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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2E1m90YSpA Singing is making music with your voice. It's costs nothing, requires no instruments, and can be done anywhere at anytime. Okay, well, the first two aren't entirely true, in that you'll likely need a microphone if you plan on recording or playing in a band, and you should probably get professional lessons if you're serious about singing and don't want to injure yourself -- but the last one is definitely true! Sing in the car! Sing on public transit and get weird looks! Sing butt naked and soaking wet in the shower, the best possible way to sing! Who doesn't like singing along to their favorite songs? It's so much fun!! I decided to take it on myself and put this thread together for all the other folks out there who wanna talk singing. I'm not much more than a beginner but talking voice with some knowledgeable folks might help me, and you dear reader, get better at singing and have fun doing it. So, let's jump right in: what's the deal with singing?! Pt. 1: Vocal Anatomy The most basic understanding of the voice goes like this: your throat contains vocal cords, which are stretchy folds of flesh that can lengthen or contract. You breathe out and the air passing over the vocal cords makes them vibrate, just like a guitar or other stringed instrument. Then you use your mouth to modulate the sound. In reality, the human voice is incredibly complex and involves all sorts of different muscles, bones, and organs. Here's a short list of some of the most important bits and pieces:
"So about men's and women's voices?!" you may ask naively. Testosterone makes vocal folds thicker and they vibrate at lower frequencies because of it, but the voice box is only one of many parts of your vocal production or tessitura. The cool part about this is that almost everyone's vocal range in both pitch and tonality is a lot wider than they think it is! Check out YouTube-famous singer Nick Pitera doing the thing he got YouTube-famous for: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9IWAxSpgKA Pt. 2: Registers, Resonators, and Techniques You might hear head and chest voice sometimes referred to as head and chest register, which isn't totally accurate. The human voice has four registers, from low to high being vocal fry (think Tina from Bob's Burgers groaning), modal (this is your primary speaking/singing voice), falsetto (think people singing Queen badly), and whistle, which is distinct from whistling. When singing, you might use your falsetto, you probably won't use your vocal fry, and you almost definitely won't use your whistle unless your name is Mariah Carey -- but you'll definitely use your modal. Your modal register can be thought of as having your vocal cords fully engaged. The folds make contact with each other along their entire length, and when air passes by them they rapidly open and close, vibrating the whole fold. Your falsetto register is a fully open state - there's less air resistance so you can pass air through at higher speeds (hence higher pitch), but only the edges of the folds vibrate, producing a more breathy/hollow sound. Men who might believe they won't be able to sing high pitches commonly use their falsetto in place of their head voice. That being said: what the heck are head and chest voice, exactly?
The pitches you can hit in head and chest voice typically overlap in an area where both voices can be weak, a transitionary part of your modal register known as the passagio. This is where your voice might crack if you try to ascend in a continuous tone. How do you deal with that? Belting is singing as LOUDLY and POWERFULLY as you dang near can. By using a lot of air and putting a lot of tension into your laryngeal muscles, you can sing higher notes in your chest voice than you might singing at lower volumes. Sometimes being LOUD and POWERFUL are good things, but you will only be able to hit LOUD and POWERFUL high-pitched notes this way. More important to know however is that you can seriously injure your voice this way. If you've ever gone to a concert and screamed along and had a bum voice for the next week, it's probably because you were belting irresponsibly. Please be careful with your voice!!!!! It is a delicate and beautiful meat instrument. Mixing or blending is engaging your pharyngeal muscles to control the degree of openness of your nasal cavity. Using your mix to transition between head and chest is more responsible form and allows for a much greater degree of control over tone and volume. Notes that you can hit in both head and chest voice can sound completely different from one another, and using your mix, you can modulate the ratio of 'head tone' to 'chest tone' in your voice to make all sorts of dynamic variations. In addition to where your voice resonates and thus the general timbre it takes on, you have the ability to amplify our voice using different parts of our vocal anatomy. Resonant voice production, or singing forward, is how you make your voice LOUD without straining. By keeping your tongue, jaw, and throat relaxed and open, sound can travel into your facial bones, which vibrate and project sound forward. A more specific type of amplification is known as twang, in which you partially close your epiglottis like you would close drawstrings. This shapes and constricts the sound coming from your larynx, amplifying certain pitches the human ear is very sensitive to and can more easily be heard above instrumentation. There are other types of selective amplification as well, which taken to the extreme can be used for polyphonic singing in which the voice produces two distinct tones simultaneously. Here's a fascinating explanation by the polyphonic singer Anna-Maria Hefele: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHTF1-IhuC0 Pt. 3: Learning to Sing Everyone can learn to sing! Unless you're actually mute, if you can make sound with your voice, you can learn too, and here's how!
