Powerful Singing: Learn The Singer’s Breath

1. Trailer - The Singer's Breath: Welcome to the singer's breath. My name is Edward Atkinson. This course shares the best wisdom and fundamentals on the singer's breath that I've learned through 25,000 hours of practice and performance around the world. You'll come out of this course knowing what a truly free and powerful and full singers breath is, knowing how to aim for that in performance and knowing how to train for it. This course is high impact. It's practical, it's time efficient, and it only contains material of substance. I won't waste my own time, and I certainly won't waste yours. And whatever genre you sing, this course applies to you. I've taught pop alternative Scream O M O. Classical, opera, jazz, R and B. You name it every genre because the breath the singer's breath is the same across genres. Good singing is good singing between all of my actual real world experience and my two degrees at the Jacob School of Music and another degree at Mercy University. I bring both sides of the coin to my teaching, the in the flash in the trenches, tried and true experience and the rigorous deep work approach that comes from studying at those institutions. Please don't take my word on my own caliber. Google me remind testimonials at the end of this video visit my website ever. Atkinson dot com Whatever. Look me up and let me don't just trust some random guy teaching, of course, but I promise what I bring to the table is an incredible wealth of experience and an incredible amount of study over my lifetime that I am excited to share with you. All right, let's go. 2. Learning Outcomes and Overview: Hi, My name is Edward Atkinson, and I am your course instructor for the singer's breath. I want to talk to you about what this course is and what it isn't. So what this course is going to do is it's going to teach you about the singer's brat. That means about inhalation, taking it into your body X elation. Information. How you use your breath when you sing, and then also the support system or a Padro that helps make that all happens super efficiently with this course definitely isn't is a bunch of bull crap. It is not possible for you to train your breath, your your abilities to intake breath and to use them when singing and to suddenly be 10 times better in two days. You will see some quick improvements, and you will work at this for a while, and then you will see the substantial improvement. Nothing to do with singing happens overnight. Your training all these tiny little muscles in your body. It's just incredible the coordination that you have tohave as its singer. You have to train all these muscles toe work in sync with one another. It's fascinating, it's incredible. It's so rewarding when it all comes together and anyone who tells you that you can suddenly sing better in two minutes, it's just not gonna happen. You will see quick gains that will happen. But they won't last the rial meet the stuff that you're actually after. It takes some time, and that's what this course is about. This course is about teaching you fundamentals that personally took me, you know, decades of practicing and worked it to figure out toe, learn toe, learn how to apply and then toe learn how to teach. I've had great success teaching the singer's breath to all of my students, and I'm really excited to share with you what I've learned along the way. Here's one more thing this courses, this course is practical. So I'm going to work with you over the course of three weeks of exercises to build your breathing capacity. And I'm also going to give you fundamental wisdom and insight that you can carry with you for the rest of your life, things that are based in both science and the great long centuries on tradition of singing largely, which is founded in the Italian school, you're gonna leave with a better understanding of your biology of the makeup of your instrument. You're gonna leave with a better understanding of how to train your instrument of how to teach your body to do new things. And you're gonna leave with a set of exercises that you can use every day for the rest of your life. One thing that I have seen in my whole life with performers I've worked with around the world is that everybody is concerned with breath. It doesn't matter if you've been singing professionally for 30 years or if you've been singing in college for a year or maybe you're in high school. Whatever it is you are concerned with, breath breath is the gas in the car. Breath is the oxygen in the air. It is the thing that makes it all work. There's nothing more important than breath when it comes to singing, and that is what this course is about. Teaching you how to use your breath in the best, most efficient way something to think about is that it doesn't matter what style of music your singing in if its R and B hip hop, jazz opera, classical music pop musical theater. The fundamentals are the same. Air is being moved through the body to create a sound. We then change that sound on a different styles and genres. But it is not this wide lead that people like to think it is that you can on leasing this kind of music on leasing that kind of music. Good singing is good singing I've seen in my whole life I firmly believe in Let's back it up Good singing is good singing The fundamentals that I'm going to teach you through this course are going to stick with you in whatever style you're working in. One of the first things we're gonna do is we're gonna get into the details of how these exercises work. One of the most harmful things that teachers do is they assign exercises, but they don't tell students how to figure out if what they're doing is effective or not, you know, haven't exercise. And next to that exercise you need to know the purpose of that exercise and how to tell. Am I doing this exercise well? Am I achieving the result that is meant to be achieved that's so crucial are also just training bad habits, right? So we want every moment of time we spend to be a moment of impact. I hate wasting my own time. I will not waste yours. That is my promise to you. And that's why I care so much about structuring this in a really time efficient way in a way that is high impact. Be patient with yourself. This takes a while, and that is totally okay. Five minutes a day over the course of a month is worth so much more than putting 10 hours in one day. It really is. That is the way our biology works, the way that our muscles and our nervous systems learn new skills a little bit at a time. Every day goes so much further than a ton of ours all at once. So make sure that your patient with yourself, it doesn't come quickly. And that's cool. That's fine, you know? And when you make mistakes, fine. That's actually good. If you're not making mistakes, that means you're not trying new things, right. And how are you gonna learn if you're not trying new things? I encourage you to embrace your mistakes. I grew up in environment where mistakes were penalized when you kind of got guilted out about making mistakes. What a destructive mindset that held me back for so many years. And I don't want you to be held back by that mindset, either really approach your mistakes as happy accidents. It is just the way to go. Thank you to Bob Ross for that. It can definitely be scary to try something new. You