Transcripts
1. Introduction: Are you ready to learn one weird trick to singing high notes, Then click Exit on this course right now because that's not what this is about. His courses about substance, about the principles of how to train your voice about the harder and lessons I'm going to share with you and about that works. So if you're down for that, let's keep going. This course is going to teach you the fundamentals of singing high notes, how to overcome the primary obstacles, how to train your voice correctly. And by the end of this course, you're going to have created a practice plan that is tailored to your instrument into your body and no one else is. You want to be able to sing high notes with relaxed confidence, with total reliability and with power. That's what this course will teach you to dio. But I don't want you to follow or trust anything I say until you find out if it works for you. So just a brief 12th introduction of myself. My name is Edward Atkinson. I'm a tenor and a choral conductor. I've been really fortunate in my life. I've been blessed to sing over 100 professional concert to the soloist I've sung in pop rock alternative classical operatic coral barbershop concerts. Just the whole damn It have been really lucky. I have to graduate degrees from Indiana University and vocal performance and an organ performance degree from Mercy University. Down in Georgia, I've been teaching for 16 years everyone from the high school level to college level to senior citizens who just want to get better singing. I love to teach. I love to teach because I see this incredible transformation in my students, and it's so rewarding. I didn't start singing until I was 18 years old and it changed my life. I've experienced so many joys and a lot of hard earned lessons along the way, and I love to share that with other people. I want you to feel good about being able to take something out of this course to really learn something that's gonna be substantial for your life as a singer, And I also want you to know that you are always in the driver's. You are your first teacher more than anyone else. You are your most important teacher, anything I say or share it on Lee works if it works for you. Some things worked for one singer and don't work for another. Take what works for you and run with it. And if something isn't working, at least for the time being, it's totally okay to just toss that aside. Do you want to learn more about me or hear me seeing you? Congar Gle me. Put my name into YouTube or go to my website Edward Atkinson dot com. It's all up there. Singing more than any other kind of musical expression, is unique to the individual. The instrument is your body, and in that way it is all of you. Yes, it is muscled and muscle coordination, but it is also your emotions and your spirit. All of that combined into one messy bundle. Singing is unique. What I teach you needs toe work, not for me, but for you. Let's get started
2. 12 Reasons Why You Can't Sing High Notes: all right, we're gonna go through the 12 most common reasons when you have difficulty in your upper register. The most common thing is a feeling of tightness in the lair, inks or a tight throat. The second most common thing is a sensation of having to rely on muscular effort and not on the breath that somehow the only way you can get the high voices with a lot of muscular effort and there's no sense of ease or freedom with it singing too far back into the throat the sensation that as you get up in a high voice, the voice gets stuck in the back of the throat, a feeling that the only way you can get to high voices by extending the neck like this high voices only achieved with an extreme of either, ah, harsh global stop. That sound is the vocal fold smashing together at the very beginning. That's out right or a feeling that you have to become extremely breathy to get into your high voice and not being able to find that that easy, comfortable, confident middle ground, a feeling that on the notes leading up to your high note, there's too much weight. The voice gets heavy, and by the time you to sing the high notes, you've already spent all of your fuel. Emotional constipation. What a phrase, That feeling of being stopped up emotionally of being repressed and full of internal barriers and unable to let go and be free in the music. Emotional aggression, almost an anger behind it or going all out emotionally. Fear, fearing that top note. 12 notes before you even get there and starting to give up along the way. Uncoordinated effort. The right muscles might be working, but if they're working in the wrong order, things fall apart. So it's about aligning the muscles and the order in which they engage in high voice. The jaw grabs, and we feel this tightness all the way down the jawline and extending into the neck. And lastly, a sense of saliva building up or scratching us that feels like it's happening right down the middle of the throat. As for the emotional category goes, you should know that your emotions of fear of needing to rely on a particular emotional state those can be overcome and they're overcome through exposure and through a plan that you know, works and has a track record of success. Fear is replaced with confidence. When you achieve something that's difficult, we're not going to achieve the whole thing in one go. But we're going to achieve brick by brick. And each time you lay down a break, each time you achieve something that's difficult along the way to singing these beautiful, glorious high notes, each step along the way is gonna build your confidence and you're gonna find that fear. And this sort of over reliance on emotional states will go away and you'll no longer need it. All right, so this brings you to the very first step of your project for this class. Take a look back at those 12 issues right down the categories and identify which ones you think describe your difficulties with high notes. Currently might be one or two. It might be five. There's gonna be some some amount of overlap. That's all for step one, But make sure you complete that step before moving on to the next video. It should take you about one or two minutes, and then you can move on to the next video
