Paule

Sometimes the most professional, big time singers are the worst at following a structured warm up routine. The benefits of warming up your voice prior to your singing practice, rehearsing with the band, recording in the studio or of course performing live are undeniable.

It’s the goal of this post to help you learn from their mistakes and to look after your instrument by maintaining good vocal health. Your vocal cords can only tolerate so much misuse and abuse before they start to break down on you at the worst possible times.

As a vocal coach, it has been my fortune to be backstage with a number of seasoned, experienced, professional singers. I have observed first hand how big time singers are not always the best at following structured warm up routines, and their often haphazard approach to warming up the voice can do more harm than good.

I have seen impressionable, inexperienced singers follow the example of these big names with little or no structured warm up routines before singing. Just because they see and hear their idols not warming up, they think they can get away with committing the same vocal sins.

There are so many reasons to warm up your voice, including:

1. Establishing correct diaphragmatic support and breathing.
2. Warming up the vocal cords and exercising the tendons and ligaments that anchor our voice box (larynx) and are instrumental in helping us to enjoy freedom of movement to help us safely reach our lowest and highest notes, as well as everything in between.
3. Maintaining or repairing minor vocal damage from the night before. An appropriate vocal warmup can help reduce swelling and inflammation in the vocal cords and can help you to achieve better cord closure.
4. Warming up your voice prior to a gig allows you to refresh the muscle memories for both breathing and vocal coordination to allow you to sing at your best.
5. An appropriately structured vocal warmup allows you to open up your airway and establish the correct open throat feelings and position to reduce strain on your voice, making it easier to hit those high notes.
6. It gets your ears and your voice in tune pitch-wise.
7. Your vocal warmup is your last opportunity to troubleshoot any challenge areas you have in your voice prior to going on stage or recording in a studio.

Popular excuses for not using a structured warmup for your voice

1. “It’s just a band practice”
2. “After a couple of songs on stage, my voice just warms up naturally anyway”
3. “There’s no place to warm up. People will hear me!”
4. “I usually just have a couple of drinks or a smoke or vape and I’m ready to go”
5. “I’ve seen professional singers who don’t warm up and they sound great!”

If you’re a singer that doesn’t warm up before they begin singing, what’s the excuse that you use to avoid it?

Let’s shine a light on all of these excuses and see if they stand up under scrutiny:

1. “It’s just a band practice”… Regardless of whether you’re singing for fun, or singing in front of a paying audience, the level of energy and the intensity that you exert on your voice is going to be very similar. If you are performing in front of a live audience, the majority of singers tend to sing a little bit harder and stronger because the adrenaline is running high. Your voice doesn’t care which of those two scenarios you’re operating in.
   
   If you are singing high intensity rock or pop (or any style for that matter) and you neglect to warm up your voice, you will risk straining your vocal cords by applying excess force to a cold cord to sing higher. If you’re screaming without a warmup, that’s even worse on your poor voice.
   
2. “After a couple of songs on stage, my voice just warms up naturally anyway”… If you’re a singer that falls into this category, those first two songs that you’re straining to hit the high notes by using excessive tension on your cords and adopting the “weightlifting” mentality will contribute to a singing voice that will feel the effects of vocal fatigue later on in your set.
   
   Any time that you need to push your voice to sing higher or stronger is a good sign that you’re singing on cold vocal cords and you’re risking vocal strain. This is not only in your voice, but in the tendons and ligaments that play such a crucial role in supporting your larynx when you sing.
   
3. “There’s no place to warm up. People will hear me!”... Most bars and music venues have bathroom stalls. They sometimes have little side rooms where you can go and do your warmup. Regardless of whether you need to warm up around other people or not, if you’re wearing headphones and singing along to a vocal warmup programme, you will be surprised how fast you forget about worrying what others think of you when you get on with the job of preparing your voice for top level performance.
   
4. “I usually just have a couple of drinks or a smoke or vape and I’m ready to go”… I wish I had a dollar for every time I hear singers with a similar response to this. When you smoke or vape, you’re passing gasses across your vocal cords that are guaranteed to remove the protective layers of mucus that we rely on as singers to reduce harmful friction on the vocal cords when we sing.
   
