Vocal cord Isolation Exercises

[Merkaba]

Ok, if you've read any of my posts, then you know i talk a deal about isolation. The T.V., Movies, and being assimilated in a society where everyone watches these two means that incorrect vocal techniques have abounded and are second nature. this means that for much of our lives we have learned to talk, gesture, and sing with a high, tense throat. so when we try to sing, its difficult to erase 18+ years of incorrect movements.

Heres the skinny. when we try to sing harder, and/or go up in pitch, we think that we have to tense up and move the throat up as we strain to get higher/louder. THis Is one of your main singing nemesises eseses(nemesi?) hehe. this leads to your throat blocking airflow to your cords, which means less air to activate the cords, which means less tone, volume. so now you think you have to push harder to get the tone and volume, which leads to you squeezing your throat more and around and around this vicous cycle you go. There is also increased pressure on the cords, but less activation. which leads to bowing of the cords and fatigue way before youve gotten a chance to work the cords properly to allow for growth and muscle memory.
So we need to learn to isolate the muscles that control the cords from those that control the throat. To simplify, think about this. there are only six sounds your cords can make. thats it. singing isnt hard! those are the six vowels... Ay, E, I, O, U(as in uuh, not yu) and ah. then you can mix them a bit to get other things like R sounds. Everything else is consonants. these are basically noise that interrupts the vowels! thats it. you make these with the other parts of your mouth. your tongue, teeth, mouth, etc. Realized how simple it is yet? had any epiphany yet, ever thought about it this way? its true. think about it. so noone ever needs help on consonants do they? noone ever cracks a note on a Ttt, or a bbbb. see!? so practice vowels.
always warm up. at least do gentle to moderate singing. there are tons of exercises. but at least do some scales and glisses up and down to get the range muscles loosened, even if you dont uses deep vocals or high falsetto. warm to them anyways. do staccato(broken, seperated) and legatto(connected, smooth silky) notes. on each vowel.

exercise:
without moving a single body part, no eybrow raising, no mouth moving, no arm moving, fingers , no anything. just open your mouth a bit. keep it open, now inhale, stomach bellowing out, exhale to sing from the gut, do scales up and down with each vowel. dont move anything! Now do glisses up and down a few times with each vowel. a gliss is when you go from high to low or low to high, with one connected sound. like a siren. (no you dont have to go up and down with one breath. seperate. although later i would try to implement this) do these from your lowest chest to your highest falsetto. without moving! not your neck,not your chin, teeth, eyes, NOTHING! you want to be a robot. also a good gliss from the gut, low to high and back down is very soothing. you can feel the resonance and vibrations move from your chest, and just work its way up to your head. and back down. (again, this is one reason why buddhists and meditators do chants, mantras and whatnot. the vibrations of the sound vibrate your whole body and can help alleviate many many illnesses by the same affects that ultrasound has) Its particularly felt in the chest, throat and head. hence, head voice and chest voice. it can also help you realize the need for a more consistent strong pressure, which would be your diaphragm. Work the still face exercises while going up in volume. pay attention to the feeling you need to press the cords against the extra pressure. your adams apple shouldnt move as you do this. And work on going up in pitch without going up in volume. this is very important, as you have to be able to seperate these muscle functions to minimize undue stress and blowout. Independence is what youre looking for.

if you feel strained by doing any of these exercises youre not coming from your gut. so keep experimenting til you find it. its the same feeling that you use to grunt, cough or clear your throat. the way your gut and belly button squeeze in and up. you have to be able to do this to your lungs slowly as you exhale a note. but this is the area you should should feel singing from. not your throat. But you dont need to have a high pressure all the time. The lungs should be the tank, and the diaphragm(gut) is the valve at your disposal.

You should be able to go up or down without a crack/break and without losing integrity in the sound. play around and have fun with it and feeling it. the areas where you move from chest to head and from head to falsetto are normally the weakest, and where many cracks occur, because people cant isolate enough to keep the cords flexible and moving constantly. and again, the higher the note , the thinner the cords, so pressure should back off ever so slightly, now when you reach falsetto you want to keep adequate pressure because this doesnt use the cords in the same way and they need extra air. you should be able to get a constant silky movement. i will post samples later. just pratice.
put your finger on your adams apple. (ladys you have one too). now swallow, feel how your larynx moves up. now yawn, or recreate that feeling(damn, i just yawned for real! weird). see how it drops. when you swallow, your throat muscles constrict to block airflow remember, science class? so that you dont choke, and the epiglottis flips down to make a covering so that no fluid or food goes down the airway. when you yawn, the throat bellows open so that you can get as much air and oxygen as you can, the purpose of the yawn! so which is the best for singin! a low larynx of course. using the throat muscles is a no no! so practice with your finger on your larynx. the cords are directly behind it. so realize how much you move it when singing and try to work on not moving it so much. now there are obviously some movements but you get the point! as you go up in pitch, you can keep the larynx low by ever so slightly tucking your chin. keep the cheekbones high, like youre scruncing up your nose and halfway smiling,or kinda like a dog snarling. if you can watch Chris cornell(one of the best rock vocalists ever) he does it all the time.

Again, you want to have some place/time where you can't be judged. to play around and ahve fun with your voice, and to discover your voice, and to practice. for me, this is my ride to work and my car in general. i've learned 90% of my voice in my car. of course, again, dont compete with the electronic system. you have an acoustic system, and you cant go buy another if you blow it out!