3. How the Instrument Works: so the first thing we're gonna do is draw back the curtain and demystify the whole thing and talk about how this instrument works. If we understand that, we can understand how to train it. First up is the vocal folds, so your vocal fold are too tiny. Little bits of mucous membrane in tiger larynx. Mucous membrane is basically like skin except inside the body. They were each 12 to 25 millimeters in size, which is smaller than an inch unit, their biggest. When these guys vibrate, they make a pitch. However, many times something vibrates per second determines the pitch. The faster vibrates, the higher the pitch. The slower vibrates, the lower the pitch. So if you're seeing really low, the vocal fold are oscillating, going back and forth pretty slowly. If you're singing really high, then the vocal fold are oscillating really quickly. Let's talk about hummingbirds when it flaps its wings. The wings moves so quickly that we can't even see them. We just see this blur the human voice at its very lowest range, the base. When a base sings, his vocal folds are vibrating, oscillating, moving back and forth so quickly that it's faster than a hummingbird's wings, even at the lowest number of oscillations per second. For the human voice, it is still faster than a hummingbird's wings, the very highest note in the human singing range. Very highest soprano note. At that note, the vocal folds are oscillating, moving back and forth 150 times faster than a hummingbird's wings. Your body, your instrument is a miracle, so let's go a little deeper. How do these tiny little pink mucous membranes vibrate? What causes them to vibrate in first place? The answer is the movement of air, also known as your breath. As your breath leaves your body, it passes to the vocal fold, and that movement of air causes the vocal folds to come together, and then the air behind it causes the vocal folds to open back up again. But this happens incredibly quickly so quickly it's impossible to see with the human eye. Here's a better way to visualize it. Remember when you were a kid and you had a balloon filled with air and you wouldn't let a little bit of everything the neck rank to make a sound and annoy your sibling and the air leaves the balloon. It causes the lips of the balloon neck to come together and come apart very rapidly, making that sound. That is how the vocal folds work air, rushing out of the body and causing the vocal fold to come together and come apart very rapidly. That's the take away here. Movement of air or your breath is what causes the vocal fold to Ossa late and then creating vibration, thus creating a pitch. But hold on a second. If I have a string that is this length and I pluck it or cause it to vibrate over and over again, it's going to create one pitch. So when the vocal folds, just be creating one pitch. Yes, the body has an answer for this there. Two sets of muscles around the vocal fools, which lengthen or relax the vocal folds, causing a change in pitch. There are little muscles or knob at the top of the guitar neck, which are gonna cause the string to lengthen right, and as you lengthen or tighten up that string, it's gonna cause the pitch to go higher with the same way. If we put slack into the string. If we sort of relax that string out, the picture is gonna get lower. This is what your body is doing. It is a miracle if someone plays a pitcher and piano and ask you to sing it. Your brain is going to hear that pitch. Decode the pitch. Tell these little muscles exactly how much toe link them or relax your vocal fold so that as air rushes through them, they vibrated an exact number of times per second to create that pitch. It's incredible. So how does this all apply to singing? High notes? High notes are easy, and you can sing them with confidence when they are created with a steady, unending flow of breath. Married with muscles that are coordinating freely. Those muscles are the ones that are lengthening. Am relaxing, the vocal folds. The movement of air is your breath. We want to marry this all together into a coordinated, free, easy movement. Let's remember that high notes come from a steady, unending flow of breath, combined with muscles that are coordinating freely. Let's recap quickly. Your local holds our tiny little pink pieces of mucous membrane inside the lyrics. As breath leaves the body, they oscillate back and forth, creating a pitch their tiny little muscles, which lengthen or relax the vocal fold, causing a change in pitch. That's the science. That's how your instrument works. Let's talk about how to train your instrument, using what we now know so that you can achieve high notes with confidence and ease. Let's go.
