Ep 10 Live Q&A – April 24, 2019 Question 5 – How do I project my voice and sound confident?

Mike Elson: (42:44)
I want to know how to project my voice and sound more confident when I sing, as well as being able to transition better between my chest and head voice. Let’s talk about confidence because I think we have a lot on the registration in this one and the last one.

Matt Edwards: (43:02)
I was going to say.

Mike Elson: (43:04)
Okay, cool.

Matt Edwards: (43:05)
Yeah, registration, go back and watch the beginning questions in this video, because those are exactly what [inaudible 00:43:12]. Confidence is tough. I think that there are a lot of great self-help books out that you can pick up and read and start understanding how the mind works and how people perceive other people. When I teach a workshop, I’ll often say, raise your hand if you like Ariana Grande, and then a lot of hands will go up. And then I say, raise your hand if you hate Ariana Grande, and a bunch of people raise their hands. And then I say, raise your hand if you could care less, and we have a chunk say that.

Matt Edwards: (43:43)
Then I move onto another artist, the same story. You get people who love them, people who hate them, people who could care less. Go through three to five artists, and you realize that different people in the room have different feelings about every one of those people. Has that stopped Ariana Grande from sharing her voice? No. We’re all going to have people who like what we do and who don’t like what we do, and we have other people who are just going to be indifferent.

Matt Edwards: (44:07)
Once you accept that, you take away one of the biggest roadblocks to finding confidence. So many times what’s preventing us from feeling confident is fear of being judged. But when you walk into a stage or, nowadays, a presentation and you look in the room at hundreds of people and you go, you know what? A third of the people in this room are going to love what I do, a third are going to kind of like it, and a third are just not going to like it at all. I’m going to perform today for the third who are going to love it, and hopefully get the third who are kind of interested in it jump on board as well.

Matt Edwards: (44:42)
That is a big first step of changing your mindset to start moving in that direction. As far as finding power in your voice, you, everybody, has the ability to call. It’s built into us, it’s considered primal instinct. In the day before cell phones, yes, for the younger listeners and watchers, there was a day when we didn’t have a phone attached to our hip. I actually remember waiting in the house for the landline to ring. When we didn’t have something attached to the hip, if you were out at the park or in the woods and you were trying to find somebody, you would have to call out for them.

Matt Edwards: (45:17)
If we go back 2,000 years ago, you’re on a hunting expedition and you’re picking berries and you finally find a big berry bush, you need to call out to let everybody know where you are and how to find it. That is in your body. So what you need to start doing is taking your speaking voice and elevating it. If you want to say, hey, how are you today, that’s normal conversational speech. Now you’ve just got to be confident enough to call it out to somebody who’s 10 feet away. Hey, how are you today? Then you’re going to start calling it to someone who’s 30 feet away. Hey, how are you today? Then you’re going to keep, excuse me, calling it out and increasing that distance in your mind until you find a place where you’ve reached the physiological limit.

Matt Edwards: (45:58)
Then you’ll back up a little bit from that and start singing your songs that way, singing the phrases as if you’re singing it to somebody six feet away, and then singing it to somebody 15 feet away, and then singing it to somebody 30 feet away. Now, it’s important to understand that when you’re doing this, you’re building strength within your vocal mechanisms, and you’re also then starting to build stamina.

Matt Edwards: (46:18)
When you’re building strength and stamina, there is no artistry involved. You are going to be a sound-producing machine. That’s it. It’s exercise time. But when you get comfortable hitting that 30-foot mark consistently, you’ll start being able to vary up the dynamics a little bit of every musical phrase, where some of the musical phrases feel like it’s six feet, some to 15, some to 30, some to six, some to 20. You’ll start to have that ability to vary things up. Then you’ll start to have the ability to make brighter sounds, warmer sounds, and then eventually, you can focus on the storytelling and your voice should come along for the ride.

Matt Edwards: (46:53)
For what it’s worth, too, to wrap this one up, is I have a yearbook sitting on my shelf in my studio, full of comments telling me I had the worst voice ever, to stop singing, and I shouldn’t even bother. My high school choir teacher told me not to bother pursuing a performance degree. So there are always going to be naysayers, there are also going to be people who tell you negative things. Remember the 30% rule. There’s usually 30% of people who are going to like what you do. Sing for them. Forget about the haters, and you’ll be so much better off.

Mike Elson: (47:25)
Absolutely. I’ll just add to that, I don’t have three straws with me, but basically, it’s like practice makes perfect. You’re going to be more confident when you can do it blindfolded with your eyes closed type of thing, where you can perform it three times in a row without a single mistake. So it’s just back to the basics. Do it one time. Put a straw, put a pencil, put a crayon, whatever you want. Mark it down, okay, I did it great. Let me do it again. Do it a second time. Nailed it again. Do it a third time. Nailed it again. Boom. That’s how you get confidence.

Mike Elson: (47:59)
It’s just the simple fact that you know you can get out there and execute it like a performer that’s well prepared, and you’ve done all your training. You’ve done all of the preparation. So when it’s time to do the performance, it’s a habit, and you can actually enjoy living in the moment and creating raw and fresh and just feeling that, and really be there with your audience, delivering that message that you’re supposed to do. It just comes out so pure and so natural, because you’ve done all the work to get you up to that point. That’s where the confidence comes from.

Mike Elson: (48:36)
For me to even be here, I’ve been working my hind off for years and decades to be able to amass the skill and the cash to build voicelessons.com for everyone out there. This didn’t just happen one day I woke up. No. You’ve got to prepare. So that would be my advice for you, is just prepare, do the practicing, learn the exercises, identify what you need, and that’s where the confidence will come to you.

Matt Edwards: (49:02)
Absolutely.

Mike Elson: (49:04)
Yeah. Next question. Do we have time for a few more, Matt?

Matt Edwards: (49:08)
Sure.

Mike Elson: (49:09)
Cool. Okay, number seven. This one goes back, this one’s maybe a little bit repetitive. But, sorry, I jumped in out of order. How to know … Sorry, I should’ve edited this. How do you know how big your range actually is?