Increase Your Vocal Endurance, Part 2: Consonants

1. Increase Your Vocal Endurance Part 2: Hi guys. I'm Madeline Harvey, and welcome to part two of Increase your vocal Endurance. If you remember from part one, we discovered that lung capacity was the key to developing a higher degree of vocal endurance. We treated our lungs in the same way that an athlete would treat their muscles. We want to tone them, we want to strengthen them. So if you've not gone through part one, I encourage you to do so before moving on to part two. Because the exercises in today's lesson build off the foundation that was laid in part one. Our objective with today's lesson is to increase the level of difficulty. We're going to continue to work with pressure by utilizing exercises called OVT. That stands for Semi occluded vocal tract. These exercises will give us a framework for what it's like to contain that pressure and focus air flow at the same time giving us a higher degree of, you got it, vocal endurance. We're also going to play with how posture and leveraging a good healthy posture can also help us increase our vocal endurance as well. So I want to encourage you, it doesn't matter if you're a complete beginner or if you're an industry professional, come back and work with these exercises as often as you need to until the benefits of these exercises become habitual. You ready to get started? Here we go. 2. Straw Exercise: All right, if you remember from our part one together, we talked about lung capacity being so crucial to developing solid vocal endurance. We're going to treat our lungs in the same way that athletes treat their muscles. We're going to tone our lungs. The best way for us to do that is to acclute or semi acclute the air. Now, we're not going to be making sound here, we're just going to use a smaller space to help slow that air pressure down, instead of just going where it moves in through a big open space. We're going to use a straw. If you don't happen to have a straw, that's okay. You can use your lips. Notice how when I use my lips, it slows down the amount of air that I can take in. This is going to really allow us to engage the side body, also known as the intercostal muscles. Let's go ahead and slurp that spaghetti noodle. And notice that when you do so, the bottom amount of your lungs and your back are going to widen. And you feel if you're attuned with your body, you may even feel this big pooh. That happens with a grand amount of authority. We want you to stick with that sensation. Let's just see what this feels like. Here we go, Good. Feel that side body really expand and open up. Wonderful. By making a smaller space with your mouth or with your straw, it allows you to really accentuate and isolate those muscles that are so crucial for maintaining pressure in the lungs. Here's our exercise. I'm going to play the metronome at 75 beats per minute. It sounds like this. We're going to count out eight counts with power. I want to really suggest full power to you. That means you're going to slurp that spaghetti noodle with a great amount of pull. You're going to feel it in the side body and in the back. You should not feel it up in the chest. If you fill it up in the chest, reset and start over. But eight counts full power inhale, followed immediately by eight counts full power exhale, Just like feeling the side in the back body on your intercostals. When you made the inhale, you're going to feel the contraction happen again in the side body. If I inhale like this, see that expansion. Now I'm ready to exhale, feel it, um, happen on the side body. I just want you to really stay focused on that. Since we did 2 minutes in our part one and today is all about increasing the level of difficulty, we're going to double that time, 4 minutes. Now, if you've been practicing with part one, it's not going to be that much of an issue for you. But I do want to encourage you to listen to your body, of course, meet your body where it is, challenge your body given an adequate challenge. But if it really starts to fatigue you, I want you to relax and jump back in when you feel a little bit more revivified. So let me play this for you. There's our metro. No, and here's our clock. So exhale. Ready to breathe? Here we go. One more. A minute. Oh, oh, well done. This is one of my favorite lung capacity exercises to do. We do not have the distraction of the voice. By using a small shape, whether it's like our lips or a straw. We're allowing a more focused amount of air because we're slowing it down. It only has a small space for which to go through, which means inspiratory muscles have to create more suction, which means those inspiratory muscles get a workout. It should feel like on the side and in the back. I want to encourage you to stay focused on that side and back body as you do this exercise. If you need to take a couple of seconds to recover, maybe this exercise is hard for you, that's okay. But quickly jump back in. You will notice that you can persist through that fatigue. It sends the message that no matter how tired I think I am, I'm staying connected to a strong recoil inhale and a strong, powerful, contracted exhale. So now let's do some exercises, shall we? 3. SS Quick Twitch Exercise: Okay, now that our lungs are activated, they are ready to go. Let us play with some sound, but