Ep 5 Live Q&A – March 20, 2019 – How do you make your voice transition from loud to soft?

Mike: Here we go. Okay, so question number one, today’s theme is kind of dynamics. So how do you go from loud to quiet is this question that we’re going to jump into first.

Matt Edwards: Great. So this kind of goes back to airflow and what we just talked about before. So when somebody’s singing loud and they have a problem going back to quiet, they’re usually having a hard time getting out of that more compressed phonation into more of that breathy phonation, right? So the spectrum is we go all the way up from pressed. This is breathy, and we’re looking to flow. Usually, someone who’s having a hard time getting softer is getting stuck more on this end of the spectrum, right? Because once those vocal folds press hard together, it can be really hard to relax them out.

Matt Edwards: Now for those of you who want to know the specific muscles that we’re dealing with, we’re primarily talking about the Lateral Cricoarytenoid Muscle, which we call the LCA, or the Interarytenoid Muscle, which we refer to as the IA. For those of you who that goes over your head, not a problem. Don’t stress about this, all right? You just need to know there are two muscles that regulate how [inaudible 00:08:07] the vocal folds are, and you’ve got to coordinate them if you want to be able to control your dynamics, okay?

Matt Edwards: We want to think of the vocal folds as being a valve that controls the release of air, okay? When they’re tightly closed together, they’re not going to release a whole lot of air, and when they’re wide open, you’re exhaling. All right? When you’re in that loud phonation and you want to get soft, you have to slowly let them come apart, and it’s not coming fully apart. It’s just pressing less firmly together. We can look at this at managing airflow, or we can also look at it from a registration point of view. Essentially what we’re talking about is using more head instead of the mix, okay?

Matt Edwards: So the first thing that we want to do is awaken your body to awaken those arytenoids and the muscles that control them to the idea of opening and closing and starting to give you some control over that sensation of open versus closed. And the best way we do that is staccati. So even just taking on a simple pitch in the middle part of your range. We’re not trying to go to the lower extremes or the high extremes, just in the middle and going, “Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.” You’re teaching those arytenoids to come together, open. Come together, open. Come together, open, all right? Because if you’re singing and it’s just pressing and it’s loud, you’re having a hard time getting them to release that opening place. So we want your body to relate those two extreme opposites, closed and open.

Matt Edwards: The next thing we want to do is start with somewhat we would call negative practice, where we have you sing really pressed followed by really breathy, which is essentially taking that staccati and breaking them into two. So now we’re going to do “Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.” Teaching your vocal folds to lightly touch, firmly touch, lightly touch …

Mike: Got it.

Matt Edwards: Firmly touch. Huh? Now after you’ve gotten them to find the two extremes, we want to introduce the middle. The middle is going to be more in the middle. It’s not suppressed, right? So it would be, “Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.” So we’re going breathy, more in the middle, all the way pressed, back into the middle, and then really breathy. You might have to play around with this a little bit. If you’re having a hard time getting it to click, do breathy, loud, then middle. So we’re going to do, “Ah, ah, ah.” Or you could flip-flop that and do loud, breathy, middle. “Ah, ah, ah.” So that’s starting to teach your body that you have options with how firmly those arytenoids close.

Matt Edwards: After we have been able to coordinate the way that they close and the amount that they put out, we now want to start doing what are called Messa di Voce exercises, okay? And that’s where we’re going to start out with breathy, slowly crescendo into that middle place, crescendo into the more pressed place, and we don’t want to go fully pressed, but to the firm closure place, then decrescendo back to the middle, and then decrescendo all the way back to the breath, okay? Yep, that guy right there, right?

Matt Edwards: We can do that in steps. So first we’re just going to go from breathy to the middle. So we would make a breathy sound first. “Ah.” Then the middle sound. “Ah.” Then we would try to crescendo to that. “Ah.” Then we could take the middle, “ah,” and loud, “ah.” And then crescendo from the middle to loud, “ah.” Then we can break that up and just pause in the middle and then go to the loud. “Ah, ah.” Now we’re connecting those together incrementally, and then we’re going to see if we can just glide all the way from beginning to end without having to pause. “Ah.”

Matt Edwards: Then when you reach that loud place, we’re now going to start working backward from loud to soft. So we’re going to take that same incremental approach. First, we’re going to go from loud to more medium. So we would just try to figure out how to do, “ah. Ah.” You may notice as you listen, I lose a little bit of the brilliance in my voice or the fuller placement as I back off of the voice a little bit. Other people may notice that the voice gets a little breathier as I start to back off that volume. So those are two different ways that you can kind of tap into some kinesthetic sensations that might help you be able to change the way that you’re crescendoing and decrescendoing, okay?

Matt Edwards: So again, back, full to the middle. “Ah.” Then middle to breathy. “Ah.” Then we’re going to try to connect the loud to breathy. “Ah.” So now we’ve built up to the full and then came back from the full. So now we would try to go one up, breathe, and then come back. Do like this. “Ah. Ah.” So we’re crescendoing up, decrescendoing back. Once you can master those two sections, then we merge it together and do it one breath. “Ah.” And then you go up and down your range, going, starting in that middle zone, and then see how much you can work towards your extremes, your lower end, and your higher end. Only go as high and as low as you can while actually being able to do the exercise. When you reach a point where you’re starting to struggle a little bit, back down by a half step. Then get that mastered, and then see if you can’t go back up or down the half step, depending on if you’re trying to work low or high, and then see if you can make it happen there. All right?

Mike: Can you give our listeners for men and women, maybe some nice, safe, easy pitches that they could start this process on?

Matt Edwards: Absolutely. Most men, whether you’re a tenor or baritone, should be okay on the E below middle C and the B above it, right? So you would just kind of start with this E. “Ah, ah.” Go up by half step and work all those until you get up to this B. And for women, most of the time, a pretty safe spot is going to be middle C up to the G above middle C. It’s a similar place as where the men are. At that pitch range, both men and women should have three to five pitches available below that and quite a bit of headroom before they start getting their turning over the point on the upper part of the voice, okay?

Matt Edwards: If you’re a woman who’s really kind of struggling still to bridge the gap, bridge your mix, then you might need to lower this a little bit and focus on it just on your chest voice or raise it a little bit and focus on it mainly in your head voice, okay? And we’ve kind of talked about blending the registers in the past, so if you’re not quite sure what we’re talking about, jump on to our Facebook page. Scroll down to some of the past Q&As, and you’ll be able to find us talking about how to blend registration.

Mike: Great, great. Okay, so anything else on that question?

Matt Edwards: I think that covers it, most of it. Just realize that this is like I said, it’s a coordination thing. You’re really trying to get muscles inside of your larynx to figure out how to do this, and if you’ve ever played a sport, you probably remember that first time you tried to throw a ball or you tried to swing a bit. I vividly remember trying to hit a ball off a tee, and you had to try to hold the bat. Then you lowered the bat to where the ball was. Then you pulled the ball back and put it to the ball where it went. And then you would try to get the two to connect it together. This is the exact same process, right? We’re borrowing from athletics and using that exercise, physiology, now it’s motor learning knowledge that’s come out of sports medicine, and we’re applying it to the singing voice because after all, we are athletes as well. We’re just vocal athletes.

Mike: Absolutely. Totally agree with that. Okay, so question number two, and before we move on, I want to say the first question was from [Kenzie Cardine 00:16:15]. Thank you so much for writing in that question. Sorry, I forgot to mention your name earlier.