Voice building vs technical tricks

A better way of thinking about vocal training

Vocal technique is often spoken about as a conscious process. For example, a student is having trouble with the approach to a big, important high note and the instructor will say something like "you're carrying up too much weight or “you need to lighten off there and use more head voice". In my opinion, this is a less than ideal approach, even if what the instructor is describing is technically correct.

The balanced function of the voice is much further beyond our conscious control than we imagine. Indeed, it is psychologically and physiologically  impossible to keep track of every tiny, interlinked part of the vocal mechanism in real time, not to mention the larger muscle groups which are responsible for regulating breath compression, which is in itself intrinsically linked to laryngeal stability. Unfortunately for the singer in my example, the result of this well-meaning instruction will tend to lead to an anemic, flipped sound, rather than the robust and full-bodied high note generally required in such a context. In other words, the singer will almost always overcorrect and the result, while "safer", will be artistically disconnected from the text, music, drama and, worst of all, the body. They are relying on a trick in the moment rather than having the voice and body conditioned to achieve balance subconsciously. Now, one could argue that if you practiced this trick 100+ times, the body will grow accustomed to this switch and start to execute it automatically. This is true to some extent, but why would we ever want to laboriously train registration or whatever else in an isolated context, rather than dealing with the crux of the issue?

We need to train the voice and body, not the singer, to execute this process. This might sound almost tautological, but the ramifications are profound for the way we think about singing and the study of it.

Think back to your last freakishly good vocal day. Whether it was practice or performance doesn't matter; we have all experienced the instantly responsive voice which flows seemingly perfectly without thought or effort. Now ask yourself: how can that be? Did you consciously do something different to produce that result? Of course not. You found your voice in that state and went with it. Somehow, through the alchemy of circumstance, your voice automatically balanced its functionality in a much more efficient way than usual. For the great technician, virtually every day is like this. Not because they have some inherently superior or arcane knowledge of what to do in the moment,  but because they understand that a warm-up or series of exercises is not just about stretching the muscles, but is also a functional preparation. You show the voice the functionality you desire, the path on which these functions will be able to combine and then allow the subconscious to put the pieces together. This is not a process that will be accomplished perfectly in one day, but a process of building in these functions and, over time, slowly constructing a superior natural voice to that with which you started.

Imagine you really want to be able to bench press 100kg. You go to the gym, lie on the bench under the barbell and try to mentally will yourself into lifting that 100kg immediately, but it is impossible. You try a number of different techniques with the wrist placement, timing, breathing, elbow position, engagement of the back, tensing of the pectorals but it is all in vain and the weight remains immovable. This is clearly a ridiculous way to train. The problem is not your technique in the moment of lifting, but rather the total lack of muscular conditioning and development to be able to execute such an extreme task. Muscular conditioning and development are equally as important in singing or, indeed, any physically demanding task. Once a struggling singer accepts this basic reality, they will stop trying to find secret resonating points in the mask or randomly pushing and pulling muscles to discover the way to connect to the body, and begin to work to condition the muscles and physical coordinations that influence the voice, an approach which will likely yield better results than ever previously thought possible; what some like to call ‘voice building’. 

What do I mean by ‘conditioning the muscles’ in the context of singing? Almost everyone has some basic understanding of progressive overload as it applies to weight lifting, but when it comes to singing, sheer strength will only get you so far. The process of voice building, while somewhat analogous to bodybuilding, is more counterintuitive.

I will take an example of a common technical problem in underdeveloped voices. A full lyric soprano has a powerful chest voice, but as she passes F4 she can’t help but flip into a weak and airy head voice with a wide vibrato dipping toward the semitone below. The voice eventually picks up strength at around the F#5, but she has a crucial octave that sounds unstable and is impractically small. This problem is constantly pointed out in audition feedback and is preventing her from booking gigs, despite the impressive size and relative stability of the top and bottom of the voice. She has tried over and over with various tricks to go up evenly without wobbling and losing strength: backing off the low range in an attempt to lighten the voice, nasal placement, accelerating the breath, opening the mouth more, closing the mouth more, thinking of floating up and back into the palate, pushing down with the abs, pushing up with the abs, etc etc. Every trick in the book has failed our hypothetical soprano. So, what is the problem and how should she address it?

This problem likely stems from an imbalance in registration. That is, the voice of this singer has only ever experienced a binary chest voice or head voice. Consequently, the vocal folds are unable to close properly or stretch above the point where the shortened, chesty function is able to work alone. This issue with registration also results in this singer’s body tending to pressurize the air to an extreme in an effort to make these dysfunctional sounds acoustically viable and, indeed, just to make pitch, which results in the unstable vibrato.

This description sounds great in theory. Indeed, many undergraduate singing students taking pedagogy classes would be capable of giving such a diagnosis, but how would our hypothetical soprano conquer her vocal demons? Perhaps she learned about the possibility of balanced registration from a friend or coach and, in attempting to sing the middle engaging more chest, all that came out was a wild and painful shout. Making a different choice in the moment of execution won’t help this soprano much. She needs to show her voice a better path. She needs to build her voice.

To put it simply, she would have to practice a series of exercises gradually showing the voice how to coordinate this balanced registration, as if the voice itself were something external to her consciousness; almost like an animal she is training. In order for these exercises to work, she will have to CAREFULLY exaggerate quite a bit in each direction (ie bringing head voice down, bringing chest voice up) using a decent amount of breath compression. Otherwise she would run the risk of the full voice not quite getting the point. I would also suggest to her to work hard on clarifying the head voice as a function in itself by practicing clean onsets, as it is likely that the voice’s concept of ‘head voice’ fundamentally involves the destructive opening of the vocal folds.

This soprano likely also has other significant issues stemming from the poor coordination of her registration. Correcting these issues would be relatively complicated, as such registration problems will typically come with significant adverse tensions in other parts of the vocal tract and body. She should set about fixing these in exactly the same way: simply by showing the muscles a better path. Without question, there would be residual problems in repertoire, but these will only be able to be addressed after the singer has fixed the fundamental coordination issues away from her arias in these voice building exercises.

The singer practicing should see themselves as the trainer of the animal, the voice, rather than as the conscious doer. Show your voice the path, give your voice the information it needs, and you will be surprised how much of the fine coordination takes care of itself. This self-sustaining balance, once discovered, can often seem like a kind of wizardry; the singer stops trying so hard to control everything and becomes the observer of a kind of singing of which they had never imagined themselves capable.

Singing is a natural process and we should always take the path of greatest efficiency, but often that path is not immediately obvious to a voice and body which do not have the correct functions embedded within them. After you have done a good job of coordinating and strengthening these functions in isolation, the unimpeded voice will emerge. After that, the hardest part is to stay out of the way.