   You’re not doing yourself any favours here. Yes, you might like to have a smoke before you hit the stage to ease your nerves, but you can achieve the same effect through practicing singer’s breathing exercises that will help you to reduce pre-stage nerves without having a negative impact on your vocal cords.
   
   As to alcohol, drinks are usually served cold and that’s where most of the problem lies. We want the vocal cords to be nice and warm to be able to perform at our best and you’re about to throw a cold drink down your throat. This is definitely going to mean that your vocal cords will take longer to warm up if you’re drinking a cold drink prior to singing.
   
   It’s a commonly accepted practice to have a couple of shots of spirits before you hit the stage to “relax your voice” and deal with those pre-show nerves. This is a practice that professional singers like Sammy Hagar (ex lead singer of Van Halen) used to swear by before he hit the stage. The only problem with this is that if your vocal cords are slightly dehydrated to begin with, you’re going to make the situation worse for yourself and you’re going to be singing on a dry throat three or four songs in. You’re far more likely to be reaching for that cold drink to replace lost moisture in your throat, which is only going to make matters worse.
   
5. “I’ve seen professional singers who don’t warm up and they sound great!”… A perfect example of this is Joe Elliott from Def Leppard. There are nights when he basically just makes a whole bunch of screaming sounds backstage in an effort to warm up his voice. When you take on an unstructured warmup strategy like this, you run the risk of only warming up some areas of your voice and you can easily neglect the essential, foundational stuff like building good diaphragmatic breath support and establishing open throat technique prior to hitting the stage.
   
   If you look at the rock singers in particular that are still out there and doing it night after night who have enjoyed long careers performing to arena-sized audiences, these singers tend to fall into one of three simple categories. The first category is people like Glenn Hughes (ex Deep Purple) who is still capable of hitting all of his high notes in his 70s, for iconic songs like Mistreated and Highway Star. Glenn has maintained his phenomenal vocal range and his vocal agility and is a better singer now in his 70s than he was when he was in hsi 20s. This is due to great vocal technique and great vocal maintenance routines for his voice.
   
   The second category is all the rock singers that were born with above average mass and length in their vocal cords that have tended to take their vocal powers for granted and have neglected to maintain structured vocal exercise and warmup routines prior to touring and during touring. We see an astounding number of these singers now in their 50s and 60s whose voices are breaking down because they have not been properly maintained. Regular vocal maintenance and warmup routines can help to offset unhealthy habits like drinking and smoking because vocal cords as they get older, if they’re not properly maintained, tend to lose their vocal agility and take much longer to repair.
   
   The third and final category and singers who are experiencing a variety of vocal conditions, including polyps, nodes, cysts and partial vocal cord paralysis. Regular vocal exercise routines, and regular pre-show structured warmup routines can greatly reduce the risk of developing nodules, polyps or cysts on your vocal cords, as well as being able to aid in the treatment and reduction of any existing conditions that may be developing on your vocal cords.

When you do a vocal warm up, it helps to warm up your body as well! Singing any form of high-energy music requires a warm body and a warmed up set of vocal cords to not only help you sing at your best, but to also prevent injuries to both your vocal cords and other muscles or parts of your body, like your jaw. A warm body from a good, structured warmup routine can help to prevent damage from pushing too hard in your stomach area, which is something that happened to Lincoln Park’s Chester Bennington (RIP).

Better information leads to better singing.

In my experience, singers fall into three main categories regarding the size of their voice:

• The first category are the singers with the above average vocal cord mass (thickness) and above average strength in their larynx mechanism.
• The second category are people with average sized vocal cord mass and average strength in their singing mechanism.
• The last category of course, are people who have undersized vocal cord mass and a lower level of overall strength in their larynx.

There are other categories of course, but for the purpose of this article we’re going to keep it simple by assuming that most singers sit in one of these three categories.

In over 20 years of coaching experience, I’ve observed that the singers with above average vocal cord mass tend to sing with a natural balance to the size of the sounds they are producing. This simply means that their vocal mechanism is able to perform the various coordinations efficiently within the larynx to produce a rich, warm tonal, round sound.