Remember you can convey the emotion and get the expressions with the face, but you have to be able to isolate this and everything else from the cords. emotions can really screw you up with tension. especially when getting into a song. the thing is to be able to make the sound so damn good that it conveys your emotion and you dont have to do it so much with other things that can only hinder you, or potentially hinder you. plus if you slip up and lose focus you can tense up and blow something out. it happens all the time. and you cant get good tone and volume by pushing 100% as hard as you can. forget about it. let your ego go. your lungs are always gonna be stronger than your little thin cords. so realize and work on trying to get the job done with 80% or less of push. too much push and the air just passing through, and cords flutter, bow and dont get a good vibration because its just too much air! the trick is to convey any wanted facial maneurisms and etc and look like youre bout to shlt a brick or whatnot, while youre really only pushing 60 or 70%. its not slacking off because you dont want your singing or screaming to sound like a cough. once you realize that your best rasp and scream and tone come at about 70% push, this will soon take a backseat to just trying to push so hard, because you realize that this is where the best sound is. so soon your ego says, hell, it sounds better, raspier, truer, grittier, etc, because we got more tone and resonance. So this level is now where you feel it more and your emotions can now be seen, but more importantly heard better. i guarantee you there are few singers that push 100% ever. even deftones, mudvayne, slipknot. you just cant do it! but you can look like , and sound like you are! And if you do push at 100 for a raspy scream, getting the rasp properly from the false cords(glottal, back of the throat wrong answer buzzer ANNKKK, and or dog bark area) its blocked to where the cords dont get 100%. But that takes proper technique and practice.
So to sum up. There are only six singing vowels, and a mix thereof. its simple! and consonants are only noise that interrupts these vowels. its simple! practice not moving anything but the cords. learn the feelings of this and work with it as you do your normal singing.
Warm up, stay hydrated, and warm down. Do regular ee's for a minute at the end of your workout. i say workout because it should be a workout. im not talking about five or ten minutes messing around here. with warming up, exercises, singing and warm down i would shoot for at least 45 minutes at the minimum. i dont like to sing for less than an hour and a half. i feel cheated. so get it going. learn to sing from the gut, and not the throat and you wil be reborn into a new world of vocal dexterity, manipulation and control.

[j0s1ah]

awesome thread/advice/exercises. i know what you mean about singing for less than 1 1/2 hours. i'm not like that with singing but with weigthlifting. i can't just start and quit in an hour. i feel cheated as well. but i haven't been singing for too long so i'll start with shorter sessions.

[Merkaba]

im just about to go to the gym. be sure not to do too much grunting while youre there.

[j0s1ah]

hmmm i never thought about that. good idea.

[Merkaba]

actually even if you dont grunt it still affects your vocal cords. your false cords above them close off to give your body that support that you get when you strain. so the pressure still affects them. but its not really much to learn about. technically, though....the heavier the lifting, the more fatigue and strain on your vocal cords. thats just for the information. hell i lift pretty **** hard, so i try to circumvent the adverse affects by taking care in all the other ways i can. it all adds up.

[j0s1ah]

i never thought about lifting and singing connections. but thanks for poitning it out.

[masaki]

This is a godsend man... I'm a guitarist by trade, but this helps me out a lot with the current situation my band is in. Our singer wasn't cutting it, so we just got rid of him, and now my other guitarist and I are planning on taking dual-lead vocals... But I'd been having problems with volume control... I was either pushing too over the top and hurting myself, or I wasn't quite loud enough, wasn't projecting to have my voice heard while I was harmonizing, even. I was closing off throat quite a bit, and I didn't even realize.

Thanks for helping me out, man.

[Merkaba]

cool. if you go to the voice help hotline sticky there is alot of stuff. Maybe thats how you go to this thread in the first place.

rock on!

[MtlGtrRckr]

hey i was wondering. i dont know exactly where my "chest voice", "head voice", and "falseto voices" are. I can only really find 1 spot where my voice breaks. thats when i start real low, then move to the high, and it happens when i get to the higher notes. But u talk about 3 voices and i can only think of 2... which i always thought were chest n head voices.

am i just a freak? lol

[Merkaba]

three voices, two breaks. hehe. thats right. one between your low, mid, and then again between your mid and high. your falsetto is just when your cords open up and you get airy. do a gliss with E and you can feel it. should at least.

[bary]

How would you sing like Daniel Johns does in silverchair - Without You? I'd make a clip of it if I could, but I can't. I hope you've heard it...

[Merkaba]

Is all the same B. check out my voicehelp hotline.

[whiskeyinthejar]

how do you get a bush singing tone. Where would you sing from?

[Rats]

What kind of question is "where would you sing from?"

The sound doesn't come from anywhere other than the vocal cords and there is only one proper way to control the air -- with the gut or diaphragm.

[Merkaba]

^

practice relaxing first, and moving as little as possible to get your goal sound, with minimal push.

[MGreeny]

Hey, I'm singing melodic punk in band. Any special advice?

[panthersfan16]

yeah, dont suck balls

[Merkaba]

yea...http://www.musicianforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=219911

[airborne50caliber]

nice v'tar, panther. and nice poast, merkaba.

"The singer doesen't sing in a space, the space sings the singer."

Originally Posted by panthersfan16

yeah, dont suck balls

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