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I definitely need to diversify my portfolio of ‘I understood something’ idioms.
The vocal fry sound is made by the vocal folds, but they can change it by adjusting the shape of their mouth. So it’s basically a way of showing the student that the filter matters too in the tuning of the note. Does that make sense, or am I talking gibberish?
Here’s a little recording:
http://mattpocock.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/ZOOM0075.mp3
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Oh man, I had such a huge breakthrough with this a few months ago. It went like this:
For so long, I thought that tuning was a mental process. If the student understood the concept that one note was higher than another, or that they were going flat or sharp, they would automatically know how to improve. It seemed like some students just didn’t know the differences between sharp and flat or high and low. So if I just told them again and again, they’d eventually understand.
Needless to say, this approach got me nowhere except that theme park called Frustration Land – of which I became a season ticket holder.
But finally it hit me. Students learn how to sing from how they speak. And non-singers tend to speak in quite a narrow register.
They don’t know how it feels to sing higher or lower. They only know the feeling of their own speaking register. But what is involved in the feeling of a high note? Obviously, the vocal folds vibrate faster, but there was surely a lot more than that:
I started breaking it down. First of all, the larynx needs to rise a little. The pharynx gains a little bit of helpful tension. Everything narrows a bit more. The tongue rises. The lips, if you’d like, can get more widened. The placement of the note (whatever that means) feels a little higher – more towards the forehead than the throat.
And then finally, WHAM. It hit me.
To teach a student tuning, you can’t just explain it in concepts. You had to acquaint them with the physical symptoms of high and low notes. And the physical symptoms the student feels are all about the filter – the mouth, the larynx height, the tongue, the lips, pharyngeal tension, and the ‘placement’.
So I call this ‘filter tuning’.
Let’s take an example. A male student is trying to tune to a middle C. This can be a fairly high note for some students just starting out. They keep undershooting it by some distance.
What you should notice is that the mouth is almost completely disengaged. There’s no sense of them raising the larynx/tongue/lips or anything. The mouth is just where it is when they speak.
So what they need to do, in this new terminology, is ‘tune the filter up‘.
The way I do this is simple:
1. Make a vocal fry sound.
2. Now make the lowest vocal fry sound you can.
3. Now make the highest vocal fry sound you can, without actually making a note.
You’ll notice that on step two, the filter tunes downwards, dropping the larynx, lowering the tongue and jaw.
On step three, the filter tunes upwards, lifting the larynx, heightening the tongue, widening the lips.
But here’s the kicker – this is all being changed by the filter. Nothing about the actual vocal folds is changing here – the sound difference is all in the way the mouth and vocal tract are changing shape.
(If the student struggles with vocal fry, this can also be done on breath. You’re then listening for the ‘dark quality’ or ‘light quality’ of the breath)
So returning to that student. Ask him to tune his filter up using vocal fry, and then to sing the note. If he still undershoots, tune it up a little more. You’ll be amazed at the difference.
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@Eliza Woohoo! Guess my SEO must be working!
Let’s demystify the recoil breath. It helps to remember that the diaphragm only works ONE WAY. And that way is DOWN. Just like a bicep can only pull in one direction, the diaphragm can only flatten. This means that ‘singing from your diaphragm’ isn’t quite true, because the diaphragm isn’t active during singing.
@Monika – Great to have you here! The lungs do have some natural elasticity to them, but they don’t pull the air in when they rebound: just like a balloon doesn’t pull the air in after you deflate it. But 3 perfect exercises nonetheless.
The recoil breath comes down to one idea: wherever you place your attention, there will be tension. We’ve all seen this: students who, when you say ‘breathe’, inhale like a hoover doing screamo. Tons of visible neck tension, tons of audible ‘turbulence’ on the breath (which indicates laryngeal and FVF tension). Bad breathing.
This means that focusing on the in-breath is actually counter-productive. So recoil breathing focuses on the out-breath. In other words, you breathe out so your lungs completely deflate (on a ‘ff’ sound or any fricative), then allow the breath in. I replied to a post on reddit with a really helpful gif to describe it.
This actually comes from a practice called ‘Accent Method’ which Janice Chapman loves (but for which most of the books are out of print!), but ‘recoil breath’ was coined (I think!) by Jo Estill.
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Agreed – I had some mixed reactions: not the Love-in I was expecting!
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3 Classics:
Singing and the Actor – Gillyanne Kayes
Singing & Teaching Singing – Janice Chapman
The Dynamics Of The Singing Voice – Meribeth Bunch Dayme3 Out-There Choices:
The Use And Training Of The Human Voice – Arthur Lessac
The Structure Of Singing – Richard Miller
Freeing The Natural Voice – Kristin LinklaterHappy holidays!
