Well I'm lucky enough to be working at the moment in a store which has no central heating and keeps it's front doors wide open all day. I live in England, so you can imagine how cold it gets. I've actually shunned the uniform in favour of my big coat, it's that cold!

Really I sort of stumbled into it, but I was aware of the steps I took to stumble into it. It wasn't like "Wow, how did I do that?" It was more like "Wow, that exercise went better than I expected".

In RYV and in Four Pillars it says you should be singing with a 'top down' phonation. So at first I get into a headvoice, which I do with simple perfect 5th sirens. Adding a ridiculous amount of twang and dropping the jaw (not merely opening the mouth, but dropping the jaw) are both necessary.

Once I got that head voice, I just tried pulling back on it. Making it as quiet as I could and eventually flipping it into a light falsetto sound (at this point, there will not be any twang left on the sound as you'll want to be slowly reducing that too). Then from that falsetto, I added a little twang to get back to just a quiet and soft head voice. Then I just take that down scales trying to maintain that feeling. Eventually it will go into chest, but if you're keeping the same feeling it will be a top down type phonation. It has improved my tone quite a bit and I will try and get a recording of it too, once I'm a bit more over this illness.

I'm not a teacher or an expert. Nor am I yet an amazing singer (as you'll hear in my recordings) but these are the things that helped me get this one element down. Hope this helps.

1 tip: Slow your vibrato down just a bit. Good job, though!

interesting nathan. what do you mean by "top down phonation"?