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Home Forums Music Teacher Forum Good Exercises for Reducing Breathiness (Singing Teachers)

  • Kat Hunter

    Member
    November 15, 2024 at 9:17 am

    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..

  • Eliza Fyfe

    Member
    November 15, 2024 at 9:17 am

    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

  • Guest Teacher

    Member
    November 15, 2024 at 9:17 am

    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.

  • Guest Teacher

    Member
    November 15, 2024 at 9:18 am

    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.

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