we're going to play with some sound, but without voice. We're going to work with another semi occluded vocal tract Sound, which is the consonant. If you remember what SVT is all about, anytime something is occluded. The general feel is that you're just going to slow down in our breathing exercise, we slowed down the inhale and exhale by making the space much smaller. The air couldn't come rushing in and it couldn't come flying out. It had to stay pressurized on the in and out. We're going to do the same thing here, Let's see, for our sweet self, what I mean, a lot of fancy speak just there as we make a strong solid count. I was going to say 4 minutes, four counts. We want to feel that there is a continuous amount of air pressure from the beginning of the S to the end of the. Let's see for our sweet selves. Ready? Breathe. Excellent, Excellent. We have ourselves a semi occluded vocal tract. Let's try that again, and let's see how the muscles here responded to the onset of that sound. Same thing. Four counts, breathe in good. Can you feel that strong contraction that was nice and low? Fantastic. One more thing to check in with. Let's check in with, can we feel that we are containing the pressure in the lungs as we mean to get the pressure out. What this is going to feel like is holding your breath a little bit. But you're not holding, there is no tightening anywhere. You're using that sound to slow the air pressure down, keeping that air pressure in the lungs. So now let's see what that feels like. Here we go, breathing, Feel that pressure stay in your body as you use the to measure how much air pressure was escaping. Very good. This is the gift of OVT exercises. Now the purpose of this exercise that we're going to do, we're going to do a stole exhale reflexes. Do seven for the count of seven, breathe on the count of eight, for the count of seven, breathe on the count of eight. Let's do this four times. Let me give you what it's going to be like. I'll just do a couple so you can see I'm going to breathe the good, very good. Now, warning. Fair warning. You're going to make it rain. That's going to be a very spitty, but I want you to concentrate on keeping the air pressure as consistent through that S as you possibly can from start to finish. We want a pressurized sound. We don't want a whole bunch of push at the beginning. See how breath that is. And you can just hear that I've let go of all of my air pressure. It's very wet sounding now. I don't have anything left. I've let all the air pressure in my lungs out through that, we kind of loose. Sound So we want to keep it relatively tight. Okay, let's keep that in mind. So again, for seven, breathe on the count of eight, we're going to do this four times together. Roll the sleeves. I mean business. Here we go, ready, breathe in. Who? That feels really good. It feels very good. I'm feeling it actually, throughout all three of my vocal substructures. But what feels so amazing about it is that because we are actively, or I might even say aggressively hissing through that sound, we are keeping the diaphragm in a committed state. In a contract committed state, so it can't kind of lift and then get bored and relax. It's staying lifted and then we're using that one count to breathe and then immediately go again. Okay, let's try that one more time to feel that. Here we go, ready, breathe in. Very good. This is strength building, isn't it? This feels amazing for those lungs. So now that we feel what this feels like on a non vocalized S sound, now we're going to put the voice into this sound and see if we can maintain our balance. Ready. 4. ZZ Intonation Exercise: Air, giving us nice reflexive action straight from those diaphragmatic muscles. Now we want to incorporate the use of the voice. So we're going to go from S to Z. Now Z's really funky. It's a little weird because if we see that there's any fluctuation in our sound, which we will see guarantee you we will see this. You may feel inspired to use a D to hold onto the sound. So I want to encourage you to let, let your voice wobble, let it feel the imbalance. Because then it goes back to the, not the inspiratory muscles, the diaphragmatic muscles to recover and to re, establish that flow. We do not want to entertain any sort of interfering here. We're simply using that Z sound to slow it down so that we can keep the focus of the pressure happening low. You're going to feel that the Z has to go a little on the head voice end instead of going like that we're little head voice. So we're going to keep it relatively soft in terms of dynamic. We could go really loud, we don't want to do that. We want to hear that little fluctuation going on. Good. Now this is all about toning and this is just working out. We're going to do the same pattern that we just did with the. We're going to do each note, we're going to go from C C four to five. We may even go to, if I'm feeling it we may go to, then we're going to do each note four times. So we'll go for seven counts Breon, eight for seven counts, balon eight. We'll do each 14 times. Why? Because I want to exhaust you. I want to exhaust these muscles. You're going to see that as we go up through the range, you may do the first rotation beautifully. You may do the second rotation beautifully. But by the third and the fourth, there may get