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When first starting to sing, there are usually major technical skills that need to be developed.
Once a baseline level of technique is established, there is a new mountain to climb – the mountain of musicianship.
In this episode, John discusses the path to singing mastery and the skill sets you should be aware of along the way.
Episode Transcript
Episode 100 – The Developing Singer
Hey there, this is John Henny. Welcome back to episode 100 of The Intelligent Vocalist. Wow, that’s actually kind of a milestone for me. Maybe not for you, but I’m currently wearing a party hat and I’m celebrating with a cup of coffee because of course coffee is greater than singing, but since this is not a podcast about coffee, I’ll talk about singing. Really, really quickly, just wanted to let you know if you are interested in learning to be a voice teacher, my book Teaching Contemporary Singing is on sale for the Amazon Kindle for 99-cents. So if you’ve got 99-cents to invest in your vocal education, well I would suggest my book’s a pretty good place to start. You can go to johnhenny.com and there’ll be a little tab in the menu to click on the book. Also my Contemporary Voice Teacher Academy is open right now for enrollment.
And I am including this new level I created called CVTA Elite where I will work one on one with your student. I will go through lessons you’ve taught and analyze them, and I will also personally coach you in your business. Now that is ultimately going to be a higher priced premium tier. But for people who sign up right now – because I’m testing this out, it’s kind of in beta, if you will – I’m including it at no extra cost. And as long as you remain a member, you will never pay more for the elite level. And then finally to celebrate 100 episodes — it’s been a while since I did this. I did it at the beginning of the year and then closed it down when the spots were filled. I’m opening up a few slots for those who want to study with me, to make a commitment to study with me weekly.
I will offer you a substantial discount on lessons. It’s actually a pretty healthy discount. I want to work with people who are able to focus on lessons and commit to studying weekly and wanting to work with me one on one for vocal growth. Go to johnhenny.com/100 for episode 100 and I will have a link for you there. Okay. Enough of the advertisements. I want to talk about your voice as you develop as a singer and how things are going to change and how your goals and your focus are likely to change. When you first come to singing, almost everyone, your voice is going to be divided into two major pieces if you will. The fancy word is registers. A registration is putting those two big chunks together. But essentially you’re going to have your lower register, also called chest voice, also called– referred to as mode one.
Again, voice teachers, we’re still debating how best to call these things, but essentially if you just say, “Hey,” there’s your chest voice. And then there is your head voice, also called mode two, and you can just say, “Whoo,” and you will feel that. And they’re so named chest and head traditionally because of the sensations that are created. And some misconceptions have come out of that, that the chest is a viable resonator. It’s primarily sympathetic vibrations that you’re feeling. Or somehow the sound waves are splitting and traveling a different ways. You go higher and that’s why you feel them in your head. All that’s happening is the nature of the sound wave, the way that the sound wave is vibrating and interacting with your resonators, this space of your throat in your mouth, a little bit in the nasal cavity more so for nasal sounds. The nasal cavity’s not really an effective vocal resonator.
But that interaction changes and it changes based on pitch and how much intensity you’re using and therefore the sympathetic vibrations. And as the body absorbs a certain amount of that energy, those sensations change. And it feels as if your voice is more in your throat and then it splits behind the soft palate and starts going back behind your eyes, and all of these odd things that are very real for us in terms of sensation but are not happening in reality. And we sometimes have to balance what we feel versus what is actually happening. Because singers’ sensations, we do have to guide by sensation. We don’t get to see our instrument. We don’t have the direct conscious control of our instrument. So we end up with these two separate voices if you will. And people often feel this break between them. They can only take the chest voice up so high and then the voice will flip very quickly and abruptly into head voice.
And that’s where most people start. There may be some matching pitch issues and tonal quality. But usually as you work the voice and you work exercises and you develop that awareness and you develop your brain’s ability to send stronger, more precise instructions to the muscles of the vocal folds. You learn how to maneuver vowels and control this resonance. You will start to create a bridge between these two voices, and this bridge will start to become rather seamless to the listener. It’s been referred to as this blending or this mixing of the two voices. Again, a problematic term in terms of what are you mixing. People will just say there’s just one voice or people say there are only two voices. Essentially when you’re in your chest voice, it is a certain type of acoustic relationship between the sound wave and the resonators.
And also the muscles of the vocal folds are primarily going to be the muscles that are within the vocal folds themselves. And they can make the folds nice and fat and plump. And they come together rather intensely. And so you get these robust sound waves that sound like your speaking voice, your chest voice, mode one. And then the muscles will stretch. You have these muscles outside the vocal folds that pull and stretch, these cricothyroid muscles. So the muscles inside are the thyroarytenoids, called the TA. And then you have these CT muscles that are going to pull and stretch. And then what’s going to happen is the vocal folds get thinner and thinner, like stretching out a rubber band, and there’s less contact and that’s what creates that flutier, headier sound, as well as some adjustments within the acoustic tuning of your vocal tract.
