Hello all of you beautiful singers and teachers of singing. I hope everyone of you is surviving this lockdown and feeling hopeful that we will sooner or later be able to go back to a more familiar way of life. I don’t want to get into a long, running dissertation about what that life is going to look like, other than I do believe it is going to be a bit of a different world than what it was before Covid19. A world that forced us all inside to rest, watch lots of television, play games with friends on Zoom, connect with our families on a deeper level via Skype, Zoom or FaceTime, take online classes that we were putting off, learn a new skill or craft, and give or take voice lessons online. 

We are living in a unique time in history, and most certainly navigating uncharted waters. Day after day we are hearing reports about how this organization or that one is going to require even stricter standards of social distancing in order to “flatten the curve” and get back to business as usual.

Then there’s the bad news coming out daily of businesses closing their doors for good, as they are unable to weather the financial blow dealt to them from weeks of keeping doors closed and loss of income. We recently learned (in the theater community) the sad news that Shetler Studios, one of the oldest and most established rehearsal facilities in New York City, was closing their doors for good, a result of too much financial loss from the Covid19 lockdown. This is a major loss to the Broadway community, but likely not the last organization to close their doors in the coming months, unfortunately. And then last week, one of the most successful shows on Broadway, “Frozen” announced the show would not reopen when the lockdown is over. 

It’s enough to make anyone want to stay in bed, binge watch Netflix, eat or drink one’s sorrows away, and forget about staying in shape physically, much less vocally. Trust me, I feel you if this is what you are experiencing. In our household we’ve binge watched more shows than I care to count over the last few weeks. Thank goodness for all of these streaming platforms, what would we do without them? It’s almost as if they knew this was coming……..conspiracy theories abound! 

Taking Small Steps to Get Your Voice Back In Shape

A couple of years ago I embarked on a weight loss journey, having seen myself in a video and noticing that I looked 30 or more pounds overweight. After viewing the video, I was devastated and decided it was time to get serious about losing those extra pounds. I changed my diet, started adding more cardio and resistance training to my daily workout regimine, and eventually lost most of the added weight. I was determined to not let the Covid19 lockdown ruin my weight loss progress. Every day since the lock down, I have religiously worked out with a couple of online fitness trainers and have managed to keep those unwelcomed pounds from reappearing. As the weather has begun to warm up a bit, I’ve started biking as often as possible, and generally feel in good shape. My voice on the other hand is a different story :-(

Teaching Voice Lessons Does Not Keep A Voice in Top Shape

As a vocal coach who also performs regularly with wedding/cover bands, as well as being a section leader for my church choir, keeping my voice in top shape is a requirement in order to perform at my best, and be able to teach as much as 30 hours (or more) voice lessons a week. Before Covid19, vocalizing daily was a no brainer, something I literally woke up doing after having my first two cups of coffee. But then that all changed as the entire world came to a screeching halt. I’m sure I speak for many of us by saying that the lockdown was a blow to our emotional states and bodies. How do we go from being a fast paced society always on the go, to going nowhere except the grocery store for weeks on end? 

About half of our Voice Soaring Studios clients have been online for the past 6 years, and fortunately, most of our in-person students were happy to continue their voice lessons online. For this I am truly grateful. 

Now six weeks into the lockdown, some semblance of normalcy has returned, but the strength in my voice has not. Admittedly I began to lapse in my own daily vocal workout regimine, and even though I’m teaching voice lessons daily, my voice was becoming flabby, not as resonant as before, and even a little tight. So I decided it was time to sit down at the piano and start re-working my voice back to it’s peak performance state, even if there are no immediate performance dates on the horizon. 

Start Out With A Light Vocal Workout, Then Build Up

Getting my voice back into fighting shape has not been unlike going back to the gym after not going for several weeks. At first (I’ll refer to my voice as “the voice” in order not to use “I”, “my” or “me” so often) the voice felt heavy and weighted, slightly weak, and certainly not as responsive as before. There was not a lot of “ringing” resonance, and the high notes that were easily accessible only a couple of months ago, suddenly felt like I was lifting a two hundred pound weight just to sing anything above the staff like a G4.

In my 20 years of teaching voice, I’ve noticed the most common issue with mature voices like mine, is that the middle voice and lower passaggio becomes unbalanced very quickly from lack of regimented vocal workouts.  

This can affect the high notes in a profoundly negative way. An out of balance lower middle register will not have as much “ring” in the sound, which indicates a lack of cord closure, therefore the upper notes will have less resonance and can sound out of tune, breathy or even constricted.

