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Not long to hit the note per se but then it kind of opens up progressively as one develops. Maybe a few months once I found the right direction training-wise?

@@thomasmartin369 I can sing high c's but they don't have that falsetto-y ringy quality that you demonstrated and I'd like to cultivate that sound. I will work on it 😅

I can't answer that I'm afraid, as there are too many potential variables. It took me years and I'm still developing it, although I had to start from literally nothing as I completely destroyed my voice back in 2015 (I couldn't even speak for a couple of months) and had to rebuild it from scratch.

@@thomasmartin369 but why do think to continue developing it? What are the current roadblocks that youve experienced with this technique?

@@azuldraconic5141 could you rephrase/clarify?

@@thomasmartin369 what do you mean by "developing it"? To me it feels like you've already unlocked a refined high note.

@@azuldraconic5141 Oh I see. Yes the note's there but it can always be more stable, richer, easier, more mellow, more powerful, less taxing and easier to integrate into an actual song. I mean, up to a point anyway. If you're, y'know, Caruso or Whitney Houston or something then I guess you can reasonably say "stick a fork in it it's done" lol.

If you find it easy you're either doing it wrong or you have a pretty strong voice *checks channel* oh ok, you actually do. Nice singing. Nonetheless, it's a strong medicine, take it in moderation. Try 5 minutes to start with and build from there in duration and in range. When you get tired, walk away and rest your voice until it comes back to normal.

@@thomasmartin369 Hey thanks for the reply and the compliment. That means a lot. Those videos are a couple years old and I’m still working through some issues. Mostly tension and slight dysphonia. I know that singing can be easier than I’m making it. Working with a coach as well as a speech therapist. I’ll work on this exversise daily as well as my others. I appreciate your videos. Keep going man!

@@JoshElliottMusic Ah! Sorry to hear it. I had muscle tension dysphonia for several years. My voice totally collapsed back in 2015 and I had to rebuild it from scratch. Like, I literally couldn't even speak for about 6 weeks. I lightened, lightened, lightened...until I had no chest voice.

@@thomasmartin369 Sorry to hear that as well. I think it’s more common than we realize. Your journey with that could be a great topic for a video 😉 Anyway nice to meet you. I’ll subscribe and best of luck with the channel!

@@JoshElliottMusic and you! Weeelll, it was a blessing in disguise really! I learned more about how the voice works from that experience than from all the books and theory I'd read put together! When you've built everything you have from nothing you learn to take nothing for granted, which is an asset for a teacher.

Thanks!

I’m trying to stop but the voices won’t let me.

It’s tricky to get the balance right. If your voice is too chesty (heavy, tank-like) you can add more falsetto and it will tend to make it freer and more elastic but at a slight cost of less beefiness. But if you cotton on to the benefits of falsetto it’s easy to fall into the trap of unbalancing things in the other direction and then scratching your head wondering what the hell went wrong when you did the same thing that helped you before. In that scenario you have to put more chest back in.

Brilliant comment/question. Unfortunately my answer is less interesting in that you’ve more or less perfectly summarised my own experience with respect to the same question. I’ve never found the magic appoggio breathing technique although I have found certain co-ordinations that, as an experience, certainly do strongly resemble the descriptions of “holding out”, “suspension” etc…as well as “bearing down” etc… I spent YEARS trying to find vocal release through breath manipulation and only ever hurt my voice, just as you describe. But when my folds are well approximated and my vowel clear and deep I do feel a balanced sense of openness but I think this opening is just the midsection being sandwiched between the impulse from below and the appropriately closed glottis with an efficient vowel formation. The thought of keeping the expansion may indeed prove helpful if all the other ducks are in a row but it’s almost certainly not the panacea it’s sometimes presented as. Of course, this is all in my experience (and in yours and others: I remember talking to another of Jeremy’s students whom I asked if the holding out had ever made a clear difference to his sound and he replied “no but that he just carried on doing it superstitiously”. The same singer complained of singing associated pain…). I still have plenty of flaws to work out in my voice and I may be wrong: but, as you yourself have found, that’s not where the evidence seems to point.

@@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.

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