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They are not all equal or even reliable!

If you don’t know, you don’t know. but what do they know?

Verify your sources.

From where did their knowledge originate?

Older (and some newer) teachers, vocal coaches, and gurus are full of it.

They are full of misinformation and some is potentially harmful.

One vocal coach in Orlando, Florida told his students to yell and to yell often. Every ENT and speech therapist would tell you that can damage your voice. Why would a singer damage the voice on purpose?

Correct. There is no good reason.

The same vocal coach said that “the larynx goes up for high notes and down for low notes and that’s how it works.” The fact is, that is how it works incorrectly! Who would agree? Richard Miller, Seth Riggs, Roger Love, Greg Enriquez, Debra Bonner and many other successful vocal coaches. They are successful because they have students who are successful and because they do not lie or mislead students with false information, wrong information, or harmful information.

I have helped some former students of this very same Orlando vocal coach and saved them a lot of pain and strain.

One student I had, who was stylistically creative and unique, had the Orlando vocal coach recommended to her. The vocal coach was a rock singer. He didn’t understand style, other than rock. He told her that she “sang all around the melody, but not the melody.” How many R&B singers ad lib, improvise or do riffs and runs? What do jazz singers do? Ignorance is not bliss, when it is imposed on others.

When that student came to me, stage fright was eating her up. I helped her with that. I also could tell that she had what it took to be famous, but had that “trained out of her”, almost like she was lobotomized. Now she sounds bland and boring and works local gigs in a duo. As if that is not sad, in and of itself, her yelling vocal coach passed away. How many people did he harm?

The same coach had a student who later came to me. that student said that the vocal coach told him that he was fat, when he first met him. The young high school man was not obese by anyone’s standards, except for that vocal coach. The point is, why insult people like that? This was in the late 1990s, before things became so contentious.

My sources were some of the top vocal coaches in the U.S., 8 physicians, 2 speech therapists, The Center For Voice Disorders, and the aforementioned above.

Richard Miller was on the adjunct staff of the Cleveland Clinic’s Department Of Otolaryngology. Doctors must know the facts, or they cannot help anyone. Some vocal coaches deal in myths and catch phrases and they also won’t tell you that if you practice at all, you just might improve. If a vocal coach gives you bad information, it probably won’t be fatal, but it may be fatal to the life of your career.

The reliability of your sources is paramount. Computer viruses corrupt data, causing errors or worse. Bad information has corrupted the careers of many a singer.

1. Breathing.  Breathing is the answer to everything.  You want to take in all the air that you can hold and lookie here!  See that?  My stomach pokes out, so I fill up with air all the way down to there.  See?  Now look at my back, how it also poofs out, down low there.  See that?  The air goes there, too!  If your voice cracks, you are taking in too little air!  You have to push real hard, like a constipated dog, to get your voice to not crack!  Always sing from your diaphragm.  You can see it here working and I can feel it when I sneeze!  Once you find it, use it, because you will never be a pro if you don’t use it correctly.
2. You must place the sound into the mask.  That is the front of your face where your mouth and your nose are, but don’t let air come out through your nose, except when you sneeze, of course. How do you place your sound?  You just put it where it belongs!  Practice and it will come to you.  I promise.
3. To get the high notes, raise your eyebrows and get up on your tiptoes and the notes just fly out on their own.  Try it!  See how it works?  This is a good reason to avoid Botox, because you cannot raise your eyebrows if you paralyze your forehead muscles.  Think about it.  Do you want to look good or sound good?  You will have to make that choice!  Do you want wrinkles and a voice or no wrinkles and limited vocal range?
4. You must have a solid core, so work your abdominal muscles and also lie down on the floor.  No, the floor isn’t the thing.  Put a book on your abdomen and see if you can hold it there, or better still, flip it across the room, just using your abs.  Once you can hold a flag between your knees in a high wind, you will be on the road to stardom.
5. Blow a big piece of paper against a wall and see how many seconds you can hold it there before you pass out.  When I was your age, I could hold a full file cabinet against a wall by just breathing on it.  One time I blew a dent in one and had to pay for a new one.
6. To sing in tune, just hold one ear with a finger or a blue crayon and sing with a piano.  I didn’t know that pianos could sing until I heard one after having some good old-fashioned LSD and lit a candle.  If you can blow out a candle from twenty feet away, you probably talk too much.
7. If your low notes are weak, you might try some cigars.  I got my range to drop two octaves by having just one cigar a week.  I also lost all my high notes, but anyone who sings high is just obnoxious and annoying.  I had a nightmare once that I was stuck in an elevator with Mariah Carey.  All of a sudden the cables broke and eventually she stopped with the whistle tones.  It only fell an inch, so we were okay, but she was scared.
8. If you want to be a great singer, copy all the great singers.  Eat what they eat.  Live where they live.  Record yourself singing with them and duplicate the phrasing, the dynamics, and every single little and big nuance you can hear.  You might consider plastic surgery and sinus surgery to get the exact  same sound.  Singers copy singers.  Everyone knows that.  Monkey see, monkey do, so sing in the zoo!
9. Your posture greatly affects your singing.  Don’t move your chest when you inhale or exhale; just move your abdomen, like it is a bellows and you are trying to fan the flames hotter. 
10. Everybody who is a pro knows these little tips:

