@@azuldraconic5141 it’s useful for anything because it concerns the basic underlying function of the registers, as determined by the intersection of vowel, pitch and intensity. I’ll expand on it soon or maybe even just restate with better examples when I’m not vocally exhausted from hours of singing lol.

@@thomasmartin369 Oh okiee thanks!

I spent years exercising the falsetto. I’m still developing it. It opens the throat and makes the voice very elastic. Then you just drop a bit of chest into that mechanism and bingo!

My question is; how exactly do you add chest voice to it? You do I so well, and I'd really love to belt like you. Do you have a step by step guide? Thanks

@@agabrook thank you! Think of it like cooking with raw ingredients: on their own things like lemon, garlic, salt, olive oil and chilli taste pretty bad but combined in the right way and in the right proportions, they can make something absolutely delicious! When you do a lot of hooting your voice eventually gets “squishy”/rubbery/elastic/soft. The engaged chest voice has a very heavy, laryngeal feeling while the falsetto “takes off”. The upper voice then is like a kite and your chest voice is like the person on the ground anchoring the kite. As an experiment sing loud and chesty up to the point in your voice where it starts to feel tight and heavy. Don’t proceed further. Spend 10 minutes doing quality falsetto hooting (I’m going to put a video out about this very soon). Go back to that same point in chest and notice how it feels now.

@@thomasmartin369 sounds like a plan. I really hope it works out

@@agabrookonce you’ve worked falsetto enough to add flexibility try the messa di voce on a given note. I recommend an Ee vowel for this.

@@torgeirlandsend6707 thanks!

@@thereverendcoyote I don’t know them but I’ll look them up!

@@JaredTakesTime thanks, glad it was helpful!

Thanks Ryan!

That's what my mum says!

Mother's are always right!

Thank you!

@@thomasmartin369You’re welcome man, keep up the amazing work! Is this song available for purchase on iTunes or Bandcamp?

Ah yes, the tickle. Yeah they don't like coming together this deep. Takes time. Maybe just stick to a couple of the lowest notes and then come back later, see how it feels. The tickle can come both from overworking the muscles and from underworking them, pushing too much air through and drying everything out.

@@thomasmartin369 Gotcha , I received ur email, was on vacation for a bit and busy etc , will respond lol I feel like I tend to be a bit shallow, or I’ve been working on getting and keeping more depth as I ascend, I feel when I get pre occupied with things above the “voice” larynx, such as the resonator etc, my breath tends to go past my voice and start to irritate it .

@@Cjay0417 Jack Livigni talks about this in one of his videos: putting air where you expect the voice to be.

This could be what Mike McDonald uses past A4

Excellent

It helped with mine when I had it, yes. But don't overdo it! You have to keep the chest voice going strong too.

Always watch your channel..... I know you made a full recovery from mtd? Could you make more videos regarding this condition please.

@@Wed137 OK! I'll have a think about it!

@@thomasmartin369 great if you could. Then you can teach me to sing like you too 😁

@@Wed137 get in touch if you want to see if I can help with the MTD. Send me a sample of your voice and a case history if you want to !

Thanks Mary!

@@vitasomething it definitely wasn’t that, no.

Thanks!

send me a demo if you want and I'll get my ears on it. thomas@tmvoicetraining.com

Try a bit of deep strong moaning. 5 minutes only and don’t go too high. Rest. See how it feels the next day.

:D

Yes, I'll do a proper video soon but in the meantime: Deep (in a relaxed, passive way), hooty, dark and hollow. If it's airy it's probably too shallow. Make sure the vowel is really OOOOO, not Ew or something. The tongue moves back a little for this vowel. Let it it be weaker as you take it down and louder as you go higher. Also, as you go higher, open your move and more (on a vertical axis only) and keep your lips forward. At a certain point, the jaw and the tongue will need to part ways which means the tongue will have to hold in position to stop from coming down with the jaw and losing you the vowel. The vowel WILL shift a bit towards Oh as you open your mouth more but you still want to maintain as much of that OO in the throat as you can. After a while you can add EE, making sure it's just as deep and hooty as the OO, almost an EE over an OO. If you're persistent and consistent, the pull of the cricothyroid will develop, open the throat and make high notes progressively easier. It makes everything more elastic, silky and open. It can take a long time though! Make sure to keep some strong Ah! type chest in the lower voice as you're going through this process as the falsetto can make the voice feel too light and collapsed until it's reintegrated with chest. You have to experiment with this: as you feel the falsetto start to work, do some strong calling out and take it near a problem area in your voice and just see how it feels compared to usual.

