We can work primarily on repertoire with little bits of technique interspersed "just in time." As an alternative, if you'd like, we can work carefully through parts of this page to prepare for repertoire (maybe appealing during the summer "off season" for community choirs).
For a sense of what you can find on this page, sample the three exercises below.
I recorded these audio notes in 2016 to document/adapt some information I had learned through voice lessons. All those features of this content that were created by me, David Liao, are public domain.
We organize the lesson into five sections. First, we will practice breathing. Second, we will practice holding our instrument. Third, we will build the resonating cavity of our instrument. Fourth, we will practice singing tones using the five basic vowels of Italian and Latin. Finally, we will use a litmus test exercise to find our natural singing voices.
If any activity becomes painful or forced, immediately stop.
To find your breath, it is helpful to understand the anatomic locations of organs in your torso. Find the lower end of your sternum, also known as your breastbone. At roughly this height, your torso is divided by a muscular shelf called the diaphragm. Your lungs sit above your diaphragm, and your viscera, or digestive organs, are below your diaphragm. When the lungs expand, the diaphragm lowers, pushing the viscera out of the way. This causes an expansion of your lower torso.
To notice this expansion more easily, sit in a chair. Bend over so that your torso rests across your lap. Open your hands, and use your palms and fingers to feel the fleshy sides of your torso between your waist and your rib cage. Breathe several times. Feel the expansion of your torso and hands. You should feel that the torso expands in all directions, to the sides, toward the front, and, even, toward the back. The obstacle of your lap impedes some of the forward expansion of your torso, which makes it easier to feel the expansion of the torso toward the back.
Keeping your hands on your torso, sit up in your chair and continue to breathe slowly. It might be more difficult to feel the expansion all around. Practice breathing in this position until you can again feel expansion all around. [in/out in/out in/out] If you need help remembering what a full expansion feels like, go back to the previous position, with your torso lying across your lap.
Keeping your hands on your torso, stand up and continue to breathe slowly. Practice breathing in this position until you can feel your torso expand all around. [in/out in/out in/out]. Again, if you need help remembering what a full expansion feels like, go back to the previous exercises to practice breathing with your torso lying across your lap or sitting up in your chair. Please consult a voice instructor to ensure proper expansion.
Many of the instruments that we can purchase have a permanent three-dimensional form that is determined at the time of construction. In contrast, the anatomical components of the human voice need to be brought into alignment before each performance.
We will develop a regal posture. Stand with your feet approximately shoulder-width apart. Your knees should be slightly bent; they should not be locked. You can put one foot several inches in front of the other to help you to keep balance.
Reach up for the sky. Extend your fingers as high as they can go. Imagine that a string is attached to the top of your head. Your head is suspended from this string.
Now, without changing any other aspect of your posture, relax your shoulders and arms and gently lower your arms so that they hang by your sides. Relax your shoulders so that they also hang from your torso, which is still tall.
A bad habit can develop in which the head creeps forward ahead of the body, placing strain on the neck. To remind yourself to avoid this habit, make a "thumbs up" sign with your hand. Press the end of your thumb into your chin until your head, neck, and spine are aligned. If this exercise significantly repositions your head, your head was not properly aligned before your performed this exercise.
One part of the human voice that we must "build" is the resonating cavity.
Your resonating cavity includes your throat and the space in your mouth. The space in your throat is called pharyngeal space. Breathe in and open your throat.
We will find and lift the soft palate. Use your tongue to touch your front, top teeth. Move your tongue back across your gums until you find a smooth, hard surface. This is your hard palate. Continue to move your tongue back until you find a smooth, soft surface. This is your soft palate. Now that you have found your soft palate, you can return your tongue to the front of your mouth.
Notice that the soft palate can lift when you yawn. Practice yawning a couple times. [Yawn yawn]. Now, without yawning, lift your soft palate. You might need to practice yawning to remind yourself what it feels like to lift your soft palate.
Another exercise for lifting your soft palate is to imagine that you are an alien with respiratory organs in strange places. Your nostrils are in your soft palate, and your throat and lungs are in your skull. You wish to enjoy the scent of some flowers. Rather than inhaling through the human nostrils on your outward nose, you place the flowers right in front of your mouth and inhale upwards through the nostril holes of your soft palate.
