Ep 3 Live Q&A – March 6 2019 – How much breath do you need to support a good belt?

Matthew Edwards: We’re talking about the vocal folds, right? I think we have [crosstalk 00:29:33]

Mike Elson: Right. Yep. Yep. Let me flash that one up. So, number four. Okay. Question number four we have, how much breath do you need to support a good belt? Now this one … two-part. Again, it’s related to breathe so we’re talking about the breath a lot today and then belt like maybe we can’t fully unpack that, but what is a belt and what does a belt sound like and things like that.

Matthew Edwards: Yeah, absolutely. So, we go back to the balloon because what we’re actually talking about a lot with this is registration.

Mike Elson: Oh, actually, wait. This is from Dylan Miller. Thank you Dylan for sending this in.

Matthew Edwards: Okay, great. I’m going to blow the balloon back up. So, the lungs and then this stem up here we’re going to consider to be the trachea. The trachea leads up to the vocal folds. So, clearly, there are no vocal folds in there, but if I take this latex and push it together, I end up creating folds that then vibrate with air and that’s how we get all those little squeaky sounds, right? So, that’s what the vocal folds do. The air pressure course through them, causes the vocal folds to flap in the air, they create a pitch. Same thing on a balloon.

Matthew Edwards: When you’re singing in a breathy voice, you do not have a lot of what we call medial compression or pressure of the vocal folds pushing against each other, okay? When you don’t have a whole lot of that compression, you’re not going to get a really firm buzz, you’re going to get a lot of air escaping and that air is going to escape really quickly.

Matthew Edwards: In contrast, let’s talk about belting. When you belt, you’re holding those vocal folds really tightly together. When you do that, only a little bit of air escapes at a time. A lot less air and I’m actually getting more sound, more amplitude without as much air, right? When you have those folds pressed together tightly like that and you’re blowing air through them, it’s going to give you a more chest dominant sound. It has less air escaping which is usually going to be louder because it has more harmonic content to it.

Matthew Edwards: The mistake that a lot of belters make is that they’ll get their voice buzzing where they have all that air backed up underneath and then [inaudible 00:31:53] they start to try to squeeze down on it, so we get that … see I try to push it down to get that?

Mike Elson: Right.

Matthew Edwards: It doesn’t sound good. On the balloon, you can hear it’s overpowering that little valve. What we hear in a singer when we overpower that valve is they either start to go sharp in their pitch or they start up their belting, they go towards what we call screlting. Screlting is more of that combination between screaming and belting. It’s what you call carrying up too much chest.

Mike Elson: Right.

Matthew Edwards: Right? So, the idea is as we go up for these high notes [inaudible 00:32:31] if you’re carrying up too much chest and you get screlty, it would be this (singing) where you can hear it gets real strainy. What happened there is I have my vocal folds close but I contracted my abs on the way up. So, I had that valve set and a chest registration and I contracted my abs and forced more air out than the valve was able to handle. So, what I need to do is get the breath to adjust for the valve.

Matthew Edwards: If I have a valve that’s really tight and I know I have a lot of air in my lungs and I know that not a lot of air can escape through a tight valve, I don’t need to shove air at it. If anything, I need to resist the collapse which goes back to that example we just did a few minutes ago where we kept the ribcage out as we sang a sustaining note and then contract it when we needed it. So, now I’m going to sing that same high belt thing keeping everything out and not trying to contract. (singing) has a lot less pressure then (singing) when I really contract those abs, right?

Mike Elson: Right. Yep.

Matthew Edwards: So, for young belters, they have a lot of elasticity within their breathing mechanism. When they’re first starting to belt, I recommend that they use as little active force as possible. That they just let the natural recoil of their voice power their belt voice. Then if they’re trying to sing a big long-phrase, then they might need to contract their abdominal wall a little bit to make it to the end of the phrase. A woman’s lung capacity and lung function hits its full maturity at around age 20, okay? You then have a good let’s say about 15 to 20 years of functioning on your full mature respiratory system and then you start losing some of your lung capacity and function at about 1% a year and it starts going downhill.

Matthew Edwards: At the same time as that is happening, women experience some hormonal changes in their vocal folds. The vocal folds are full of hormone receptors and as women age, their hormonal balance changes within their body. Oftentimes, what will happen is those vocal folds thicken up a bit and they will find that they have to start actually giving a little bit more active force at the very beginning because otherwise, those vocal folds have thickened to the point that they don’t want to move, okay? Then if you couple that with the fact that they’re losing some of their lung capacity because of aging and things are becoming less elastic, they also are not going to have that same passive force happening in the respiratory system that a 20-year-old belter does.

Matthew Edwards: So, what I’ll see happen a lot of times is you’ll find a famous belter who is in their 60s or 70s and they’ve been performing all over the world and they’re super famous and they say, “You have to tank up and you got to contract right away.” She’s right. She does because at her point and age her lungs don’t have the same capacity as when she was 20 and her vocal folds have thickened a bit. Then a lot of times what’ll happen is you’ll see that approach then applied to a 19, 20-year-old belter and that 20-year-old belter tanks up as big as they can and they contract right away and it sounds like they’re screaming.