@@thomasmartin369cool thanks for the detailed response , my Oo and E arnt to bad, when I open to the other vowels is when I feel like I have air leaking. I’ve been working with a guy, who is big on developing this for the reasons you pointed out. he says similar things or to think of breathing against the chest or collar bone area and as I try to open to other vowels in falsetto to try and keep a “w” form with the lips to not spread to much of etc.

That's normal, don't worry. Do an experiment: make a deep, relaxed Oo and a shallow OO, both in falsetto. You should notice the deep OO is less airy, not because of adding cord closure but simply by virtue of the fact that it's deeper. When you switch to a more open vowel it's like you're unsealing the resonating chamber and the sound kinda falls out of its tube. However, as the falsetto develops and the throat opens more the larynx naturally sinks deeper and the sound becomes more focussed. This, combined with the reintroduction of chest voice, should slowly give you a nice balance on the more open sounds. You might notice that my high note has a strong OO component, even though it's on an Ah vowel. That's not a manipulation or a conscious alteration of the vowel: it's just the voice being pulled into the OO resonance pocket as the falsetto takes over more and more.

Liking this exercise How often should I be doing this?

@@Wed137 depends on how much you work your chest. Chest is like bulking up your voice, falsetto kinda smooths everything out. So it has to be proportionate. Reply

Great! But make sure it's dark and CLEAR! That's not so easy on OO. It tends to get buried and muffled. Support is largely a reflex action and your support mechanism behaves differently depending on what kind of sound you're making. So trying to add more support as a panacea is a dangerous dead-end. Loud chest is good if done well and in moderation, very bad if done badly and/or to excess. Not sure about "tiny OO": this OO is neither tiny nor thin lol. BUT working your voice big and robust actually helps to access softer and lighter sounds in a way that feels more stable and tonally consistent. If your voice is irritated it could be a sign that you're doing things wrong but it could also just be that you're doing them too much or going too high before you're ready for certain notes. Moderation and rest are essential.

I was referring to the falsetto or pure head voice Oo, in terms of tiny. I feel like that has been therapeutic etc. So when I first started , I used to like engage the abs when singing to “support” I now have been more of just inhaling and trying to keep the expansion going, and exhaling, or more so saying the sounds at the bottom of the throat and not worrying about the the final sound , and letting the body or abs be more reflective as you said.

@@Cjay0417 ah right, Yes! Falsetto OO is great as it opens the throat space and gives maximum stretch to the cords without the burden of chest voice. If you get into trouble working with chest you can also use falsetto to bring ease and balance back.

Cool, thanks for the response. All I know, it can be extremely frustrating lol

@@Cjay0417 Oh, I know. Back in 2015 I completely destroyed my voice to the point where I couldn't even speak for about 6 weeks. It took me years to build it back up, during which time I often thought it was gone forever, and it's still growing now! But build it back I did, to a great extent by using these kind of exercises.

right! It bypasses your usual habits! Tabula Rasa!

Hmmm, so yes, you're probably right lol. It's important to understand that making depth and squeeze are not the same thing but you have to find the depth in the right way and in this video he's almost doing a mini messa di voce and kind of sliding into the bite on the sound. But yeah I've definitely had to work hard on getting the sound - whether dark and operatic or poppier - to come out with the voice's natural intensity rather than directly pressing. The thing, I had some lessons with Daniel after he made this video and he changed his teaching a bit: he quotes Pavarotti for instance saying "you really have to make the voice more squeezed". And I know what he means and I don't think he meant that, you know, he was just going back on what he says in this video. Rather I think it's more that when singing out and strong there IS a lot of pressure but that you want to kind of ride it with a great sense of conviction to avoid the voice falling back into the throat, as opposed to mechanically ramming the folds together.

www.fiverr.com/tmvoicetraining/teach-you-how-to-build-a-strong-singing-and-speaking-voice Couple of things there if you cycle through the windows. Mostly quite soft stuff though as that's personally how I like to sing although I work out my voice loud and go pretty high and I find that gives my soft singing more body and security. If you want to hear examples of that I can dig something out and send it to you directly.