Be careful not to swallow your tongue. Sometimes, the feeling of lifting the tongue can be confused with the feeling of lifting the soft palate. Unfortunately, it is difficult to notice this bad habit since the raised tongue reflects sound back toward you, making it seem to you that your sound has improved and become more operatically dark. To ensure that your soft palate is lifted and that your tongue is not lifted, please consult with a voice instructor.
Now that we have found the power source for our voice (that being the breath), built up a resonating cavity for our voice (by lifting the soft palate and having an open throat), and learned to hold the voice with regal posture, we are ready to start producing some tones. Specifically, we will practice producing five vowels used in Italian and Latin singing.
Two kinds of sound that we can make are breathiness and tone. Breathiness sounds like wind. Tone has a distinct pitch. We want to produce tone. More specifically, we want to create steady tone. To do this, breath flow needs to be both steady and sustained. To prevent an uncontrolled and rapid exhalation, think of continuing to inhale into the lower sides of your torso even while exhaling.
Using a steady tone, we will practice phonating on five vowels.
Sing on one pitch, "a e i o u." Notice that this is different from singing "a ay i ou uu." Depending on language, composition, pitch, and challenges of blending voices in a chorus, it might be necessary to sing modified vowels. For example, the vowel, "i" might need to be thought of as being placed more in the soft palate and airily floating tall through the head to prevent an ugly spread sound, "i."
See www.mtacda.org/articles.html
When singing, syllables are typically sustained on a single pure vowel. For example, consider the Latin word, "Gaudete," spelled g-a-u-d-e-t-e. The letters g-a-u include two vowels, but the only first, the "a," is sustained. The second, that being the "u," passes by in an instant before the next syllable is phonated. We phonate "Ga(u)dete," not "ga-oodete." The ugly twisted transition from one vowel to a second is called a diphthong. Unless otherwise directed, avoid diphthongs.
We now put together what we have learned about our breath, about our posture, about our resonating cavity, and about toned phonation on vowels. Check your posture. You will simultaneously, in one gesture, breathe in, feeling expansion around your torso while also lifting your soft palate, opening your throat, and shaping your mouth in the shape of the first vowel you are about to sing. Inhale in the shape of the vowel that you are about to sing. Then, without collapsing any of the spaces that you have just created, you will sing the five vowels on a five-tone scale.
[a e i o u]
Please consult with a voice instructor who can help you to identify a comfortable, healthy range of pitches for you and who can suggest vowel modifications for different ranges of pitches.
I will describe the exercise and then demonstrate it.
Establish good, tall posture. Inhaling in the shape of the vowel sound "a," simultaneously expand your torso, open your throat, and lift your soft palate. Sing a descending chord comfortably low in your range. Without collapsing any of the spaces you have created, inhale again while raising and opening your arms and hands away from your sides. Begin walking. Only after you are already walking, and while continuing to walk forward, sing a descending chord an octave above where you previously sang. Continue to walk forward until after you stop phonating. The motion of walking helps to keep your attention on your lower torso and helps to distract you from your throat. Concentrating intention too hard on your throat can cause strain. I will demonstrate this exercise:
This exercise is a litmus test for brutality. If you try to force the top note, it will either come out loudly cracked, or not come out at all. If technique is not correct, it will be obvious. This is not one of those exercises that kind of sound half right when you use mediocre technique.
Please consult a voice teacher to ensure that you are performing this exercise free from tension. Your voice teacher can help you to identify a reasonable range of pitches to use for this exercise.
Eventually, it becomes possible to sing the descending chords with steady tone while at mp or p while seated.
Eventually, it becomes possible to sing the upper octave without heaviness, almost as though using a different voice (but not a falsetto). This is very difficult to do because it requires you to resist the tempting impulse to forcefully grab and to strain.
Please consult a voice teacher to ensure that you are performing this exercise free from tension.
It might take a couple weeks of attempts to be able to perform the litmus test we have previously described. Even though that experience is enjoyable, some bad habits can soon thereafter start to develop. The following exercises can be used to address some common initial difficulties.
The feeling of lifting the tongue so that it almost touches the ridge between your hard and soft palates can be confused with the feeling of lifting the soft palate and opening the throat. Lifting the tongue reflects sound back into your head creating a rich, deceptively operatic sound for you, but preventing much of your sound from leaving your mouth. When this happens, the audience hears an unattractive, muffled tone. To the audience, it sounds as though you are struggling against yourself.