know, Teoh, put yourself out there and to try to take on a new skill. And it's awesome when you do that, it makes you feel alive when you're taking of risk, right? So take that risk, put yourself out there and see what happens. You might be surprised at how awesome the end result is. 3. Project Step #1: Okay, so let's talk about your project. Project is super easy and it's super effective. I want you to do is to take out a pen and paper or start a Google doc or a note on your computer. Something like that. And I want you to write down and answer to this question. What is the thing that you feel like you're singers? Breath can't get you right now. What's the big obstacle and just pick one? Don't pick a bunch, just pick one. Maybe it's you feel like you're running a breath at the end of phrases. Maybe it's you feel like you're not. You don't have enough power, you know, whatever it is with the breath. Maybe you feel like you can't access a low enough breath. Write that down. Super important to write it down. Now, before we get further into the project. Eso Step one. Take out pen and paper started. Document whatever. Write down what your biggest obstacle is with your singers. Breath 4. Deep Understanding of How to Train the 3 Pillars: So before we get into exercises and training, it's absolutely crucial. You understand your aim. What? Your goal is what is a powerful and free and incredibly effective singers breath. So we're gonna talk about that first, and then we're gonna talk about how to train freight and then we're gonna train for so first thing talking about that breath. There are three aspects to it. There is a Padro, your inhalation and your ex elation. Those were the three big pillars that make up the singer's breath. So here are your goals. You want your inhalation to go in three directions. The most important direction in the 1st 1 you'll learn, is to get that direction to be going downward, to feel that the breath comes downwards. Not that we draw into our bodies raising it up. So the first direction is downwards. The second direction is out. We feel that when we let our stomach go and we feel that the breath comes down and then we feel that it goes out as the stomach releases and the third direction is back, that the breath comes down our body and then our back releases and we actually feel our back, our lower back area expand on the inhalation so inhalation that has three directions down front and back. That is the foundation for a great inhalation, which is the most important part. Ah, Pa Joe or support. So we create a wonderful support system for the breath for the singing, for the X elation and so on that relies on rib expansion. So they're intercostal muscles, which wrap around the ribs, and we want to keep those ribs expanded when we breathe in and, crucially, keep them also expanded as we breathe out. So the Apologize system is supporting everything else. That's a big part of it. Your ribs and another big part of it is, of course, your posture, which aligned your bones and your muscles and create optimal flow off air on then also your abdominal muscles. And here's something that quite advanced, which is your abdominal muscles. If you think of abs, you tend to think of your six pack right? 123456 However, you want those six to be relaxed, but there are all sorts of other abdominal muscles farming on those six. If you silently laugh to yourself and touch your belly and keep going lower and to find exactly where it is. For most people, it's just a little bit below the belly button. You're going to find a set of muscles or a muscle at the very bottom of your abdominal area that kicks outwards as you laugh to yourself. Feels a little strange, all these other muscles that kind of loosen elastic, and then you get to the place at just below the belly button. Usually for most people where the abdominal muscle kicks out when you're signing laughing to yourself, that is one ab muscle that we actually want really engaged. You want to feel that kick out when you're singing. So but Upadhyay in general is just with the idea of creating a support system through using the ribs, their expansion through creating elasticity of other muscles and a great posture. And then, crucially, that little muscle, the very bottom of the abdominal sheet, which you want to feel kick out. So a Pa Joe your support system. That's what we're aiming for, using our muscles and posture to really support healthy, beautiful, powerful singing and then X elation. Ex elation is all of a creating free, freely moving in continuous movement of the breath. So one of the first things that trips up most people when it comes to breathing is a sort of stuttering breath flow is that the breath is choppy and that almost certainly result in this tightness that people feel here in the lair inks. And then they feel a little tired after just 15 minutes, singing with healthy singing, you can sing for hours and hours a day, not an exaggeration, and do it myself healthfully without tiring out your voice. And one of these big fundamentals here with breath and breathing, is about continuous movement of the breath through this sound. So we're gonna work on all of that inhalation, UPA Joe and ex elation. 5. Pillar 1: Inhalation: I would say that the most important thing for you to think about at first is your inhalation because nothing else matters. If you don't get the inhalation right, it's that first step. So with the inhalation, it's also really powerful to use visualizations. So we're training our body, the interior of our body, all these tiny little muscles to coordinate and do things and a really powerful way to instruct your body in the right direction. I want to do this differently now, and I want to tell this muscle to do this is to visualizations So have at the back of your head. And I want you to work on work on being created with visualizations. I'm gonna give you some to work with. And you can also come up with your own and come up with helpful analogies as well that help inspire you to move towards that deeper inhalation. So we're gonna talk a little bit more in depth now about each of the three pillars here breathing inhalation of Pa Joe and exhalation. I encourage you to take some notes. I'm not gonna be super repetitive. I'm gonna just try to drill down right toe what matters were first only talk about inhalation, drawing the breath into the body. So when we do these exercises, you need to know what to aim for. Doing a bunch of exercise over and over again, but not in the right way is totally counterproductive. We don't want that. So let's have an aim and an intention in mind. What are we trying to achieve with our inhalation exercises? Let's talk about drawing breath into your body, the inhalation, what to aim for what to go for. So when you draw breath into your body, it enters the body. The shoulders are 100% uninvolved, completely neutral because breath is going so much lower than the shoulders. Really. We end up as singers, feeling that it gets lower than our lungs because all these muscles and organs on the inside of your body have to literally move out of the way to let the lungs expand. So the body sensation is actually not in the lungs, but the body sensation for a fantastic inhalation. You end up feeling it at the floor of the pelvis at the very bottom of where your torso ends. It's