In other words, good singers that are born with above average mass always sing in a way where they have control over the song. There are exceptions to these rules, but for the most part these observations are accurate.

Whereas singers that are born with average mass in their vocal cords tend to try and subconsciously and/or consciously make bigger vocal sounds than their vocal mechanism is able to comfortably support. This will create a number of vocal challenges and difficulties and will literally (in most cases) sabotage and prevent the singer from ever reaching their full vocal potential.

Those people born with smaller than average vocal cords tend to have an even bigger Napoleon complex, in other words the singer with the smaller voice often tries to over compensate and create a bigger sound than what their vocal mechanism can initially handle.

In the short term, this will show up in the singer as sung notes that sound very strained. The notes will sound dull and flat. When you understand a little bit more about the actual mechanics of singing, it’s no surprise that all of this additional, excessive pressure and tension that they’re applying to their vocal cords leads to a disappointing vocal performance. This means less paying customers in the future!

The consequences of making your vocal sounds bigger than they need to be

These consequences include:

The singer always needs to be in control of the song.

1. Poor cord closure. The goal of every melodic singer is to learn how to use their vocal mechanism correctly to produce the closest thing they can get to a speech-level cord closure on pitch i.e. The notes that they sing need to have the same cord closure as a spoken phrase.
   
2. Excessive tension. Making the sound too big and too heavy can very quickly overload the larynx mechanism and your voice will experience restriction in range. You will likely experience tension in your jaw and constriction in your throat.
   
   This will lead to what I affectionately refer to as the “strangled cat syndrome”. Hopefully no further explanation is necessary because every singer has experienced those exact vocal challenges at some point in their quest to sing higher and extend their vocal range. If this is you, don’t worry – you’re not alone! This is a temporary vocal affliction and it can be resolved through proper coaching instruction and through a better understanding of the role the larynx plays in efficient pitch production and changing vocal registers.
   
3. Passing excessive amounts of air through the vocal cords. This results in what we commonly refer to as a “breathy” singer. This is the equivalent of opening your mouth and aiming the air of a blow dryer into your throat. In a very short period of time, that hot air is going to dry out your vocal cords and it’s going to be dryer in there than the Sahara desert!
   
   
   
   While some singers no doubt use this technique to achieve a smoky quality to their vocal tone, the reality is when you pass excessive air through your vocal cords, the air passing through those cords will quickly dry out your voice and remove the protective layer of “mucosa” (the singer’s lubricant that naturally protects our cords and reduces the effect of friction on the vocal cords when we sing). When we remove that protective layer of the singer’s lubricant, our vocal cords are prone to heating up, causing them to swell and become inflamed. This is a very common cause of hoarseness in singers and in some cases can lead to complete loss of voice.
   
   Singers that prolong this style of singing i.e. who are passing excessive air over the vocal cords, be it unintentionally or intentionally, run the risk of exposing their cords to damage. This includes but is not limited to the growth of nodes (nodules), polyps and cysts on the vocal cords, among other conditions that could affect vocal performance.
   
   Examples of “breathy” singers are Adele and Sam Smith. Both of whom coincidentally have experienced vocal conditions that have required surgery to remedy.
   
4. Limited range. If a singer is makes their vowel and consonant sounds too big, they are running the risk of overloading the vocal mechanism with excessive weight and tension that will prevent the laryngeal tilt, which is the natural mechanism in the voice, from being able to change pitch and register freely and easily as it’s designed to do.

This tends to be less of an issue in the bedroom (in front of the mirror when you’re rehearsing), but it’s a different story when you finally hit the stage and you’ve got that expectant audience in front of you and your “performer’s adrenaline rush” kicks in.

Often the combination of a performer’s adrenaline rush and any pre-show nerves will dramatically increase the potential of you experiencing the “sing big or go home” mentality. That carefully rehearsed song in the bedroom, or the shower, or the lounge where you hit all the notes and you sound like a million bucks suddenly feels like the combination of weightlifting contest and a wrestling match with your larynx.