One way to address this problem is to imagine that you are holding a pill on your tongue, under your soft palate. Let yourself notice the sensation of the pill. As you sing, do not let the pill fall into your throat.
One danger that can arise when we first encounter the spacious sound made possible by lifting the soft palate is getting carried away with the darkness of the sound and allowing the sound to sink all the way into the throat and out of the upper half of the head and face.
You do not want to smush your voice completely into your nose, but you do want to your voice to have a bit of nasal ringing. To find this crackly buzziness, take on the role of the Wicked Witch of the West and exclaim, "and your little dog too!" Deliberately overdo the witchís nasty sound. This is probably nastier and buzzier than needed for most applications. Please consult a voice instructor to determine a degree of nastiness suitable for particular repertoire.
Another exercise for finding a nasty, somewhat nasally buzz is to mimic a babyís wailing cry. [wah]. You can use this wailing exercise to explore high notes [wah, wah, wah on ascending half steps].
When we become accustomed to singing in a gentle voice, we can easily sing through long rehearsals even when repertoires explore high pitches. When simply learning notes, learning pronunciation, and experimenting with phrasing, a chorus does not need to sing at loud volumes. Thus, when we learn to sing in a gentle voice, we become able to sing through much of a rehearsal with the same ease with which we gently speak.
We can sing gently in multiple ways. Sometimes, we sing with extra gentleness. Sometimes, we sing with slightly more core and brilliance.
In this and the next exercise, we will practice singing with extra gentleness. Sing a note in falsetto to familiarize yourself with how it feels to sing lightly.
[demo falsetto]With about the same lightness, we want to hum up and down the scale degrees 1 2 3 2 1.
(light) mmm 1 2 3 2 1You can go back and forth between this humming exercise and the falsetto to check whether the humming feels basically as light and easy as the falsetto.
Work with a voice instructor to find a cluster of pitches on which to begin this and the following three exercises.
In this exercise, we will replace the hum with a vowel. First, lets sing a note in falsetto to remind ourselves what it feels like to sing with lightness.
[demo falsetto]Now, sing the scale degrees 1 2 3 2 1 on oo.
oo 1 2 3 2 1Periodically sing a note in falsetto to check whether you are singing the vowel with a similar lightness.
After you have become comfortable singing on oo, sing the scale degrees 1 2 3 2 1 on eh.
eh 1 2 3 2 1Later on, you can sing the exercise on other vowels.
In this and the next exercise, we will continue to practice singing gently, but now with slightly more core and brilliance.
There is a little sensation of placement in a region that lies on the intersection of the following two lines: the line passing left-to-right through your cheek bones and the line extending behind of your nose.
First, we will hum.
mm 1 2 3 2 1Find the creases where the bottoms of your cheeks meet the skin above your upper lip. When doing this exercise, lift these creases, as though almost ready to smile.
mm 1 2 3 2 1Notice the 3-dimensional cavities behind your nostrils. Imagine passing down from each cavity until you encounter the hard palatte. Imagine lifting the energy of the sound upward through those places.
mm 1 2 3 2 1We will now open to a vowel. In this recording, I will demonstrate using the vowel oo.
Remember the sensation of placement in a region that lies on the intersection of the following two lines: the line passing left-to-right through your cheek bones and the line extending behind your nose.
oo 1 2 3 2 1Remember to lift the creases where the bottoms of your cheeks meet the skin above your upper lip.
oo 1 2 3 2 1Remember to lift the energy of the sound through the locations on the hard palatte that are directly beneath the cavities of your nostrils.
oo 1 2 3 2 1After you become comfortable singing on oo, sing on other vowels.
Unless otherwise indicated, notes should be both smoothly connected and distinct. I will demonstrate three versions of a five-tone scale that have improper articulation, and then I will demonstrate a five tone scale in which the notes are connected.
First, I will demonstrate a ploddy scale.
Now, I will demonstrate a scale with audible hs between notes.
I will now demonstrate a scale where the connections between notes become audible sliding.
Finally, I will demonstrate a five-tone scale in which the notes are connected, but without scoops, without hs, and without ploddiness.
To be able to produce a connected scale, practice slowly singing scales with long audible slides between notes. Then sing the scales again, but with shorter slides. Eventually, the slides take virtually take no time, but you still know that they are there.