also very helpful for people to visualize air going into their heels to release those muscles. So even though the air does come into the lungs, the body sensation is all below the lost. Almost all of it. Yes, the ribs. We do feel the ribs expand on the side, but that's not a big sensation. Be a sensation is below the lungs. So the breath comes into the body and then we feel the stomach sinking down right. We feel the very bottom of our pelvic for releasing and whoa, that's low in the body where we don't normally do that, right? So the stomach releases feel at the bottom of the pelvic floor releases. And then crucially, because of that, we feel that the air that has come down like this, we feel that it expands in this down and out direction. Also, if we're releasing our lower back muscles, if we've trained them, which we will with these exercises coming up to release, we feel that the breath comes down this way and also expands down and back. So the goal with every inhalation exercise, every single inhalation exercise is this feeling that the air is coming down like a single drop of water out of a faucet, and then it blooms backwards and forwards in a down and out and down and back motion like that. That's the goal of the inhalation. A part of that. A big part of it, and it overlaps with UPA Joe is that the ribs are expanding words. So your small ribs at the very bottom of your rib cage or actually separated so normally your ribs are joined together like that, right at the very bottom of your rib cage. We have what are called the floating ribs, and they literally move they allowing its space for the lungs to expand on your inhalation . It's amazing, the biology behind it's just it's incredible, so but they're expanding, and we feel that we feel that expansion on the inhalation. Okay, let's move on to a poncho 6. Pillar 2: Appoggio: Papa Joe is supporting your system. So a pato. A lot of people say support your sound singing from your diaphragm. Stop singing from your diaphragm is Bs. Your diaphragm is almost entirely an involuntary muscle. You cannot tell your diaphragm what to do. It is really important to know that if someone tells you seem from your diaphragm, they don't actually understand the biology behind singing what they probably don't understand how to teach singing Singing from your diaphragm is an incredibly useless phrase . We do not sing from the diaphragm. Our guy friend is incredibly involved in singing Don't get me wrong, but it is not a muscle that we get to tell it what to do. I can tell my finger to do this or my bicep two contract. I cannot tell my diaphragm to do something in the same way. So because of that talk about Papa Joe or support, which is a different idea and a much healthier and more scientifically informed idea of singing and supported your city, something that might be cool to know is a PA job goes back to the early Renaissance. When we first started hearing the term in these early textbooks from Italian singers. One of the most amazing things in the history of music is that the Italians that there is a school of singing that was unbroken for hundreds of years called Bel Canto School. And they're all these ideas and techniques, these all these visuals and analogies and body sensations to teach The idea of a beautiful , good singing bell Encontro just simply means beautiful singing. And what we found out later in the last 50 years, through all sorts of, you know, biopsies and using imaging and so on on the inside of the body is that the Italian school was scientifically accurate, which is just amazing that in the 14 hundreds there are all these treaties on music and singing, and they were scientifically accurate back then, which is just incredible. They figured it out on their own without meeting Teoh use modern imaging techniques, but it's pretty cool that has been completely confirmed by science in the last 50 years. But Papa Joe Apology, remember, is Italian for to lean. So what does that mean? There's a lot of people talk about it in different ways. You can think of it as the sensation of leaning right, or you can think of it as the idea of support. I think the idea of that sensation of leaning is very helpful also because leaning is one of the ways to train a podgy. So Papa Joe is really about aligning your body with great posture, learning to keep the ribs expanded, even while you sing right, and then learning to let go all sorts of muscles. And then really, just be using this this muscle very bottom of the abdominal, but visualizing What are we supposed to be going for? What is the intention behind every single a podgy exercise? The intention is that you feel that the breath and the support and the power source of the singing is below your body. The goal and intention of a PA job is that the power source of singing is not felt in the throat. It's not felt around the mouth. It's not felt here in the chest. Everything is felt below right here, below the solar plexus. You want to feel it in the bottom part of your body. So there are two big things to think about that great singers have pointed to over and over again over the years. One is many singers find that says that the sensation of the rib expansion is where they create their sense of a padre. That's where they imagine the breath is coming from that in all time they inhale, they keep the room expanded and, as they're singing to keep the ribs expanded, and then they go to see again and the ribs air still expanding. So 100% of the time they're keeping the ribs expanded. You can train your intercostal muscles, which the muscles that wrap around the ribs to do. That's the first great intention that works for a lot of other, for for a lot of singers, one of the other things to think about to visualize an intention to go for with Papa Joe is that very lower abdominal muscle that we feel that 123456 is at muffled well know are relaxed and loose and elastic. And then that muscle that you confined by silently laughing to yourself and then touching down low on the abs, the one that kicks out as you silently laugh. That is the muscle that's engaged right? I would encourage you to go for. I want to feel the ribs expanded at all times. It really helps you have this fantastic posture on. It's kind of a short cut to quickly figured out how to support new system. My shoulder blades together and my ribs are expanded at all times. Fantastic Intention Toe and a more advanced one is to feel that little abdominal muscle kick out. Okay, so that's your intention for a Pa Joe, and I will leave you with just one other thing. One thing I think about a lot with Papa Joe is often mentally pointing down point down into the floor that you feel that the energy source of your singing even though yes, it's your loans, right? Yes, your lungs. And that's where the air is stored. But there's all these other co ordinating muscles that press in and do all these different things to make this thing happen. I'm always visualizing down, and sometimes it in my practice will simply point at the ground to remind myself to feel lower with the breath, right, So that's a that's 1/3 thing you can think about with the PA Joe. I would say the most important intention is that the ribs are expanded at all times, inhalation and formation. When you're seeing your ex elation, so and then the 2nd 1 is that abdominal kick outmuscle, feeling that engage, as you say and then 1/3 1 is to simply have that idea of down. Everything is releasing downwards. We tend to walk around with so much tension, especially in our abs and in our back. And it's singers. We have to learn to let that go when we're breathing and singing, and that allows your lungs to fill up more. That allows you to have this deeper and more powerful breath. 