How to Smoothly Sing Your Way through the Passage Areas of Your Range

{Published in Business Times Newspaper March 10, 2015} If you’ve ever been fearful of using or exploring your range when you sing, this article will offer tips on how to get over your fears and most importantly, how to remedy your situation. I frequently hear people say, I can’t sing high notes. Or, my voice really hurts when I sing only a couple of songs. Complaints are by and large pretty similar in the sense that, there is only one solution to all of these seemingly varied vocal problems. Yes, once you’ve done it, you’ve fixed all your vocal issues in one fell swoop. I will explain.

As you sing higher into your range, you may have experienced that you begin to tense up around the throat, feel uncomfortable and even switch registers in a manner that actually doesn’t sound right. The reason this happens is because you are encountering areas where muscular and or resonance activity make it difficult to negotiate smooth transitions between vocal cord adjustments. Most singers know these areas all too well. They are places where the voice jams up, suddenly shifts in quality, or even breaks—things that can discourage someone from ever exploring the full potential of their voice. And so you begin to think, you can’t do this!

We, however, refer to these areas as passage areas. That's because, when you approach them the right way, they become passage ways between where you are coming from and where you want to go in your vocal range. And there’s only one way to get through these passage areas—by doing specific exercises that cut through these areas.

Your first passage area is the most critical. It's where your outer muscles (if they haven't done so already) are most likely to enter into the adjustment process. When they do, they pull on and tighten around the outside of your larynx in an effort to stretch your vocal cords to get the necessary tension for the pitch or dynamic level you require. However, stretching your cords in this manner causes your entire singing mechanism—tone and words—to jam up! Fortunately, there is a better and much easier way to stretch your vocal cords to achieve the necessary tensions without disrupting your tone-making process or your word-making process.

The key is to do less in order to do more. To be specific, the higher you sing the less air you should and conditions you to do just that.) When you reduce the

amount of air you send to your vocal cords, you make it possible for the muscles inside your larynx to stretch your vocal cords by themselves. Your outer muscles are less likely to interfere because there isn't as much air to hold back. Your outer muscles will interfere in the vibration process whenever you use more air than your vocal cords and the other muscles inside your larynx are able to handle.

use. (In training, this is an automatic reflex and

To help you get started with singing higher into your range, I offer FREE vocal coaching via WhatsApp that includes FREE mp3 downloads to vocal exercises. 

JOETT
Vocal Coach/Private Singing Lessons