Ready to take the plunge center stage with your own band? Ready to get to the next level as a vocalist? Even if you’re just looking for others to “jam” with, collaborating with actual musicians is key to building your listening abilities and to be musical with your singing. Here are some places to get [...]
Ready to take the plunge center stage with your own band? Ready to get to the next level as a vocalist?
Even if you’re just looking for others to “jam” with, collaborating with actual musicians is key to building your listening abilities and to be musical with your singing.
Here are some places to get you started on your search:
My friend Ryan Luchuck and I finished our “Singing Tips” videos for YouTube. Below, you’ll find a direct link to the first of four videos in this series. If you’re a singer, or know one, please have a look and pass it along by email or by re-posting on FB….We tried to load them with [...]
My friend Ryan Luchuck and I finished our “Singing Tips” videos for YouTube. Below, you’ll find a direct link to the first of four videos in this series.
If you’re a singer, or know one, please have a look and pass it along by email or by re-posting on FB….We tried to load them with tons of info to make singing easy to understand.
Special note to my students: don’t laugh at me (too much)!! 
Huge Thanks to: Eric Yu, Caleb Cosman, Nick Visscher, Ryan Peplinski, and Amal Nooh
Also, check out DSVocology’s latest newsletter to learn more about our affiliation!
Tenors Wanted for Toronto Choir: The General Manager of a men’s chamber ensemble is looking for tenor voices. The Canadian Men’s Chorus is in its second year under Artistic Director Greg Rainville. Any interested tenors are invited to check out their website at www.canadianmenschorus.ca and send Greg or the GM Arlene an email if they [...]
The General Manager of a men’s chamber ensemble is looking for tenor voices. The Canadian Men’s Chorus is in its second year under Artistic Director Greg Rainville. Any interested tenors are invited to check out their website at www.canadianmenschorus.ca and send Greg or the GM Arlene an email if they have any questions or are interested in an audition. Contact Arlene Jillard: ajillard@canadianmenschorus.ca
Contact: Robert 905 597 3293
Most singers can only sing far below their potential. Lack of range, power and ideal tone are unfortunately all to common…. But it doesn’t have to be! One of the main reasons for these common inabilities is the lack of high quality accessible educational information for singers. For this reason, my good friend Ryan Luchuck [...]
Most singers can only sing far below their potential. Lack of range, power and ideal tone are unfortunately all to common…. But it doesn’t have to be!
One of the main reasons for these common inabilities is the lack of high quality accessible educational information for singers. For this reason, my good friend Ryan Luchuck and I have put our heads together to form “Superheroes Of Voice – Changing Your Vocal Destiny”, a fun, interactive workshop that we’re presenting for FREE (w/PWYC donation to charity) on November 21, 2011 @ The Winchester Theatre (80 Winchester St.). We’ve been developing this presentation for over two years, and the feedback has been phenomenal.
You will learn:
- The #1 thing you do with your voice that is holding you back.
- What tools will fix ALL your vocal issues.
- How to unlock both your own voice and other singers
- How to develop power and range free of strain, as quickly as possible
- The same elite voice training information we teach our private students
Seating is very limited. To sign up, send a reply to this email or visit our event page on facebook.
Hope to see you there!
Brandon Brophy and Ryan Luchuck
Not sure how important rhythm is to singing? Nothing like watching the masters at work. And this is one of my fav’s. Watch how Michael’s virtuosic singing revolves around his snapping on the 2nd and 4th beat of every “bar”:
Not sure how important rhythm is to singing? Nothing like watching the masters at work. And this is one of my fav’s. Watch how Michael’s virtuosic singing revolves around his snapping on the 2nd and 4th beat of every “bar”:
How To Sing: Without Strained Vocal Cords Many singers feel their vocal cords strain, and their larynx rise as they sing into certain parts of their vocal range. Strained vocal cords and/or a high larynx, if left unchecked, creates swelling and a host of other dangerous problems at the vocal cord level which can be [...]
Many singers feel their vocal cords strain, and their larynx rise as they sing into certain parts of their vocal range.
Strained vocal cords and/or a high larynx, if left unchecked, creates swelling and a host of other dangerous problems at the vocal cord level which can be very serious in singing.