7. Pillar 3: Exhalation/Phonation: Let's talk X elation. Full nation X elation is air leaving the body. Faux nation is simply creating the sound while air is leaving your body, I'm using the terms pretty interchangeably here. Your goal with your phone nation and ex elation is toe have continuous breath. You can think about an unbroken line of breath, a column of air that keeps spinning where you can think about one of those wind tunnels and the wind keeps moving and moving and moving and moving through your body. But that is always your goal with ex elation and faux nation. Is this continuous breath that is the magic sauce. So go back and review some of that. If you want to please. I hope you took notes. If you didn't encourage you to go back and review knowing your intention before you doing exercise it just I mean it. Quinn tools how effective that exercise is going to be for you. So go back and make sure you know your intention for the inhalation. Your intention for Papa Joe and your intention for full nation or ex elation can always think of it as an intention. Or you can think of it as a visualization, but a goal you're not to simply repeating and exercise right. But you're doing an exercise with a goal to feel further expansion, to feel mawr continuous and free breath. Right? So whatever the goal is for the particular exercise have that in mind absolutely crucial to effective practice. The practice videos are only six or seven minutes along. That's it. You don't need a lot of time. You really don't to become great at something. You need a lot of quality time where there's a very specific intention before you do the practice. It's called deliberate practice, and I'm laying it out for you here. But it's really important that you are engaged and you're writing down. This is my intention, and then you're doing it. I promise it's the way to go. In the end, it takes hold much less time. So now we've talked about we should understand in a general idea what a good breath is, and then we talked about what we're aiming for, right? What it's gonna feel like our intention are visualization, and then we're gonna get into how to train for it. But before getting how to train for it. With all these exercise videos, I want you to know that how the biggest, how is couple ing and intention or visualization a deliberate choice with that practice those two together. That's how you make a substantial amount of progress in a short amount of time. 8. The Psychological, Spiritual Side of Singing: So I'm going to teach you about all of the technical side of breathing. You know, your PA Joe, your inhalation exhalation, insulin, and we're gonna get down the details. You're gonna make amazing progress. There's 1/4 aspect here, which we can't go too far into detail with, but it is also connected, and it's intensely personal, and that's probably why I'm not going to put it into this course. I'm not gonna try to do a one size fits all for something that doesn't fit all the technical stuff. We can all work on that together. The very personal side that psychological spirituals, you know, emotional side of things is it's very important, but it it's it's very personal. So I want to just talk about it very briefly, anything that's in our lives personally and spiritually and emotionally. Insulin. It represents itself physically in the body. When I'm stressed out, if someone yells at me right that is expressed in cortisol in my body, which causes muscles to tighten up, we feel that our voice, if you've had a bad day, your boss yelled at you or something like that about the last thing you're going to do is go out and sing with a free spirit, right, unless you trained to do when you work through that before may be right, but it's very hard to do. Any amount of stress is always expressed in the body physically, including trauma past traumas. Maybe someone made fun of you for your voice when you read a very sensitive seven year old age or something like that, right? All those things are expressed in the body, usually in our subconscious mental state as well. I want to encourage you to, as you work through this, to embrace and openness your mindset and your willingness to make mistakes. Your willingness to make mistakes enthusiastically and just enjoy the process is a big part of this. Working with my students, I'm always we're always We work on the technical side and we work on the artistic side. And then there's this other column, which is just It's very personal, but there's always this opening up of the heart that happens in singing right, and that's why we love seeing. That's why I fell in love with the human voice, and that's why I wanted to do it for the rest of my life to sing and to teach others to see . There's just this raw humanity and singing, and what you have to do is a singer, as you have to open yourself to the process, you have to open yourself to trying new things, not just because it's a good idea that makes you learn faster, but because that expresses itself physically in your body. You are your instrument, and that doesn't just mean your muscle fibers in your nervous system. Yes, that's part of it. But you are that and your emotions and your mental state, your psychology and your spirituality. All of that comes in to make you the singer, so I encourage you to pursue a path of openness with yourself to be kind to yourself. That doesn't mean you don't work hard, right? We can work hard and have an open mind set at the same time, right? Almost every singer I work with, there are always these these little breakthroughs that happened maybe every few weeks, every couple of months, whatever it is, where there's just a deeper release, a letting go that happens and whatever that letting go happens on the psychological spiritually emotional state. It always manifests itself in the body, and then suddenly they confined that deeper breath. So I want to encourage you as you go about this. You're working your 67 minutes a day of exercise and so on that you're also embracing a mental state of openness. And you're only seeking to gross. You can become a little bit more open. It's this other fourth part to the singer's breath. That's very personal on. I would just say that the most important part of progressing and that is to learn to be open, to be open to mistakes. Mistakes are bad if you don't make mistakes. You're trying anything new, right? Mistakes are bad, so it's it's It's creating that openness, that kindness to self Andi embracing a vulnerability That is probably why you want to sing in the first place. Keep going deeper with that embrace that vulnerability. It will take you to a place where you're able to find a deeper breath 9. Nitty Gritty Details on How to Work the 3-Week Plan: Okay, here is how your three week plan is going to work. Every week there's a video and it's only six or seven minutes long, and you are going to practice and work with this video every single day