Matthew Edwards: Then you see the 20-year-old screaming and this Broadway pro with a Tony Award sounding like a goddess and you go on, “Why are these two things not working?” Then you’re saying, you go, “Clearly, that works and clearly that does not.” That’s why when I’m teaching singers and working with them, I’m always looking at the individual. What does that particular person need? How can we help that person with the way that their body works? Looking at the other person and going, “Okay. Well, they need a different set of skills because of where they are in life.” Then that’s where we then really come back to what you and I are talking about earlier which is balance and registration.

Mike Elson: Right. I mean, you can have breath but if you don’t have … you’re using the balloon analogy which I think is great, but if you don’t have the valve closed at the top, all the air escapes, right? So, there’s no belt. It’s gone or they run out of breath. Singers have asked this question too. Hey, I’m running out of breath and things like that. So, it’s like, “Well, hey, if you don’t have the right registration …” We’ll unpack that I think in a different session here. Then, all that breath is just going to escape.

Mike Elson: What we mean by registration for those of you that are maybe new to singer, just trying to understand is that primarily there’s a lot of different camps and schools that taught them, but I’m just going to do the easiest one is you got chest voice, and then you’ve got falsetto voice, right? So, that just me switching back and forth between two primary modes of registration. One is lower voice and one’s up here is a higher voice, right? So, those create different movements within the muscles. Dr. Edwards can explain a lot more than I can with that, but when you have the right balance of the muscles and the registration and the closure and the glottis seals up, then all of the stuff we’ve been talking about breath is applicable, but if you don’t have the valve sealed, you just going to have air escaping too quickly or not enough air escaping if they’re too tight.

Matthew Edwards: Yeah. So, you mentioned that’s our entry-level understanding of the chest and the head is that tends to be that bottom and the high. Then where you get to the middle of your range, you start to have some options where you can sing that same pitch in either way, right?

Mike Elson: Right.

Matthew Edwards: Then that’s where it really starts to impact the respiratory system. If I sing in a chest dominant place on a middle C and if I just do ah vowel (singing) that’s got a lot of chest so that air is really getting backed up because in chest voice those vocal folds press pretty firmly against each other and you’re in a thick vocal fold mold meaning most of the vocal fold is touching and contacting through a vibratory cycle, okay?

Mike Elson: Right.

Matthew Edwards: When you’re in head voice though, your vocal folds usually thin out and do not press together as tightly. So, in falsetto, (singing) I run out of breath really quick because there’s nothing holding that breath back. So, if I’m singing a song where I have to hit this note both in the chest in one phrase (singing) followed by head or falsetto in another (singing) I have to have two different respiratory strategies, right? So, I’m doing (singing) I’m going to use up a lot of air and if I try and do it in chest (singing) I can keep on singing because I have a lot of air left in my lungs because my folds are so tight it doesn’t let much out, right? When I try to do that on breathy if I then (singing) and I keep trying to sing, I can’t because all of a sudden I don’t have any breath in my lungs, right?

Mike Elson: Yeah, good demo.

Matthew Edwards: They’re touching so little, I’m leaking a lot of air. When you’re leaking a lot of air to make sure that you keep that maintain strength line that we talked about earlier, you do apply active force. You contract your abs fairly early in the phrase because you’re using up air fast, but in that example where I stayed in more of a chest production and just kept talking on pitch for a long time, I didn’t really contract my abs until the last maybe four or five counts, because the passive recoil was more than enough and I didn’t have to actively contract to try to increase the airflow.

Mike Elson: Yeah. That’s a great way to summarize I think a lot of the points that we’ve talked about today. So, what else? I think we’re almost out of time.

Matthew Edwards: I think you are as well. [crosstalk 00:40:07]

Mike Elson: A great joy to have you on again. So, go ahead.

Matthew Edwards: Oh, thank you. Thanks for having me. I have a … just give a shout out for my blog edwardsvoice.wordpress.com. There’s about 120, 140 articles on there right now. If you go back on your laptop down to the bottom where it says older posts and you start clicking on that, you will find this photo somewhere along the way with an article about some of Thomas Hixon’s spots. There’s a couple of other things that address registration and respiration on there [crosstalk 00:40:37]

Mike Elson: Yeah. Shoot me over those links. We can drop them in the thread on this so everyone can see. We should link to the book and we can link to your blog on that, too.

Matthew Edwards: Absolutely.

Mike Elson: Fantastic. Well, thanks for joining us again. Thank you, everyone, for your wonderful questions. If you’re just tuning in, we do this every week. Hi, I’m Mike Elson, founder of voicelessons.com. We have with us, Dr. Matthew Edward. So, thanks for joining everybody. We’re taking your questions. We’re tackling these topics. We’re starting with some of the easy ones but we’re going to work our way through a lot of the different fun and some more difficult and some more controversial topics on singing both for students and for teachers. We’ve got an amazing platform here.

Mike Elson: If you haven’t checked it out, go to our website. Look around. We’d love to show more about our platform at other times, but this is really just a singing conversation where we’re trying to discuss and talk about and educate and promote healthy natural voice and explore through science and Dr. Edwards’s research and everything like that. Things and topics that everyone’s talking about and wants to know more about. So, drop a question in if you have one, we’ll be sure to put it on the list. Thank you, everyone, for attending. Have a great week.

Matthew Edwards: [inaudible 00:41:58] so many familiar names up there. Have a great week. We’ll see you next week.