As I mentioned earlier, I began going back to my morning vocal workouts a week ago starting with simple, easy vocal exercises. The first exercise will be either lip trills, tongue/lip trills (a studio favorite!) or rolled R’s on a descending and ascending 5 tone scale starting at C4. This is about as easy as it gets by gently beginning the process of re-gaining the strength in the voice. I will take this exercise down by ½ steps slowly descending into the chest register, and then ascending upward by ½ steps until reaching about Bb4 in a pure head voice mixture.

Next I will sing a small “ooh” (u) vowel using that same descending and ascending 5 tone scale on a glide. By using a glide between the 5th and the 1st and up rather than focusing on individual notes, you are literally giving your vocal cords a chance to stretch out without tension. I’ll take this same scale and descend into the lowest comfortable chest tone, and back up to the highest note in the head voice. 

Once the voice starts to free up, then I’ll add a 5 tone ascending and descending scale on the vowel sequence “ah eh ee oh ooh oh ah eh ee”. This is a favorite vowel sequence as it lines up the lower and upper passaggio very easily. Instead of descending, this is usually the first ascending scale I’ll sing starting around C3 and moving up through the registers. Most of my students love this scale and will often comment that it feels like a massage on their throat. 

Next I will sing an arpeggio 1-3-5-8-5-3-1 on the word Alleluia. This simple scale on a beautiful word actually begins the process of connecting the chest voice to the head voice by starting the scale around C3 with the “ah” vowel on 1-3 and the “le”on the 5th, the “lu” on the 8 and carrying that all the way down to “ia”. Then I will slowly take this scale up by ½ steps to about Bb4, B4 or C5 if the voice is feeling comfortable up there.

The last two exercises are a coin toss but I generally, if not always sing the two octave Voce Cuperto starting at low A2 natural on the vowel “ah”, and jumping up two octaves to the vowel “ooh” (u) before descending in in whole steps back to A2. I’ve written extensively about this wonderful exercise taught to me by Maestro David L. Jones, my longtime vocal coach, and it’s benefits for the voice. The exercise is featured prominently in my instructional program “Let Your Voice Soar” with explanations and demonstrations on how to sing it, as well as a practice track to work it into your own voice. I absolutely love this exercise as it lines up the voice from top to bottom with no noticeable breaks over a period of time, and releases the high voice like no other exercise I’ve ever used. 

Lastly I will use either the “Meow” or the “Siamo” exercises, both of which are built on a 5-8-5-3-1 scale. These two exercises both use the concept of starting with a closed “ee” vowel before opening up to an “ae” sound which opens the soft palate wide and releases the root of the tongue. I will take this exercise as high as I can in full voice without letting it flip to falsetto or too much in the mixed voice.

This entire process of vocalization can take anywhere from ½ an hour to 45 minutes depending on how the voice is feeling. Once the voice feels well lubricated and ready for action, I’ll begin singing easy songs that don’t require too much range or power. Then it is time to take a break and come back later on to sing through the bigger songs with a wider range in my repertory, followed by a 5-7 minute cool down. 

All of the exercises mentioned in this blog-post can be found in my instructional program “Let Your Voice Soar” which can be purchased for the ridiculously low price of $35.00 by heading over to my website:
www.voicesoaring.com.

Voice lessons online are available to all singers from 10-100 regardless of genre. Write to me at jeff@voicesoaring.com to book your first lesson.

Stay well, get some fresh air, eat good healthy foods, exercise your body and your voice, keep in touch with family and friends and most importantly, remain hopeful that on the other side of this, we just might be living in a better world! 

Happy singing everyone and LET YOUR VOICE SOAR!

Hello all of you beautiful singers and teachers of singing! This is my first blog post of 2020 and I wanted to start it off with a topic that I believe will lay the ground-work for a successful pathway to your complete, healthy voice, a voice that will last a lifetime, and one that others will enjoy listening to! 

How Well Do You Know Your Voice?

Ask yourself the above question and the following ones: How well do I know my voice? Do I know my voice well enough to know exactly what it’s going to be like on any given day? Is my technique reliable enough to get me through the bad days? 

We will come back to this question, but first I want to share a statement made by a wonderful singer I’ve been teaching for several years named Jonathon Moon. Jon and I were in the middle of his lesson and I stated that his voice sounded so much more consistent and was responding more reliably than it was a few years ago. Jon paused for a moment and said “What singers don’t talk about enough is normalizing the day to day practice of singing, because if you don’t know your voice, then you can’t deal with all the new things that come up like a recording session, a performance while your sick, or you have too much time between the last time you vocalized. So the point is to practice everyday to normalize the fact that, from one day to the next, your voice is going to be different. You may have seven different versions of your voice in seven different days, so normalizing that through daily practice is crucial”.