for seven days in a row. Okay, so it's only six or seven minutes, and it's six or seven focused minutes and you're gonna work on it every single day for a week in a row. That will be a week. One video. Then you move on to your week to video. Daniel. Move on for your Week three video. These are not random exercises. Thes air exercises in a progression that I use with my students that is effective with almost every single one of them. Work this steps put in the work and you'll see results. It is not a lot of work. It's about focused, deliberate work, and I'm laying it out for you in the little six or seven minute chunks narrated and you'll see video of me doing the exercises. Everything is super easy to follow, but just make sure you do it every single day. Putting in a ton of time of one day is really not effective The way that your body layers, information and skills and knowledge is basically that you input information. You try new things and your brain goes through the process of encoding at night, and then you have something to build on. The next day is really a very hard biological limit on how much you can learn in one day. So it's absolutely crucial that you work the exercises and you go to bed and you sleep and you come back the next day and work the exercise in exit of exercises. So just please, please know that for for this to work six or seven minutes a day is how to do it. That's a commitment. I know. I've got a kid. I've got a family. You know, I've got all these other things I've got to do. But I still make time to practice. For me, it usually needs to be before new. I need to get it in before noon or just do it right. Got to make sure that you're practicing. So that's how it's gonna work. Week one. Do all the exercises seven days in a row to all the exercises. Seven days in a row. Week three. All the exercises seven days in a row. Remember also to be intentional. We went over earlier about the intention and visualization that you want to feel and be aware off as you're doing each exercise. And then this is really important. These exercises are all the building, the breath not necessarily but singing a favorite song or something like that. I want to encourage you to do these exercises and then saying, saying Whatever sing in the shower, sing in the car, you're going to notice an improvement. Maybe there's something you're working on. You're trying to get better at seeing a particular song. Whatever it is, do these exercises first and then also sing. So these exercises are meant to also be in addition to any of the singing. You don't have to make other practice time for saying just seeing throughout the day sing Happy birthday, whatever it is. But doing these exercises, plus some additional singing, is really powerful. Take notes if you go along, so I mean, if you're this kind of person, take notes. Keep a little journal just a couple of sentences After each practice session. It is so rewarding to get to see the progress that you make after a few weeks, you know? So it's not just this linear thing. It might be this bad day and the amazing day, right? But overall, you're going to see this kind of Jacob graph going up your progression. You'll hit these breakthroughs. It's a really rewarding thing to take notes it also handwriting. It recruits a lot of parts of your brain at the same time, both motor and then conceptual. And this processing. So long. Story short. If you hand write them out, you're gonna get a lot more out of it. And then if you type, you know your intention, you know what you're visualizing. You know your goal. And now we're going to train for it. Let's get to work. 10. Week 1! Do once daily for 7 Days: Week one. Let's do this. If you work on these every single day, you will see tremendous progress. Remember, you cannot crammed with music. That's just not the way the body works. Every single day, we're gonna work on the three fundamentals UPA jewel inhalation and exhalation for the wall press. Lean against the wall, taking deep breaths, and as you do, you will feel the sides of your ribs start to become engaged and start expanding those of your intercostal muscles, which wrap around your ribs, starting to be engaged in your inhalation. It's so important to strengthen those and wake those up. You can also lean into the wall, which is a fantastic way for some people. Also access the ribs, but it's all about feeling the side ribs. Draw your shoulder blades together, stand up straight and take a deep breath. Feeling your belly sink to the ground. Fold your body over and let it hang limp like a wet noodle. And when you're in this position, breathe deeply. It will cause your torso to rise up a little bit. There's also strengthens and stimulates your intercostal muscles, which are just absolutely key for good. Upon Joe lying on the ground face up with your knees bent. That's very important with your knees bent, because otherwise your abdominal muscles get tensed, and then you can take that low breath. Simply touch. Your stomach can lie here for a couple of minutes. It's very relaxing. Get a lot of oxygen in your body. You will find that when you are no longer standing, your abdominal muscles totally relaxed. And it's possible for you to take that really deep breath that you've been seeking. So in this position you can breathe deeply, touched the belly, stick with it for 60 seconds or so, and you start to build body awareness a body sense of Oh, hey, this is what that deep breath feels like once you know what it feels like. It it's Ah, that's one of those key things that really helps you re create that breath when you're standing. So this is a building body sense body awareness and will teach your body. Hey, when I'm standing up, this is what I want my breath to feel like lying on the ground face down. Make sure to put your arms right where your forehead would lie so that your head can be in a neutral position. You lie down and you breathe deeply here. What you're gonna find is that you can feel the breath in your lower back because of your position, and you're going to feel those back muscles totally loose and you're going to feel them release. As you inhale, your breath goes in three directions, it goes down and then you feel it. Go out with the stomach releasing and you feel it. Go back with your back muscles releasing so this similar to your ground breath face up builds that body awareness builds that body sensation your sense memory so that when you're standing, you can tell your body. Hey, I want this breath to release in my lower back The body remembers the brain remembers, and you can much more successfully achieve that low breath. Breathe and hold. Breathe in through your nose hold and then breathe out through the mouth. You could do this in cycles of four seconds each. Four seconds in four seconds. Hold four second out. It's fantastic for teaching your body to take a deeper breath, so when you do this, the air is actually inside your body longer and you will draw more oxygen into your blood cells. It does that. It's also fantastic for expanding your lung capacity and not to mention just training your body. Hey, we're gonna take that deeper breath. Lip trails teach you to use continuous breath on the exhalation and on Phone Nation one of those fundamental things which makes everything else so much easier in singing. We'll do