that fluctuation going on, indicating that that air pressure is dropping. We just need to meet that moment. Just need to persist through that as best as we can. Right now with our breathing muscles. Remember Z, much like S is a reflex. Meaning if you go, those muscles already contract. Do you don't have to do anything to push those muscles. All you have to do is stack those teeth. That creates the occlusion that slows it down, which really gets that lift going on. You're ready? We're going to go slightly slower. We will go slightly head voice, I just want to really encourage you, doesn't matter if there's fluctuation, you don't have anything to really hold onto. You don't have a shape. If we were going like a ah, we could hold onto that shape. We don't have anything of the such, we just have a Z sound. So get ready, we're going to see a wobbling. Here we go, breathe then. Good, good feeling these muscles engage. And staying engaged. We have one more. Let's do one more just for a wish. Good. A good Good, keep it head voice. If you notice as a singer that you're feeling a little effort right here, I just want you to bow your head. That will help to cancel out the influence of the tongue in the back of the throat. So it will default it a little bit more into a head voice. Good. If you noticed a lot of fluctuation again, don't be alarmed and don't be disheartened. Just stay focusing on exhaling. Just keep offering a nice, steady exhaling as best as you can. Good. Remember, you don't have anything to hold onto, so you have nothing that can help you save your lungs. This is all about your lungs, so don't be discouraged if it wobbles or if it suddenly surprises you. Like I thought, my voice was stronger than this. The exercises is catered in a way to expose this. Okay, here we go. Keep your head voice, see what I mean? Good, just really stay stay focused here. Stay focused here. Keep offering that Xcel, no matter what happens. Yeah. Hear that. It's all right. That's all right. One of the things I'm noticing as I work with this exercise is that the first one pretty all right. Second one, all right. But by the third one it is shaken. This is why we're doing this exercise. We want to say that no matter how tired I am, even though this is kind of hard to maintain this, consistency is hard to maintain. I'm going to go here, I'm going to stay engaged here as best as I can throughout the exercise. That's all we can ask. Here we go. Wow, that was her that was so hard. That was so hard, yes. You don't have anything to hold onto. It's not like like you don't have anything to hold onto. It's the only thing that really will balance this over time is just its consistency. Your body will learn how much air pressure is actually necessary to create a consistent tone on a sound such as this. And that's what we're going for you, ready to try this on your own. 5. ZZ Intonation Practice: All right, here you go. I'm gonna start you off at middle. Each note gets seven, counts. Breathe on eight. Remember, just keep focusing on offering a nice consistent exhale and keep that Z in a head voice position. Here we go, breathe in, okay. Oh, oh, keep it in the head voice thing down. Uh, uh, uh, uh, ah, good job. 6. Posture Intro: All right, so far what we've done in our lesson with endurance is we've created a low impact stress. Our S and R Z. We've done it consistently over a long period of time. Seven counts breathe seven counts breathe seven counts breathe. This is going to create a nice, consistent, pressurized behavior. The body is not falling out of balance. It's not behaving in ways that is anxious, it's not stressed. It knows how to stay consistently balanced. What we're going to do with the remainder of our lesson is we're going to incorporate posture as a means of increasing the amount of pressure that we can contain in the body stand. Feed about shoulder with the part good. Now keep your shoulders loose but relaxed as in the way that you would normally carry your body. Keep your neck nice and loose but long and your belly relaxed. From here, let's do two cycles of our S Sound on seven, breathe on eight, on seven, breathe on eight. But what we're going to be paying attention to is I want you to observe right here in your sternum, right around the center of your chest. I just want you to be aware that as you create that so there is some pressure that is collected contained within the chest. As that sound out, just want you to be aware of it. Don't want you to over exaggerate it at all. Just want you to be gently aware of it. Ready? Here we go. Stand relaxed. Here we go. Feel that gentle, gentle awareness of that little bit of pressure. Now, you might have heard people say you need to sing with good posture. And it's not to just stand up on a stage and look stuffy. It's to actually help generate what's called a counter force in your body. What all that means is that the energy of the breath is going up. We need something that's going to go down, that's the counter force that when put together, generates a lot of stabilized pressure inside of the chest and gives you an even higher concentration of air, air endurance. Just as we were standing, nice and relaxed. Now we're going to take our shoulders gently, roll them behind us, Gently, gently, now we're not exaggerating, Just a nice gentle roll. And