4. What Do Good High Notes Feel Like?: your training, your voice, sitting high, notes. You need to know what good high notes feel like when someone asks you, you know, what a sense of the human body do you mostly use to sing? Most people point to their ears, and they say, Well, you know, they're hearing, you know, their sense of pitch and that kind of thing. That's actually not the case for singers. The most important sense that we use is our sense of touch. So it's that sensation we have when, when someone touches our hand, we have that same feeling, that sense of touch when all of these internal organs air moving to make the magic of singing actually happen. So I want you to be guided by your sense of touch by the feeling of sensation within your instrument when you're trying to sing when you're training to seeing these high notes, because those feelings those inner sensations of what's going on in here is going to guide you in a way that you're here cannot. So the first thing to know about great high notes is that basically from here between these two spaces here, right where the lyrics resides, you feel nothing. That's a strange. It's a strange thing to be told, right, but you feel nothing, and that is what good high notes feel like. This happens because of balance, balance in the muscles, balance with your posture, balance with breath. Another way to tell that you're singing good high notes is that you're not listening to yourself. If you've ever heard a recording of your voice, it can be surprisingly, go. Do I sound like that? And you do? The reason we can't perceive our own true speaking voice is because the ear drum resides within the body. There's all this bone conductivity going on, so we end up hearing and actually distorted version of her own voice. When you sing, you cannot be listening to yourself. Something that happens in high notes is that you actually hear less of your voice because the voices being projected in a higher placement the more you pay attention and try to really listen and be careful to that high voice, the more you actually draw that voice within and make it very difficult to project in that results in muscular tension. So one of the signatures of great high notes is that you actually hear less of your own voice. So we talked about the fact that we feel nothing here and that we do not over listen to our own voice. And and of course, it feels nice. It did to hear your own voice, and we want to hear it right. But by focusing on that, we actually end up making it more difficult to produce the high notes. Have you ever been helping a friend move out of an apartment and they have some old school desk and attack cast iron legs or something? And you £900 you get down there to lift it up and you feel all of this muscular strain, right? Like the ligaments are just pulling. Contrast that with how it felt when you were nine years old and you just ran as fast as you could on the football field, and you felt like you were flying almost floating above the ground. There was this incredible ease to the feeling to this outburst of energy. That is what good high notes feel like. They feel like floating. They feel like flying, and there's so much energy behind them. But there's no strain. That is what good high notes feel like. He's like You're flying and like you're floating despite the fact that there's tremendous energy behind, Um, good high notes feel like the throat is open. And what that is is that the soft palate in the back of your throat raises up and stays raised. That feeling you have in the back of your throat of something lifting up an opening when you yawn. That's a soft palate in high notes. That soft palate is raised 100% of the time, not 99% 100% of the time that soft palate is raised, and it's what helps us toe access the higher residence, which is where the easy and most beautiful high notes are created. One more thing to look for him really great high notes is that we feel that the voices buzzing or resonating in the mask. So the mask right being basically the Sinus cavities that we feel around the eyes that we feel the voice buzzing here. If you put your voice on your throat when you speak, you'll feel that the voice is buzzing here. We feel the residence in the soft tissue of the voice when we speak. But if you use a protected voice, you actually will feel that the buzzing is happening in the bone around the eyes, right? So that's what you want to feel is that same sensation? The buzzing or resonating is around the eyes during the high notes. So those were the things to be looking for, that you feel the sensations that are telling you. Oh, I'm doing this correctly. And if they're not there and the opposite is there, you know, instead of the freedom and easiness, you feel tension and grab right. Then you know what's wrong? You know that something is keeping you from a good high note. So I wanted to make sure that you know what? What really great high notes feel like two singers across all voice types, men and women. This is what good high notes feel like, because you need to know what to be shooting for. And when you feel these things, you know I'm on the right track. When you don't feel these things, you know I need to fix something
5. How to Train Specifically for High Notes: In just a few moments, I'm gonna walk you through the different categories of exercise it that you're gonna use to train your voice to sing into your higher register. Before we do that, we need to talk about how to train. So if you go to the gym and someone says here, do a bench press, it'll make you stronger. That's useful information. You can design a program out of that. You can start experiencing progress. Out of that, we're gonna talk about how we use these exercises so that you can use them to great effect and not just have to dabble around hoping to see some results. I'm going to give you to general principles for practice number one, practice every day. You've got to practice most days in a row. So usually I advised my students to practice six days in a row. Take Sunday off. The reason for that is you're not remembering fact here, right? Your training muscles and your training, a nervous system. You're gonna love you results if you do all right. The second general principle is that your voice will rely on what you repeatedly do under moments of duress or stress, such as a performance or such as high notes, things that are hard and the brain does. The alarm bell that goes off in the brand goes, Jeez, this is gonna be tough. The brain and the body, which is your instrument, is going to rely on the oldest habit. So the second general principle here is to make sure that what you were doing repeatedly is healthy and correct and training your body. We're going to get into this in a little bit more detail, but basically you're gonna want to be training primarily not in high voice. And that is what is going to teach the voice to sing in high voice. I'll explain it later, but it's super important to your success. Your voice will rely on what you repeatedly do. I want to give you four principles for application for actually practicing. The 1st 1 goes off of what I was just talking about, that your voice does what it repeatedly does. You need to