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Body acceptance is a growing trend, freeing us from attempting to fit into narrowly defined concepts of attractiveness.
Yet this often doesn’t happen with the voice. Singers struggle to make their voice some it’s not, often to frustrating results.
In this episode, John discusses the concept of vocal acceptance, and why your natural voice is more than good enough.
Episode Transcript
Episode 160 – Accepting Your Voice
Hey there, this is John Henny. Welcome back to another episode of The Intelligent Vocalist. I do so appreciate you spending your precious listening time with me. All right, I need to thank all of you listeners because February was another record breaking month, at least a personal record breaking month, in terms of podcast downloads and listens. The podcast continues to grow. So I thank all of you for being faithful listeners and for sharing it with friends and singing colleagues. I really do appreciate it. It is very gratifying to know that I’m not just talking to myself. Although I do often talk to myself, at least in this instance, someone is listening and it’s also very gratifying.
I’ve gotten a number of messages from people who have listened to the podcast, particularly ones about mindset and putting yourself out there, not giving in to your fears or being worried about critics and trolls, and a number of you have gone out. You’ve told me after listening to the podcast, to give you a bit of courage, gone out in and started performing again or auditioned or taking on a role in musical theater that scares them. And it’s good to be scared. As they say, get comfortable with being uncomfortable. That’s where good things happen. So it really is heartening to hear that. So I thank all of you who’ve emailed and shared that with me. You can always email me at john@johnhenny.com. I do personally read and answer all of my emails.
Now, today, I want to get into this idea of acceptance. There has been a lot or trend towards body acceptance, and certainly cosmetic companies and different manufacturers have jumped on that and this idea of accepting who we are, what we look like, accepting our looks, accepting our shapes and these deviations from this idea of perfection and finding beauty in our uniqueness and this is a positive thing. However, we tend to stop there, because we don’t have a lot of advertisers constantly reminding us to be accepting of our voices.
And we end up comparing ourselves to other singers. And I did a whole podcast on this called Stop Comparing, but we compare ourselves to other singers who don’t have voices like us. And it’s much like comparing yourself to airbrushed models on a magazine cover. Are there even magazines anymore? But you’re comparing yourself to singers with voices not like yours. And I am here to tell you, if you think you have a bad voice, you do not. I was up early this morning working on my newest book, and this book is going to be for singers, focusing on beginning singers. But if you have some experience, you may find the book helpful as well. And the focus of the chapter I was working on was this idea of acceptance. Because when we don’t accept our voice, we start to manufacture and manipulate our voice, and we move further away from the inherent unique beauty that is our voice. Again, you don’t have a bad voice. You actually have a beautiful voice. You will have an imperfect voice. All of our voices have some imperfections but within these imperfections again, there is beauty and you need to accept it.
You can take a $200 guitar. And a $200 guitar these days, manufactured overseas, they use computers to cut the wood, etc. They’re actually quite fine. They’ll play in tune. You don’t have to struggle with the neck too bad. It sounds like a guitar. You put a nice set of strings on it, you’ll get a pleasing sound. I’m talking about acoustic guitars. It could apply to electric, but I’m thinking acoustic because you’re not dealing with the amplifiers. So just the pure guitar. But what’s the difference between a $200 guitar and a $5,000 guitar? Why would anybody spend 2,3,4 or $5,000 or more on a guitar? And sure, some of it is cosmetic, but not a lot.
It really is the quality of the tone woods, and also the guitar maker’s ability to shape these acoustic spaces within the guitar to bring out more of the guitar string, to filter and enhance the sound waves emanating from the guitar string in a way that brings out more beauty, more richness, more transparency. And you can put the exact same strings on the $200 guitar and the $5,000 guitar. And the $5,000 guitar will sound better. It’s how it interacts with those strings. And I am telling you, you have a $5,000 guitar within you, you have a $10,000, $20,000 guitar within you.
But you may be temporarily using it like a $200 guitar, and especially if you are fighting your instrument. If you’re trying to make your instrument something it’s not, then your instrument cannot bring out the inherent beauty of the sound waves that are emanating from your vocal folds. Now the way the whole system works, I’ve talked about this before, you send air to your vocal folds. Your vocal folds close over, compress the air. When the folds open, that compressed air now starts vibrating, bouncing around in your throat, in your mouth, out past your lips to the listeners’ ears. The sound wave itself is filtered by the vocal tract, the throat, the mouth, to a lesser degree the nasal cavity, but that really only comes into play in a nasal sound.
But if you aren’t using your vocal folds in such a way that you’re creating balanced sound waves– and by balanced, unless you’re going for vocal effects, but by balanced, you’re compressing the air properly so there’s the right amount of energy in it. That there’s not too little energy, or too much energy and you get that squeezed over compressed sound, but you’re getting this is balanced flow of air through the vocal cords that are resisting and balanced, and you get this beautiful sound wave. But now this sound wave, much like the strings going into the $200 or the $5,000 guitar, need to be filtered, and each guitar is going to filter it differently. Guitars can’t change their size and shape once they’ve been manufactured. But we can change the size and shape of our guitar body instantly. We do it constantly while we’re speaking, constantly while we’re singing. That’s how we create vowels. But it’s also how we create color, this resonance, and you want to work your voice in such a way that the resonance is optimal for the note that you’re singing, for the intensity that you’re singing, for the color that you want, for the pitch that you are singing, and we’re constantly changing and rebalancing this resonance.