then press gently the shoulder blades down. Feel the length in that neck. In gentle pushing down. See how my sternum has lifted now. I'm trying to keep my back as straight as possible. But if this is my normal posture, you just a little bit like that. My shoulders are going to go down and back. Just lift that sternum a little bit. It's a natural byproduct of creating counter force. My body is ready now. Again, I don't want you to hurt yourself now, work with your own body's balance. But roll the shoulders back, press them as if you're actively reaching. Reach to get something. Now let's try our S, two cycles of seven. Breathe on eight. And notice now by contrast, how much air pressure you can contain. Here we go. A lot more pressure. A more pressure, good. Now, if you just felt like a slight addition, don't worry. That's still more pressure. That's still more pressure. We do not want to contort our body and we also don't want to over pressurize our chest. We want to work gently, gently and evenly across time. We're going to add this into what's called a, a muffle is pretty much like a chipmunk face like that. So notice how it's another occluded sound. It's a closed mouth and you're going to aggressively push the air through your lips. Now you're going to get a little leak because that's what we're wanting, we're wanting to release a little bit of that air, air, go a little bit of the sound, but we don't want to release it all this is going to help pressurize our body. And you're going to feel it, trust me. Shoulders down and back. Let's start on. It's going to sound like this. That's it. That's it. Very, very, very easy. You're just gonna gently, that's it. That's it. You're gonna have to really engage the diaphragm to keep the air flowing, flowing forward. Let's try it again. Good, very good. Now this position is probably my favorite in terms of working with endurance, because you really start to see the value of being a wind instrument. The shoulders are down and back. There's your counter force, The air of the energy, the energy of the air goes up. The shoulders and sternum go down and allow for a nice, robust feeling of pressure in the chest. Your diaphragm has to stay lifted to keep your cheeks full. Your cheeks full. But some of that air and some of that sound is escaping through tiny little, tiny little holes in your lips. That is, everything right there. You actually feel what it feels like to contain pressure in your body. Now that we have a feeling for this, both the posture nice, lifted shoulders down and back, and the muffle, Let's put this in an exercise. 7. Muffle Exercise: Now that we know what we know about posture and how it creates a counter force, simply by holding the body open, helps to stabilize the body. We want to take the pressure up a notch. Ergo, the muffle. We're looking to create a long musical phrase. That means we're going to start singing and sing for a little while before we take our next breath. But we want to make sure that the pressure is nice and even and consistent from all the way to finish. Don't start well and end poor. Keep, keep your body nice and balanced. If you need help with the posture area, you can take your hands and put them behind you. And g, reach down. But you want to make sure that you're not arching your back. As you do that, just keep your back nice and straight. This will put you in a natural position for that. If it feels uncomfortable, don't worry about it. But I personally, really, really enjoy it. Our phrase is this. In a muffle with good posture. Again, we're looking for that nice consistent breath. That nice consistent supported pressure from start all the way to finish. We've got a couple things to think about, that posture as a counter force, either have your hands behind you or shoulders rolled back and then reach down your side body as if you're going to go get something. This is going to give you a very powerful lift with your diaphragm. Use the muffle to blow that powerful breath forward into those resonators. This is going to teach you what it feels like to be a powerful wind instrument. You ready? I know It's a lots to think about. It's a lot to think about. We're going to try to do this in one breath now. That might be too much to ask, but we are going to try. If you can't do it, that's okay. Breathe where it's necessary, but then try to get through it maybe a little bit further next time you do it. Here we go. We've got, we've got that first note five times. That's a consistent application of the same note. You're ready. Here we go. A concentrate on blowing through your cheeks as if you were blowing through a horn consistently. Think down, you're demonstrating a nice open, very powerful body. Do not work that energy against you by thinking, Think you've seen opera singers take the stage like like that. Mimic that model that make your body as wide as you can on the inside, as comfortable as you can. Let's try that G again. Here we go. Oh, powerful, powerful work we're doing right now. I just want to pause to remind you, don't scream really allow your body to feel that same sensation that it felt down through the cup. In part one, we blew the bubbles down through the straw. So we want to feel that. We don't want to have to feel like we've got to shut the application of the voice is like blowing a