teach your voice freedom of breath and resonance and the way you're going to do it, and where you're going to do that is in your middle voice, not your high voice, not your low voice. If you don't want to go into the extremes in your middle voice where things are actually easiest, that is where we start training your voice. It is actually so much more important than high notes. If you sing well in your middle voice, if you can teach that freedom in the middle voice by transferring, since you can bring that up to your high voice another way to look at this is it simply breaking things down into achievable chunks? The voice cannot achieve in high voice until it knows how to achieve beautiful, healthy freezing. And you learn to do that middle voice, and then you slowly start applying that higher and higher in a very intentional way. Number two. When you start singing higher and higher by half steps, as we're working on things progressively moving up and you hit that kink in the voice and the brand goes, Oh, this is getting really hard. What you do next is super important. Do not hammer those notes. So when we're trying to sing high notes and you know we get up Teoh G or A or whatever the difficulty notice and we really want to sing it, and so we think we'll tow learn it. You gotta sing it so we try to sing it 100 times in a row. This causes harm. You are training your voice to sing with strain. So what's the solution? In all likelihood, there are three possible things going wrong. Breath residents posture. So you've hit the hard point, the voice tightens up. What you do is you immediately switch to an exercise, which is going to help fix one of those things your breath, your residence or your posture. I highly encourage you to start with either breath or residents. If you don't know how to self diagnose ago G things fall apart. Just pick either a breath were residents exercise, which you'll learn in the next module and seeing that exercise. Then go back to the exercise you re singing where you were going progressively higher. But don't just start in the high notes, start at the bottom again and start moving up. So this is crucial. You're moving higher and higher by half step. You hit that place where things fall apart. Don't repeat the difficult exercise. Switch to an exercise which will break down the problem and help you get your breath resident or posture in place and then go back to the exercise. Number three Progressive Challenge, Not progressive failure. Remember that your voice is going to rely on whatever you do the most repeatedly. A very common thing is that as someone is seeing higher, they start to feel like they're punching the top. Note that, you know 123 and four are fine. But then on five there's this big burst of energy. You're right on the point of getting to failure. So then what you want to do? There is not push it into failure but is to actually start descending the exercise. So we go up by half steps. We reached that point where we're right at our limits, and then we start descending. Remember that we're trying to progressively challenge the voice because its muscles a nervous system. But we're not trying to progressively cause the voice to fail. Realize that by strengthening the fifth and sixth rung of the ladder, you are strengthening the 10th rung of the ladder. It's all connected. The instrument that is singing your middle voice notes is the exact same instrument that's gonna be singing your high voice notes. So we want to be training at well, increasing those challenges little by little, but not repeating failures. All right, so the fourth principle we're gonna talk about is fear is about emotional exercise. How to overcome the fear. We all feel fear of high notes when we're starting out of singers, every single one of us fear is replaced with confidence. When we achieve something that is difficult or we overcome an obstacle that is difficult knowing this know that you can progressively build confidence over time as you are moving your exercises up by half steps right on one day, you might be singing in F two days later in F sharp. Three days later, a G. As you're seeing, you're going to progressively build confidence. I don't want you to worry about the fear so much if you're working with progressive challenging as the way that you're going after this, not hammering things and not trying to push yourself to failure but progressive challenging in a very intentional way, you were going to find that your fear is incrementally replaced with confidence
6. Core Exercises: Posture, Breath, Resonance: Okay, Now we're gonna talk about the core exercises that we're gonna use to put together a program that are gonna take your high notes to the next level. The first thing we're gonna talk about his body alignment. So the alignment of your body affects how much air gets into your lungs and whether or not it's getting into the bottom of the lungs, which is good or being stacked at the top of the lungs, which is bad. So it's very important that your posture is tall so that you have your shoulders, which feel like they're a little bit further back than normal and that your chest is high and the abdominal muscles are relaxed. This alignment allows the breath to enter the body in a more relaxed manner. It sets you up for success, and it's very simple and easy to ignore. But if you ignore the posture you're working on other exercises, they're not gonna work. So it's one of those fundamental things you have to get down before you go on to other other exercises. So know that the posture set yourself up for success. It's basically straightening out the instrument toe. Let the air flow freely. A great way to check your posture is to put your spine against the edge of a door so they open the door halfway. You put the base of your spine against the back of that door and slowly roll the spying up and you'll find that you end up with this much taller posture. From there, you push yourself away from the door and see if you can maintain that very erect posture. Great way to make sure that your shoulders are back and that your chest is high. So again that's taking the bottom of the spine, touching it against the edge of the door, rolling the spine up to get as much of the spying touching the door is possible and then step away. When you step away, you'll find they have this tall posture, and you want to maintain that during the entirety of singing jaw attention. A big part of your body alignment is jaw attention. It's very easy toe over open the jaw or to have this tenting in the jaw when you sing, especially when you get up into the higher rangers. So great fix for that is to take you're hand and just place it underneath the jaw. We're not pushing against the job or anything like that, just placing the hand underneath the jaw. And once you do that, you'll find that your monitor in the jaw and you'll become aware. Oh, the jaw is over opening on high notes and we don't We don't need to do that, so that's actually counterproductive. So all you need to do is place a hand underneath the jaw, and that's gonna help you loosen up the jaw as you sing. So another way to get rid of jaw tension is to make over exaggerated facial expressions. All demonstrate, and you