How to Get Your Voice to Work for You: The Training Process

Training your voice, as you may have guessed, means learning to coordinate and strengthen the muscles in your larynx so you can sing with speech-level posture over a wide pitch and dynamic range. Coordination and strength are most easily developed by doing special exercises. You don't control your voice directly by working on or thinking about breath support, vocal cord adjustments, or resonance. These things are all by-products of speech-level singing. They happen automatically when you condition your larynx not to move, by relaxing your outer muscles and by allowing your vocal cords to thin and then shorten for higher notes to insure that your outer muscles stay relaxed.

As you do the exercises in the training program, you will memorize the physical sensations you experience in your voice as you do each exercise correctly. Everything else will take care of itself.

Developing coordination—the first step: Coordination of your voice at your speech level must be developed before you can begin to build strength in your voice. As you do the exercises, don't feel you have to sing them loudly. That's not important. If you try to sing too loudly (using too much air) too soon, your outer muscles will never give up their pulling and tightening reflexes. Have patience.

You must first eliminate any outer muscle activity that interferes with your tone. This will free your tone and, consequently, free your ability to produce words easily and clearly.

Your body's neuromuscular system, however, has been programmed by years of poor singing habits to activate every muscle it can to help you control your voice. It will attempt to resist any changes in muscular coordination you try to make. For a while you may feel tension in the muscles under your jaw, in your neck, in the back of your mouth, and in your soft palate. These tensions are caused when the "wrong" muscles (your outer muscles) are reluctant to give up control to the "right" muscles (the muscles of your larynx) in producing tone.

Never work around these tensions by doing things like changing the position of your tongue and jaw, raising your soft palate, making more space in your throat, or changing the pronunciation of your words. You will only create other tensions. Just do the exercises correctly, according to clear and concise instruction. Once you have successfully reprogrammed your neuromuscular system to accept your voice's functioning at your speech level, these tensions will disappear. You will then be able to sing with release, a condition in which your voice works without your having to think about it, or do anything to it. My affordable, all new and exciting private lessons Quick Start Program helps you get started with reprogramming your neuromuscular system to eliminate all of the obstacles that come in the way of your singing. To take advantage of my current End-Of-Year Sale (closes December 31st),

You are the instrument, learn to sing like a pro!

JOETT

Vocal Coach & Author
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