Now, part of the problem is the way we hear ourselves. Sound waves travel differently depending on how fast they are vibrating. Slower sound waves travel in a circle. Faster sound waves travel in a straight line. So when you are singing a lower note, you are getting sound waves actually– sound waves are traveling in a circle back towards your ears where you hear them like you hear other sounds. And then as you sing higher, the sound waves are shooting away from us. So we’re just hearing reflections. We’re not getting this direct input to the outer ear. Now we hear a certain amount of sound through our inner ear and the sound waves are transmitted through bone. But bone doesn’t transmit high frequencies as well, so we start to hear less and less.
Then when you factor in all the changes of sensation and the fact that you get less sensation on a higher note, the sensations change. There are false sensations that are misleading. It really creates a problem. And what the singer will do is try and force the voice to sound the same on the high notes as it does on the low notes. Not accepting the instrument, you’re not accepting the way the instrument will feel. You’re not accepting the way the instrument will sound. And then when you hear this shift on the higher notes, you think something’s wrong with the sound and so you begin to manipulate and fight it, and this is what is likely causing you to sound bad. And then there’s the non acceptance of the limits of our voice.
We can extend our range, but only to a point. All of us are physically different. The size of the vocal folds, how much space we have to stretch and thin the vocal folds for higher pitches is limited, we’re all different. And we all have different types of muscles. Some voices are lighter, and they have more fast twitch muscle. These voices can move quicker, and they can do runs and stylize better than some voices that are bigger and don’t move as quickly.
Now, you can always get better in regards to this, but don’t obsess. Understand that your voice has limitations, and these limitations don’t make you less of a singer because you will have strength somewhere else. Some voices are just naturally belty voices. They sound perfect for musical theater, they’re bright, they have that real horn-like trumpet sound. Even the the diameter of areas of the throat are likely more narrow that causes a boost of energy. And other voices, they’re not as loud, or they’re darker, but they lend themselves to other styles of music, to other colors. I mean, do you just like one singer? Or all the singers you like, do they sound exactly the same? I hope not. I hope you listen to singers of all styles. I love Pavarotti, I love Bob Dylan, I love Paul McCartney, I love Pink Floyd. I love Aretha Franklin. I love David Crosby. There’s just all these different types of sounds. And you’re going to have a particular sound.
You can make a range of sounds, but it’s going to be within this sphere. So if you don’t sound like Aretha Franklin, that doesn’t mean that nature has failed you somehow or you’re less of a singer. Accept what your voice is. Accept who you are. Love who you are. Become a huge fan of yourself. Because if you keep beating yourself up, denying what your voice is, trying to push your voice into something it’s not, you’re just going to have frustration.
I will see male singers obsessing that they don’t have the soprano high C. Maybe your voice isn’t made to sing that high C. Very few male voices are. You can’t get hung up on that. I’ve done a couple of YouTube reactions to a singer from Kazakhstan, Dimash Kudaibergen. And Dimash has a voice that is hyper flexible. He can get these crazy high notes and sing above where female opera singers sing. That is a gift of nature. All right, that is something he has. If you don’t have that, you’re not going to develop that, it’s not going to happen. And if you sit around worried that you don’t sound or can’t sing as high as Dimash, again, it’s just a world of hurt. Make friends with your voice. Love your voice. Explore your voice. Play with the colors, play with your range.
Find sweet spots in your voice. We all have sweet spots. Find where your voice works best. Why do guitarists change guitars multiple times during a concert? Yeah, sometimes the guitar has a different tuning and so they don’t want to spend the time doing an alternate tuning on stage, but often that particular guitar will have a certain sound that fits for this particular song. So a Les Paul is a different sounding guitar then a Fender Stratocaster, and guitarists use them accordingly.
Some guitarists will stay with one guitar, but most won’t try and make a Strat sound like a Les Paul. They’re just going to get frustrated. And if you’re trying to force your voice to be something it’s not, again, frustration. So the message today is, love yourself. Love your voice.
Hey, if you want to know more about me, please visit my website johnhenny.com. Be sure to sign up for my email list while you were there. And you can check out– I’ve got a free vocal warmups course. Shows you how to warm up with a straw, which is really key. I love vocalizing through my straws. And if you’re interested in being a voice teacher, click on the teacher training link up at the top and check out my Contemporary Voice Teacher Academy. You can learn at your own pace, it’s all online and you will get a certificate at the end. And I will say, if you do all the work and pass all the tests, you’ll be a pretty darn good voice teacher. So check that out if you’re interested. And until next time, to better singing. Thank you so much. Bye bye.