La La La, Blah Blah Blah


I've been reading about singing. There's a lot of opinions out there, a lot of blogs, youtube videos, and expensive courses - all claiming to teach you to sing "the natural way", though they all have a different idea what that is.

But I've learned a few things:

  • Singing too soon after eating makes you burp. Yep, I discovered that too - start singing less than 2 - 3 hours after a meal and you won't believe how much air comes bubbling up from your stomach - usually at just the right time to ruin a perfectly good take.

  • All that stuff about drinking honey tea soothing the vocal cords, or coffee and nuts furring them up, is a load of old toss. In fact, it's so obviously a load of old toss that I deserve to be hit over the head with a wet haddock for ever believing it. The only way any food or drink would come into contact with your larynx is if you choke on it.

  • A lot of new courses are bunk from 200 years ago, repackaged as amazing new scientific discoveries. There's stuff about "singing from the diaphragm", which is anatomically impossible and doesn't even refer to a misleading subjective sensation of the voice resonating down there. And there's "singing into the mask", which so far as I can tell means shaping your jaw, tongue and velum so as to make it feel like you voice is resonating in your nose.

    Oh yes, all these years I thought I was pronouncing "G" and "K" by pressing my tongue against the back of the roof of my mouth and snapping it away...I was actually lowering my soft palate onto my tongue. The roof of your mouth has muscles in it - that's quite cool.

  • Most people speak - and sing - in a "chest voice", so called because it feels a bit like the resonance is in the chest. There's also the "head voice" where it feels like the buzzing is in your head - think Richard O'Brien in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. There's a "super-head" or "whistle" tone which I don't understand, and one or more "middle" or "mixed" voices between head and chest - think cartoon characters and the muppets.

  • The old school say low notes go in chest voice, high notes in head voice, and in between there's a "break" of about half an octave where it's impossible to sing in either - your range and break depend on your physiology. And to bridge the gap, you've got to develop a middle voice.

  • The new school says that's rubbish - all ranges are available in all voices. Everyone has one or more "breaks" which can be overcome with practice and not trying to force it with shouting.

  • You know how some singers have a kind of "gritty" or "sandy" tone when they sing? And you know how teenagers sound when when they moan "Awwww Muuuuum!"? Same process. The vocal cords are pressed together but not firmly, so although the main oscillations along the whole length are regular, there are random minor ones where air leaks through momentary gaps.

  • You can train your vocal cords to pinch together tightly halfway up, so only the looser half vibrates - and that's how Jimmy Somerville sings counter-tenor.

  • The currently fashionable approach to teaching singing is called "Speech Level Singing", and it begins with the quite reasonable premise that speaking well and singing well are essentially the same process. Though it does assume that people speak well naturally - which I'm pretty sure they don't.

    Before abandoning the idea and replacing it with...actually I don't know, because I haven't spent $200 an hour a day for six months to find out.


Anyway, I've decided all I want from my singing at the moment is to hit the right note. So I've got some free software to tell me when I'm off-key.

6 comments:

  1. You don't need to pay 200 bucks/hour to learn how to sing!

    Shoot, all you need is a singing, dancing nun!

    Just put on your play clothes and repeat after me:

    Doe, a deer, a female deer.
    Ray, a drop of golden sun.
    Me, a name I call myself.
    Far, a long, long way to run.
    Sew, a needle pulling thread,
    La, a note to follow sew,
    Tea, a drink with jam and bread!
    That will bring us back to do oh-oh-oh!




    P.S. I always chuckle when I read about lessons on how to sing, esp. since music and singing mean many different things to many different people. What's lyrical and musical to some is guttural and screeching to others.

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  2. all you need is a singing, dancing nun!

    Hmm. Are you sure you're straight? :-)

    Anyway, apparently I'm a bass. No, not the kind of fish, the kind of singer.

    I measured my range, and it's about two octaves long. Though I can only comfortably get it halfway up before it starts to creak.

