THE VOICE CONNECTION
SOUND OFF
SOUND OFF
Welcome to The Voice Connection Sound Off; a forum for users of books like Raise Your Voice, Melody to Madness, The Ultimate Breathing Workout, and Unleash Your Creative Mindset, as well as a place for Vendera Vocal Academy members to interact.
This message board was created so that singers could come together and "sound off" to help support each other during vocal development and the creative process of unleashing the creative spark that occurs when writing and producing music. Currently, myself and vocal coaches Ben Valen, Ray West, and Ryan Wall are here to respond periodicially to your questions, with new vocal coaches coming soon. But, feel free to help each other too:)
This board is here for you to ask questions about my and my fellow coach's books, videos, and MP3 programs, as well as offer others help with our vocal techniques. You may also post videos of yourself and your band to share your music and ask for critiques.
Please refrain from negative comments, profanities, spamming, and inappropriate criticisms of vocal methodologies, vocal coaches, and singers. All negative posts will be deleted and subject to banning without question. I will not respond to negative posts, because, as Mark Twain once said, “Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.” With that said, positive criticism is welcome because that is how you'll grow as a singer during the training process.
Comment
Michael L
Let's drop all the "chest voice", "head voice" jargon for a minute and state things in purely technical terms. I'm pulling the following from the linked academic articles on the topic, just in case someone thinks I made it up. (It's interesting reading, if you can wade through all the technical detail of anatomy and acoustics.)
http://www.choralnet.org/paint/266734/A+Science-Based+Explanation+of+Vocal+Registers.pdf
http://www.med.rug.nl/pas/Conf_contrib/Castellengo/Castellengo_bio_touch.htm (includes sound file examples!
)
These are separated purely by differences in the anatomy of sound production.
Pulse (M0) - Vocal fry. That thing you can do that sounds really raspy, lets you approximate very low tones and can be mixed with other modes of vocalizing to change the tone and ease transitions across breaks. Uses the vestibular or "false" folds. See also: Tibetan chant, Mongolian/Tuvan throat singing. And this guy:
.
Lower (M1) - Speaking range / Chest voice. Pretty self-explanatory and something we are all intimately familiar with. When you sing high-ish notes while "pulling chest" or belting, you're forcing M1 when your throat would naturally prefer M2.
Upper (M2) - Mix(?) / Head voice (male). This is what bridges the sonic gap between speaking tones and falsetto tones and is what most of us here are striving to develop. I actually think a breathy M2 might be the exclusive speaking mode of this guy:
.
Flute (M3) - Pure falsetto(male) / Head voice (female) / Flageolet. From British boys' choirs to quiet monkey and pidgeon gargle exercises, I think we all know this when we hear or use it.
Whistle (M4) - Zipped-up falsetto, with only the forward portion of the folds vibrating. Mariah Carey, anyone?
A quick reminder of pitch notation: Middle C = C4, Tenor C = C5, Soprano C = C6. Other pitches carry the number of the C below them. Thus the lines on the bass clef are G2, B2, D3, F3, A3; treble clef lines are E4, G4, B4, D5, F5.
So I, as a baritone, can sing relatively effortlessly from A2-D4 in M1 and A3-D5 in M3 (I'm skipping M2 on purpose here), and greater effort/control (not strain, mind you) gives me F2-G4 and G3-A5 but with airy tone at the low ends and low endurance at the belted high ends.
The trouble comes when I try to practice Transcending Tones (messa di voce) in the C4-C5 octave. As I understand it, as I attempt to sustain a note while crescendoing from pp-ff (or 1 to 10) my voice starts in M3 and should transition to M2 and, at lower pitches, all the way to M1. This works fine at C4/D4, requires focused control at E4/F4 and is quite difficult to control at G4, which will resolve to a full belted M1 tone.
Here's where the trouble sets in: at A4/B4 I can swell to mf (6), transitioning smoothly from M3 to M2, but when I try to push it to f or ff (7-9), instead of resolving to M1 or maintaining M2 with more energy, my tone enters a death spiral of continuous cracking
. Apparently, this rapid alternation between modal registers is used extensively in classical Iranian avaz singing style.
