6

Staking Claim to Middle

QUITE OFTEN when I work with a new student, the first lesson is a revelation. The first few exercises take the student right into middle, and the discovery is thrilling. My student Danielle, for example, initially experienced a lot of pressure at the top of chest voice, but when she learned what middle felt like, she was exuberant and left my office with her feet barely touching the ground.

When we met again two weeks later, she had a huge smile on her face. “I just had the best two weeks of my vocal life,” she told me. “Once you pointed me in the right direction, I had a fabulous, positive learning experience on my own.”

My experience as a teacher tells me that even when students are as confident as Danielle was, our second lesson together is crucial for their progress. That’s because the second time students work with me, they’ve tried on their own to imitate what they heard in lesson one, and they’ve had time to get into trouble.

If you’ve been doing your homework and practicing for a week, you, too, have had time to experience the pleasures and pitfalls of looking for middle voice. In this chapter I’d like to take you through some typical lesson two experiences and let you see how they compare with your own search for the middle way.

Too Much Chest

Danielle was very clear on the concept of making middle voice thick and strong, but she was so focused on that powerful sound that as she tried to get into middle, she wound up mixing in too much of the chest sound. (Listen to audio 24 on the website to hear what middle voice sounds like when it’s both too chesty and too heady.) Yes, she was in middle, but it was a middle overloaded with the lower resonances of chest. Trying to hold on to the thick chest sounds created way too much pressure as she moved toward higher notes.

When I explained that her middle was still too filled with chest qualities and that we needed to add a little more head to middle, she complied. But the second she did, she said, “Oh, I hate that! That can’t possibly be right. That’s not what I was doing—that’s head voice. It’s not middle anymore.”

You Can’t Judge by Feel Alone

Danielle was so skeptical that I played back a few moments of the recording we’d been making of the session. “If you’re really jumping from chest to head, you’ll hear a big break,” I told her. “So listen carefully, and tell me when you hear the gap.” Danielle was astonished to realize that the voice on the recording had gone beautifully from chest to middle without showing even the tiniest seam.

“Was that me?” she asked. “It felt like it was so much in my head that I thought it would sound completely like head voice.”

The reason the physical feeling didn’t match the voice, I explained, is that everything above chest voice feels as though it’s resonating so much higher in the body than chest; middle voice and head seem to be resonating in almost the same place. Fortunately, you don’t have to rely solely on what you’re sensing to figure out whether you’re in chest or head—you can use your ears. If you have any doubts about how you sound, make a recording to orient yourself. When you wonder if you’re really going from chest to middle to head or if you might be skipping from chest to head, pull out your phone, play the audio from the website, and record a set of scales as you sing with me. Then go back and listen for audible breaks and gaps as you move from low to high. Remember that the point is not to judge. You’re trying to determine where you are on the vocal map so you can find and stay on the path to middle.

Making Adjustments

Finding middle, I tell my students, is a little like being on the Yellow Brick Road. It curves to the left—too much chest. Then it curves to the right—too much head. But if you keep adjusting, looking for ways to relieve any pressure that builds as you ascend the scales, you’ll eventually wind up at the Emerald City meeting the Wizard, which I define as having the perfect blend of chest and head to form absolute middle.

Danielle was concerned about using too much head voice, but I reassured her that it’s perfectly acceptable for women to lean a bit toward head voice in the early stages of looking for middle, as long as there is not a huge break between chest and middle. Try it, listen, and adjust. And keep experimenting until you hit the smooth sound of middle.

Once we find middle and you spend a little time getting used to the way it sounds, we’ll dress it up to sound gorgeous. Right now, just get used to making middle with any sound necessary. Many times in the audio exercises I ask you to make funny sounds to guide the voice into a specific place. Please use every extra trick—or trigger, as I prefer to call it—I give you. Use the cry sound. Use the funny voices. And when I say make it sound funny, I mean really funny. When I say make it sound absurd, try it! As the cords and the body accept all of the new placements, they won’t need any extra help. But for now, go for it. The object here is to make the biggest and best changes in the shortest amount of time.

If you have a good ear and can match pitches on the piano (or the audio on the website), your ear will be your compass and let you know if you are veering to the left or right of middle. Even if you think you have a bad ear, and have trouble recognizing pitches, the best thing you can do is to keep listening to the exercises and singing along. You may be off 89 percent of the time, but every time you run through your scales again, you’ll be on target a little longer. Step one of this process is to listen carefully. Step two is to sing along. And step three is to record your voice to give yourself a frame of reference. You need to know how you’re doing—and with the objective ear of the tape recorder, you have the feedback that allows you to be your own best teacher.

“I Don’t Like the Way It Sounds”

Sometimes the sound and feeling of middle are so different from what you’ve grown accustomed to that hitting a perfect middle isn’t satisfying. It feels off somehow. My student Johnny, for example, found middle fairly easily, but he just didn’t like it.