If you find yourself identifying with the topics raised in this article and you want to take your singing to the next level, let’s have a conversation.

Better information leads to better singing!

Sting, the singer from the rock group The Police once wrote, “Every breath you take, every move you make, I’ll be watching you.” Every breath we take starts naturally by using our diaphragm.

Human beings are born into this world with natural diaphragmatic breathing, and through various conditioning agents, i.e. nurture and nature, and through the subconcious modelling of our grandparents, parents and school teachers, it’s very common that by the age of 10, most people have fallen out of using diaphragmatic breathing in favour of inefficient upper chest breathing.

The reason for this is very simple. Diaphragmatic breathing provides a very powerful, efficient fuel and support system to project a loud voice. If you’ve ever been to a primary school during recess, you can be forgiven for putting your hands over your ears to block out the deafening sound of one hundred young kids all screaming, yelling and shouting at once. At five years old, these kids are using their diaphragmatic breathing naturally, and the result is a loud, powerful voice that projects effortlessly.

Obviously this is not an ideal volume level for most households, so kids are often encouraged to learn how to speak without yelling. The majority of children by the age of 10 have been so regularly conditioned to speak quietly and not raise their voice when they get excited. By doing so, they’re learning how to breath inefficiently into the upper chest to achieve a quieter voice. Ironically, this system of upper chest breathing often leads to creating children with higher levels of anxiety, and they also experience a vocal or personal disempowerment.

Diaphragmatic breathing supports higher athletic performance

When an athlete is performing at their personal best, they are relying heavily on natural diaphragmatic support because when your diaphragmatic breathing is engaged, your diaphragm actually expands in your body, making it possible to lift more weight, to run faster, to jump higher, to kick a ball further. You can see how if someone is referred to as a natural athlete, what’s going on as well as the improved physical coordination skills and mental awareness that they usually possess, they are strongly connecting to their diaphragmatic breathing and support system to produce above average results.

Maintaining your diaphragmatic health is essential for everyone, whether you sing or not.

Nerdy anatomy stuff – to satisfy those singers among us that need to know how things work

The diaphragm is a parachute-shaped, fibrous muscle that is located between your chest and abdomen, underneath your sternum. The diaphragm serves to separate the thoracic cavity where your lungs are, and your abdominal cavity where your body’s internal organs (like your stomach) are.

There are three openings within the diaphragm. Under the caval hiatus, there is the Vena Cava and the terminal branches of the right phrenic nerve. Under the oesophagael hiatus you have the oesophagus, the right and left vagus nerves and the oesophagal branches of the left gastric artery vein. Under the aortic hiatus, you have your aorta, your thoracic duct and your Azygous vein.

Quick fact: The right dome of the diaphragm is usually larger than the left dome.

The benefit of singing from the diaphragm

The benefit of singing from the diaphragm is that you immediately begin to recruit natural diaphragmatic support. In the simplest terms possible, it means that the diaphragm initially contracts down on itself. You create more space for your lungs, which makes the breath feel lower and more centered. We can then apply some gentle downward pressure on the diaphragm to slow down the diaphragm’s ability to release back to normal position, which in turn slows down the process of emptying the lungs of air. This is commonly referred to in singing as “engaging diaphragmatic support”.

The benefit of diaphragmatic support is that as the diaphragm contracts during the inhalation cycle, the diaphragm actually expands and becomes thicker. It increases the quality of compression in the air that we are passing through our vocal cords when we exhale. This basically means that the compressed air that is passing through our vocal cords is providing our vocal cords with far more energy than an upper chest breath can muster. The result is additional projection and power in our voice, meaning that we can sing higher notes for longer periods of time due to this improved vocal support.

Another benefit is that diaphragmatic breathing allows us to pass smaller volumes of air over the vocal cords, so that we don’t end up over-filling our lungs at every opportunity. If we over-fill our lungs, all the air that we take into our body needs to go somewhere and it ends up building up in the narrowest part of our lung at the top, which ends up blocking our airway with high pressure air. This causes our vocal cords to get blasted by the equivalent of a powerful tornado and the more that the vocal cords react to this pressure, the tighter they become. This results in the singer experiencing choking or the feeling of contortion in their throat and also in their voice.