(Side note: see this example where the singer first uses M1/M2 jumps and later M2/M3 jumps as musical accents. Neato!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcCAQqNqvPk
At C5/D5 I can resolve to a strong reinforced falsetto sound, probably M3 with a lot of compression, and at E5-A5 (and occasionally up to B5/C6 for very brief intervals) I'm learning to actually feel my thyroid tilt that accompanies the vocal folds zipping into M4.
My weak spot, then, is a small range of pitches intermediate between M1 (full chest) and M3 (falsetto, reinforced or otherwise) that only give me trouble at high volume. Ah, the elusive M2 "voix mixte"! I've tried isolating the exact pitches/volumes where vocal production starts to break down, by doing very slow mini-sirens (1/2-octave or less) at varying volumes. Has anyone else tried this? For example, E4-A4 up and down at a rate of 1/2 to 1 second per semitone, repeated in dynamic increments from very soft falsetto slide (pp) up to full volume and resonance (ff). I'm still working on identifying exactly what this register feels and sounds like, at which point I will try sirens exclusively in this mode as high, low, and loud as I can. At that point I hope to draw up a pitch production profile for myself, with M1, M2 and M3 drawn as curves with pitch on the x-axis and volume on the y-axis. (Yes, I was a math nerd.)
After all the work I've done, I feel a definite limitation, like a physical ceiling that sags down above those few notes (G#4-B4) and prevents me from reaching full volume in that pitch range. Imagine a spot in the middle of your living room where you don't have room to reach up and get a really satisfying stretch because your elbows hit the ceiling. I'm frustrated but persevering.
A final bit of technical terminology, for those of you who are interested: Open Quotient (OQ) vs. Closed Quotient (CQ). When taking direct measurements of the voice by Electroglottograph (EGG) one useful metric is the proportion of time that the adducted vocal folds are in contact with each other (closed) vs. open and allowing airflow (open) during sound production. These two values always add up to 1. Knowing this, the only difference between a high flute-like falsetto tone and a Jim Gillette metal scream on the same pitch is that the soft tone has a high OQ (0.7+) and the metal scream has a lower one (near 0.5). This is achieved (I think) by the muscles in your larynx squeezing around the vocal folds, forcing them a bit closer together so that they spend more time in contact during each oscillation. As far as what you hear, the sound gets "bigger" or "brighter" as a result of greater overtone production and some subharmonics. I'm pretty sure this is what's happening where (I totally forget exactly where in RYV) Jaime says something like "think about grunting, but don't actually grunt, and is actually different from the glottal compression I've read/heard about from several other sources.
Sorry for the rambling wall of text I just left, but there's an awful lot of information and misinformation floating around teh interwebs and I was hoping to spark a more in-depth discussion and sharing of experiences regarding the development of the different registers and working to smooth out the transitions between them.
(Post also copied to TheModernVocalistWorld forum.)
http://www.choralnet.org/paint/266734/A+Science-Based+Explanation+of+Vocal+Registers.pdf
http://www.med.rug.nl/pas/Conf_contrib/Castellengo/Castellengo_bio_touch.htm (includes sound file examples!
)These are separated purely by differences in the anatomy of sound production.
Pulse (M0) - Vocal fry. That thing you can do that sounds really raspy, lets you approximate very low tones and can be mixed with other modes of vocalizing to change the tone and ease transitions across breaks. Uses the vestibular or "false" folds. See also: Tibetan chant, Mongolian/Tuvan throat singing. And this guy:
.Lower (M1) - Speaking range / Chest voice. Pretty self-explanatory and something we are all intimately familiar with. When you sing high-ish notes while "pulling chest" or belting, you're forcing M1 when your throat would naturally prefer M2.
Upper (M2) - Mix(?) / Head voice (male). This is what bridges the sonic gap between speaking tones and falsetto tones and is what most of us here are striving to develop. I actually think a breathy M2 might be the exclusive speaking mode of this guy:
.Flute (M3) - Pure falsetto(male) / Head voice (female) / Flageolet. From British boys' choirs to quiet monkey and pidgeon gargle exercises, I think we all know this when we hear or use it.
Whistle (M4) - Zipped-up falsetto, with only the forward portion of the folds vibrating. Mariah Carey, anyone?
