Vocal Training Mini-Course: Correcting the Top 5 Singing Mistakes (part 2)

In my second installment on correcting the top 5 singing mistakes, I want to talk about Vocal Cord Closure. When you don’t have good compression on your vocal cords, it leads to all kinds of problems, specifically the cracks and breaks in your voice as you make the transition from your lower to upper register… like flipping into falsetto when you don’t want to. The voice has a defense mechanism, in that, when it’s getting to be too much and your vocals don’t want to take all that strain, the vocal cords will split up so that you automatically flip into falsetto—an airy high note to help cushion the tension. Falsetto is only good for special effect, to embellish a song in a certain way. It works beautifully when done in good taste, and you’ll know when it doesn’t sound right when you’re simply applying it to cover up for your lack of range when trying to hit a certain high note. So ideally, you want to sing correctly but have good vocal closure. So how do you go about this?

Let me start by explaining the difference between falsetto and head voice. Flipping into falsetto—not only in your high notes but also in your mid range or transition area too—is a big part of what happens when you don’t have good vocal closure. In essence, head voice has plenty of grip, or cord closure. A lot of people have trouble distinguishing the two. But what happens with cord closure is that you have a nice sound. One way to correct that is to apply the pharyngeal resonator “NG” sound (which I covered in Part 1—if you haven’t read it you can now read the article on my blog at joettmusic.com). Ideally, you want to convert air to sound as quickly as possible, and so the good consonants to use in training with ANY scale, be they arpeggios, descending scales, chromatic scales, octaves and so forth, are the “GOO” or the “BAH” (the latter is where your lips help your vocal cords get a good grip right at the onset). And you can go right ahead and try out some of these quick-fix exercises by simply downloading piano scales to work with from my free Learn to Sing with Joett MP3s uploaded to my HulkShare page here.

Thank you for visiting my blog,

JOETT
Vocal Coach
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