a pro art

4 VOCAL TECHNIQUE IS: “ A PRO – ART ” NAME_____________________________

A Audiate: Inner hearing or the ability to hear music inside your head. You can only sing what you can first hear in your head. Try this: Can you sing a familiar tune in your head without making any sound? Can you look at your song for class and sing every note in your head? Are some notes less clear or sure? If so, you still need to practice more until all notes are equally strong in your head. Can you hear the piano accompaniment in your head? Can you turn it into an orchestra? These are some of the ways people develop their ability to audiate. Singers talk about audiating in terms of “having a good ear” and they usually mean someone

who can hear music and remember it very accurately and very quickly. Having a weak ear may result in the phenomena we sometimes refer to as ‘tone deaf’. Often this is a problem of a lack of training for the ear. With enough practice everyone can match pitch, however, as with most abilities, we all lie on a spectrum from very good at something (TALENT) or not very good at something (REMEDIAL). I will evaluate your ability to Audiate and we will place an X on the spectrum below indicating where you are right now. Then, we will list ways to improve your abilities. Ability to AUDIATE: Extremely Good Ear Completely Untrained Ear (TALENTED) (REMEDIAL) Steps I can take to begin to improve my ability to AUDIATE: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

7 VOCAL TECHNIQUE IS: “ A PRO – ART ” NAME____________________________

P Posture is the ability to line up the muscles and skeleton so that the correct physiologic activities can happen in order to produce a free and resonant sound with the LEAST amount of effort and tension. It is important to remember that your muscles hold up your skeleton, not the other way around. The simplest way to line up posture is to have someone look at you from the side and determine if your ears are over your shoulders, which are over your hips, which are over your knees which are over your ankles. If they were to draw a line to connect these points on your body, it should be a straight line. A great deal of time is usually spent on fixing posture by finding the spots in your body where you ‘hold’ unnecessary tension, releasing that tension and creating a balanced alignment. At first this may not feel good in your body, especially if you have weak posture. I tend to align students’ posture from the feet up. DRAW a stick figure of your current posture below: Steps to improve my POSTURE: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.


R Respiration is the act of breathing for singing. You were born breathing correctly, but the tensions of life often result in changes to our breathing patterns. If you watch a baby or a pet sleeping you will see a wonderful example of a deep, easy breathing cycle. Our goal if for your breathing to feel as easy as it did when your were a baby. Your breathing should begin low in your body and your inhalation should be silent. If you hear a gasping sound when you breathe, the walls of your throat are tensing. When you inhale, you want to feel a sense of expansion in the lower ribs of your back and the lower abdominal muscles in your front. Once you begin using your air for singing, the ribs and abdominal muscles are energized but flexible to respond to the demands of singing. The muscles of your face, mouth, neck, chest, and arms should not look or be tense. Depending on the amount of muscle energy you generally have, you might need to use less or more energy to breathe correctly for singing. REMEMBER: All of these steps are cumulative. You must first establish balanced posture in order to be able to breathe well! My current breathing cycle has the following strengths and weaknesses: STRENGTHS WEAKNESSES

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5. 5. Steps I will take to begin to improve my RESPIRATION: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

17 VOCAL TECHNIQUE IS: “ A PRO – ART ” NAME_____________________________

O Onset is the moment your body creates sound. There are three kinds of onsets: 1. Airy - where too much air is pushed through the vocal folds. It sounds like Marilyn Monroe singing “Happy Birthday, Mister President”. 2. Glottal: where the vocal folds are banged together with too much force and 3. Coordinated: where the vocal folds come together cleanly and gently and there is no excess noise or junk in the sound. Good onsets result in little or no sensation in your throat, in fact, you begin to feel like the sound begins nowhere and everywhere at the same time. Once again balance is required between the air pressure, the muscle energy, and the correctly energized posture for good onsets to occur. Between inhalation and onset, you want to create a brief sensation of suspension in your body and throat. Offsets, or the moment your body ceases making sound, must also be monitored. Learn to stop singing by initiating a breath instead of collapsing or whomping the sound. REMEMBER: All of these steps are cumulative. You must first establish balanced posture and be able to breathe well in order to have clean, efficient onsets. My current ONSETS AND OFFSETS issues: ONSETS OFFSETS

