Ep 5 Live Q&A – March 20, 2019 – What is “singing as you speak?”

Mike: Yeah, you’re right. So we had another question that came in, and let me just go check where that one went. It was … Okay, “Can you explain sing as you speak? A student had said, ‘Hey, it sounds musical, so are you just singing?'” So I guess can we elaborate a little on sing as you speak?

Matt Edwards: Yeah, absolutely. So what we mean by sing like you speak is that you’re not trying to manufacture a sound. You’re not trying to twist your voice into something that’s completely different than who you are authentically when you’re talking, okay? So a lot of times we’ll hear singers come in and they’ll talk like this. They’ll be like, “Hi. How are you today?” And then we’ll ask them to sing, and they’ll go (singing) “How are you today?” Which is not at all related to their speech. On the opposite end, we’ll ask you to say, “How are you today?” And they’ll say, “Hi. How are you today?” Then we’ll say, “Sing that,” and they’ll go (singing) “How are you today?” And they’re pressing all the way through it. On the operatic end of the spectrum, we’ll have them come in and talk and say, “How are you today?” And then they’ll go (singing) “How are you today?” And they’ll try to sing in this manufactured place that’s not like their speaking voice.

Matt Edwards: So what we’re talking about when we say sing like you speak is to get all of those entanglements out of the way, get those extreme volume levels out of the way, the too soft and the too loud. Come back to your speaking voice. So if I say, “How are you today?” I should be able to put that on-pitch as (singing) “How are you today?” It’s not a whole lot louder than my speaking voice. It’s just my speaking voice on the pitch. Now when the teacher said, “My student says, “But that’s musical,'” you’re right. It is. It depends where you start within that speaking or singing spectrum, but, yes, you’re using your voice musically. So we’re not saying drop that. We’re just saying don’t try to add a bunch to your voice to start. Just get your speaking voice working on the pitch first and then build up from there.

Matt Edwards: So in this case, where you feel like you’re losing control, I would say let’s get you to reset back to speech because at that speech place, you shouldn’t be blowing so much air or using so much constriction in your throat that it’s going to throw you off pitch or throw you out of control in the other way, okay? And then slowly from that speech level of amplitude, increase the volume level of your voice incrementally, right? So you’re going to want to start, let’s say it’s volume five. You’re going to start at volume five and then eventually start bringing it up to volume six.

Matt Edwards: When you get to volume six comfortably, you’re going to want to move up to volume seven. Volume seven’s comfortable, try moving up to volume eight. If you’re not sure where those things land for you, you can grab a decimal meter just like this off of the Internet. Okay? This one’s run from my iPhone. So right now you can see it’ got numbers that are telling you about how loud I talk. So if we could go back to singing like you speak, I could say (singing) “How are you today?” And that peaked at around 80. Then I would sing slightly louder. (singing) “How are you today?” Moved up to like 87. And I could project it more. [crosstalk 00:24:14]

Mike: It shut off. Okay.

Matt Edwards: Yeah. (singing) “How are you today?” And I can see how much further I can pick it up, all right? So we can use a visual monitor, a decibel meter so that we can monitor whether the changes in amplitude that we think we’re bringing are real or not. We can also it to see if we’re really only picking it up a little bit or if we’re overblowing it and picking it up [inaudible 00:24:40]. So oftentimes we’ll say, “How do I get it to be louder?” For a lot of people, simply thinking louder is enough, right? Just saying, “I’m going to increase my voice.” Sometimes I’ll use spacial awareness exercises where I’ll say, “Imagine you’re talking to someone who’s three feet away from you. Now imagine talking to someone who’s 10 feet away. Now imagine calling out to someone who’s 20 feet away from you,” all right? And our bodies kind of instinctually knows how to do that already from all of our life experience. You know how to talk quieter in a small space, and you know how to talk louder when we’re out playing a sport and we need to get a teammate’s attention.

Matt Edwards: But we start there, just seeing if we can get that indirect method to kick in. If that doesn’t work, you might want to see if you’ve got enough air in your lungs. If you don’t take a full breath, you’re not going to have enough air pressure or enough air volume to create and sustain a higher amplitude in your singing voice. So try putting your hands on your ribs. Breathe in and fill in on your ribs and then sing from that place. If you feel like that’s not enough to kick up your amplitude a little bit, you could try some abdominal contraction.

Matt Edwards: So what you would do is you would inhale in, again, filling up that ribcage, and then what you would try to do … I’m going to lower this camera just a hint … is you would try to tuck these muscles in here like you’re doing a crunch. See how I’m pulling them in. So we would start the sound and slowly pulling those guys in and see if that would up the volume level. So it’d be like this. “Ah.” And as you can hear, every time I contracted my abs, it started to give me a boost of amplitude, and then when I relaxed my abs, it came back down. So you might want to play around with a little bit of abdominal contraction and see if that gives you some of that extra boost you want. You may find when you do that exercise that you’re contracting your abs way too much, which is part of what’s making you sing out of control. So you would want to kind of play with that.

Matt Edwards: And finally, use your phone and record yourself, all right? Because when you’re doing all these different changes and playing with these ideas, you want to be able to go back and listen and see if they’re effective for you or not. So I would literally do is say what you’re about to try and sing it and then say the next thing you’re about to try and sing it. Keep doing that and then go back and listen. So for instance, if I was just going to sing a “yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,” I would first say, “This is me singing just like I speak.” (singing) “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.” Then I would say, “This is me singing filling my lungs as big as I can.” (singing) “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.” Now, this is my singing contracting my abs. (singing) “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.” And then stop the recording. Go back and listen to it and see how each one of those things affected my voice. Then you can identify which one of those tactics that you took to achieve a different sound seem to work best, and then start practicing at that place and building from that point.

Matt Edwards: And I would say that if you kind of take all these ideas together between checking your monitoring system, allowing yourself to start off back at the speech level, and then use some of these ideas to incrementally increase the amplitude, you should start to gain back some of the control you feel like you’re losing.