do this as you sing. What you do is you're taking your muscle engagement so far in one direction that once you decide to come on over, exaggerate on one pass through and then I'm going to just do it normally on the second pass , you'll find that the second past that those muscles that you just over engaged are actually gonna relax, right? So those are two methods to get rid of attention. One is a hand underneath, and the other is over exaggerated facial expressions. Let's talk about breath exercises. The first thing we want to get right is your inhalation. A good inhalation feels very free and it gets into the bottom of your torso. You'll feel it in the bottom of your abdominal muscles. So a great way to find out what does a good breath feel like is toe. Lie with your back flat on the floor and just bend your knees like this. So you're making a little pyramid with your knees lying there, place one hand on your abdomen and simply breathe. What you'll find is that the breath gets so low into the body. It's also very relaxing. That is the good inhalation. For a singer, that is, the breath was trying to go after. That is the breath we're trying to go after. So what happens is when you stand, your abdominal muscles are actually somewhat contracted to help your body stay erect. What we're going to do is create this good posture, because if you have this tall posture, you actually do not need the abdominal muscles to keep your body erect quite as much, and you'll find that if you have the tall posture, it's easier to have that low BRAC tickets into the lower abdomen. The second exercises controlled exhalation. Watch yourself in front of a mirror for this. So what you're gonna do is gonna take a good inhalation right low into the body and then you're going to breathe out through pursed lips for a number of count, usually in multiples of four. So maybe started 12 and then move up to 16 and move up to 20. And do you going to purse your lips and blow out a steady stream of air for 12 counts to begin with, I'll demonstrate one time, that's all there is to it. And then you're gonna take this exercise and do it over longer. Count 12 the first time, 16. The next time, 20 the next time. What you're trying to do is create a very steady stream of breath. If you do that, you're going to be training your body to give a steady stream of air over a duration of time. And that is what we want the body to be doing when we're singing. 1/3 breath exercise is to take that same controlled X elation, but to do it with a lip trail on What you do is you start getting the vocal folds vibrating as you do that, and you're also training the body now to not only have a steady stream of air, but they have a steady stream of air while the vocal folds are vibrating. I'll demonstrate one time, and that's all there is to it. Do it over 12 counts, 16 counts, 20 counts, etcetera and see how steady and even you can make that sound. So understand that when you're breathing, there are muscles that are around the side of your body, wrapping into the ribs that are called the intercostal muscles. The's muscle we need to wake up. We often don't use them. So if you've ever had to suddenly run and you haven't been working out for a few months and then the side of your body hurt because you're breathing so hard, those are the muscles. We use it singers. So we want to awake those muscles up. We want to engage them and get them involved before we get into anything serious. A great way to do that is push ups. Just do enough so that you just feel the muscles are getting engaged trying to wear ourselves out. Feel free to do push ups where you're on your knees instead of your back feet, or you can do wall pushups. But you want to do enough repetitions so you feel the sides of your body. Feel these muscles intercostal muscles. Start toe wakin up and get energized. All right, let's talk about resonance exercises. So resident is all about where the sound is vibrating where the sound is being created. The goal for singers is toe have this sound vibrating and being created in the mask. The mask is a term that singers used to refer to the hard tissue and the bone up here around the eyes that we feel vibrating when we're making a resident sound. So if you put your hand on your throat while you're speaking, you can feel it vibrating here in this soft tissue of the throat. But when we're singing, we want to actually have a buzzing feeling around the eyes. So I'm gonna give you a few residents exercises toe, learn how to get that sound into the resident space into the mask, the first or what I called controlled shout exercises. So we're going to make a controlled shout on an off vowel, beginning with an H or A W. Hough or wa. And what we're gonna do is see if we can progressively get that sound to go a little bit higher in the voice in a very free and easy manner. We want this to be in our projected voice and not in our speaking voice and the difference there is. We don't want it to be in the soft tissue of the throat, but we wanted to be in the hard tissue here in our projected voice. A variation on that exercise is to start off with an imitation of a yawn. When we own, we often make a sound, and when we do, we feel this opening in the back of the throat. What's happening is that the soft palate is lifting up. What that is doing is allowing sound to come through the throat into the mask. Amanda, making this very resonant sound, so great exercises to imitate a yawn and to make those sounds a very resonant sound with the lifted soft palate to practice getting into the residents space. Oh, basically, it's the same thing in the first exercise, but just a different approach mentally, where you're thinking of imitating a yawn instead of making a show sound, 1/3 residence exercise is to speak. Text any text at all in your resident projected voice that could be a newspaper. Ah, Blawg, whatever you want the back of your shampoo bottle. But the point is, is toe. Have some text and to see if you can pronounce it in a very resonant voice. All demonstrate candlelight company Japonica Berry. And then what you want to do is Teoh almost do this in a singsong a voice. Were you doing long vowels? And then what you're practicing is your resident space as well, a sustaining sound. And then we're only one step away from singing. But it's very important to do these in order candlelight company Japonica Barry, and to see if you can create the longest vowels possible that the sound is totally connected from syllable to sellable. A great way to check your resonance if you're doing a vocal lease or if you're practicing a piece is to pinch your nose. If you pinch your nose, your force your voice to either open up the soft palate all the way would close it down. The clothes off palate is going to make that super, um, nasal sound this kind of ugly nasal sound which we don't like. But by pinching your nose what you're singing, you can also cause a soft palate open all the way. It will help you sound a little bit more resident. You can pinch your nose during any of these exercises. And if you're ever having trouble, it's one of those things that we look back to as a quick fix to see if we can help open up the soft palate just by pinching the nose.