two sets of exercises. I'll play along on the piano and also lip trail. All you have to do is look trouble along with me. - Lastly , we take a phrase and we take it to three stages of speaking normal obnoxious voice and then sing song voice each time exaggerating the vowel length and the residents with which were proclaiming the text. The sky is blue, water is wet, the sky's blue water is wet, the sky is blue. Water is the sky eyes. What is it? Every day? Ask yourself these questions. What did you do best? What felt different in your body, your instrument and what will you improve on tomorrow? Six minutes a day of practice every day and you will be stunned how far you come in a week . See you tomorrow 11. Week 2! Do once daily for 7 Days: Week two. Let's get this. If you've done all of week one, you are ready for week two. Every day is day one. Compete against yesterday's you and just put one foot in front of the other. A little bit of the time was the furthest here we G o r. Three big exercises UPA jewel inhalation and exhalation. We again, we'll start with Wall Press. You know how to do this from last week. Now, as you're doing it, see if you can release your stomach as you're breathing in. Let that stomach fall down so that the arms and the side you're doing all the work with every inhalation, you feel that your stomach is releasing down into the heels of your body. You can also visualize the sides of your body, the sides of your ribs being engaged. We draw our shoulder blades together. We stand up straight, shake things off, breathe deeply, reset folded over rib expansion. We know how to do this This time, as you're getting into the breath, see if you can breathe, you know, to 90% or 95% of your capacity, take a much as you can in before breathing out through the mouth. Remember, you're hanging over like a wet noodle drawing, inasmuch breath as possible, feeling your ribs becoming engaged. New exercise. Rapid breath through closed fists. This wakes up your diaphragm. Fantastic. Quick exercise we move on to inhalation would get on the ground again. Facing up, We make sure our knees are bent were lying on the ground touching our belly. And this time I want you to close your eyes and visualize what's going on with your breath . Visualize the kind of breath you want. You can visualize that your breath iss sinking into your body. You can visualize that your stomach is moving out of the way to draw more breath into the body. You can remember how free it feels right around the belt area, where all of those muscles are totally released. As you breathe in, it feels freeing. The breath is drawn deeper into your body. Keep breathing. Keep finding the sensation. Search for a visual that helps you recreate this. When you move on to standing up, the breath is going as deep into the body as it possibly can, moving on the ground breath face down. So now we're going to focus on a different kind of visual. Visualization is so powerful the teacher body to remember things to teach it habits. Visualize the muscles the very low back muscles that are going from the area of your spine out towards your sides. Visualize those releasing there often so tight when we're standing or sitting in a chair all day. Visualized those muscles that air tight, visualized them, letting go. Visualize with each breath, those muscles becoming larger and looser as they get out of the way and let your body expand. Let the bottom part of your back expand. Move out of the way to take that deep breath. Gonna keep visualizing what those muscles air doing so that your brain can lay down a new pathway that says these muscles are getting out of the way with every breath inhaling in cycles. Breathe and hold. If on week one you were breathing, holding and exhaling in cycles of four seconds, bump it up to six seconds. If you doing six seconds, bump it up to eight seconds. Stretch your abilities. You will expand your lung capacity. You will expand the ability of your intercostal muscles and your lower back muscles to be released. So great exercise whatever you did last week, bump it up a notch and stretch your abilities by a couple of seconds longer in your cycle of breathe, hold and then exhale. At this point, you're a pro with the lip trails. This time as you go after the lip trolls, you're going to see if each iteration of the literal could be totally connected. And there's no stuttering with the literal, but it's a completely released, connected air for every single exercise. - Stretch yourself on the normal toe obnoxious to sing song. See if you can bump it up a little bit higher and pitch, which is very helpful for the majority of singers and see if you can bump it up in volume. Experiment with getting a little bit louder with it while still feeling that freedom with the open vowels, The sky is blue, water is wet, the sky's blue water is wet, the sky is blue. Water is the sky is what ISS new exercise for you, which is to move your body against the beat. It feels totally strange. We want a dance you want to move to the beat. But the key is to move your body against the beat. You can swing your arms backwards and forwards you can walk. But whatever you're doing, you're walking or swinging your arms. Moving your body in a large motion against the beat. You can sing one of your literal exercises, sing a favorite song. Whatever it is, this is a key exercise I use with almost every single singer to teach them to release muscles. When your body is focused on this, it cannot tense up in the voice the same way and one more new exercise for you this week, which is to create the longest hiss ever on the letter s. So you're gonna take a deep breath in the best breath you can possibly create at this point . And then you're going to create the longest s possible. A long prolonged s sound time, how far you get today and the next day. See if you can beat it in this video. I hiss for 30 seconds, see if you can beat me. Awesome job. Keep doing the work and you will keep seeing the results. Ask yourself these questions. Be kind to yourself. Find out what's working. Does something feel more powerful? Does it feel better? What do you excited about? What do you excited to get better at next time around? See you tomorrow. 12. Week 3! Do once daily for 7 Days: Welcome to Week three. Let's finish strong. So we're going to do things just a little bit differently this week and I'm gonna move through the exercises. You know really well quite quickly, and you can pause and take more time and them as needed. As always, we work on our three fundamental pillars UPA Joe inhalation and exhalation. Start off with that wall press. Get the intercostal muscles alive. Feel the sides of your ribs burn a little bit as you breathe deeply. Draw those shoulder blades together. Remind yourself standing. What a good posture feels like. Full yourself over, dropped down like a wet noodle and take in that breath aggressively. Feel those ribs expand so much your torso kind of pops up a little bit. Taking that rapid breath. Who closed fist really feel that diaphragm suddenly come alive this time before actually getting on the ground? Stay standing and see if you can achieve that looseness in the abdominal muscles and you already know what that feels like when you're on the ground. Maybe it doesn't work out so well. Maybe it does. Then pop down on the