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4. 4. Steps I will take to begin to improve my ONSETS and OFFSETS: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

20 VOCAL TECHNIQUE IS: “ A PRO – ART ” NAME_______________________

A Articulation is the act of learning to control the shape and quality of the tension in your articulators which are: jaw, tongue, lips, teeth, and spaces in your head: naso-pharynx, oro-parynx and laryngo-pharynx. Learning to control airflow with your respiratory muscles instead of the articulators is an important first step. Then our goal is to pronounce words correctly without creating unnecessary tension in your articulators. Issues of regional accents and speech impediments such as lisps will also be dealt with in this area. REMEMBER: All of these steps are cumulative. You must first establish balanced posture, to be able to breathe well, and use clean gentle onsets in order to have clean articulation of your vowels and consonants. My articulators have the following issues: Jaw Tongue Lips Teeth Naso-pharynx Oro-pharynx Larygo-pharynx Exercises I will do to begin to improve my ARTICULATION: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.


R Resonance can most simply be thought of as the ‘ring’ in your voice. You are familiar with this concept because we’ve experienced that it is more fun to sing in the bathroom where the sound bounces off the hard surfaces of the tile and sounds very loud. As a singer you must become skilled at learning to sing in your resonance. A resonator needs to be hollow and have an opening for the sound to escape. Therefore you will learn to maintain an open throat, to lift your soft palate and to learn to sing by ‘feel’ where various vibrations and sensations occur within the architecture of your body. This is how singers learn to make a sound that can project throughout an auditorium or over an orchestra. Different kinds of resonance are called for in different styles of music. When opera singers perform popular music it often sounds funny because their resonance is over produced for pop styles. Learning to identify the shapes of your articulators that work for different styles is part of becoming a skilled singer. When you sing in resonance you produce the maximum sound for the minimum effort. The ability to sing loud is mostly determined by the architecture and acoustics of your body, but most of us can learn to produce more sound easily by correctly singing in resonance. REMEMBER: All of these steps are cumulative. You must first establish balanced posture, breathe well, use clean and gentle onsets/offset and use the correct amount of tension for articulating vowels and consonants in order to be able to sing in resonance. My current issues with resonance:

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5. Steps I will take to begin to improve my RESONANCE: 1. 2. 3. 4.


T Technique is the act of combining all of the elements you have studied so far to reliably produce your healthiest, most efficient sound. As human animals, our bodies are constantly in a state of flux and we are affected by many factors in our daily world. As you begin to establish a technique you may become frustrated when you have a bad singing day, especially when the day before was a wonderful singing day. Learning to improve your technique is a process that takes time and requires that you have an outside set of ‘ears’, preferably a voice teacher who understands the working of the human voice. With a teacher’s help, you can steadily layer in the elements of a solid technique. Over time, one hopes that healthy habits form so that your voice ‘works’ because your posture, breathing, onsets, articulation and resonance work without requiring too much conscious thought. Remember when you first learned to drive? Every single action took thought and concentration: foot on brake, turn the key, adjust mirrors, look behind you, foot on gas pedal, etc. Now you handle the ‘technique’ of driving with very little conscious thought. Hopefully your singing will develop similarly. Keep in mind it will take years to develop a solid technique and occasional fine tuning will be required for life. But for now, take pride in the progress you have made in one semester to learn to sing. My current strengths and weaknesses with my technique: “A PRO-ART” STRENGTHS WEAKNESSES

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6. 6. Steps I will take to continue to improve my TECHNIQUE: (Remember: use it or lose it!) 1. 2. 3. 4.

a pro art

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