Just a few lessons here and there.

Thank you!

Funnily enough it’s absolutely from the neck or, more specifically, from a low and strongly engaged larynx. But the training feels super-intense at first. It feels like your head will explode, there’s so much pressure. You feel it everywhere, in your whole body and it’s completely exhausting. If you push it too far you strain and hurt yourself even. But if you do it with great moderation and rest a lot between vocal workouts something magic happens: the tiredness concerts to a sense of strength and security and what previously felt like lifting up the sky starts to feel easy and velvety.

so beautifully put wow, i got chills even! i've sent you an email as well :) @@thomasmartin369

Haha, thank you my friend! I was thinking of shaving but now how can I?

I do the vast majority of my teaching online so we could work remotely. Would be fun to work on some Cohen!

It is falsetto pull coming into the voice but you can lean into that with more substance while carrying on the feeling of falsetto release to take chest higher. When you make a darker, meatier sound it draws in more chest and there's a greater risk of locking it all down and getting stuck so you have to think "strong, yes, deep and clear, yes but also: is it moving well?". Singing is such a high-wire balancing act between poles of pressure and flow. So if your voice is getting stuck and constipated-sounding you might benefit from the mere thought or suggestion of an H before each note, with absolutely no holding back! The sound is loud and the air is flying! An actual H might bring air into the tone itself and you don't want that. The feeling is of a kind of wildness or recklessness, especially as you go very high. A bloom or rush or explosion, almost like the full voice is riding on the falsetto feeling at the top of the register where it gets loud. Alternatively you can keep the sound lighter (less dark and heavy) and brighter which will lead you to more of a slimmed-down mix place. It still needs to be quite loud though. But louder and deeper will make it chestier and heavier. Choose your adventure. You don’t need to cover to sing higher in connected full voice. You can go to that slim and more falsetto dominant sound if you want. But if want that massive verismo sound or you want to sound like Bon Jovi or something, you’ll need to keep it chestier, which will necessarily entail what they call covering. That’s just where it wants to go when you keep more thickness. However, even if you just use this lighter co-ordination it will still round off a bit because of the influence of the falsetto. Unless you sing in a squished beegees reinforced falsetto.

@@thomasmartin369 Wait wait wait wait. Thank you for your profound response, really nice of you. I just need to finally get one thing straight. I hear about this “deep” sound yet clear. i just cannot seem to find the answer to what exactly a deep sound is. Is it just that I make it dark, almost would you said woofy by itself, but when I add the clear part, it is more resonant? See, thing is when I make the sound dark and deep, i feel like I am placing the voice to my pharynx. I know how it feels to sind dark and clear hopefully, just my previous training with “modern” teachers was about brightness and lightness (I study operatic singing) so i kind of freak out conciously when i make the sound dark by puting it back. I know you showed the pure dark sound without core in your last video about the technique. You make it really woofy for the spoken words just to show the kind of depth I think. I can do that and then I get this deep woofy sound. I can make it much more clear afterwards so it gets pretty loud and resonant (especially with proper breath support - that is a beast of a sound :)). So is it that the deep sound is this woofy sound placed into the pharynx only we need to get it clear at the same time? I wish I could ask my teacher but je is in France studying with Jeremy Silver, so I need to wait until he is back. I believe you do not mind my questions ;) take cate Thomas and please continue ;) I did some experimentations yesterday and today and the topic of covering seem much clearer now. I was basically singing more open in my high range which was an exciting sound but it would be dangerous in a long term for sure. Just before I wrote this reply I got pretty good basic covered sound. Although lot of it comes to proper breath support. I never had troubles with breathing low, but I just kinda let go even though it looked like I am supporting, but I was not at least not for proper operatic singing thus losing a lot of oomph. I really should be a true bass thanks to it, the low notes are now much more meatx than before and they are not thing of coincidence and luck like they were before. And it helped to make proper pure falsetto and make covering work ;)

