Ep 7 Live Q&A – April 4, 2019 – What can I help as a singer to not loose breath while singing?

Mike: So the second part to the question, how can you … Sorry, let me just read the whole thing. How can you help to not lose your breath while singing? So this one, I’m a huge fan of registration first so I’m going to say if you’ve got the right registration, and what I mean by that is coordination between your falsetto and your chest, right, or your cricothyroid and your arytenoid muscles, and you have a balanced registration, then you’ll have the appropriate closure at the glottis and with that, you won’t have the air escaping, right? So it’s more a matter of, I like to use the term breath management and so, when the glottis is correctly checking and you have the right registration there, you’re not going to lose all your breath, right?

Mike: So Dr. Edwards, Matt says things way better, way more technical than I could explain them. So we’ll see if he comes back here. Let me send him a quick text message. So still on, on his end. Okay, it looks like we have a technical glitch. Am I on, on my end? I’m not sure. Hold on, guys. We’re going to figure this out. One second. Yeah, refresh, refresh. Copy link. I got that, things were going, things were going. There it goes. He’s back.

Matt: I’m back. I got lost in the [crosstalk 00:36:14].

Mike: Well, I just answered the question so you’re good. We’ll let you go. No, just kidding.

Matt: Yeah. No, but you did. I was listening.

Mike: [Crosstalk 00:36:20], yeah.

Matt: Registration, I heard you. It’s funny ’cause I could still see you.

Mike: Yeah. Okay, you heard me. We just lost your picture.

Matt: Yeah, yeah, but yeah, I agree. Start and look at registration. We’ve talked about that before. Make sure that those vocal folds aren’t leaking air because if you’re leaking air, it’s going to be a problem, right? Then at the beginning of the session, we talked about making sure that you’re breathing when the punctuation tells you can breathe and then also make sure that you’re not pushing so hard in that initial second of singing that you’re using up all your air immediately.

Mike: Yeah, if at all, it escapes out the glottis and depending on where your registration, your vocal habits are, right, you might have the best registration and never have to address it in any of your training, right, and then there are those of us less fortunate souls that actually need to go fix some registrational issues because mother nature didn’t impart with those of us a nice balanced registration so we have to go exercise those components.

Mike: So if you’re dealing with an escaping or breath just kind of coming out and you’re running out of breath at the end of phrases, chances are that you do have to go work on the principles of registration, right, and that’s developing, sometimes you have to go all the way down to purifying the registration. What that can mean is all the way down to zero, right, so essentially you take your falsetto voice down to a very pure light falsetto. You completely isolate the chest voice and just work on a very full chest sound. And then you slowly integrate the two together, right. And I like to go from the top down so you go with more falsetto into a head voice, then back down into the chest voice.

Mike: So there’s a process of doing that. And you definitely, if you do need some registration work, I would definitely say you want to work with an instructor on that because that, even if you’re a smart person, is really hard to figure out on your own. There are the few natural people that just they figure it out and then there’s the rest of us that we need to work with a voice teacher and a voice coach that can hear the sounds that we’re creating and say “Oh, add this, subtract that, go up here, sing a little louder over here, but sing softer over there.” And by doing that, by changing the different intensities that you’re using in your vocal registration, you can create a nice balance. That’s how I would explain it. Matt, what do you have to add to that?

Matt: I mean I agree with that. I think a lot of people don’t understand that this is a classic technique so there’s people out there who say that classical is the basis of everything. Well, registration balance actually comes from classical traditions, right. It started back with a guy named Manuel Garcia in the 19th century who said if a woman’s head voice or middle voice is weak, you build up a chest voice.

Matt: Somehow in the United States, we got away from that idea and then we started avoiding the chest voice and thinking it was part of the devil. I have some historical and social research that had some really interesting implications I think for that. The simplest way to say it has zero to do with science [crosstalk 00:39:25].

Mike: Did that start with the Scarlet Letter?

Matt: It’s not Scarlet Letter.

Mike: Just kidding.

Matt: It has to do a lot with race and social and economic class in the way that…

Mike: Really? Okay.

Matt: That race was viewed in America in the early 20th century in the way the chest voice singing was viewed in America in the early 20th century.

Mike: Wow, okay.

Matt: There was a certain kind of singing that people called shout singing, and it was primarily associated with African Americans at the same time American universities were starting to offer music programs, right. And so shout dominant singing or chest dominant singing was associated with vaudeville, was associated with down and gritty dancing, dirty music to the upper class, and the upper class was giving their financial donations to build up music programs at elite universities. And if you are of the upper class, you’re going to donate money for upper-class music which was classical music, right. And you wanted to separate that from things like vaudeville that’s considered low-class music. So using the chest voice [crosstalk 00:40:26].

Mike: Wow, interesting.

Matt: … that music would be a bad thing because you were trying to learn how to cultivate an upper-class voice, right.

Matt: I actually have an article that talks about oral pedagogues in Victorian England thinking that they could go on mission trips to Africa and use oral pedagogy as a way to help tame the natives along those lines is to help save souls. There’s a lot to it and it’s not that singing in your chest voice is bad. There were a whole lot of social, political, cultural things going on at the turn of the century that filtered their way into higher education, and we’ve gotten away from some of the old techniques that actually started with operatic singing. And now that we have so many resources available to us for research, we’re starting to learn this information and realized “Oh, we’re not really creating something new. We’re just returning to where some of the masters started.”