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Good Exercises for Reducing Breathiness (Singing Teachers)
Just wondering, does anyone have any good exercises for reducing breathiness? I’ve got a couple of students, though one in particular, that just can’t seem to stop getting a very light wispy tone. It works well for some stuff but not for others and every time we manage to undo it for a phrase or two it’s right back where it was next week! I do think it’s partly a confidence issue, but I’m interested to see if anyone’s got any ideas.
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4 Replies
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Is their speaking voice wispy and breathy? If not, you can often use speaking as a template for how the voice will feel in a nice solid chest voice. I would stick to lower songs/exercises to try to develop some vocal fold adduction and use forward vowels etc..
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So I adjust my warm ups accordingly:
– Nasal scales/arpeggios for the chest voice
– Continuous sirens for the head voice, which avoids any crackle as it has to be a pure tone
– Encourage the student to drop/raise the larynx for each exercise so they can feel how their tone changes and how to get clarity this way
– Get them to feel comfortable with a shouty voice (imagine calling over to someone on the other side of the street) as this triggers the reflex of power your voice makes -
Thanks for the lightning fast replies, both! Her speaking voice is a little wispy, but not as much as her singing and she has successfully sung a clear, strong, breathless note before now with a little persuasion. I just want to start getting her to the point where she can do that herself as I can’t coax her into it every time she needs to sing! I’ll give those a go, thanks.
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Agree with both Kat and Eliza here. Something I do as part of the warm up is to take unvoiced, semi-voiced and fully voiced consonants and sustain them so the student gets a feel for each kind of sound. They then work on it at home, then we open each sound onto a clean vowel. It seems boring but if the student really works with it, the results are great.