@@UnityCZ The longer I do this the simpler everything seems. So if I vocalise I just either sing the vowel more bright and Italianite, in which case I get a slim sound through the middle and high voice with only VERY subtle (and largely passive) reshading of the vowels (you know, Aa, Ah, Aww, Oh, Uh, OO) or I make the decision to sing with more chest weight (the dreaded "pulling up" of chest voice, *EVERYBODY TAKE COVER!*), in which case you just have to go to that more covered sound because that's where the voice goes if you keep hold of more chest. For years I would be trying to "do" the modification or covering on top of what is quite natural and intuitive, essentially doubling it up and then getting woofyness, strain and very haphazard growth. Of course, even if the wrong thing is, by definition, not what we're going for, you kind of have to accept to some extent that you're going to do things messily for while, just as learning to ride a bike necessarily entails falling off quite a lot and possibly scraping your shins, even if falling off is BY DEFINITION what you're trying to avoid. There's probably some zen truth buried in this somewhere, lol.

Thanks! Yes, it starts off very pressed, like the sound has got to squeeze through a bottleneck. As it gets stronger it also feels and sounds more open. Also - and this isn't illustrated by anything I've posted here - opportunities open up for greater dynamic variation and more sensitive singing. The pianissimo becomes more readily available and you are able to take a full - but delicate - voice higher without cracking to falsetto.

Thanks! Actually no, there's no nasality: it sounds a bit like that on the EE especially because we're used to associating the bright ping with nasality but here it arises because of a strongly engaged larynx (cord-closure, compression etc...) and a relatively open pharyngeal space, the two going together quite naturally and spontaneously (in other words, I'm not really raising my soft-palate, but my soft palate is raising, largely in response to the strong source vibration - it sort of billows up like a hot-air balloon inflating). When you sing deep and clear it tends to draw in more chest voice which creates an intense amount of harmonic excitation. To do this feels extremely intense and effortful at first if you're not used to it but the effort level diminishes thereafter by degrees as the mechanism gets stronger and, slowly, you move towards the state that young, undeveloped singers are erroneously advised by older, more developed singers, to "do" as a starting point: i.e the open throat, no sensation blah blah.

To experience this do a very strong, strident, deep, loud moan on an Oohhhh (like "boat") with your mouth quite open vertically. Like "nooooooo"!. Do not let it lighten at the pitch zenith. If anything, make it louder and more strident. Do not do this too much. A few times then rest. On returning to it, you should feel that the lighter and less exaggerated voice has a little more substance and body.

Thanks! I studied the Tom Lomonaco material with Craig Sirianni and more recently Shawn Uplaznik. I’ve studied with A LOT of teachers but the sounds I make here come from those ideas, as best I can interpret them. Also worth a mention is Daniel Formica with whom I had a few lessons which were influential on me. He’s a rock coach but he’s a grand student of Arrigo Pola so it’s basically an opera technique he uses, only less deep and heavy.

I tend to train on deeper, louder sounds (these days more and more just with operatic sounds) because they represent the greatest opening and power. So when you go back to lighter styles there's plenty of strength and space to spare and you're not operating at the limits of your ability.

@@thomasmartin369 that's great that you did all that and I think I can agree with what you said. It's so interesting how everyone starts out. And your training the way you have doesn't look like it prevents you from making less dark sounds.

the brightness comes from the glottal closure and the stiffening of the vocal folds and its amplification within the pharynx. The deeper you go while keeping the sound clear, the louder and more piercing it gets. That's how opera singers sound both very dark and yet have the most ring/squillo/core.

@@thomasmartin369 my current brain and knowledge can't process this, but thanks very much for talking about Anatomy and for the explanations for those that can understand this stuff.