ground like this Face up. Remind yourself over 45 breaths. Okay, this is what it's supposed to feel like. Pop back up and stand up. It's fantastic. Great would challenge yourself standing ground breath, standing ground breath. Challenge yourself in the same way with the face down ground breath you're standing, you breathe in. You visualize those low back muscles releasing, and you see if you can achieve that breath with the back muscles. Let go standing up, boom, pop down to the ground, get in that face down position and then breathe deeply. You're gonna immediately feel those back muscles move. Pop back up to standing. Go back and forth with 45 breaths when standing for five breaths, face down on your ground breath. Great way to challenge yourself and learn how to do this while standing. Which is, of course, your end goal. Breathe and hold whatever you were doing on Week two. If it was eight seconds, bump it up to 10 seconds. Take the cycle longer. Make sure you don't do just one cycle. It's really important to do two or three cycles minimum to get it and effect from this. But whatever you were doing in week two, bump it up a notch a couple of seconds longer for each step in the cycle. New exercise. You move your arms downwards in this motion downwards and out as you inhale. And then you bring the arms back up in the reverse motion as you exhale. Inhale, Exhale each time accompanied by this coordinated our movement. What you're doing is you're using kinesthetic awareness. You are mimicking with your arms what's actually going on inside the body. This release of the muscles combining kinesthetic awareness along with one of your visuals that you found effective where you can visualize these muscles, letting go visualizing your stomach, letting go visualizing your lower back muscles letting go along with this Our movement is a fantastic way to transfer what you've trained your body on the floor into the standing position. New exercise bouncing your knees up and down as you take a deep breath in and then a breath out. You're releasing your abdominal muscles, your back muscles and getting a little bit looser with your breath while doing this lip trails. You know what you're doing with them at this point, However, I want to encourage you. Make sure you go all the way up to the higher notes and all the way back down. Don't skimp. You've really gotta follow the whole cycle up and down to get the most out of these. Go for it in Week three. I encourage you to come up with your own phrase for the normal obnoxious singsong progression. Whatever it is, perhaps from a favorite piece of music, it could be a headline from the newspaper. Challenge yourself with new words and new vowels. The sky is blue, water is wet, the sky's blue water is wet, the sky is blue. Water is the sky is what is it moving against the beat without your arms or your legs walking and so on. I want you to file this one away with every kind of singer, from jazz singers to classical singers, toe pop singers, toe R and B singers. I have always found this one helpful. It's one of those exercises that just seems to work for almost every singer. File it away when you're having trouble with something, start walking while singing. Start swinging your arms in a strange manner against the beat while singing, you'll find that you will release your voice almost every time. It always helps people move forward. Just a little bit. Great exercise toe have in your toolbox. Don't forget it. Keep using it through week three so that you're really good at it. Here you are with your longest hiss ever. Whatever your best time was last week, see if you can improve on it. You also want to make sure that your s sounds is totally continuous. It's not Stuttering writes your training, that continuous release of breath. It's absolutely crucial for good singing him for management of the breath. It is not the most exciting exercise, but it works. New exercise is to create the longest. Do you possibly can pick a note just right in the middle of your range? You don't want to be alone. Oh, you don't want to be a high note to something really easy right in the middle of your range and see how long you can sustain in. Sing who? On one pitch here I'm singing a 32nd. Do see if you can beat me. Your daily rap question this week is simple. What are the habits that are making me grow? What are the things that you were doing that are helping you get better. Identify those and keep after those habits. After seven days of crushing Week, three exercises tune into the next lesson. 13. Project: Step #2: All right. So this is your project. Follow up. Remember, you asked yourself, what were you hoping you could get better at singing with this breath. So now answer that question. Three weeks later. How did you get better? What improved? I want you to add that to your document and then post that as your project partly for yourself, because it's gonna give you a sense of accomplishment, but also to help other students. It's really hard to practice and motivated on your own, right. I know what is for me, and I know it is for all of my students. If you post your project and just say, Hey, I thought I was bad at this, and then I got better this. Whatever it is, it's really powerful to help your fellow students to also progress in their own singing. So take 10 minutes, answer that question. Follow up on your project, and what did you get better at? And also maybe you haven't insight. Maybe you realize, Hey, if I think of this particular visual, if I think of you know, whatever your analogy is, that was really helpful. Share that share that with your fellow students and helped them progress as well 14. Wrap Up and Parting Thoughts: all right. So I hope that you have gotten so much out of this. You can always come back to this. Use your week one week to Week three progression or just stick with just a week three because you're more advanced at this point, going back and practicing thes air exercises that I work my students through, and I still do them all the time and also a fair set of other more advanced exercises. But it's so important because remember, we're building our biology. We're building instrument on so that eventual practice is really important. So come back. Use that week three video whenever you want or anything other ones that you found helpful. Andi, I hope that you can keep marrying it with your singing, you know, do a little work on breathing and then get to applying it to whatever song you're working. So thank you so much for participating in the course. I look forward to seeing all of your projects. It's so helpful to other students, and it's really rewarding for me to see the breakthroughs that you made working on this. You can check out more resources at my website. Edward Atkinson dot com. I offer a lot of resources, like singing tips on my blog's articles, videos, lessons, classes and so on. I offer video lessons on their digitally to students around the world. I also teach in person. But if there's any resource there that you can take advantage of, please do. I hope you got a ton out of this course. You can always come back to reference it, and I look forward to seeing you in my next course Happy singing. 15. 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. 