In order to find your singing voice that is naturally free, naturally powerful, and naturally easy, you need to get all 3 parts of your voice connected up properly, and working in optimum relationship with each other.
These 3 ‘parts’ are:
The Power (Breath)
The Sound Source (Vocal Folds)
The Filter (Your Resonators)
A lot of singers unfortunately don’t get them properly connected, and end up pushing too hard at the throat. This is tiring and can cause strain and rough tone, and means you don’t project easily.
But there is a wonderful, natural solution!
This is something I have discovered for myself through years of practice, and I recently found out that a lot of detailed research has been done on it by a renowned singing teachers Janice Chapman and James Platt.
(I attended a day workshop on this topic with them last week so it has prompted me to share the fundamentals with you.)
So what is it?
It’s ‘Primal Sound’.
Primal Sound is a kind of instinctive, emotional vocalising: Such as wailing, sobbing, laughing, crying, whimpering, calling, whooping, and sighs of relief.
Have a go at one of these – do you feel your abdominal muscles coming into play? Do you feel the sound project easily?
James said that ‘ we are neurologically hard-wired from birth to make these sounds - which are efficient, free, and connected’
What’s absolutely essential here is that you generate the sound from a genuine emotion.So you have to find and tap into an authentic feeling to power that primal sound.
Again James Platt said something like ‘when we make emotionally driven sounds, our bodies automatically come to the party – which links up our whole voice with minimal effort’.
It naturally gets the breathing system to act in a very sophisticated, but optimum way, which powers your voice easily so that you aren’t straining at the throat.
Spend a few minutes tapping into, and playing with, some of those primal sounds. (it’s a lot of fun! – you really have to un-inhibit yourself) – and get familiar with the physical feeling of how your voice is working when you do this.
Then USE THAT to activate your singing voice – and again, find a song which communicates some emotions that you can really get behind, so that genuine emotion is the stimulus. This switches on the Emotional Motor System of the voice.
When we consciously employ the natural pathways of Primal Sound to power our singing voice, we get access to a free and powerful voice. Yeeha!
It feels really good! Try it out and leave me a comment to say what you discovered.
However it’s not the whole picture of course. This generates a rich free powerful tone, but you also need to develop your vocal instrument so that you can articulate beautifully, expand your pitch range, change registers smoothly, express nuances of feeling in the music etc.
It’s like, when you’ve got a well-crafted instrument, the electricity you put into it through the primal sound pathway, gives you incredible possibilities, choice and control.
Have fun exploring this tool, and when you’re ready to fine-tune your voice as an instrument, get in touch with me for aLift-Off Session.
