Shake your head
Singing “no no” whilst shaking the head side to side will relax you and it will also show you if you are a tense singer. If you crack whilst doing this ‘easy’ exercise, you are squeezing your neck muscles to get notes. You don’t have to perform this exercise for very long; a three-note scale will suffice. This exercise is excellent for disengaging the neck muscles. If you have a tense neck, how can you possibly sing comfortably?
Larynx
Keep the larynx neutral. This is easier said than done, but if you push up to sing the high notes, so will your larynx. If the larynx is too high, the neck muscles will pop out and shortly the chords will disconnect, which makes that horrible crack sound. If the larynx is too low, ie. when you move the chin and head down to reach the very low notes, you are blocking off the trachea so there is no free flow of air. If there’s no free flow of air, the chords can’t open and close to create a tone. Keeping the larynx neutral is so important in developing a powerful, clear sound, but more importantly, a correctly placed larynx will prevent you from damaging your voice.
The larynx should remain neutral at all times when singing, no matter how high or low the notes are. The best advice to keep the larynx neutral is to change your thoughts towards singing. Instead of reaching up for the high notes, imagine that the sound is coming from your forehead, not your mouth. Take everything a little higher. Imagine the vocal chords are placed in your cheeks and not your throat. This might sound strange, but if you place everything higher, you won’t have to push up, because the voice is already there. So when you hit a high note, push the diaphragm down for support and power, and bring the note down the front of the face. Using your fingers to pull the note down helps to get you in the moment. Vice versa for when you’re singing low notes. When a note at the bottom of your range is approaching, again imagine the chords are at the cheeks, and as the pitch descends, move up the face so eventually the note feels like it is projecting from the forehead.
The swallow muscles
Formally known as the diagastric muscles, these little things are used when we swallow. Put you thumb on the squidgy bit under your chin and swallow. You feel the muscles come down? The reason that happens is because when we swallow we don’t want food to go down the ‘wrong hole’ – the trachea. That’s why sometimes when you eat you have a coughing fit. The swallow muscles haven’t come down to block off the airway. As you have probably guessed, we don’t ever want these muscles down when we’re singing (unless of course you need to swallow saliva.) When they do come down, the larynx pushes up (to get out of the way) and with a high larynx comes additional tension.
You will know if you use these diagastric muscles if you have a raspy voice after singing. To work on not using these muscles, you need to loosen the jaw and neck (as spoken about above) and move your placement higher, preferably to the cheeks and not have the voice feel as though it is coming from the mouth, but from the cheeks. It is amazing how much your voice will change if you think higher.
13