Almost a decade after the passing of my dear coach where the sadness didn't allow me to touch singing, this video still brings back his instructions as it illustrates them so well. Now I'm too old to pursue a career in opera, but those sunday mass attendees better get ready for my new and improved chanting.
Omg, at 3:59 I subscribed and liked this video. I'm a pop singer and I have been dealing with that debate on lifted soft palate or not. I thought this would not be useful for pop singing but hot damn that tone u got at the end of the video is fire. Would u say there is a little nasality on it? I hope so because it would make a lot of sense for me
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.
Thomas, may I ask you to inform me and everyone else about the “covering”? I got the sense it is more of a falsetto pull coming into the voice? How would you describe it? This is opera channel talked about keeping the sound dark to make a muscular switch, but when I try to maintain dark sound it becomes woofy and overdarkened, without any core. Could you please elaborate on this topic please?
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.
Almost a decade after the passing of my dear coach where the sadness didn't allow me to touch singing, this video still brings back his instructions as it illustrates them so well. Now I'm too old to pursue a career in opera, but those sunday mass attendees better get ready for my new and improved chanting.
Wow, surprising ending.
Omg, at 3:59 I subscribed and liked this video. I'm a pop singer and I have been dealing with that debate on lifted soft palate or not. I thought this would not be useful for pop singing but hot damn that tone u got at the end of the video is fire. Would u say there is a little nasality on it? I hope so because it would make a lot of sense for me
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.
Thomas, may I ask you to inform me and everyone else about the “covering”? I got the sense it is more of a falsetto pull coming into the voice? How would you describe it? This is opera channel talked about keeping the sound dark to make a muscular switch, but when I try to maintain dark sound it becomes woofy and overdarkened, without any core. Could you please elaborate on this topic please?
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.
Did you take the real vocal lessons from Daniel Formica,so how long you was his student?
Just a few lessons here and there.