I asked Jon if I could use this quote because I felt it really hit the nail on the head when it comes to the question of “how well do you know your voice?”. By the way, I am blessed to have so many critical thinking singers in my voice studio. They often say things that blow me away when they’ve had one of those “a ha!” moments in a lesson or in their practice sessions and need to express their discovery out loud. When they share these moments, or epiphanies with me, I will often write them down and share them with other singers or voice teachers. After all, knowledge is power and must be shared! 

My Voice Is A Stranger To Me

When a singer comes into a lesson and says “My voice doesn’t feel like my voice”, or “my voice is being really weird, it won’t do what I want it to do”, I will then ask them how often they’ve practiced in the last week or so? Nine times out of ten they will say something to the effect of: “Well not much, I didn’t want to mess it up and just thought I would wait till I see you to figure out what is going on with it”. 

Trust me, I totally understand this and have been in the same situation where I thought “Humm, maybe I should wait to sing when I see David Jones (my voice teacher) to work out this vocal issue I’m having”. 

Finding Consistency With Your Voice

Over my many years of singing and teaching singing, I’ve come to understand that, unless there is some pathology on the vocal cords that require a laryngologist’s treatment or speech language practitioner’s intervention, or a throat doctor ordering complete voice rest, not vocalizing for days on end can cause the voice to lose elasticity, strength, onset-coordination, and beauty rapidly. The voice gets flabby just as our bodies do when we don’t exercise regularly. 

Not Going to the Gym vs Not Going to the Voice Studio

I love going to the gym regularly. There is something so incredibly satisfying to see my body get stronger over the years rather than lose muscle mass as I get older. It’s not always easy to get to the gym, especially as I am teaching singers online and in person at my New York and New Jersey studios, as well as having a church job as a tenor section leader, singing in a band and having a lovely long term relationship to attend to at home. But if I didn’t go to the gym regularly, I’m quite sure a few things would happen quickly. 

First, I would lose muscle mass rapidly. These days I have to workout 10 times harder to have even a semblance of my former “show body” (“show body” is the body you get from dancing and singing onstage for 8 shows a week. Your entire body lengthens and strengthens and your voice is strongest and most powerful it can be from that kind of regimen!). Once the muscle mass deteriorates, so does the coordination to be able to walk over to a weight rack and easily pick up two 35 pound dumbbells, walk them over to the incline bench, and knock out 3 to 4 sets of 12-15 reps of incline presses for the chest.   

There is a strong correlation between being consistent in the gym, and being consistent in your vocal practice sessions. It is absolutely crucial to allow yourself a block of time at least 5 times a week to do vocal exercises, and work through song repertory. Your vocalization time needs to be part of your daily routine to not only build your vocal stamina and learn songs, but to truly understand and get to know your voice better than anyone else. After all, it is your voice, and if it’s anything like my voice, it has all sorts of idiosyncrasies as well as many colors and sounds to paint beautiful aural pictures with through song. Voices are amazing and so very individual, and because of this, we need to spend time with our voices, alone and unencumbered by the noise of the world in order to truly understand it intimately. 

Always Be Prepared/Know Your Voice

Just when I think I’m about to retire from singing onstage, an opportunity comes along that challenges me to get back to daily practice and prepare for a performance. I have actually grown to love the process of preparing for a show, as it not only stimulates me emotionally, spiritually and physically, but also scares the hell out of me! There’s something motivational about being scared to fail in front of an audience! 

Just recently, I was invited to be a guest singer in an 80’s cover band called “Fast Forward”. My wonderful student Karen Masson is the lead singer of the band, and when she found out that the band I had been singing with for many years had dismantled, she asked me if I would like to perform with her band for an upcoming show. I was asked to sing 6 to 8 songs by the 80’s band Journey as well as some other hits from the “hair band” era. I’ve been singing songs by Journey since I was a young singer, but never 7 songs of this iconic rock group’s songs in a row, onstage, in front of an audience! I really had my work cut out for me as I prepared these songs for the first show which was only 4 weeks away. 

Practice, Practice, Practice/Know Your Voice

Everyday I would try to slice out a block of time to work on the songs whether it was at my New York studio between student’s voice lessons, or in my car driving to and from the gym, or at my home studio. 

At first, singing so many songs made famous by lead singer Steve Perry felt like lifting a heavy load, and I would literally have to sit down after running through just 4 of them back to back. With consistent work, I soon was able to get through all 7 songs without passing out or blowing a gasket, and a week later the entire set felt easier and less weighted. I knew that I had to keep my practice sessions going right up to my first rehearsal with the band. That rehearsal went very well and the band was happy with how the songs sounded. By showtime a few days later, I was ready and not very nervous at all because I had put the time into preparing for the performance, and the show was a big success! 

