Hey there, this is John Henny and on today’s vocal tip will talk about getting your voice out of your throat.

When going for higher notes and you feel that bit of strain come on, singers will often describe it as feeling as if their voice is stuck in their throat and to a degree it is let’s talk about what is usually happening. 

Well, we have two primary resonators, the throat area, and the mouth area and these acoustic spaces boost the sound waves coming from our vocal cords or vocal folds. Now a primary boost that occurs in lower registers or chest voice is more associated with the throat and if we tell try and take that acoustic tuning up too high, the throat resonator will tend to stay over involved. 

And the way the singer keeps it over involved is by raising the larynx, this bump right here in your neck here, it’s an Adam’s apple, you’ll feel that start to go up, they’ll start to really drop the giant spread the lips as wide as they can, very often the chin starts to come up, and the over involvement of this resonator, everything starts to close off. Because this resonator actually does a better job of boosting lower parts of the Soundwave rather than higher parts. 

We want to give that job more over to the mouth. So a good way to begin to feel this transfer of resonance is to make your vows a little more closed. As you go for higher notes and you feel yourself beginning to spread and widen. Use your hands to gently press your cheeks and bring that a little more focused. So rather than Mama, Mamaaaaa, you get Mom, Mom, Mom, mom, and you start to feel that transfer a bit more and you’ll start getting your voice out of your throat. 

Hey, for more vocal tips go to my website johnhenny.com and be sure to subscribe to my podcast The Intelligent Vocalist. 

Thank you so much!