horn. So if you need to feel that you've got a little bit of air that by passes through the lips first before the application of the voice. Okay. That's okay. So one more time. Feel the balance of how much air is necessary. You don't want to overwork this. You want to feel that all three of those substructures are balanced. Here we go. Yeah. Don't pull out at the end. Keep that diaphragm working. Keep offering that he keep that diaphragm as lifted as you possibly can. Let's try that one again. Flat, good. One more. Oh my goodness, that's so hard. Good, good. When you came to work out today, remember the purpose of this exercise? We get a higher degree of pressure, but it's still considered a low impact stress. Go figure, right? We want the pressure to be even from the beginning all the way to the end. So no matter what happens, you keep exhaling good. Are ready to try it on your own. 8. Muffle Practice: All right, here we go. Remember to keep those shoulders down and back spine straight, and use that muffle to help push a higher degree of pressure. Here we go. Starting right here. Breathe. He oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, excellent job. Excellent Jo. 9. Vowel Scale Exercise: All right guys. We come to the final exercise in today's lesson and it's something that we've been working across both modules where both modules have had that same OVT pattern to them, secluded basically means it's just going to help slow the air down so that you can embody a little bit more of that pressure. Now we're going to put what we've learned to a little bit of a test with an open tone. So our last pattern was now what we're going to see that manifest as is a vowel scale. Our pattern, our objective, should I say, across endurance has been finish. There's a consistent amount of air pressure. We don't want to start good, hard, high degree of air pressure, and finish bad. We want to start and end in a nice pressurized place. This is a wonderful test for it, It's a long phrase. Our pattern is specific to triplets. So those are triplets. If that helps you, I would really like you to do this in one breath. But I also know that that's a very big ask, and these are very open vowels, so I've got to be a little, a little forgiving, that's the word. So if you need to take a breath, take a breath right before the descent, right before there, that's a nice way to catch the breath. It's more important that we have that nice, consistent amount of air pressure. So here we go. If you also want to make it easier for you, don't open the mouth so wide. If you're finding that it starts great. But by the end, I'm all out of breath and I'm noticing a fluctuation. Make your mouth a little smaller. Want that to seem like it's right in front of us, rather than ooh running out of breath by the end. Are you ready? Here we go. Go easy on yourself. Be nice. Mmm. My, me, me by. Yeah, that's hard. That's, that's really hard. That's really, really had you did fantastic. You want to try it by yourself? 10. Vowel Scale Practice: All right, You're on your own. Just remember there are things you can do to make it easier as you work because you grow in this exercise is you can make your lips smaller. Really work with that space. You don't have to go open wide if you're not ready to the other is you can sing it just a little bit softer. That will allow you to hold onto some of that air pressure or focus it for lack of better word. Here we go. Ready, He. 11. Summary: Congratulations guys. You have just finished part two of Increase Your vocal endurance. Now there's something that I want you to meditate on as you're playing and practicing and experimenting throughout your day. Or maybe as you're going through parts one and part two again is what does it mean to be a wind instrument? I would love for you to orient your voice towards the feeling of playing a horn. That you singing feels the same way as playing a horn. This will restore your power and your strength back to the lungs and the muscles that govern that contraction, the diaphragm and the Ab muscles. This will also help you restore an interior balance across all three substructures. It just means that it's going to feel easy. It's going to feel open. Feel free to work with any one of your favorite OVT postures, whether it's the bubble cup or a muffle. Feel free to work with any one of your favorite exercises or your postures. You can use this in a song just to demonstrate what it feels like as you're working in that song. Remember in part one, we said the bubble cup was very similar to both the training wheels in the sense that it kept us upright and balanced, but it also acted like ankle weights to the runner. This is what OVT exercises are all about. We get accustomed to doing these types of exercises, and when we go to sing, that feels like release. It's like we just fly. And that's what endurance feels like. Ultimately, feel free to come back to either one of these models, part one, part two. Practice with them as often as you need to until these habits become muscle memory. Because it doesn't matter if you're a complete beginner or if you're an industry pro, there's something here for you. It's been my pleasure to work with you today. Thank you so much for including me in your vocal journey and I look forward to seeing you again soon. Bye.