7. Core Exercises: Vocalises: All right, So we're gonna talk about vocal eases the first thing I want to talk about our straw exercises. Singing any vocal lease or a passage through a straw is an amazing tool. It's very strange, but an amazing, incredibly effective tool to teach you how to sing on the breath. I could demonstrate it for you. But Professor Ingo Tisa has put together a demonstration on YouTube, which is unparalleled one word of advice. There are a number of always teachers online who have put up their own demonstration of straw exercises, but they're not at the same level. Professor Ingo is an award winning researcher who's contributed groundbreaking research to the study of Voice for his entire life. He is a primary source in a world class expert, so I highly recommend the only strong demonstration you look at is Hiss calling to it in the notes below and also in the video. But police check it out because this is one of those tools that is life changing for almost every singer who checks it out. For all the vocal leases, I'll give you the vocal ease, and then the way to practice them is to sing them where it is comfortable in your lower middle voice and then it slowly work up 1/2 step at a time. All right, we're gonna talk about the first vocally is to use when building your high voice. We're gonna sing on scale degrees 13531 on watch. Make sure that your tongue is against the bottom row of your teeth. During this entire exercise, your goals are toe have freedom of breath and have the sounding projected into the residents space and not stuck in the soft tissue of the throat. Repetition is not the goal. Seeing the exercise well is the goal. The second vocal ease is basically singing from 1 to 5 and back to one. 12345432 on and we're going to sing it on two syllables. Bi on D B d btb btv DVD BDB The purpose of this one is to take those constant is the boat and the and to help you project the voice forward. So the voice needs to be being created in front of the B sound and in front of the d sound . Always use constants to help projects the voice forward. Once you start getting into high voice with the BDB exercise, you can switch in tow. Watch. So as soon as you start feeling Oh, this is starting. Get a little difficulty feel strain in the voice switch to wah wah wah wah wah The third vocal ease is a descending finance scale 54321 And we start by sustaining the very first note we sing and then descending down and we sing this on kaw So we use this que to help again project the voice forward So where the sound is created in your mouth you want to feel like your voice the vowel, the vibrating sound is projected in front of that and not behind it. Ah, don't be afraid of constant constant are actually your friend in helping the voice get projected into that place that allows the high notes to come out. So wherever your constant air created, remember that the vowel needs to be produced in front of the continent. For the fourth vocal ease we sing in alternating 3rd 13 to 43542 on moving from the vowel e to ah, we use this small interval to sort of sneak into high boys one step at a time. That e vowel switch into the AV owl is also a great way to get the voice further forward. The fifth vocal lease is a rapid vocally also referred to with cholera Tora, and it has to be performed quickly. The reason for that is that when you perform something quickly, the muscles are forced to loosen up. So we call this one fives and nine we sing up to the fifth scale degree and back down to one and then we sing up nine notes and then back down toe. One, 1234543212345678987654321 Imagine you're sprinting And every time you put your foot on the ground, you hit the ground as hard as you can. You can't move very fast When you're sprinting, you have to sort of let go and get into the flow of things and the muscles find their way on their own. So the same thing happens when we practice rapid cholera, tora exercises and by teaching the voices in with freedom. That is what is going to allow the high notes to come out. It's also easier to sing high notes when we only have to sustain them for 0.12 seconds. Right, So this is a great way to touch the high voice and come back down. Know that the first several times you do this maybe the first week it's going to be the hardest exercise. Keep working at it and keep knowing that the purpose of this is letting go and freedom. I promise that this one is going to take you the longest to master. But once you do, it will also have a massive payoff for your high notes. Yeah.