A mix is you kind of play with that muscular action. You will engage a bit more of that TA, or the muscle inside the vocal folds, to fatten them up, but not too much because then the stretching muscles won’t be able to do their job. So a lot of your time is going to be spent working on this muscle balance as well as the acoustic balance. And then finally you’re going to start to feel your voice. That break is going to start to go away. Now you will still feel on some level a shift, and a trained ear can hear the shift, but the shift sounds great. This shift, actually, you don’t lose vocal intensity. You actually get a bloom on the voice as you go higher and you get all these nice upper harmonics and ring and all of these wonderful things.
So a good chunk of your singing life is working on that and you’re always working on those balances. But in the beginning, you’re spending a lot of time working on those balances. Now the way I work, I always like to keep the student working on songs, even right away, even if their voice is cracking and they’re having trouble matching pitch because the next big– I tell people, you get over the ‘hill’ of developing this vocal balance, and then there’s the ‘mountain’ of becoming a musician. And this mountain, you never hit the peak, but it is a beautiful, wonderful climb, and thank goodness we never reached the end of it. And as you get better as a singer, how you practice is going to change. You’re actually going to spend more time focusing on material and learning material, researching. Or if you’re a songwriter, you’re going to spend more time working on your own songs and finding the real beauty in your words and melody and the colors that you want to create in your voice.
And you’re going to delve deeper and deeper into that. In terms of just the balance of the voice, you’re going to do more focusing on sustains and working on your vibrato. And you’re going to do the wonderful work of vowel tuning and these little micro adjustments that are going to change the color and you’re going to– what I love to do is really get deep into vowels. You know, vowels really are the color wheel of your voice. I even did a podcast on that and just finding these micro changes within the vowel and how you can make a certain word a little darker, a little richer, a little thinner, a little brighter. And that’s before you even bring in more extreme types of things like screaming, but just finding all the color in the balance within the voice. You start working on riffs.
I mean there’s a long checklist, but these are all the things that you have to look forward to. And not riffs just blindly trying to copy someone, but really starting to hear within the music the patterns that will work. And you start to build up a vocabulary of riffs. People who are great at riffs, they have a library of riffs that they have learned and memorized. And if they can nail that, they can then mix and match and create new riffs out of. And very often soloists are not constantly creating on the spot. A great soloist will use patterns they already know. And it’s like the brain can go onto a little bit of auto-drive and you use the pattern that’s familiar and then you go into creating something new and something magical in the moment. And then the brain engages in a new mode of creation.
But then if you just stay in this brand new mode, you’re likely to kinda end up on the rocks here or there and get a little lost. So you always have those patterns to come back to. And it’s kind of this ebb and flow. So you want to start building that library. You want to start becoming an actor. And you know, this is– you can think of this episode as almost like me going back over the last hundred episodes and kind of hitting highlights of things that I’ve talked about. But I want you to really start thinking about this and in being the whole singer and really developing this toolkit. You know, when I first started looking at becoming a singer, I thought, Oh man, I just need to be able to sing higher and sing in tune. And that was, again, just the very, very beginning. The foothill before the hill before the mountain.
You gotta get style. You have to start understanding dynamics. You know, you’re acting. You’re going to become a greater actor. You’re going to start communicating emotional content. You’re going to start to use dynamics, just as you would in speech where you emphasize certain things and pull back. You’re going to become more and more human in this process. You’re going to start– the whole key of learning to sing well, and this idea of singing like you speak, that’s not entirely true. You may have heard that, but you don’t sing exactly like you speak. However, the end result to the listener should be as free and easy for you and as impactful and as fluid as speech, and as emotionally available as speech, so that notes aren’t getting you all bound up and nervous and worried that your thought is no longer on communication but actually hitting the note.
Now that may happen here and there, but really good singers, they’re able to stay in emotional communication most of the time. And then you got to learn to listen, and start listening deeper and deeper and hearing the music around you. When you are first learning your instrument, you are going to be so focused on yourself and so focused on those notes and ‘Oh my gosh, what am I doing?’ And the first time you get on stage in front of people, it’s nerve wracking and suddenly you don’t know what to do with your hands. It’s just, you feel really awkward and people are watching you. But then you will eventually learn to get your focus off of yourself, and your focus is in the music, in the other musicians, and you are locking in with the drummer and the bass player and you’re listening deeper and deeper to the actual chords and how the melody sits in.