There are many singers throughout time that could sing across their whole voice effortlessly and with fullness – without having to rely on hiking up their larynx or straining their vocal cords much at all: Ella Fitzgerald could do it… So could Sarah Vaughan, Joni Mitchell (in her early years), Wendy Moten, Kate Bush, Barbra Streisand, Stevie Wonder, Luther Vandross, Pavarotti, Robert Weede, Smokie Norful, Anthony Warlow, Dawn Upshaw, Kristin Chenoweth, even Aretha Franklin…
They all sang with a vocal freedom and intensity that was both striking, rich, and powerful – yet somehow baffling easy.
Yet still, some people have gone as far as to make the assumption that because the larynx seems to raise with some (not very good) singers on certain pitches, that we should just accept it and sing like that anyway!
Not so! Singing with a raised larynx or strained vocal cords can be avoided when you understand what the problem is.
Your larynx (voicebox) contains your vocal cords that lay flat over your trachea (windpipe) and vibrate horizontally in your throat. In order to sing freely and easily without vocal strain across your whole range, your vocal cords need to vibrate and make their adjustments for pitches freely, and they need your precious resonant areas and external muscles around and above the vocal cords and larynx to be free also, for maximum full-effect.
However, engaging the swallowing muscles does the opposite: It lifts your voicebox into a crunch creating a “clamp” around your vocal cords triggering the epiglottis to lower over it. This seals off the passage way into your voicebox so the food or liquid that your body is preparing to take in slides across the back of the epiglottis, over the voicebox, safely into your “food pipe” (esophagus) that eventually drops into your stomach.
Put your finger on your adam’s apple (not as pronounced in women), and swallow. Could you imagine trying to sing as you do that? This marvelous contraption ensures nothing, not even air, will get through your larynx, vocal cords, or into your lungs when you’re swallowing something. Lucky. Our lungs are enormously sensitive, and if that were ever to happen, we wouldn’t live to tell the tale.
Swallowing is great for eating and drinking, but terrible for singing! Any singer who has experienced trying to sing with a high larynx will tell you that it is NOT a nice feeling. Continuing to sing that way can result in a number of long terms vocal issues which can potentially scar the voice for good.
So how do we get the larynx to stay down? Because there are a number of factors that tend to work together to create that condition for the singer, it’s often not the easiest tendency to unravel for those who may struggle with it, especially in a written article of few words such as this. Understanding what the problem is a great start! But finding a skilled teacher who has a proven track record of stabilizing and balancing a wide variety of singers is crucial to developing an understanding of what makes your voice unique, and what is required to balance it out.
With that said, we can begin to address the strained vocal cords and high larynx by first acknowledging the many obstacles which may create it, and then some possible solutions to fix the problem. Remember, many of these obstacles may work in tandem to create the high larynx, so often it is not one solution, but a few in various proportions that will result in stability and balance for the whole voice. And once you have learned how to get your larynx to stay down in a few exercises, then you have to retrain all your old habits which many of us may have built over many years, that led into the problem in songs in the first place!
Good Luck!
The SECRET to singing: The ONLY Thing You Need To Know! Good voice training should (at least) teach you how to do one thing: How to sing from your low voice into your high voice without your vocal cords coming apart, cracking, or going breathy, and definitely without straining. Sounds easy right? Wrong! This issue [...]
Good voice training should (at least) teach you how to do one thing: How to sing from your low voice into your high voice without your vocal cords coming apart, cracking, or going breathy, and definitely without straining.
Sounds easy right? Wrong! This issue of being able to sing from low to high easily has plagued singers and teachers for centuries. In fact, we could say it’s the holy grail of singing!
Even today, few teachers have been taught how to help others deal with it – if they have even learned how to do it themselves. 
Most teachers usually will work with your voice as it ALREADY IS, singing something you can already sing, while perhaps adding a few sparkly bits they perceive to be cherry on the cake, things like: “Imagine an apple in your throat”, “add more support” or “put the ‘sound’ here” (as they point at their nose).
Unfortunately, as you have probably already discovered, all of this kind of advice, although it describes how the voice SHOULD feel when it’s working right, does next to nothing to help you GET IT and KEEP IT working right. That’s because their advice doesn’t teach you what adjustments you have to make at the vocal cord level and with your vowels, to shift in a reliable way between your low and high voice. You must learn what you have to adjust to maintain freedom on all the sounds you have to sing (some are very difficult) in your throat – the crucial, delicate “valve” that is the heart of your instrument.