8. Designing Your Program: All right, so now we're gonna talk about designing your program. The first thing is, you got a plan. The work and work, the plan, your training muscles, trading in nervous system and your emotions and spirit are all involved in singing. It's a messy business. It takes work and it takes time. But it doesn't take that much work or that much time. I want you to get over the idea that you either have it or you don't That's scientifically untrue. I want you to think about your voice in a different way. You either work for it or you don't work the process. You will get results. So here's the plan that we're gonna work, do the exercises, track them, get accountable and write a journal for the exercises. Basically, you want to make sure that you're doing them six days a week. Once you figure out how to do these, it's actually only about 10 to 15 minutes of practice a day. I put together a spreadsheet for you to use so that you can track your progress over time. This can be really motivational because we can see that we have a streak going. Hey, I've done it this many days in a row, and we can also track that are high notes, are getting better and better and were able to seeing at a higher and higher range. It will also give you insight when you married the spreadsheet with your journal. I've created this all for you along with video clips of the vocal leases so that you can download them and get going today for the breath and residents exercises all you're gonna do with check off. Hey, I did it for the vocal ease. Exercise is what I want you to do is to mark hate. This was my highest high note today. This was the highest note that I saying really comfortably before things started getting strained. Those were the important notes, not the high notes that we strained for, but the ones that are getting in a high voice where we feel Oh, this was easy. Keep tracking that. And over time, you're going to find it. Maybe in just three or four days that that note the last high note where you start where you're comfortable before things get tense is actually going to be getting higher and higher. It's so rewarding to be able to see this and track it over time. But remember, this doesn't work unless you work each step. Posture, breath residents and the vocal leases all part of one instrument, and we can't leave out any of these because they're foundational to the process. Get accountable. There are three ways you can really quickly get accountable. One is pay a teacher. Pay someone who's a voice teacher who's going to keep you on track. You have to meet for the next four weeks and pay every Monday. When you pay someone you have put up in investment, you have risked your money. And once you do that, you realize that you need to follow through on what you're doing. Another ways. Ask your friend to help you get accountable. Every Tuesday at 9 a.m. You and Joe have a phone call just five or 10 minutes, and you let him know. Hate. This is what I did, and it's got to be something like a phone call that requires commitment. For each day you skipped a program you owe Joe beer. Risking something is really important to being accountable, so you both have the social pressure and you owe Joe something. If you don't follow through, it's a win win, Joe. Get to be over once in a while if you don't follow through. But it makes you really motivated for following through. None of us are islands. We require people to help us feel supported and motivated. Use that the last one is maybe not quite as effective. But it can sometimes be useful for certain personality types. Use social pressure. So post on social media all over Facebook Instagram, instagram stories, Twitter let people know. Hey, I am working this program for the next four weeks. Sometimes just making something public will help you stay accountable. The last part here is to write a journal. So after every single session, I want you to write a short journal. It can be three or four sentences. It really doesn't take time. But it does take a mental commitment. What I want you to write is, what did this feel like in my body? What did the high notes feel like? You have to develop a vocabulary of being able to identify. This is what this felt like in my body by taking these bodily sensations and putting them into a word you actually start to have control over them. This is a really important process. Identifying this is what the bad notes felt like. This is what the good notes feel like. Use adjectives to be descriptive. This one felt free. This felt tight. It felt a little stopped up or used analogies, whatever. But be descriptive in your words, and you will find that your ability to self analyze and self teach will progress rapidly. For some people, this is the easiest thing because they already journal for others they've never journal. Today in their life, I really encourage you to do this. There's a lot of science backing up this approach, and if you just put one or two sentences down that will have a huge effect on your ability to self analyze. So I went ahead and created an instant checks list. This is a list of instantly useful things you can do to check yourself and to fix something . If it's not working, let's say you're practicing your having trouble, things getting tight behind hotel working. It's worse than it was yesterday. Look at this list. It's a great way to just check. Hey, am I doing the things right? If I'm not choose how to fix them, do you have a tall posture? Do you have draw attention? Is the tongue against the back of your bottom row of teeth? Is your breath moving? Are you feeling emotionally free or kind of tense today? Is the sound nasal? Does the voice feel like it's stuck in the back of the throat? Do you feel like you're punching the top note? But the rest of the exercise feels good. Does your throat feel tight or sore when you get to the higher notes? Are you dehydrated? Do I feel fear before I even get to the high notes? Lastly, we're gonna talk about the core principles of learning. High notes work a little every day. This is training a nervous system and coordinating muscles. Along with developing your emotional capabilities. You've got to work a little every day 10 to 15 minutes a day is worth more than eight hours on a Saturday. I'm not kidding. Expand from your strengths. So seeing well in the middle voice just learned this thing really well in the middle voice And if that was all you did for a month, your high notes would improve. The same vocal folds that are producing the middle voice are the same vocal fold that are gonna produce the high notes. So expand from your strength, start with the middle voice and slowly increase and then come back to the strength. But the idea of it's so easy for a lot of students to just work on the higher voice and think that's gonna help. That's actually going to make things worse. So expand outward from your strengths, know what good singing feels like and know how to describe it in your own words. This is a big deal. You need to have a concept in your brain, an idea that is a goal so that, you know, this is what I'm shooting for. When I'm singing, it will be your guide when things were not going well and it will be your guide and getting you back on track. Know what good singing feels like? Practice makes permanent practice does not make perfect practice makes permanent, so if you're practicing with tension all the time, you are making tension permanent. But if you're practicing with freedom all the time. You were making freedom permanent. If practice makes permanent, then it becomes very important how we practice. So it's so important that we're breaking things down, isolating into a smaller and smaller section until we've got something we can do really well. And then we expand from that. Just remember that whatever you're practicing is making it permanent in your nervous system , in your body, so practice things in isolated chunks that you can really do well and then expand from there.