Johnny had been to a lot of teachers before he met me, and he’d spent a lot of time focusing on his head voice. He’d grown up singing along with great artists like the Beach Boys and Smokey Robinson, and because he was a good imitator, he could soar with them. Some of his teachers believed, as many do, that there was no such thing as middle. They concentrated exclusively on chest and head voice, treating them as separate units that would come together later, with a seam that is known in Italian as the passaggio, or passage area. But Johnny, in his years of study, never learned to smooth out the seam until he met me.

Learning about middle undeniably got rid of the gap between chest and head, but Johnny’s first response to it was completely negative. It sounded strained and funny, he told me, and way too nasal. Middle shocked him with its brightness and its concentrated thickness. Compared with the light purity of head voice, this was a foreign animal, and as far as he was concerned, it was ugly. Not only that, he said, but he hated the way his voice was still breaking a bit.

Johnny was willing to bet money that he sounded terrible, but when I played back his voice for him, he was stunned. He couldn’t hear a break when he moved in and out of middle, though he was certain that he’d felt it. We played the recording again, and this time he had to admit that he didn’t sound nasal or strained at all. So what was the deal, he asked. He’d been so sure that he was way off the mark.

Once again, there was a disparity between how he felt and how he sounded. He assumed that because he felt a change in how he was producing his voice when he moved from chest to middle, we must have heard it. He was wrong. He figured that when he felt the resonance of his voice go into the nasal area, it must create a nasal sound. Wrong again. He insisted that it must be too harsh, because it felt so strong. Strike three.

Every vocal student learns that there’s a huge difference between the way the voice feels and the way it sounds. That’s why it’s so important at the beginning to record your voice and listen to it. Listen a lot. Listen to other people too. When you can truly listen carefully, you can detect and correct problems before they become ingrained. As I’ve said before, the biggest gift I can give you, and that you can give yourself, is the ability to take in what you’re hearing and to learn from it.

How the Pros Handle Middle

As you’re working with middle yourself, you should be pulling out all of your favorite CDs, MP3s, and old records and tuning in to a new aspect of the sounds you love—the technique of the singers. To get you started, let’s listen together to some of my favorites, old and new.

Whitney Houston. Whitney had an incredible instrument, with a rich, vibrant emotional quality that I love. But even her voice had a few problems. If you go back and listen to her hits, you’ll notice that as she approaches the top part of her chest voice, she sometimes builds up too much pressure. She gets louder and louder as she goes, and her vocal cords are bombarded with air. You can hear the strain and sense the tension building as she ascends. As she leaves chest on her way to middle or head, I think you’ll hear how the top of her voice just doesn’t match the bottom. The high end seems much too airy and light. Listen to her hit “Saving All My Love for You.” At the end of the song, she sings a final “for you,” and you can hear a marked difference between the sound of “for” and the sound of “you.” If she had total command of middle, they would sound like they were from the same family, rather than like estranged cousins.

This flaw in her technique took a heavy toll on her voice during the height of her career. She could never stay on tour long enough to get to all the fans who wanted to hear her live. She always had too many vocal problems. The cause: too much pressure at the top of chest voice.

If you want a modern-day example of someone who strains in a similar way, listen to Florence Welch of Florence + the Machine. There is simply too much pressure as she approaches the top part of her chest voice looking to get into middle. The result is similar to what Whitney struggled with. Florence wants to belt out all the higher chest-voice notes, but it has to be extremely hard for her to do without straining and losing her voice night after night.

Sting. Sing along with any of Sting’s hits and you’ll cover the whole range. He soars, even by tenor standards, and he keeps his voice strong without pressure as he moves from chest to middle to head. His transitions are smooth and seamless. He’s an excellent singer to imitate.

A more modern example of that type of middle could be someone like Bruno Mars. He is certainly a tenor and can sing all the high notes. But he does so in a way that makes the middle part of the range still sound like he’s low and speaking to you. When the notes are high and the tonal quality sounds low, like chest voice, that’s a great indication that you are in middle voice.

Steve Perry. In his prime, Steve, the lead singer of the classic rock group Journey, had fabulous vocal technique. In fact, I believe he had one of the best middle voices in rock music. He’s a perfect example of what we aim to do, moving from low to high with no breaks, equally strong at every part of his three-plus octaves of range. No matter how high he goes, he still sounds attached to chest voice. Steve’s a great person to imitate if you’re a tenor or wanna-be tenor. His middle is more than worth studying and emulating.

If you want to listen for middle voice, put on “Open Arms,” one of Journey’s most famous songs. Here’s how one line breaks down: “So now I” (all chest) “come to you” (middle) “with open arms” (middle).

Aretha Franklin. She’s a true diva, with a gorgeous voice that covers chest, middle, and head, completely connected at each seam. Listen, copy, and learn. When she goes swooping up to the high notes, she sounds like she never fully left chest voice. Her middle has a buzzy, nasal sound that is very easy to recognize and imitate. The top part of her range is not pretty and sweet. Instead, the middle she demonstrates sounds like it belongs to a person full of pain, longing, and struggle.

You can hear the same qualities in Jessie J. Her middle has a tonal ring very similar to Aretha’s. The bite and presence of the middle are very clear as Jessie navigates from very low to high notes.