So how does it feel? Here’s an RVR coaching tip

When you correctly engage your diaphragm in the inhalation breath, it feels like there is a rubber inner tube around your midsection, just under your sternum. When you lean into this diaphragm support, you start to naturally notice as you sing higher that the notes begin to float up with ease. This reduces the strain or weight that you feel in your throat. Compared to an incorrectly sung, unsupported note, the difference will feel like night and day.

Without diaphragmatic support, as you begin to sing higher, or as you begin to sing with more volume, the muscles in your throat will begin to strain and contract. A singer will commonly feel this as pressure, or weight in their throat. This provides you with a false sense of support that very quickly does more harm than good. This is because as muscles begin to contract, we can’t control the degree of contraction. The muscles will react in an exaggerated manner, reducing the available width in your wind pipe. Once this process starts, you lose control of the degree of pressure than you apply, which can shut your voice down and leave you with the feeling of a constricted airway, similar to what you may experience when lifting heavy weights.

When you sing with false support, all you end up doing is incorrectly engaging the muscles in your throat with a series of unwanted muscle contractions that may support three or four mid-range notes in your voice, and give you a false impression of power. However as soon as we increase our vocal range, the extra demand from these muscles in the throat will suddenly turn into excessive muscle contractions, squeezing the life out of our singing voice. Ironically this will result in choking off both your potential power and your additional natural vocal range.

In comparison, when you engage diaphragmatic support you engage an expanded diaphragm that to an average singer feels like a rubber inner tube around your middle (located at sternum height) that feels very much like a Whoopie cushion. As you gently exert a little bit of downward pressure, or lean into your diaphragm, your voice suddenly experiences a feeling as your notes start to float up and your throat starts to open up and relax. You will enjoy less tension in your throat and the diaphragm being a much bigger, stronger muscle allows you to support your voice with less strain and more ease for longer periods of time.

Singers that engage their diaphragm breathing and produce correct diaphragm support enjoy improved vocal projection. Their voice has more power and they are far less likely to lose their voice trying to sing over a loud band.

To understand natural diaphragmatic breathing, there are three phases of the breathing process that you should be familiar with.

Phase 1: The inhalation

The inhalation coordination starts with an expanded ribcage to create space and release pressure off the lungs, allowing them to fill up as the inspiration (inhalation) process begins. As it begins, the diaphragm is released, which contracts itself downwards and creates additional space for the lungs to begin to inflate.

🤓 Nerdy science fact: Lungs do not inflate themselves. Instead they are inflated through a difference in air pressure, creating a vacuum in the lungs that draws air down the air pipe.

When the diaphragm releases at the beginning of every inhalation breath, it contracts into itself which produces an immediate change in air pressure by increasing the volume of the thoracic cavity. This forms a vacuum in the upper part of the chest. The lungs have more space now and can enjoy more natural expansion. Air is naturally drawn in, as opposed to being sucked in by an upper chest breath.

Your lungs are simply sacks and don’t have the ability to draw air into themselves. The diaphragmatic movement creates a vacuum to draw air into the lungs.

🤓 Nerdy science fact: The diaphragm is actually instrumental in removing human waste from the body. It’s the part of your body that gives the “push” while you’re on the loo!

In direct comparison, an upper chest breath is inefficient because it means we are not creating the same amount of space or pressure difference, causing a smaller amount of air to enter into the top of our lungs, which is the narrowest part. Utilising a diaphragm release, we create more space at the bottom of our lungs, which creates a natural vacuum, which then in turn draws in more air.

Performing this inhalation correctly provides you with the feeling of a lower centre of gravity. If you breath in the top of the lungs, it is much harder to provide a steady stream of air that is required for good phonation (sound), and you are required to force the small amount of air that you have inhaled out of your body.