9. Wrapping it All Together: Okay, There is a ton of information in this course, and I've tried to present it as briefly as possible. Your project is to take that spreadsheet and go back to the core exercises video and to be able to reproduce each of the exercises posture, breath, residents, vocal leases and so on. And learn each of those exercises, then taking that spreadsheet, see if you can practice six days in a row. If you do that, you will see results. I promise you, if you're working in order with each of those steps, all I want you to do is to commit toe one week. If you commit toe one week, you're going to see amazing things start to happen in your voice. I want you to know you can do this. I have been teaching for a long time, and I've taught a lot of different students, some with some crazy problems, and some who are insanely talented who have gone on to do great things. But I want you to know that in that entire spectrum you can do this. People like to think, especially in Western societies, that ah voices just a gift, and it is But it is also a gift that every single one of us has. Your instrument is your body. If you can speak, you consent. We have to learn how to train the instrument, right, But remember that it is a nervous system and it is muscles. And yes, it's your emotional state in your spirit. But it's not some magical thing. There's no smoke and mirrors to it. I promise you that you can do this, and you can train your voice to sing in a higher range. At one point in your life, you were a little baby crawling on the floor. You learned a walk. You want to hold yourself up, you learn toe run right. Over time, the muscles and the nervous system can learn and adapt to almost anything. Check out my website Edward Atkinson dot com, for some free resources that are related to singing on your own. I would love your feedback. I want to know, as you work this course, hate what is working for you, what is not. And if there's anything that I could do to help, I will. I'm offering a free one on one coaching with the 1st 30 people who contact me mentioning this course. Use the contact form on my website. Get in touch. Mentioned this course I would love your feedback. I want to know what's working for you with this course. And I want to know what's not working for you or what you would love to see next. If there's another course you would like me to record. So remember, that's the project here. You're gonna take that spreadsheet. You're gonna learn the exercises and do six days in a row. I promise you're going to see results, and then you're gonna want to commit toe another week. But the only place we're going to start is one week due the first week. Thanks for watching this course. I hope you got a lot out of it. And good luck on your way to better high notes.
10. Reference: Vocalises 1-5:
11. Free resources for ongoing learning: I want to make sure
you also know about all of the other
free resources here. So we've got a discord
learning community that was just launched where all of the
students can get together and ask each
other questions, help each other grow and also
have access to myself where all the answering questions
I'll be posting videos, just making sure that there's
ongoing support for use. If there's really a sense of community that really helps you a lot when you're going through
these learning processes. There's also the blog
where I'm putting out free resources,
writing articles. Then there's also, of course, the course downloadable PDFs, spreadsheets on their different supporting me says
for each course, Of course, there are
other courses as well. And then lastly, you
can just always use a website to shoot me a message. It goes right to my inbox, read every single message I get. I respond to every
single one as well. So I'm happy to connect
with you there too. One of the ways that
you can really help out myself and also your fellow students
and future students as well as if you
leave a review, it really helps me to learn what worked for
you, what didn't. But I always take all of that student feedback
and we'll put a new videos, change a video. I'll add course content, downloadable, whatever
needs to be done. So these are kind of always evolving and I'm always trying
to improve them over time. So please leave a review if
you have the time that really helps me and helps the
other students as well. But the main thing is, I
want you to know there's so many free resources
here for you to continue your
learning journey. So please reach out to me, connect with your
other students, use these resources and have a wonderful learning
journey going forward.
Edward Atkinson, Teacher