I hope you enjoyed reading my OP and maybe learned something new! Let me know if you have something good to add or if I said something dumb or incorrect. Let us all know how you're progressing, and share your voice with us if you're feeling brave! I guess we probably won't have gearchat as much as they do in the other megathreads, but please feel free to talk mics or vocoders or whatever too (good mic info can be found in the recording and live music threads). It can be hard to not feel shy about your voice, so let's all keep it chill and positive and encouraging! Everyone in the world has a voice all their own, and yours deserves to be heard too!
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# ¿ Nov 20, 2017 09:29 |
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# ¿ May 18, 2024 01:37 |
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alnilam posted:Thanks, i enjoyed reading about chest vs head voice, that's a neat distinction i hadn't thought about before There's a lot of singing floating around but aside from the parts of the voice that are expressly dimorphic, there's not a significant difference in the mechanics of voice in most people. Commonly, men just don't get taught to use their head voice because unless you sing countertenor it's not a huge part of pieces written for men's voice types. Voice ranges are also largely overlapping, which is called a bimodal distribution in statistics and more voices than not fall somewhere that's within both normal male and female variation. POOL IS CLOSED posted:Oh man, I wish I'd learned even a fraction of this in my chorus class. Vocal cord thickness will determine your mean vocal pitch, but the width of your range probably has more to do with the strength of your laryngeal muscles and elasticity of your vocal cords, which as far as I've been able to learn mainly comes down to phenotypic variance without much correlation to hormone exposure. The average human range is about three octaves and change plus or minus maybe 2/3rds, so a wide range would be around 4 octaves and a narrow one shy of 3. Vocal range, of course, has nothing to do with your singing ability as you can have a wide range and be a bad singer or a narrow range and be a fantastic one - Adele notably only has a range around 2 and a half octaves. You can expand your range with training but it mainly comes down to chance (though you can definitely shrink your range through smoking, injury, etc). Hoshi posted:Good OP! Thanks!! This is a good point too. With singing, the hard part should be coordination -- which is more of a mental exercise than anything -- not exerting or straining your body in any way. You learn to resist your body's natural inclination towards tension in your mouth and throat, which aside from damping some of your voice's best qualities (e.g. clear, loud resonance) can cause injury if you strain too hard. Don't hurt yourself singing because singing is fun and if you hurt yourself you won't be able to sing as much and that's no fun! City of Glompton posted:I learned more from this op than I did in choir from middle school to college. thank you for sharing. I don't see a voice teacher in my future but youtube videos are do-able Shucks, thank you! My teacher is a PhD vocal student so aside from having an amazing voice, she knows a ton about the mechanics of it all and picked up that I'm the kind of dweeb who would want to learn how everything functions in tandem from a scientific viewpoint. Vocal anatomy is super cool, humans have this complex and incredible instrument just hiding inside their mouths and throats all the time! mister magpie posted:i love to singa
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# ¿ Nov 21, 2017 18:40 |
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Hi folks! Sorry for not responding, it's been a whirlwind couple of weeks for me.Hawkgirl posted:That is a much better OP than I would have made, great work This is a good point, and thank you!! I was kind of being overly simplistic on purpose but I don't wanna be factually incorrect about it, so I'll go edit that when I get around to tidying up the OP (there are a couple of weird grammatical errors, etc.) Simone Poodoin posted:Great OP, OP. This sounds like a head/chest voice thing to me. I would guess that your passagio lies in a place that's kinda awkward for the songs you're singing, so it's easier to sing down an octave in a comfortable chest voice even if you can't ascend down quite far enough to hit some of the lower notes. When you're getting to higher notes, your chest voice might be giving out and you might need to learn to transition to your head voice to hit those notes. As far as scales go, keep your energy up! I do this too where I do very bright and clean vowels going up that get kinda lazy and mushy coming down. A good thing to practice is watching yourself in the mirror and making sure your mouth isn't getting droopy. My teacher likes to tell me that when I go down, I should think up - keep your posture upright and don't let your chest collapse or you'll have trouble controlling your diaphragm. Also, thank you too!!! Jazz Marimba posted:Thank you so much for this! PM a mod so you can get this stickied and changed to the school tag, cuz this is some great info! 1) The one old white dude meme that always stood out to me was that it's LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE for there to ever be a 'male alto' despite the fact that the classic 3 octave ranges for tenor and alto pieces are like 90% overlapping and there are definitely many folks with wider ranges than that. Of course, none of those people making a stink about male altos ever mention female tenors. 