Learn
How to Sing
Perfectly in Tune!
YOUR
REAL VOICE
The Daily Tip Sign
Up
Seven
Secrets Course
The
Emotions Course
About
Us
The
Daily Tip Archive
Main Page
YOUR REAL VOICE
Archive Main Page |
YOUR
REAL VOICE - the vocal ezine for real people
February 5, 2006
#19
FEATURE EDITORIAL
What Is That
Dog-Collar on My Neck?
OK, so it's a strange title, but it feels like a real thing
sometimes. What am I talking about, and what does a dog-collar
have to do with singing? I'm talking about what is an experience
that most singers have, but few are able to identify or stop once it
starts. It is what I call the Goofy Voodoo, and it is one of the
most frustrating, and yet eventually revealing, parts of singing that
any of us can explore. The Goofy Voodoo is all the unconscious or
conscious thoughts, worries, feelings and sometimes dread that take
over the throat and manifest physically during singing. In my
experience, it feels like I'm wearing a tight dog-collar that restricts
my throat and makes everything physically difficult while I sing.
It is all completely thought-based and emotionally driven, and it
interferes tremendously with the voice and any vocal technique a singer
may have.
Before I started studying vocal technique, when the tightness would
happen, I used to think that if I just worked harder while singing, I
could somehow power my way through the tension or sing louder and still
get the voice out, particularly in my high notes. Once I began
singing lessons, and the dog-collar came back sometimes, I
thought it was just my bad technique. It wasn't until voice
teacher number 2 actually explained it to me that it began to make
sense as an emotional phenomenon. When I began to explore
the emotional side of the physical issue, that made everything clear,
and not only helped me resolve it for myself, and eventually my
students, but gave me some of the greatest insights I've ever had into
real performance issues and what it truly means to be "present" during
a song. Ah, what goes on in that throat.....
So what really is the Goofy Voodoo. It is the physical experience
of your thoughts and emotions on your throat while you sing, and
it is never a good thing. Think about a particularly difficult
passage in a song, one that scares you or makes you jittery and nervous
to sing because you are worried about the voice and how you will sound
singing that part. As soon as you start thinking about that part
of the song, your throat constricts, your air cuts off, your chest
tightens and the muscles on the side of your neck begin to tense.
Your tongue constricts in your throat and pulls on your larynx, all
while you begin to worry more about what will happen when you have to
sing the hard part, and as you approach the difficult passage, it
becomes increasingly difficult to sing at all. Just when you need
your voice to be at its best, it's at its worst, and you have no idea
how to undo it. Feel familiar at all?
How does this all happen? It's a relatively simple phenomenon even
though it feels like a complex mystery while it's happening.
Basically, your thoughts lead to feelings which you experience
physically in your body. The more intense the thought, the more
intense the physical experience of it is. Emotions and body
energy are your nervous system's way of translating and expressing your
thoughts. Take crying, for instance. If you have a
particularly intense thought, and begin to cry, you then have an
intense physical experience that results from your originally upsetting
thought. Your thoughts DO show results in your body, and since
for singers, our instrument is our body, any thought we have has the
potential for great or disastrous results in our singing.
What makes all of this even more difficult to untangle is how
UNCONSCIOUS it all is. This is the part I call your "news
crawler." Think CNN or any of the TV news networks that run the
constant stream of news across the bottom of the screen from right to
left as the program is going on. We may all see the news crawler,
but we mentally jump back and forth between paying attention to the
crawler and actively watching and listening to the program going on
above it. We only jump from the program to the crawler when
something grabs our attention and shifts it to the words scrolling
below. It is completely subconscious while it's happening.
That is, until we learn to focus on it. Until you have trained
yourself to examine your own thinking, especially while your are
singing, it can be tricky to catch it. I often find that during a
students lesson, if I speak their thoughts out loud to them, they begin
to notice the thoughts going on for themselves.
Listen for thoughts in your own head conversation like "Oh no, here
comes that note again" or "I know I'm going to have that same problem
again once I get to that part of the song" or "what happens if someone
hears me singing" or any of a number of emotionally-charged thoughts
that are creeping around in your mind while you are
singing. NOTICING you are having the thoughts is the first
step in beating the Goofy Voodoo! You have to notice the thought
to begin to unravel the physical effects on your throat. Once you
notice the thought, and even say it out loud, you begin to undo the
subconscious physical grip it has on your voice.
So here is the homework/challenge for the next two weeks: pick a
song to work on that just slightly scares you. If you know one
already, but it still has spots in it that make you nervous, that's
fine. Any song that you would be nervous being heard singing will
work. Before you try to sing the song, write down every single
thought you have about singing it, particularly the negative
ones. If you don't know what your thoughts about it are, consider
why the song may slightly scare you. You may even be able to
speak them out loud immediately if the song really triggers you.
Write down every single thought you have about the song, and then read
the thoughts OUT LOUD to yourself. You need to hear the thoughts
in your own speaking voice to begin to recognize them and begin the
process of eliminating them. By speaking the thoughts out loud,
it is almost as if you are exposing them to light and letting them
evaporate. The more you acknowledge the thoughts as being there,
the sooner they can go away. I suggest you read the list out loud
until it sounds boring and dull to you, as though the thoughts are just
there, but not really yours. THEN put the song on and sing
it. Notice what happens to your thinking and your voice.
You may be surprised.......
Next time, we will continue with what to do with all of these thoughts
and how to clean them out of your throat and your song while you are
singing it. I'd love to read your results! Email me at
info@sing-in-tune.com and let me know what happens as a result of
making your thought list and doing the exercise.
YOUR
REAL VOICE is the best vocal e-zine for real people! It
is a
FREE
biweekly newsletter that is jam-packed with hot stuff on all
things vocal, no matter what styles of music you are into. If you
would like to sign up for this newsletter, here is the
link to the sign up page.
Contact Athena by e-mail at info@sing-in-tune.com
or learn how to sing
perfectly in tune at her web site at www.Sing-In-Tune.com
|