Singing is kind of like music, but it sounds mushy and out of control, compared to a harpsichord.  It’s best to wait until nighttime to sing, so that you don’t scare or scar the rooster or the pigs.  If you miss a note, get it next time.  Don’t worry about it.  If anyone compliments you, they are a liar.  Ignore them.  If anyone criticizes you, ignore them; they are a liar.  As a matter of fact, it is best to ignore everyone, to not be influenced adversely.  You either have it or you don’t.  No amount of practice or lessons will turn you into anything worth listening to.  If you were not born with it, just stop annoying people with your disgusting noise that you make!

Above Is A Parody, A Farce, A Hoax, and Bad Jokes.

It is all bogus and anyone in this century should know better, but ignorance and apathy are ubiquitous. Don’t get caught in the rain without an umbrella, fella!

A little anatomy, physics, acoustics, and modern vocal pedagogy have the facts which all serious singers should know.

Ignorance is not bliss, when you don’t know why you aren’t getting hired. The truth might set you free from unemployment.

If you’re a songwriter and a singer, read on.

What could happen if you don’t give a damn?

Everything or nothing at all.  Your choice.

Today is the best day to give yourself the freedom of expression without judgment.  Take out the trash first.

Preparation

1. If you feel determination and there is anger in it, you are in the wrong place.
2. If you feel determination and there is fear in it, you are in the wrong place.
3. If you feel determination and that you must prove yourself to somebody or anyone, you are in the wrong place.

Where is the right place?

It is a place of insouciance, but not solely that.

A strong component, insouciance is, and a necessary one, to have true freedom of expression.

How do we get into that state of mind?

You probably won’t experience a transformative and instant change of state, but you might.

If you do not, there are some steps you can take to arrive in this new place of insouciance.

It is a place without worry but is also a place where many positive things can exist including artistry, creativity, imagination, and the unmitigated unbridled highest and best use of your talent.

Being Forceful Is the Wrong Path

Letting go of tendencies and habits are required to be powerfully insouciant.

• You won’t compromise your standards by being insouciant.
• You won’t lower your sense of aesthetics.
• You won’t compromise with your artistic imagination.
• You will more fully express your true self.

The tendencies which have led you down the wrong path are:

• Judging others.
• Judging your artistic works as being bad.
• Judging your artistic works as being good.
• Thinking about who would like or not like your creation and why.
• Seeking perfection.
• Seeking to make a masterpiece.
• Seeking to be better than the rest of the world.
• Comparing your work to the work of others.

A famous compose once told me that “composing music is very lonely work”.  You may need to find the joy in the activity of creation.  Composers do not typically have critics and judges surrounding them as they work.  If you have the essence of any in your mind, write down their names on a little piece of paper and toss it in the trash.

Before beginning a single work, be sure that your mind is prepared.

Set your parameters of standards before beginning.

Look at your work as one of many thousands of works you will do, but not as the only one or the most important one.  

Remove perfectionism and take away the permission to judge yourself or your work.  You can no longer say that it is bad or good.  It is neither.  It is a work of art and art has latitudes.

Old bad habits are very creepy.

Old bad habits tend to creep back into your mind or your space.

When one comes around, show it to the door and close and lock the door.  It is not allowed anymore.

______________________________________________________

You will never be a critic and a great artist, without causing your art to suffer.  _____________________________________________________

If you habitually criticize others, you will have the idea that criticizing is a normal thing.  This opens some doors that need to be locked.

• You will think that criticism is normal.
• You will think that criticism is good.
• You will think that criticism is a strength.

Analysis Isn’t Criticism

You have your standards and you won’t compromise with them.  You know what is “good enough” and you work above that as a habit, but you still must not judge it.

Analysis is not judgement.

Separating analysis and critiquing a work can be tricky at first.

You know there are rules in music theory. You know that the rules in music theory vary from one era to another or from one style to another.  It’s not good or bad.  It is about style and form and function.

Today is the best day to give yourself the freedom of expression without judgment. 

Being insouciant does not mean that you don’t care, it means that you don’t worry. 

Worry can be as severe as what we call anxiety.  Anxiety is a feeling and may have many emotions attached to it, but it may not be the best place to be when composing music.  An exception could be if it were an appropriate emotion within a composition done to evoke anxiety of fear in the listener.