And how that note– if it’s something beautiful like a major chord, then going to the minor. And if your melody follows that, just the color that you want to put, to accentuate that change in the harmony, that change in the chord, and then you start communicating with the other musicians. There is nothing like playing with live musicians. There’s really not. And I know a lot of music today is being created by tracks and loops and keyboards on the computer. Nothing wrong with that. There is music. Moby just put out a new album of ambient music. I think it’s his second volume. And it’s just this beautiful, evocative, slow moving textural music that I absolutely love that’s just basically synthesizers. And even though he’s playing here or there, I think he’s playing the whole thing. But some of it’s probably sequences.
But that doesn’t matter. You know, music is beautiful. However, working with real musicians, and the level of communication when you’re locking in with musicians, they will love playing with you. They really will. A singer who’s not in their own head, but who’s listening, communicating, adjusting, being playful, being in the moment, being expressive, being emotionally there. There is so much to mine there, there is so much to learn there. And that is the beauty of what it is that we do. And then digging deeper and deeper into the lyrics and not just what the lyrics mean and communicating that and being present as a singing actor at all times. Always communicating. But the sounds themselves, and I’ve talked about this before. The vowels create the color and the music and the sustain and all of that beauty, but the consonants create the pop and the accents and the rhythm and the bits of noise.
It’s almost like your little beatboxer. And then there is the phrasing and where you sit the note and how you delay it or how you push ahead and those choices. And then of those choices, you get so good that you get beyond the intellectual exercise of going, ‘Oh, I’m going to back phrase a little here, and maybe wait a minute before I sing this word, or I’m going to swing this a little bit here,’ but it transcends that into you communicating and reacting in real time with wonderful musicians who are reacting to you and you’re grooving. Singers who have a sense of time and who can groove, it’s just a beautiful thing. I mean, if you want to hear this in motion, in action, go to Frank. Go to Spotify or Apple music, wherever you listen. Pull up some Frank Sinatra and pull up some of the music, the albums he did, I think late fifties, early sixties with Nelson Riddle.
The man’s phrasing is just so beautiful and he feels time so well. It really is just an absolute masterclass. And just even understanding swing, even if you don’t want to be a jazz singer, start listening to some swing set and hear how they control time and how they interact with musicians. And sit within that and sit on the beat and push the beat and to lay the beat. It is a wonderful, wonderful thing. And even if you don’t sing jazz, man, all music’s got to swing cause it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got, that’s right, that swing. As Duke Ellington said, it’s got to have the swing. All music swings. It’s an inherent feel and a groove, and understanding groove and being able to listen to what the drummer and the bass player are doing, the rhythm guitar, how they’re playing off each other, what notes they’re accenting and you mirroring that or playing against it in your voice.
So suffice to say, because I could ramble on here and have a three hour podcast for number 100, but it is just a huge, huge, beautiful world. And I just want you to constantly have your eyes open, all right? And have your peripheral vision, everything, wide open in terms of being a singer, as to what is out there and what you need to learn. And don’t think that just because right now you’re having a little trouble matching pitch or you don’t like your tone or your voice is cracking a little bit, you’re running out of air. We’ve all gone through that. And that’s something that you can knuckle down and you can take care of. But all of this other beauty of music, don’t give that up while you’re getting your voice in shape. This is something you’re constantly going to be studying in.
You’re constantly going to be learning from. I’m waving my hands with emotional context. I just whacked the table here. So that’s that little clunk you just heard. I’m not going to bother editing that out. Hey, it’s episode 100. Anything can happen. So I just want you to, again, I’m always, always telling you, keep the passion, keep the love for this ’cause man, learning to sing is hard and it can grind you down and you got to keep enjoying it. You’ve got to keep a love, and you just got to keep pushing on, and you’ll never get to the top of that mountain and it’s a beautiful thing. Hey, a hundred episodes. I so want to thank you for listening. If you’ve been listening since episode one, bless you. There wasn’t that many of you that first listened when I first got on.
I know I’m hearing from more and more of you that now we’ll find the podcast and just binge listen. I will be honest, I could not do that myself. I get tired of hearing myself talk so there’s no way I could sit through a hundred episodes of me going on. But I really, really do appreciate it. I appreciate the support. If you want to help support the podcast, go review it on iTunes or wherever you listen. Just tell people about it. You can share it on social media. I just, I’m loving seeing this growth. It really helps keep me motivated to keep doing this. I really love creating content, and to the extent that you find that helpful, it really does warm my heart. And until next time, to better singing. Thank you so much. Bye bye.