We do not want to audibly search for placement, tone, and pitch after we have begun to phonate. I will demonstrate three problems that can occur when we begin to sing.
First, I will demonstrate a glottal stop.
Now, I will demonstrate a scoop.
Finally, I will demonstrate initiation of a tone using the consonant h.
In contrast to the three examples I have just demonstrated, we want to initiate a tone in the following way: [demonstration].
To initiate a pure tone, you must hear the pitch before you sing it. This way, your vocal folds will already be tensed in just the right way to vibrate at the correct fundamental frequency even before air starts to pass over them. Your throat needs to be open. If you use just the right amount of air, the passage of air will draw together the vocal folds just close enough that they vibrate.
It can be helpful to imagine that the sound that you want to sing already exists in the fabric of space with proper shape, proper tonal quality, and flow. Rather than forcing the sound to come into being, you simply prepare yourself to coincide with its continuing existence.
Maintain a uniform quality of tone as you change pitch. A descending scale should sound as though it were played on a single instrument. There should not be a distinctive pitch where the tone suddenly drops out of the head and sinks into the throat and chest. In other words, a scale should not sound like
do ti la so [drop on fa] mi re do
Instead, where the tone would naturally sink, intend that your sound continue to flow upward through your palates and up and out through your lower eyelids.
do ti la so fa mi re do
In this exercise, you will slowly sing an ascending scale, dwelling on each note until you are confident that you have lightened it enough to effortlessly slide into the next note. If this exercise takes a long time, you should feel free to take breaks for breaths. However, come back into the exercise on the same note and with the same tone that you left. I will demonstrate part of a scale.
Do not grab or hit high notes.
To practice high notes, we sing an arpeggio while moving our bodies. Stand. Loosely extend your upper arms horizontally at 10 and 2 oí clock. Let your forearms loosely dangle down and forward. The notes and syllable for this exercise are Ja-ja 1 3 5 8 5 8 5 3 1. Twice in this exercise, you transition from the fifth degree of the scale to the octave. During each such leap, simultaneously get on the tips of your toes while flicking your forearms and hands upward.We want to develop a familiarity with pitch that allows us to know what notes sound like before we sing them. Otherwise, we audibly scoop. We also want to develop a sense of pitch to prevent shifting keys, especially in a cappella music.
We often obtain reference pitches from a piano. Pianos and human voices do not sound alike. Thus, new singers often have difficulty matching pitch with a piano. This can result in singers singing an octave below written notes.
In this exercise, I will play a note on the piano. I give you a moment to sing the note on the vowel sound "o." Continue to sing the note. I will sing the note played on the piano, and, then, if needed, adjust your pitch to match.
C below middle C
G
Middle C
If we rely exclusively on an outside reference source to inform our choice of pitch, we will sing notes with a slight delay. Additionally, it will be difficult to hold pitch in a cappella singing. To develop an internal sense of pitch, we practice singing chromatic scales into a chromatic tuner. A chromatic tuner is a small electronic device used to tune stringed instruments. When you sing on pitch, a green indicator lights up. If you fail to sing on key, the green light will flicker or completely fail to shine. To get accustomed to the way that the indicator lights of your chromatic tuner work, gently sweep through some pitches while humming.
Now that you have become acquainted with the tuner, use an external reference source, such as a piano, to obtain a pitch. I am about to demonstrate an ascending chromatic scale..
do di re ri mi fa fi sol si la li ti do
Now I will demonstrate a descending chromatic scale
do ti te la le sol se fa mi me re ra do
Practice singing these scales, dwelling on any note that the tuner indicates is out of tune. Slide around in pitch until the tuner indicates that the note is in tune before ascending to the next note. If it takes ten minutes to get through each scale, that is perfectly fine.
Eventually, it becomes possible to sing an ascending and descending scale with every note immediately in tune having used a piano only to obtain the first "do."
It is important to note that for a cappella singing, you might be asked to sing pitches that are slightly different from the pitches that you have become familiar with using the tuner. The chromatic tuner is designed so that consecutive semitones are equally far apart in logarithmic frequency space. This means that many pairs of notes are not quite harmonic. Some of their closely aligned overtones have slightly different frequencies, causing beats.
Another exercise for internally staying in tune is to mentally hear the initial pitch of a phrase repeated while you sing the rest of a phrase. For example, while singing do ti la so, try to hear do do do do. Mentally, you try to hear [combined mixed].