An athlete will get little use out of being TOLD how a winning performance should FEEL. It’s far more useful to learn what the athletes biggest CHALLENGES are first, then teach the athlete what he/she should be DOING differently to fully address those challenges, to gradually but efficiently improve and strengthen their “game”. And MAYBE then, they might actually get a chance at feeling “it”.
The first step is recognizing what YOUR biggest challenges are. The second step is knowing how to address your challenges, and work towards improving and strengthening them… Your human voice is no less a set of muscles that you need to train to shift between high and low!
So let’s get to it!
The human voice is experienced in two very distinct and very different ways. As singers, we are generally well acquainted with only one: Either we are good at the deep, full, thick, somewhat masculine feeling low voice (usually referred to as “chest voice” – vowels such as “Ah” and “Agh” as in “bought” and “bat” will help you find it), or we are well acquainted with the light, thin, empty, and somewhat feminine feeling high voice (generally referred to as “head voice” – vowels like “oo” and “ee” will help you find it). Usually, we are great at one, and terrible at the other. Great singing is about being great at both, and being able to seamlessly shift between them!
There are a rare few that we should all learn from that can/could sing easily into and between both feelings (the high and the low voice) – voices like: Aretha Franklin, Julie Andrews, Jeff Buckley, Pavarotti, Kate Bush, Anthony Warlow, Stevie Wonder, Barbra Streisand, Ella Fitzgerald… the list goes on. As an audience, because of their easy shifting between one and the other, the resulting sound sounds “effortless”.
This is the art of effortless singing.
There’s absolutely no point in continuing to develop JUST one part of your voice – especially the one you are already familiar with. It’s not really gonna help you much is it? The purpose of voice training then SHOULD be, to access ALL the different areas of your voice (as your vocal range begins to expand and becomes more familiar, nuances such as vocal registers begin to reveal themselves) without straining and without going into falsetto.
To learn to sing effortlessly, you need to:
1) Identify which part of the voice you are most comfortable in
2) Use tools and sounds which help you get comfortable in the part of the voice you are unfamiliar with.
3) Generally AVOID sounds which will draw you back completely into the part of the voice you are already familiar with.
4) Allow the two feelings to seamlessly blend together!
Good Luck!
Stage Success: Developing Your Stage Persona Why You Need to Develop Your Self As a performer, your audience NEEDS you to be the best that you can possibly be. Actually, what your audience secretly want is someone to look up to! But to meet that kind of demand, you must stand consciously and powerfully on [...]
As a performer, your audience NEEDS you to be the best that you can possibly be.
Actually, what your audience secretly want is someone to look up to! But to meet that kind of demand, you must stand consciously and powerfully on your own two feet. You should understand what makes you special, what makes you stand out from the rest, and what gives you an edge. At the same time however, you have to do so while remaining completely AUTHENTIC to you.
While there can never be a formula for self-discovery, this article should help orient and give some perspective to yourself, that is, your Self, as to it’s unique character, so you can start to weave your natural and authentic essence into a brilliant stage persona.
While you don’t have to write a biography about your life, you should have some perspective on what has made your life different from others, but also what is ultimately universal about your experience, so that others can align with it.
Ask yourself: What have been the major forces and experiences that have shaped your life? Who have you always wanted to be? Who have you become? What stirs your emotions, your heart? What are the reasons you behave the way you do? What are 3 aspects of your life that you find challenging or that challenge you with degrees of tension? What 3 prominent people do you admire or relate too and why? What are some personal stories of yours or others that have really made an impact on you or your life? What if you were put here by some mysterious force to deliver a message… Who would you be? What would the message be? How passionate would you be? How would you dress? How would you interact with people? If your life and your passions were condensed onto a series of canvases by a master artist, what would they look like? Abstract? Landscape? Caricature?
Your answers here can also provide great starting points for some songs now, or later down the line.
Renowned swiss psychiatrist CJ jung’s most famous development was his personality typology theory, developed further and known now as the Briggs Myers typology test. By using it, you can start to become familiar with some of the things that deeply motivate you, that you probably didn’t know about. Find it here: http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp. Knowing this aspect can shed some light on your perhaps unconscious behavior and ultimately add some depth to your performances.