16. Bonus Q&A - How to be consistent: Hi, this is Edward Atkinson. We're going to talk a little bit today about consistency. Nico wrote in with a question about struggling between some days having a full sounding voice and then other days having a thin sounding voice. What can he do to get a little bit more consistent? The way to answer that is to understand what causes a full voice versus a thin voice and what causes an inconsistent result and a consistent result. At first, I just want to talk about consistency. What causes consistency versus inconsistency? You have to treat your voice like that little school project you had in third grade, where you planted some beans in a little styrofoam cup and you watered them just a little bit every day. And then eventually they grew into a full plant. That's what growing your voice is like and growing your consistency in your abilities. If you try to do it all at once, it's not going to work. If your practice schedule is on Saturdays, I spend one full hour practicing. And then the rest of the time you're too busy to do it. You're not going to grow your voice. It needs a little bit of water every day, and that's because your voice is muscles and a nervous system and tissues and your brain and memory and DNA and all of those things are built slowly and iteratively over time. That's the first thing is just make you're doing a little bit every day. 5 minutes a day is much more effective than one or two, or even 3 hours on one day on the weekend. And it sounds counterintuitive, but that's the way our bodies work, that's the way they learn. So a little bit at a time. Another thing is your body is going to do whatever you do the most of and most of the time, If your speaking voice is tight and thin, right, Then that's going to be what your voice is used to doing, right? So one of the easiest ways that you can improve your singing voice is actually to change a little bit your speaking voice. So if my speaking voice is right here and it's really thin all the time, well that's going to be what's going to go into my singing voice because it's the exact same instrument, just used in different ways. The difference between singing and speaking is sustained Sound Right? Right now it's not sustained Sound When you're speaking, the sound is very chopped up. When you're singing, the sound becomes much more sustained. You have long pitches that you're holding. You can also think about just practicing to opening up your speaking voice a little bit. That little bit of practice will go a long way, and if you can find any chance to simply speak in this manner where it's a little bit more open, a little bit more resonant, you're going to find that it translates into your singing. A very great teacher, Virginia Zane, told me once that you will sing as you speak. And that is rock solid truth because they're the same instrument. Speaking voice and my singing voice are the same instrument. Just used in different ways. Simply working on your speaking voice a little bit to be a little bit more open, to be a little bit more resonant, can really help with the singing voice as well. And that consistency because your voice is going to do whatever you do the most of. All right, let's talk a little bit about the technique here. Between what causes a full voice, that big sound, and then what causes a smaller and thinner voice. Basically, think of two main sections to this machine, right? You've got this big area here, your instrument, where there's this tube where the air flows through. And then you've got the whole support system in your torso, down below our tube and our support system, when your voice is full, that tube is very round. That tube is very, very round. And your support system has gone very, very deep. Another way of saying that is when you breathed in, it went all the way down into your toes. And when you were making sound the tube that makes up your voice wasn't constricted like this, but instead was very open and round versus the opposite of that, a thin voice, very easy to figure out, right? Very, very thin, very, very shallow. So let's break it down as quickly and simply as possible. What can you do to consistently get a deeper breath and consistently to have a more open instrument? Because that's all it is. You're looking for consistency in those two things. Consistently, deeper breath, consistently more open instrument. Find the exercise that works for you and do a lot of it. And that sounds dumb, right? That just sounds really simple. Like, come on man, that's not really an answer. That is an answer. Find the exercise that works for you and do a lot of it. So if you go back through any of the courses here on breathing, you're going to see that some of the exercises work for you and some of them don't. And that's how it works with singing. Because my body is different from yours, your body is different from somebody else's. We have different DNA, we have different biological histories and muscle memory and those kind of things. When you're going through a set of exercises, there's always going to be one or two, or three if you're really lucky that really pop out for you. So let's take the breathing right. So if you want to have that deeper breath, one of the things that works for most people to reconnect and find that deeper breath is to lie with their back on the floor and to breathe as deeply as possible. And this will remind their muscles of how free and deep inhalation can be. And once the muscles and body are reminded of that, then they can stand up vertically and breathe more deeply. So that's a great one. It does work for the majority of people, is to lie with your back flat on the floor. Remind yourself of what that really deep, powerful breath feels like and then get up vertically. But the main key isn't simply one specific exercise. It's that principle of find an exercise that works for you and do a lot of it because it's that volume of repetition that builds the consistency. Now the dangerous part here, of course, is if you have a high volume, a lot of repetitions of something that causes your voice to be tight, or something that causes your breath to be shallow. Well, that's also going to be building into and training your instrument. You want to make sure you find something that actually works and do a lot of it, not just brute force and something just because you think it's going to help. It's really got to be working for you. Find an exercise that gives you deeper inhalation, like lying on the floor. Find an exercise that helps you open up the throat. Speaking obnoxiously is a common one that works for most people. And simply reconnecting with a deeper breath. Finding an exercise like of nauseous speaking, which helps you to open up the throat and doing a lot of it. Specifically, remember not doing a lot of it on just on Saturday, but doing a little bit every day. 5 minutes before lunch, right? You're not allowed to eat lunch until you do 5 minutes of practice. That 5 minutes a day, it will take you very far versus an hour or two or 3 hours in the weekend. Nico, I hope that helps if you run into issues after trying to apply some of this to maybe be a little bit more regular in the practicing and to do smaller, more frequent practices versus long practices. If after trying that you are still running into issues, please send me another message and I'd be happy to follow up with you.