🤓 Nerdy science fact: It is possible to take in too much air! Upper chest breathing is highly inefficient and when you breath in too fast, you can take in far more air than your phrase requires for singing. This reduces the flexibility of your vocal cords, making it harder to produce a melodic pitch. This is experienced as a heavy feeling in the throat, and stiffness in the upper chest.

Phase 2: Learn how to engage the diaphragmatic support

To correctly engage diaphragmatic support, we need to expand our ribcage from a relaxed position, with our shoulders dropped down. While maintaining an expanded ribcage, we should let go of the abdominal (stomach) muscles. This will recruit the diaphragm to start contracting and begin the inhalation stage of our breath.

When you do this, you should feel that your breath goes down lower into your lungs. You’ll feel a deeper breath, not necessarily by drawing in more air, but by correctly engaging your diaphragm and achieving a natural inhalation breath.

Phase 3: Learn how to sing while correctly engaging diaphragmatic support

To beginner and intermediate singers, this can feel very counter-intuitive. This is because our brain will tell us one order of coordinations, while our diaphragm wants to operate in an entirely different way.

Since the diaphragm is the main respiration muscle of the human body, it makes sense to listen to the diaphragm and follow its natural directions to achieve the best results. Put simply, begin developing a healthy fascination for experiencing a diaphragm release before you make sound.

A really good example for this is to imagine that you’re at the best fireworks display you’ve ever seen (closing your eyes will help with this!). As the rockets shoot up into the sky and explode in a round of breathtaking effects, simply release your diaphragm and make “Oooooooos” and “Ahhhhhhhs”. Make sure that you release your diaphragm before each one of these very simple sounds.

“Oooooooooooh!”, “Ahhhhhhhhhh!”, “Wooooooooooow!”

When this exercise is performed correctly, you will have a very good sense of which physical feelings you should be experiencing in your body that will tell you that you are using healthy diaphragmatic support to improve both your singer’s breathing, and correctly engage your diaphragm to improve the power and projection of your singing voice.

The next topic in this series will be focused on understanding the exhalation phase of breathing, and how singers use the exhalation phase to sing without needing to push sound out of their voice.

Better singing everyone!

In my last post, we discussed what the passaggio is and why we should always use it to help us naturally change vocal registers to provide us with the greatest amount of freedom and ease on our voice.

In this post, I’ll explain the correct sensations that you should be experiencing so that you can practice with confidence and develop the correct vocal coordinations for changing registers in your voice.

A vocal register is defined as “a range of tones in the human voice produced by a particular vibratory pattern of the vocal folds.” Vocal registers are usually grouped by eight notes, which make up an octave. Changes between vocal registers can happen anywhere from 2-3 notes into an octave, to half way or three quarters of the way into an octave, depending on what range a singer’s voice will support.

🤓 Nerdy fact: Did you know that a normal, healthy, average singing voice is designed to connect up to a three-octave range?

The basic vocal registers within the human voice start with “fry” voice, then a low “chest” voice (which is usually quite soft in volume for most singers). Next, we have a belting register in chest voice, followed by either a mixed voice or head voice. Finally, we have two different kinds of falsetto; a “breathy” falsetto and a “reinforced” falsetto.

A reinforced falsetto is the desired falsetto to develop in a singer’s voice because it can connect up to the other vocal registers in the voice and provide us with additional range. This is typically applied to different styles, including by heavy metal, jazz and R’n’B singers.

The last register in the human voice is “whistle” register. Whistle register is the Mariah Carey effect, as heard in the song “Emotions”. Both male and female singers are capable of producing whistle tones, depending on their voice type.

This post is going to focus on helping you to successfully navigate chest voice into mixed voice and this builds a balanced middle-upper voice, which is essential for learning how to reduce the weight in your singing voice if your goal is to sing higher in your range without straining.

If you’re not already familiar with the anatomy of your larynx and its purpose, I highly recommend that you go back and read my previous post before reading on.

In our efforts to stretch our vocal range, the higher you sing in chest voice, the more stress and strain you will experience in your larynx. If we were to ignore the warning signs of all the impending stress that is building up in your voice, the result is that sooner or later your voice is going to crack, wobble or break. It is the most embarrassing thing that can happen to a singer when they sing live or in front of an audience, because the resulting break is clearly audible and does not sound like their previous vocal tone.