Knowing what your character strengths and weaknesses are can help you to deepen the essence of your stage persona. You should know what flows easily to you, so you can maximize your potential.
Two great strengths tests are: VIA character test and strengths finder. The free VIA test is here: http://uat.viacharacter.org/. Strengths Finder requires that you purchase the book, but is well worth it: http://strengths.gallup.com/110440/About-StrengthsFinder-20.aspx.
Once you know where you are strong, you must also become aware of and grow stronger at where you are weak. This emotional intelligence test shows you exactly how to improve on your character weaknesses (online survey costs $40): http://www.talentsmart.com/products/surveys_noflash.php?ID=43.
After you have got some perspective with these tests, it is time to let it sink in. Become acquainted with any of these newly known aspects, and the nuances of how you naturally flow. Soon, you’ll be well on your way to self-knowlege, and crafting your unique stage persona.
Coming up in pt 2 of Discovering your stage persona – discovering archetypal themes in your story.
Playing with Fire: Using Tension in your performance “The greater the tension, the greater is the potential. Great energy springs from a correspondingly great tension of opposites.” – CG Jung In this article we will discuss the many ways you can play with tension in the music, to help make your vocal delivery magical! Warning! [...]
“The greater the tension, the greater is the potential. Great energy springs from a correspondingly great tension of opposites.”
- CG Jung
In this article we will discuss the many ways you can play with tension in the music, to help make your vocal delivery magical!
Before we begin, a word of caution is in order: It is important to note that as a vocalist, you must be extremely attentive to any inappropriate build up of tension in the body, especially in the throat. This kind of vocal tension is not creatively useful.
Vocal strain is viciously damaging and plagues singers everywhere. Without a good teacher trained in teaching, it can be a nasty habit nearly impossible to get rid of on your own. If you experience vocal strain, seek help from an SLS instructor.
The kind of tension you’ll read about here is far more subtle than that.
So, then, what is this tension I speak of? We live in a world with significant tension: careers, relationships, world wars… Sometimes, we feel it so much it is difficult not to have it gather in our bodies. It can take a massage, a trip to the gym, or a good distraction like a movie to take the edge off.
The truth is, we all feel tension in one way or another, and in varying degrees throughout the day. On one end, getting your heart broken can create so much tension it’s unbearable. On the other end, falling hoplessly in love can be the softest, sweetest kind of trip that makes us feel like we’re walking on clouds – virtually no tension at all…
We have all experienced all these degrees of tension. Everyone can relate to it.
Music is a unique art form that creates layers of powerful physical vibration (sound) which recreates these subtle degrees of tension in both obvious and subtle ways in the bodies of the listener.
We experience these extremely sophisticated shifting vibrations as a kaleidoscope of changing patterns and colours. This plays a significant part of what we experience as emotion. When all this works in tandem, the audience can very easily lose themselves – ideally at your feet.
As a singer, when you understand how to turn this powerful aspect of music to your advantage and pair it with a delivery that is meaningful to you, your audience will melt in your hands.
Below are some of the more common ways tension is used in music:
The most obvious. High vocal notes create a sympathetic fast frequency vibration in our bodies, and we can’t help but get caught up in it! People will pay hundreds of dollars for a live performance ticket just to hear ONE high note in a song. Such is the power of tension in high notes. This is why voice training is so important for singers – high notes can be quite precarious, yet you must nail them EVERY time.
Often called dragging or varying the melody. The same notes in Verses and choruses repeating in the same way is quite common in modern song structures. Set up the melody the first time by keeping it simple. But after that, change it up! Experiment with expectation tension by varying it a bit: wait to start singing the melody a tad off the beat by starting to sing it either just before the beat it is expected to start on, or after it. See how that plays with the audiences expectation – it will build an alluring tension.
Most melodies are written to compliment the lyric – it often is sung with rhythmic and melodic inflections similar to how we would actually speak it! But there are many ways to accent how you sing your line to make it stand out and create tension. Perhaps you actually speak a few words off the pitch – throwing the audiences expectation. Perhaps you feel compelled to add a growl, a moan, a sigh somewhere in the words your singing. These spontaneous swoops keep you and your audiences ears fresh, hanging on the edge of their seats.