2) Having a wide range is good, but having a narrow range isn't bad, is kind of the way to look at it I think. If you work on your fundamentals, your range should naturally expand a bit, but having a wide range won't really do much for tone on its own. So keep practicing! 3) I don't have PMs! Anyone wanna message a mod on my behalf? Also change the thread name to Human Instrumentality Project tia Hoshi posted:Fun tip for breath control! Neat trick! Some good breath exercises I know are short and long hisses. Basically, you take one big breath (imagine you're sucking in air through a straw and really fill up those lungs and let your chest expand), and then do somewhere in the realm of 15-25 consecutive short hiss hiss hisses or one long steady hiss for that amount of time. They work out different things too -- the short hisses are all about activating your diaphragm and as you get better at this you can really feel your diaphragm moving in and out and forcing air through. The long hiss is about keeping your diaphragm engaged and sloooooooowly letting the air out as evenly as you can. I think I'll write a bit more sometime soon about exercises into the OP, and I've also been thinking about twang a lot because it's something I've been practicing. If you wanna know what twang sounds like, listen to some Grimes cuz she sings with a lot of it and it's what makes her voice sound so nasally and higher pitched than it actually is. AverySpecialfriend fucked around with this message at 01:29 on Dec 1, 2017 |
# ¿ Nov 30, 2017 21:16 |
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Simone Poodoin posted:Thanks, my teacher told me pretty much the same last week lol. That makes sense, but also more generally I can understand how it would throw your ear with multiple voices going. What songs do you like to practice? My teacher makes me do this one John Dowland song called Flow My Tears that was written in like 1650 or something and I frickin' hate it now (she warned me I was gonna keep singing it even if I hated it) but it's really good practice for breath control and long clean vowels. My personal favorite song to practice is I Will by Mitski and I sing it every morning for my warmup. It helps its a song I like so much and don't get tired of, but I kinda wonder about the neighbors lol... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjy6au_whJg
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# ¿ Dec 1, 2017 01:21 |
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I'd say it depends on what you're looking for. When you say online vocal coach do you mean like video tutorials or actual face time? Videos are good for learning exercises and new things to experiment with but they can't meaningfully replace direct feedback. An online coach can give you feedback on certain aspects of your singing but a) that doesn't include your posture which is a big part of singing and b) the audio quality might get in the way of them giving accurate critique depending on your setup. So I'd say, if you want to find an online coach go for it but don't overpay and consider looking for in person lessons anyway. Also, hi thread!! I haven't been posting much because I've been on hiatus with lessons because of winter break and the holidays, etc. I'll be picking back up in January so expect more content then!
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# ¿ Dec 26, 2017 20:15 |
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Tweezer Reprise posted:Right, thanks! I'm probably going to go with a face-to-face coach, then. Good call imo, and best of luck!
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# ¿ Dec 26, 2017 20:33 |
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Hey vocal thread! I was meaning to revive this, I just got the pieces for a vocal recording setup and hopefully I'll record something soon I'm not embarrassed to share! I'll post pics of my setup in a couple of days too. I can't speak to vocal lessons in general, but my experience taking lessons with a classically trained singer was incredibly positive and I went from square zero to not actually that bad anymore in six months on and off, and a lot of that has to do with her coaching the minutae of my form and posture. If you can find an instructor who can teach you good fundamentals (and who you get along with, also very important!), that will translate to any style of singing. If you live near a university you can definitely find a poor grad student who would be more than happy to teach you.
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# ¿ Feb 28, 2018 23:19 |
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Learning to use your mix voice isn't easy because it's hard to know which direction to approach those notes from. The best advice my teacher gave me for when you're singing in your passagio is to really relax and let your voice go where it wants to go without trying to force it to do anything specific.
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# ¿ Mar 26, 2018 03:11 |
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# ¿ May 18, 2024 01:37 |
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Hawkgirl posted:You sound like you might have vocal nodes, so maybe go see an ENT doc that specializes in vocalists? They would probably have a referral to the kind of rehabilitative vocal therapy that you were thinking of. This is also a possibility
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# ¿ Mar 26, 2018 04:38 |