Due to the unexpected nature and effect that it has on our voice, many inexperienced singers subconsciously avoid their break area. Your break area is your best friend for identifying where your register changes will naturally take place.

Exercise 1: Identifying your chest to head voice break area

Try this simple exercise. Smile wide, then “yawn” at the back of your throat. In a comfortable part of your speaking range, vocalise on an “Ah” sound. Next, gently slide up in pitch until you experience and hear that crack, wobble or break in your voice. Get to know this area of your voice because this break is actually very helpful in helping you to identify where the chest voice naturally wants to hand off its big, wide vocal tone to the head voice.

The head voice tone is narrower and brighter. It has more of a ringing quality to its tone. The thyroid cartilage is starting to tilt forward, whilst on the inside of the larynx your vocal cords are beginning the process of thinning down and lengthening out. As singers, we want to encourage this activity and learn to isolate the correct micro muscles, tendons and ligaments, and exercise these muscles using specific vocal exercises to educate and encourage these muscles to develop additional strength. This strength will allow them to carry their own weight and this builds a stronger passaggio connection, making it much easier for chest voice to transition into middle voice, and ultimately head voice.

🤓 Nerdy fact: Understanding diaphragmatic breathing and support is essential for providing the correct vocal momentum and air support for register changes.

Gently repeat this exercise 10-15 times to help you get familiar with the sensation of your vocal break.

Once you have discovered where your vocal break is, we need to learn how to stabilise that sound so that the vocal break sound remains constant (your vocal break sound is audibly different to your previous chest voice sound). The vocal break sounds thinner and lighter, and initially may seem challenging to control. Quick tip: add lots of RVR “whiny bitch” (cry) to help you to support that sound. Once you’ve found that break sound, you’ve found the doorway to enter into your passaggio! Be patient and expect lots of trial and error before you can find this doorway to your middle voice.

Four steps to help you use your passaggio (bridge) to connect your chest voice to your head voice:

1. Adopt the correct posture. Stand up straight, place your hands on your hips without raising your shoulders. This will trick your body into providing better diaphragmatic breathing support.
2. Create an open airway support system. Smile wide and “yawn” in the back of your throat. You must be able to create and maintain an open airway throughout this exercise to successfully connect your voice between registers. Yawning and smiling are the two fastest things that we can do to trick the body into creating this open airway.
3. Find your break area. Start with a comfortable pitch in your speaking voice and gently slide up in pitch from the bottom of your chest voice (or wherever you started from) until you hear the break in your voice. This will sound like a lighter register and may initially go from chest voice straight to a falsetto sound. When you hear and experience this break, you have discovered your initial bridging area (passaggio – Italian for passage).
4. Reduce excess air pressure buildup. Use a diaphragm release to provide the breath support necessary to allow the vocal cords to change pitch. The diaphragm is the main respiration muscle in the human body and is responsible for actioning both the inhale and exhalation breath. We use the diaphragm to create a diaphragmatic support system (think of it like a “Whoopee” Cushion). Taking a correct diaphragmatic breath means that the diaphragm will actually expand to support our lungs, taking a lot of strain out of the voice. When we apply pressure to our Whoopee Cushion, we are stabilising the outgoing flow of air that the voice is singing on. If you don’t know how to release your diaphragm correctly while you are singing (and prior to singing), you are not breathing efficiently the way a singer should.

Once you’ve found the bridging area in your voice, you have discovered the passageway (passaggio) that is designed to thin down the vocal cords and safely transition your chest voice into a mixed voice, head voice, reinforced falsetto, and ultimately the whistle register. Your bridging area might initially feel very weak, unstable and shaky.

This is where it’s important to find a good vocal coach or singing teacher that can not only demonstrate what the passaggio sounds like and how to perform it, but also has an intimate knowledge of how the vocal anatomy works so that they can teach you to develop the correct coordinations for yourself, as well as address the psychological reactions that the brain experiences as we sing higher.

Better singing everyone!