Nature gave us our voices for more than one reason. 1) The first and foremost function of the vocal folds is to protect our lungs from foreign materials. If you have ever done what your mother asked you to not do, and talked while eating, you may have gotten a particle of food trapped in […]

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Old Wisdom The teachers of the Old Italian School had a tradition that a little practice every day always provides superior results to a lot of practice sporadically.  While this rule applies to all musicians, it is especially true for singers. Singing uses the entire autonomic neuro-musculor system. There are no keys to press. There are […]

Let’s look at a few facts here: Popular music is almost always pitch corrected, tempo corrected and dynamically compressed into a brick wall of sound. Dynamics, phrasing and subtly are impossible under those conditions. Young listeners “learn” what is “good” about music by listening to recordings. These young singers, when they hear an actual live […]

When you first begin to build your singing technique, you often get the fastest and best results when you work with the different parts of your voice in isolation. This means being given various technical exercises by a well-qualified teacher in order to find the necessary muscle coordination. The goal is for you to produces […]

Here is a post I wrote for the Institute for Vocal Advancement’s blog: Today I’ll be discussing how vowels work to smooth out the bridges of the voice. My first 8 years of vocal training was with a teacher who specialized in the “Caesari Method.”  While I don’t agree with everything Caesari has ever written, there […]

Throw a rock in any direction, and you are bound to hit a voice teacher. They are everywhere nowadays, each one peddling their own brand of pedagogy. I am simultaneously amused and dismayed by the large body of ad copy on the Internet promoting the latest “new and revolutionary method” which will supposedly make one […]

There are a LOT of voice teachers in this world. In fact, it seem as though there are more people teaching singing than ever before. I have had the opportunity, in my 13 years of professional teaching experience, to familiarize myself with many teachers of many different techniques and styles of singing. There are plenty […]

Many students of singing have encountered teachers who ask them to “place” the vocalized tone (meaning direct the vocal resonance to some specific area of the body). Some teachers require that the voice be placed “well forward in the masque,” “between the eyeballs,” “floating above the back of the tongue like a ball on a […]

There are two different sets of laryngeal muscles, the inner (or “intrinsic”) and the outer (or “extrinsic”) muscles. The inner muscles govern processes such as the adduction and abduction (bringing together and separating) of the vocal folds, the changing of the shape of the vocal folds, and the increase and decrease of the tension along […]