority view. It works for me, though, which is why I teach it.
My 16 year old daughter loves to sing, although she is not especially brilliant or anything. She likes to sing pop, but is open to some level of classical training. What should I look for in a voice teacher for her?
The most important things are rapport and trust. In order to sing you must allow yourself to be vulnerable, not to mention be willing to fail (sometimes spectacularly), and without trust it’s very difficult to open up that way. Don’t be afraid to shop around. Any voice teacher worth their salt will understand the importance of that relationship, and will not be offended if a student chooses to go with another teacher (you don’t want to deal with those not worth their salt anyway).
My teacher has a list of other criteria in her book that I can post later, when I have it in hand. She’s been around the business a lot longer than me, so she knows what’s up.
Is it that it’s the action of the body muscles that produce the sound, not the act of breathing? Or that the action of breathing out sort of interferes with everything that has to stay relaxed? Or…?