Ep 5 Live Q&A – March 20, 2019 – How do you make more space in your throat to make high notes sound better?

Mike: Awesome. Awesome. Thanks for that. So moving on to the next question. I want to say hi, Jonah, hi, Jackie, hi, Jessica. Thanks for tuning in and the shout-outs over there. So moving on to question number three. Question number three is, “How do you make more space in your throat to make better sound when reaching higher notes?” And this question comes in from [Esty Johnson 00:28:28]. Thanks for writing in, Esty.

Matt Edwards: Yeah. I think one of the biggest misconceptions is space in the throat and what that actually means, okay? If you just drop your jaw and inhale, and as long as your tongue is resting behind your teeth, it’s a silent inhale, and you’re just breathing in pretty naturally, your throat is open, okay? There are no muscles that hold that throat open. There are only muscles that squish it and squeeze it out, okay? The muscles that line the throat are called the constrictor muscles, and if you put your hands here on the side of your larynx, and you go, “Goo, goo, goo!” feel all those muscles squeeze in. Then go, “Ha, ha, ha,” and you should feel everything relax.

Mike: Ha, ha, ha.

Matt Edwards: So we’re going to do those opposites. Goo-goo-goo. Ha-ha-ha. All right? Try that and notice what’s happening on the side of your throat. When we go to sing, a lot of times what happens is in an effort to make a certain tone quality or in an effort to sing really loud, we end up squeezing these muscles when we try to produce sound, so then we feel that our throat is narrow, and we think that we need to open up, and so then we try to engage different sets of muscles to create an open throat. And then basically what you do is you tie your singing voice into a knot, right? Your body is already squeezing things tight, and you’re trying to relax those things by squeezing something that doesn’t exist, and then you create all kinds of false sensations, and then you get your tongue dropping backward, your palate getting into a stuck, overextended place, and your larynx is either stuck really high or really low, and it just becomes a big mess that would take a long time to untangle, all right?

Matt Edwards: So one of the things we want to do is first start out and figure out where the location of the tension is that’s causing you to feel like you have a narrow, thin throat, that your throat isn’t relaxing open, okay? So we started with that “goo-goo” and the “ha, ha,” which is testing those constrictor muscles. Another way you can see if those constrictor muscles are actually part of the problem is to sustain a pitch and then start slowly looking up along the way. So if you’re causing constriction, and we have the sound, this (singing) “Ah!” And then I start to look up. You’ll hear that sound go away. (singing) “Ah!” Because all of a sudden, those throat muscles can no longer squeeze, and then the voice just starts to open up naturally. Okay?

Matt Edwards: So let’s say you do that and you find that you can go from “Ah!” and nothing really changes. Then we want to go and look at something else. The next thing we’re going to look at is the tongue. What we’re going to now do is stick your tongue all the way out and go (singing) “Ah!” And then pull your tongue really far back like you’re saying an R and sing an R with an R tongue. (singing) “Arr”, and stick it out. (singing) “Ah.” Then pull it back. (singing) “Uh.” And if you notice that your tongue feels really out of place when you extend it, and it starts to feel really at home when you retract it, that probably means that your tongue wadding up in the back is part of what’s narrowing it in your throat, okay?

Matt Edwards: You could also play with narrowing your tongue, doing a hot dog tongue. So going (singing) “Oh” and then widening your tongue over your bottom molars. (singing) “Ah. Oh. Ah.” If you find that “uh” feels more like your default and “ah” feels like it’s taking you in a new direction, then it’s possible that you’re getting narrowing tension in your tongue that’s locking things up in your larynx below, okay?

Matt Edwards: Let’s say that’s not the case. Then the next thing we want to do is look at your jaw. A lot of people end up holding tension in their jaw, and when you hold tension in your jaw, it has a ricochet effect that goes down your throat, and it tightens up the muscles that contract on your larynx. So what you would want to do is first start off by biting your pinkie finger, which makes you kind of crunch down and you go (singing) “Ah.” And then you would push it on your masseter muscle. You’re going to find your masseter muscle if you put your fingers on your cheekbone, place them down slightly. You would push in on this and drop your jaw and then sing “ah.” (singing) “Ah.” Then again, we’re going to alternate between those two. (singing) “Ah. Ah. Ah. Ah.” If you find that the biting feeling seems more like what you tend to do normally when you sing, then jaw tension might be what’s in your way and starting to narrow your throat instead of opening it up.

Matt Edwards: Finally, what we’re going to want to do is test your laryngeal position and see if you’re maybe locking your larynx low or if your larynx is getting too high and it’s getting stuck. So to find the low laryngeal position, you’re going to first put your fingers here around your Adam’s Apple or your Eve’s Apple, and you’re going to imagine you’re sipping an imaginary string of spaghetti. So you’re going to go … And then we’re just going to sing “oh.” (singing) “Oh.” That should be a lower laryngeal position. Then we’re going to go, “Nyah, nyah, nyah-nyah-nyah” like the kid taunting another kid on the playground. “Nyah, nyah, nyah-nyah-nyah.” And most likely you’re going to feel that larynx go high. So we’re going to alternate between those two. (singing) “Woo. Nyah, nyah, nyah-nyah-nyah.” If you feel like it’s going towards either one of those extremes, then you might be creating tension of shoving your larynx down or pushing it up high if it’s narrowing your throat in. If your larynx feels like it doesn’t really do either of those two, that’s probably not the issue.

Matt Edwards: You’re then going to go back and look at those four things. You’re going to go to our Facebook page, voicelessons.com Facebook page, and review some of the past Q&As because, in those, we talk about how to relieve tongue tension. We talk about how to deal with jaw tension. We talk about how to release the constrictor muscles and how to rebalance your registration along the way, and we’ve also talked a little bit about the laryngeal position and things that affect it. Then you’re going to start using exercises to address those different components. Ideally, each one of those things should be able to freely move into those different positions, so if you find you can’t really move your tongue out and back, I would work on that until you’re able to use it. Because anytime we can’t do something, we might as well figure out how to do it, because it never hurts to have more flexibility in our vocal instrument, right? If you feel like you can’t sing comfortably with a narrow draw and with an open jaw, I would work on that, right? And each one of those other things we mentioned.

Matt Edwards: And then what I would do is spend most of your time, then, otherwise balancing registration and looking if you might have a little bit too much chest voice getting carried up into your mix, because when you carry chest voice up, it tends to constrict a little bit because your larynx raises, and most singers don’t have the skills right away to keep their larynx free and those constrictor muscles out of the way while they engage chest voice. And if you instead start to bring head voice down or falsetto down into the middle part of your range, you should start to experience freedom, and then when you start to engage in more chest-dominant vocal production, it should be easier to find that free place and not just go towards the defaulted constricted voice.