vocal production

When I was learning how to sing for real, in my late teens, the method in vogue was the Klein method.  The story goes like this - one day when a young Joseph Klein was heading into an office tower for the day, he saw a dog barking.  When he came out that evening, the dog was still barking, but he didn't seem to have lost his voice.  The dog had barked all day, without any apparent issues with stamina!  Joseph himself had issues with vocal fatigue and stamina, so he wondered whether he might learn something from this amazing dog.  So he took a closer look.

He noticed that every time the dog barked, the dog's abdomen would push inwards.  Could this be the secret of the dog's amazing vocal stamina?  I'm unclear about what happened between this formative experience and the popularity of the dog-immitation method, but from these humble beginnings came the Klein Method, which (at least as taught to me) involves a log of muscular pressure in the abdomen in order to supposedly free the vocal mechanism.

Fast-forward fifteen years to 1999.  By then I've taught hundreds of people the practices of the Klein method, but I'm suffering from vocal stamina issues that I can't get over.  I'm beginning to wonder if I have missed something.

At this point I was fortunate enough to get some vocal instruction from a few terrific instructurs, including Adele Clark and Corlynn Hanney.  Their big question for me, "why are you pushing so hard?"  Maybe it's just my over-achievement personality type and I took the abdominal "support" too far, but it took me a few years to unwind all that conditioning and habit, in order to finally achieve a relaxed and free voice.  Spring of 2005 I made a big leap forward by "barely singing" for a while.  Still plenty of sound outside my head, but I was addicted to the pressure so it was a big change for me.

So here's my philosophy in a nutshell.  Vocal support is an important teaching technique and is necessary to some extent when vocalizing, especially at the upper extreme of your range, but it's also very easy to overdo it, so be cautious!

I am interested in learning more about other techniques, such as speech level singing, that seem to be more well adapted to "pop" styles of singing rather than opera.  After all, unless I'm terribly mistaken, opera singers have more trouble with vocal fatigue than any other sort of singer, rock stars included.  That's what you get for trying to cut through a 120 piece orchestra!

Here's one for the singers, or really anyone who includes singing in their performances.

If you're a close-harmony singer, you and your ensemble live and die on your tuning. With tight voicings, like four parts within an octave and a third, missing a note by a few cents can make the difference between beautiful music and nails down a chalkboard. No other aspect of the music is as critical as tuning.

And tuning well is not easy! So whether you are a singer or a person who coaches them, this article is for you. (And if you're a coach, are you in the directory? Is your favorite coach in there?)

These are my top-five.  There are certainly more.  You might have other favorites.

Before we start - can you hear pitches?

Lots of people talk down their own hearing skills, but only about one percent of the population really can't distinguish pitches.  I'm talking about people who can listen to a middle-C on the piano and then a C-sharp, and they can't tell which one is higher.  If this is you, it's not your fault - your parents probably didn't play enough music at home before you were two years old.  But sadly if you're in this state, I have advice: take up bowling.  It's really hard to rewire your ears after the fact.

The rest of the reasons are for people who don't suffer from this neurological issue, but still don't tune perfectly all the time.  Now on to the Top Five List!

Reason 5 - you don't know what "in tune" sounds like

If you're a beginning, and you didn't grow up harmonizing with everything (dial tones, vacuum cleaners, air conditioners, bathroom fans...), you might not know what "in tune" sounds like!  Each interval, properly tuned, has its own distinct character or "texture" - an octave sounds very clean and free of beats.  A perfect fifth is quite open but has a "flutter" in it, down low.  Same with a major third, but the flutter is lower.  Part of learning to sing close harmony is to discover all these musical textures.

Just for fun, turn on your bathroom fan and sing a major scale, slowly, in that key.  Notice what all the intervals sound like.  You should get killer undertones on some of them!  Now sing a semitone scale, and discover what all thirteen intervals sound like.  When they're right, they kind of "lock in."  You'll be able to tell.

Reason 4 - you don't know what to tune to

Tuning is of course a relative thing.  You don't just tune, you tune *to* something, and sometimes it's not so obvious what that something is supposed to be.  I mean if you're tuning to the piano notes as you play the melody, you're trying to match those notes - simple enough.  If you're singing the same notes as a bunch of other people in your "part", like a bass section or an alto section, tune to them!  [They will also be tuning to you, but let's keep this simple.]

However, if you're supposed to be the only person singing a given note in an ensemble, you have to decide which of the other parts you're going to tune to.  And it might not be the same person all the time!

Here's what I find works in practice.  If you are the melody singer, tune to the tonal center almost all the time, and if you're a harmony singer, tune to the melody singer.  Practice singing your melody part so that the intervals are correct, and yet the tonal center doesn't migrate up or down as you go.  So if you start in the key of F and there are no key changes, you finish in the key of F!  So most of the time, a melody singer can practice with a piano and be just fine (but see reason #2, below).

Reason 3 - you can't hear what you're supposed to be tuning to

Once you're in the habit of tuning to the ensemble, you really get in trouble if you can't hear them.  It's like trying to drive on a road with no lines.  Groups tend to rehearse so that they can hear each other well.  Lots of quartets will stand and face each other in rehearsal, because it's easy to hear.  Then they get into a performance situation and stand in a line for the first time, and the "end guys" can't hear everybody else!  Predictably, the tuning goes to hell in a handbasket (as my grandmother used to say).

This is what sound check are for - make sure you can actually hear each other well on the stage in the venue where you'll be singing.  If you can't, get it fixed!  Ask for more monitors - whatever it takes!  Nothing is worse than singing out of tune and not knowing it until the audience fails to applaud.

Reason 2 - you don't know what part of the chord you're on

In close harmony singing, the piano notes just aren't good enough.  The piano, you see, is "equal tempered," which means all the notes are evenly spaced, rather than tuned by ratio.  It has to be that way, so that you can play in any key, but it's a compromise.  Just intonation sounds better if you can do it, and that means your notes will fairly often be *quite different* from the piano notes.  Thirds and fifths feel like they need to be higher than the piano note (even though one of them actually doesn't).  Dominant sevenths feel like they need to be lower than the piano note.

So take a couple of pieces and analyze all the chords!  Go ahead - it's not *that* hard.  If you need help, don't be too proud to get it.  Go through your music and but a square around your note if you have a root, and a circle if you have a fifth.  Draw an up arrow for a third, and a down arrow for a seventh.  Or make up your own notation.  Next time you get together with your ensemble, really go to school on the tuning.  Don't let anything go by if it's not exactly right.  Hard work, but well worth it!

Reason 1 - you're not singing well enough

The NUMBER ONE reason why ensembles fail to sing in tune is that they are singing too heavy, with too much pressure, and that drives the pitch down.  Often this is because they're trying to sing loud, and I can't overstate this - singing loud is just not important compared to singing in tune.  It might be fun to do, but we're making music here not powerlifting.  It's about musicality, not decibels.

Do yourself a favor and develop the habit of singing with a truly relaxed and free tone, and not too loud.  You'll hear better, and it's much more likely that your voice will actually go where you ask it to go!

Finally, don't forget that the body is connected to the voice.  If you're having trouble finding the tension in your voice, try looking somewhere else - your neck, your shoulders, your stomach.  Make sure you keep your body relaxed and mobile as you sing, and it will do wonders for your singing!