I learned so much from preparing the songs for the show which included: 

“Separate Ways”, “Lovin Touchin Squeezin”, “Faithfully”, “Stone In Love”, “Lights” and “Don’t Stop Believin”, and that was to be prepared well in advance of the actual show date. Preparing not only meant vocalizing and practicing everyday, but also preparing myself mentally by avoiding anything too stressful or taxing, getting plenty of sleep, avoiding foods that cause reflux, and drinking plenty of water. It also required that I had to listen to my body to make sure no unnecessary tension was creeping into my shoulders, neck and throat muscles. As the songs began to settle into my voice, I felt I had a greater understanding of how it worked than I have in many years. It felt like my voice and me were one! 

Singing Is A Daily Practice

In closing I hope you will take what I’ve written here and use it as a guidepost for knowing and understanding your voice and how it functions at it’s optimum best. Find a vocal coach who can help you build a strong, solid vocal technique that will allow your voice to grow in beauty, strength, resonance and power. If you can’t find a vocal coach in your area, I teach online to singers all around the world. It doesn’t matter what time zone you are in, we will find a time that works for you. If you are in the New York or New Jersey metropolitan area, I have studios in Midtown Manhattan and in West Orange, New Jersey. Check out my website:

www.voicesoaring.com to learn all that we offer at Voice Soaring Studios. Until next time, 

“KEEP SINGING AND LET YOUR VOICE SOAR!”

Hello all of you beautiful singers/teachers of singing. I hope all of you who celebrate Mother's Day had the chance to spend time with your mom, and if you didn't see her in person, called her to let her know how much you appreciate her. Moms are the foundational rocks of families and we should all say a collective "Thank you Mom!' to these special women in our lives.

I was thinking about how fast time goes by, as this is the time of year that many of my high school students are finishing up their last weeks of study with me before going off to college, university or conservatory. It is always a bitter sweet time of year as many of these students have been studying voice with me for many years.

One of these students holds a very special place in my heart because she was one of the first pre-teens I ever taught, and her name is Cinya Khan.

Her father, Mark Khan, called me up just over 9 years ago, and after introducing himself said, "Would you consider teaching my 9 year old daughter? I'm not sure if she is singing correctly and my wife and I want to make sure she doesn't hurt her voice because she sings almost non-stop all day long!"

Mr. Khan sent me a video of Cinya in a school talent show singing "Hey Soul Sister" by Train as she accompanied herself on guitar. The guitar was almost as big and she was, and I was immediately impressed by her tone, sense of rhythm and pitch. She was definitely singing by the seat of her pants without much technique, but the basic voice was there, and I immediately called Mr. Khan up and told him I would be honored to teach his daughter.

After a couple of years in voice lessons with me, we felt Cinya was ready to start recording some demos in a recording studio, which we filmed for YouTube. The recording engineer in those first sessions, Max Caselnova, was blown away by Cinya's maturity, musicality, phrasing, pitch, and sense of self, which belied her 11 years.

One of the my goals as her voice teacher was to make sure that she understood the importance of daily vocal workouts, and to always warm up before she started to sing songs. By the age of 14 her voice was starting to mature into a rich alto with a warm lower register, and a free, open upper register that could easily sail to high Eb 6.

When we were developing my instructional program "Let Your Voice Soar", I knew instantly that Cinya must be one of the four singers to demonstrate the exercises in the video portion of the program. The program has sold to singers all around the world since the release almost 5 years ago, and to this day singers who have purchased the program write me to ask "How is Cinya doing?"

Cinya's dad Mark is my graphic design artist, and he has created almost every single piece of art work associated with Voice Soaring Studios for 9 years. Several years ago Mark and I began encouraging Cinya to start writing her own songs. Reluctant at first, she soon became a prolific song writer and has written many songs over the last 4 years, any of which could be on the radio.

Cinya has remained consistent in vocal studies with me, and with a lot of encouragement from her family, friends, and us at Voice Soaring Studios, has developed into an artist that I know you will be hearing about for decades to come.

She recently became one of 12 finalists to win the National YoungArts Foundation Competition in Miami, Florida. Cinya was also accepted into the Berklee Conservatory of Music in Boston and will be headed there this Fall. We are beyond proud of our girl Cinya for not only having so many amazing accomplishments in her 18 years of life, but also for sticking to the program here at Voice Soaring Studios!

Check out her performance at the Young Arts Competition this year singing her original song "Finger Freedom".