Ellie here! I work with a veritable plethora of pro singers, from rock and pop superstars (I sh*t you not) to small venue singers like jazz, blues, and a cantor or two (who, even if they don’t get paid, sing enough to be considered a pro for all intents and purposes aside from paying the rent)
When I get a new pro student who hasn’t trained with me, I see a number of things that are very similar generally – and this includes the Metropolitan Opera singers who come in intermittently. These issues do not cause the singer to suck and they don’t mean the training wasn’t good, but just when you are playing a lot of shows and not checking in with your vocal teachers, you kinda drift because you start to just try to find a way to quickly solve the problem which often would not be the way your singing teacher would solve them. It’s like my nieghbour’s cousin in Wiggins Mississippi was recently visiting and had engine trouble. Which he solved by duct-taping his engine together. Did it work? Why, yes it did! Was it what his mechanic woulda done? I suppose that depends on the mechanic :D. Likewise the solutions pro singers often develope involve tension and pro singers are prone to:
- Having “bad” breathing – tight and not as useful as it could be.
- Having “bad” breath support. Breath support is your lifeline when you sing hard material and the tension in the breath becomes misdirected breath support so you can be working hard but going against your body instead of helping it.
- Having vocal strain – the voice is a delicate balance and coming off that balance impedes you resonance a little. Over time that becomes a lot as you keep trying to make it happen.
- Singing isn’t as fun. One of the great things about singing is the fact that the breath activates a nerve called the Vagus nerve which, when activated, gives you a feeling of well-being kinda like a high. If your breath is tight this nerve won’t be activated so you don’t get as good of a “singer’s high”
This is not to say that these are the problems everyone comes in to solve – and we can certainly work on what you want – however, these issues generally are present in most pro singers.
In addition to giving you back you balance, I like to also work on a deeper breath than you probably learned. Most of us learned how to breath as a singer by being told to push the stomach out in front. As we got better, we may have been told about “back breathing” (breathing into the back lower ribs) IF WE WERE LUCKY. However, I want you to take a breath just now like you are going to sing. Really do this. I’ll wait.
OK while you have that breath, notice how tense your butt is. With your butt that tense, your diaphragm can’t lower as much. Breathing is not a uni-directional thing. It’s like an all over thing and that includes down *through* your pelvic cage to what I like to call your “situation”. Does your Situation lower when you inhale? If not, that’s a tight breath and – even if you are singing sold out shows in coliseums (which some of my clients do), this tension is still prone to happen to a singer.
Another example is we are told not to move our upper chest and shoulders when we learn to breath. As singers, we carry this through our singing career and the chest gets tighter and tighter. However, a natural breath includes a lot of movement most singers don’t know is going on. For instance, the spine between the shoulder-blades moves backwards on the inhale and then returns to a more forward position as you exhale. This might be hard to understand in you waking hours when you’re all stressed out. If you take your big Singing Breath again for me now….you’ll maybe notice you’re holding your shoulderblades tightly – some people can’t notice it. If you didn’t, when you go to bed tonight and are totally drifting off to sleep, notice this movement. This is the feeling of a natural breath and, to my knowledge, no vocal studio teaches this except us. There is of course more that’s better done in person, and this breathing will massage your vagus nerve better than “stomach” or even “stomach and back” breathing.
With pro singers, too, they have generally built so much muscle memory around being tight in their breath and technique that it is very hard for them to let it go – harder than it is for beginners and it takes longer, generally. The reason is pro singers are so used to getting the job done at any cost – whatever they hafta do to make it work before showtime – that they prioritize the outcome. That might sound normal – and it is – but to learn new techniques, you have to let go of the idea that you’ll sound awesome when you’re trying the new stuff; you have to prioritize the method at first. The reason is you are fighting years of muscle memory and we are attempting to put down new muscle memory you can access when you sing a show. But at first you have to build that muscle memory brick by brick and “throw away” the outcome. Ironically, when you are able to do this – and it’s an emotionally uncomfortable thing to do – you sound better. But if you WANT to sound better and prioritize that, then you don’t. Yes, Grasshopper. I know it’s heady, but you know the basics of singing. This is like a more advanced stage where you are refining and, IMO, where you’ll make the most progress with not only your sound but also with making singing easier and more fun.