    I'm told bass singers never get to sing interesting parts. Though they sometimes get to play Othello.

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  3. All that stuff about drinking honey tea soothing the vocal cords, or coffee and nuts furring them up, is a load of old toss. [...] The only way any food or drink would come into contact with your larynx is if you choke on it.

    You're absolutely right, drinking honey and hot water doesn't soothe your vocal cords, but it can improve your vocal tone by soothing other parts of your mouth and throat. If you think about it, cough syrup never comes into contact with the layrnx either, but people with a sore throat still sound less rough after they've swallowed some. That said, the biggest part of the effect of honey & hot water is probably the warmth helping to relax the muscles, so coffee would work just as well.

    There's stuff about "singing from the diaphragm", which is anatomically impossible and doesn't even refer to a misleading subjective sensation of the voice resonating down there.

    Well, the diaphragm is involved in the process of drawing and releasing breath, so it does have some relevance to singing. What singing teachers mean when they say 'sing from the diaphragm' is concentrate on your breathing, and try to draw deep, sustained breaths, rather than shallow, snatched ones, and use those deep breaths to underpin the note. This approach makes it easier to sustain the voice, but it also has the side-effect of people tending to relax their shoulder, neck and jaw muscles, which allows the sound to resonate more fully.

    Anyway, i don't think it's something you should be worrying about, since your voice sounds just fine to me. :o) I think i'd be rather disappointed if you started coming over all Leona Lewis... ;o)

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  4. @Aethelread:

    What singing teachers mean when they say 'sing from the diaphragm' is concentrate on your breathing

    If that's what they mean, it might help everyone if that's what they said. It's obviously good advice, but I'm not sure it is what they mean.

    I spent the night watching youtube videos of professional singing instructors saying things like "standing with your hands on your head stretches the larynx", "project your voice from your eyes" and "you should be able to feel the sound coming from your diaphram".

    The trick of raising your arms gives the lower airways more room to expand - it doesn't make the voicebox any larger, which is impossible. There are no tactile nerves in the diaphram so it's impossible to feel anything in it, and obviously sound doesn't come from there.

    And as for singing out of your eyes...?!?!

    No, I've rapidly come to the conclusion that most teachers of singing - like most teachers of any subject - just don't know what they're talking about. They seem ignorant of basic anatomy and to talk in metaphors that are both opaque and inaccurate.

    your voice sounds just fine to me.

    Well thank you, but there's lots of areas I need to improve. I've got too much vibrato and not enough range.

    [Goes to Wikipedia to find out who Leona Lewis is...]

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  5. Sorry if it seemed like i was lecturing you before. :o)

    If that's what they mean, it might help everyone if that's what they said.

    Oh, definitely, definitely. But it is, of course, to their financial advantage to make learning to sing seem more complicated than it actually is.

    I've got too much vibrato and not enough range.

    A range of two octaves is already pretty wide - the average is about an octave and a half, i think. There aren't many songs where you'd need more than an octave, and some very succesful singers have a range smaller than that.

    [Goes to Wikipedia to find out who Leona Lewis is...]

    I'm sorry to have shattered your state of blissful ignorance...

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  6. Everybody luvs a singing, dancing nun who kicks Nazi ass! Unless you happen to be the baroness whose man the nun is stealing.

    You'd be surprised at how awesome and successful bass singers are! Barry White did pretty damn good! Luved his work. And there are plenty of operas and musicals that highlight the bass voice in fantastic songs, like in Showboat, Les Mis, Rent, Phantom of the Opera, Lion King, etc.

    Bass singers are actually harder to find than sopranos! Choirs and bands are always on the lookout for bass singers!

    As far as projecting your voice from your eyes, yeah, that's kind of stupid. Unless they meant it like using facial expressions in musicals, in which case, the best example and one of the best singers I've ever seen is Jennifer Holliday, in Dreamgirls at the 1982 Tony Awards. This is a shorter clip of a great one that I can't find anymore. In this scene, she gets dropped from the group by the manager, her ex!

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