Often, these vocal embellishments can really make a singer stand out. But be careful! Too many, and you will seem flashy and dishonest – like you’re not really in the moment. Or worse – that you’re trying to show off. Done tastefully, embellishments are like genius brush strokes in the sky: they take your singing into the stratosphere through their wild, complex patterns of precisely changing pitches which your audiences experiences as shifting emotional tension.
The opposite to licks & runs, but often just as powerful. By holding a note over your music where your audience doesn’t expect it, creates a powerful steady emotional state, and a very high degree of tension. Holding the 5th degree in the key of your song, creates a powerful pull in the music too. As an advanced exercise, see if you can get your band to stop time and hold a chord as you hold your note… You just might tear the place apart when you come back to the rhythm!
A flexible vocalist should be able to sing softly, gently, or breathy to a full, strong, belt, and everything in between. All of these add colourful degrees of tension. Falsetto are higher notes which drop nearly all vocal cord tension altogether, and most vocal presence is lost from the voice, making it very ineffectual in general. However, it can be powerful as an effect. After you have the audience burning in the palm of your hands, take a high note and “flip” into falsetto. In effect you will be dropping your audience out of your hands as the normal tension in the voice gives out to a disconnected tone.
While this is hard to tweak without a fairly deep understanding of chord structures and key relationships, how your song is structured will play the strongest role in dictating what is most appropriate for you to do vocally. Try and become aware of the many elements within the music – the instruments, the sound relationships, solos, volume changes, and crescendos, however minor. All of these things create shifting degrees of tension that give you plenty of opportunity to experiment.
There are potentially endless ways for you to experiment as a vocalist. Try them all, and find out which ones seem to work best for you – and you’ll be on your way to building an incredibly unique vocal style.
Preparing for a Vocal Performance The nerves! The energy! The excitement! So much to think about! How can you ensure a fabulous and fun performance? By following the exercises below, you can really carve out a deep connection to the songs you are singing, and the performance you want, and know you can, deliver! Record [...]
The nerves! The energy! The excitement! So much to think about! How can you ensure a fabulous and fun performance? By following the exercises below, you can really carve out a deep connection to the songs you are singing, and the performance you want, and know you can, deliver!
Do you “miss” any notes, or are you practically perfectly on pitch the whole time? If you missed a few, figure out where they were, what vowel is being sung, and see if you can better establish the “pitch center” of the word. If the note is in a bridge area of the voice, you may need to modify the vowel slightly to keep it in tune.
Become the story teller. Establish who you are in the song, who is in the story, and who you are singing too. There is no limitation here – be creative! The more wild and adventurous your choices are, the more wild you can give your singing permission to be. What’s the story? Where are you when you’re telling the story? When is the story happening? How is the story being told (first, 2nd, or 3rd person)? Most importantly, WHY are you telling the story??? Why should your audience be interested in being interested?
In light of the questions above, look at your song, and lay out the groundwork for how you will convey all the naunces of your story as it unfolds over musical time. Choose just 2 or 3 musical things you can do, that will shift your storytelling towards your personal interpretation: Where and how will you provide energetic and musical vocal accents, or pauses? Will you take away or add notes? How will you increase or decrease the vocal dynamic? What kind of vocal sounds can add to your story? Are there vocal things you are doing at any point that take away from the intention of your musical blueprint? Also, note where any difficult passages are, if any, and make a mental note to be present to that passage when it arrives in your practice. You may need to be more focused on executing that particular passage in the song, than putting your energy at that time into projecting your story, for instance… How can you better plan those precious few seconds?
As a performer, you need to be natural onstage. You need alot of energy, but not so much that you become overwhelmed with nervous energy, or negative thoughts. How can you find your “zone”, and be ready to step into it? Where does the anxiety come from? What are your thought processes? How can you compensate for them? You may need positive self-talk to re-orient yourself back to having a successful and fun performance! You may also want to use imagery or breathing exercises to reduce your anxiety, and reconnect you to your body, and the state of mind you require for your song.
This is taken from “Coaching The Artist Within”: Creating requires a centered presence. Here is my definition of the term CENTER:
This means NO stopping and rewinding. You must put yourself in the moment of the performance, and practice existing in that moment, so it doesn’t surprise you as much when the moment happens. Use visualization. Completely immerse yourself in the experience, if you can. Where is the audience? How are your nerves? What are you feeling? What deters you from the focus of your performance?
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