A quick reminder of pitch notation: Middle C = C4, Tenor C = C5, Soprano C = C6. Other pitches carry the number of the C below them. Thus the lines on the bass clef are G2, B2, D3, F3, A3; treble clef lines are E4, G4, B4, D5, F5.
So I, as a baritone, can sing relatively effortlessly from A2-D4 in M1 and A3-D5 in M3 (I'm skipping M2 on purpose here), and greater effort/control (not strain, mind you) gives me F2-G4 and G3-A5 but with airy tone at the low ends and low endurance at the belted high ends.
The trouble comes when I try to practice Transcending Tones (messa di voce) in the C4-C5 octave. As I understand it, as I attempt to sustain a note while crescendoing from pp-ff (or 1 to 10) my voice starts in M3 and should transition to M2 and, at lower pitches, all the way to M1. This works fine at C4/D4, requires focused control at E4/F4 and is quite difficult to control at G4, which will resolve to a full belted M1 tone.
Here's where the trouble sets in: at A4/B4 I can swell to mf (6), transitioning smoothly from M3 to M2, but when I try to push it to f or ff (7-9), instead of resolving to M1 or maintaining M2 with more energy, my tone enters a death spiral of continuous cracking
. Apparently, this rapid alternation between modal registers is used extensively in classical Iranian avaz singing style.(Side note: see this example where the singer first uses M1/M2 jumps and later M2/M3 jumps as musical accents. Neato!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcCAQqNqvPk
At C5/D5 I can resolve to a strong reinforced falsetto sound, probably M3 with a lot of compression, and at E5-A5 (and occasionally up to B5/C6 for very brief intervals) I'm learning to actually feel my thyroid tilt that accompanies the vocal folds zipping into M4.
My weak spot, then, is a small range of pitches intermediate between M1 (full chest) and M3 (falsetto, reinforced or otherwise) that only give me trouble at high volume. Ah, the elusive M2 "voix mixte"! I've tried isolating the exact pitches/volumes where vocal production starts to break down, by doing very slow mini-sirens (1/2-octave or less) at varying volumes. Has anyone else tried this? For example, E4-A4 up and down at a rate of 1/2 to 1 second per semitone, repeated in dynamic increments from very soft falsetto slide (pp) up to full volume and resonance (ff). I'm still working on identifying exactly what this register feels and sounds like, at which point I will try sirens exclusively in this mode as high, low, and loud as I can. At that point I hope to draw up a pitch production profile for myself, with M1, M2 and M3 drawn as curves with pitch on the x-axis and volume on the y-axis. (Yes, I was a math nerd.)
After all the work I've done, I feel a definite limitation, like a physical ceiling that sags down above those few notes (G#4-B4) and prevents me from reaching full volume in that pitch range. Imagine a spot in the middle of your living room where you don't have room to reach up and get a really satisfying stretch because your elbows hit the ceiling. I'm frustrated but persevering.
A final bit of technical terminology, for those of you who are interested: Open Quotient (OQ) vs. Closed Quotient (CQ). When taking direct measurements of the voice by Electroglottograph (EGG) one useful metric is the proportion of time that the adducted vocal folds are in contact with each other (closed) vs. open and allowing airflow (open) during sound production. These two values always add up to 1. Knowing this, the only difference between a high flute-like falsetto tone and a Jim Gillette metal scream on the same pitch is that the soft tone has a high OQ (0.7+) and the metal scream has a lower one (near 0.5). This is achieved (I think) by the muscles in your larynx squeezing around the vocal folds, forcing them a bit closer together so that they spend more time in contact during each oscillation. As far as what you hear, the sound gets "bigger" or "brighter" as a result of greater overtone production and some subharmonics. I'm pretty sure this is what's happening where (I totally forget exactly where in RYV) Jaime says something like "think about grunting, but don't actually grunt, and is actually different from the glottal compression I've read/heard about from several other sources.
Sorry for the rambling wall of text I just left, but there's an awful lot of information and misinformation floating around teh interwebs and I was hoping to spark a more in-depth discussion and sharing of experiences regarding the development of the different registers and working to smooth out the transitions between them.
(Post also copied to TheModernVocalistWorld forum.)
math nerd indeed! maybe you should try using doing some slope point form math instead!