Let go of self-loathing, self-judgment, and the loathing of others and the judgment of others. 

Give yourself permission to be, to be yourself, and to do your composing with a clear mind.

Take each project as an experiment and as a learning experience and an opportunity to grow.

If you view writing as a practice, you will give yourself the necessary space to grow and to advance.

Keep the creepy creeps at bay and begin.

Such a horrible and politically incorrect word, the word ignorance !

This is about correctness and not about politics.  It’s the subject of anatomy.

Most vocal coaches I have had know little to nothing about anatomy.  Some have misunderstanding and misinformation that they pass on to their trusting clients, who sadly do not know any better.

As if that were not bad enough, what they spoke about was either invented or was revealing of their ignorance (that bad word, again).

Ignorance can mean to have ignored facts or to simply have not studied the facts.  When it is applied ignorance, fantasy may enter and confabulation or simply lying, to hide the ignorance.

Specifically, there are things which should be known but were either never taught or were never studied by some vocal coaches.  Is it negligence that things were never studied or learned, or was it purposely done? Either way, the result is the same. Singers are taught things that are not only incorrect, but are also potentially harmful.

Fortunately, there have been some very well and broadly educated pedagogues in the field of voice instruction.

The worst thing about ignorance of anatomy is that it can be dangerous and result in injuries to the vocal apparatus or can cause other deleterious effects.

Breathing And The Breath Apparatus

A vocal coach may tell you to “fill up down here”, as the coach pats the lower abdomen.   This means to put the air into your lower abdomen. 

Your lungs do not extend that far down into your body.  If you have air in your abdomen, according to the Yale University anatomy class I have done, you must immediately go into surgery to save your life.  That is reality.  Air does not go into your abdomen from breathing in.  The exception would be from injury to the lungs or intestines.

When coaches pat their lower abdomens, they also may push out on the muscles and are doing nothing more or les than potentially causing a pot belly on their bodies.

Cause and effect exist universally, but the cause of the abdomen protruding is the contraction of the diaphragm, which moves downward and causes a partial vacuum in the lungs and air is drawn in. 

As the diaphragm descends, it puts pressure on all the organs beneath it and they bulge, having no room to move downward, being enclosed by the pelvic bone and the pelvic floor.  Thing of a donut being smashed (cause) between two books and the circumference of it expands, as a result (effect).

Breathing Is Natural, But…

When you are born, one of the first things you do, and without thinking, is you breathe.  It is natural.  It is automatic.  It is done without thought.  Breathing is mostly involuntary, until the singer takes over the control of it.

When you change things from what is natural, it gets more difficult, but there must be control of the breath for the purposes of turning your body into a musical instrument, being a singer.

If you force your abdomen outward, you don’t gain any space for more air.  At the same time, if you force it to remain flat, you cannot get a full breath because the diaphragm will be inhibited from descending upon its contraction.

Your lungs are in your chest.  If you use the intercostal muscles, the ones between your ribs, to hold your chest in place and to not let it naturally expand, as the lungs inflate, you cannot and will not get a full breath, if and when you need one.

Under-breathing and over-breathing are not natural and can be problematic for singing.  The solution is simple.  Take in enough air to do the phrase.  A slight amount more is comfortable, but a slight amount less is not comfortable, and you can even feel oxygen-starved from under-breathing.

Keep it as simple as you can but be pragmatic and proactive. 

Participate.  Learn.  Practice.

Sing Like A Pro Or Get Off The Stage

This is something that you never want to hear!

I haven’t ever been booed off a stage, but I have seen a recording of that happening to people at The Apollo Theater. That’s evidence. It does happen.

Yeas ago, Chuck Barris had a show called The Gong Show, and if the performer was not liked, GONG! Exit!

Chuck had a net worth of 160 million dollars. His was the harbinger or predecessor of talent competition shows, even though his was not the first. It was the first with a gong, though.

Harsh? You bet it is!

An early kinder and gentler talent competition show was Ted Mack’s “Amateur Hour”.

More about competition shows later.

What Do Singers Want Most?

1. Instant gratification and immediate change.
2. To not have to practice and still to improve.
3. To be rich and famous (not all, but many).
4. To know they can improve rapidly as a singer.

Secrets About Vocal Coaches

1. Most vocal coaches of famous singers have usually helped them, but they did not cause their success. Most were famous before they sought a coach.
2. All vocal coaches are not the same and do have varying degrees of knowledge and expertise about what they are doing.  Some are clueless or worse.
3. Some vocal coaches can cause more harm than good, because they don’t know what they are doing.
4. Some singers will improve no matter what they practice. There is a limit to this, but practicing can help one to improve, especially if they never practiced before.

You can test your knowledge here.  It takes a little courage, but it is revealing.

The Test