Ol’ Blue Eyes. So let’s talk about Frank Sinatra. Frank managed to be the most recognizable voice in singing history outside classical music—and he used only chest voice. The crooning style he and Dean Martin and Tony Bennett refined was all chest-voice derivative. It was all about mirroring a cool, cigarette-smoking, Scotch-drinking image, and chest voice worked for that image and era because it’s so conversational. Singing in chest conveyed the idea that singing was easy, no sweat. Frank’s voice was great not because of where he was going in range but because of his phrasing. He had the ability to group words together to make people believe and feel what he was feeling and thinking. We’ll talk about phrasing in a later chapter. Meanwhile, aim at making your chest voice as strong as Sinatra’s—then add a great middle and head and see what happens.

Elvis. Elvis Presley spent 85 percent or more of his singing time in chest voice, but I believe he was a closet tenor, and occasionally he would hint at a bit of middle voice. His access to higher realms gave him more pretty overtones than you hear in Sinatra’s voice, and Elvis doesn’t sound like he’s running out of range when he hits his top notes. He could have had a great middle if he and I had met.

The point here is not to cast stones at famous artists. I’d just like to intrigue you with the idea of listening to the singers you enjoy with an ear to the techniques they’re using to produce the sounds you love. You’ll also begin to notice problems you’ve never noticed before. All voices are influenced by good and bad techniques, and no matter how incredible the instrument you were born with, it can still be easily damaged by strain and pressure. When you become aware of technique and how it affects the voices around you, you can refine your ear and listen more critically to your own voice—the one you can develop and change.

Still Can’t Find Middle?

How’s it going for you now? Many times, students come to me after they’ve been practicing at home and claim that they still can’t find the middle voice. If you aren’t clear about the difference between middle and chest, I’d like you to go back to the middle-voice demonstrations on the audio recordings (14 and 24). Can you hear the distinctive qualities of each part of the voice? Most people have no problem recognizing the differences between them, and that’s a great start. Then it’s time to look more closely at why you might not be able to reproduce the sounds you hear.

Let me reassure you that you’ll know middle when you hit it. It’s thick and edgy, and higher than chest voice. When you notice that you are high in the range, past where your break used to be, and that you are not straining to produce a large sound—you’re there. And if you don’t feel it, you probably haven’t hit middle yet. Chances are you’re still going from chest straight to head voice. And once you realize this, you need to go back to the exercises and try them again.

Without straining, don’t let the voice get so soft on top. Run down this familiar checklist, and keep going back to these points in your practice sessions:

Use your diaphragmatic breathing to help generate a stronger sound by allowing your abdomen to fall back in as you exhale, instead of constricting your stomach muscles to try to force the air out. Some years ago, when I taught classes at UCLA, I used to ask for a show of hands at the midway point of the term to find out who was still having trouble with middle. Most often, the reason the struggling students didn’t find middle was that they locked up their stomachs and didn’t give themselves an even flow of air to work with. It’s easy to get the cords to zip into the middle position, but until you consciously stop pushing, and stop treating breathing and singing as though they’re related to weight lifting, you can’t produce the middle sounds. The blockage produced by locked stomach muscles allows so much air pressure to build that there’s no chance that the cords can withstand it.

What does it feel like if you’re locking your stomach? As you move up the range, you’ll notice that you just don’t have enough air to make sounds. You’ll feel as though you’re trying to blow through a pinhole rather than having your whole throat to work with. For a graphic demonstration, take a straw and pinch it together in the middle. Now blow hard into one end. The pressure you feel is the same as the buildup you feel internally as air tries to get from the lungs to the vocal cords.

Most people start doing vocal exercises and immediately put breathing on the back burner. It’s not dramatic. It seems inconsequential. It’s invisible. But anytime you run into a wall with your vocal technique, the first place to go is back to your breathing exercises. Without the right amount of air, the cords are powerless to help you make beautiful sounds.

Check the position of your head. When I look at a piano keyboard, I see it as a horizontal object. It’s no more difficult for me to place my left hand all the way down on the bottom than it is for me to noodle around the middle keys or place my right hand near the top. All the notes are in the same horizontal plane. Your voice has a similar configuration, but a lot of inexperienced speakers and singers imagine that the notes they want to use, the sounds they want to make, are arrayed top to bottom like a piano turned on end.

To play a keyboard in that position, a person would have to lie down on the floor to reach the low notes and jump into the air to touch the high keys. And vocalists often believe that that’s what’s required to make sound. They lower their chins to their chests, thinking that’s where the low pitches are. Then they raise their heads to the sky, stretching their necks like giraffes eating leaves from a tall tree, as though this position will somehow help them hit the high notes. It just doesn’t work like that. And the pain in the neck that results is just one more source of strain that keeps them from gaining access to the middle. Use a small hand mirror as you do the exercises to check your chin. Keep it level, and let your breath and the sounds themselves do the work of taking your voice where it needs to go. I repeat: If you feel like Annie straining to sing “Tomorrow! Tomorrow! I love ya…,” you may not have a voice tomorrow. Getting rid of every source of strain is the way to achieve tremendous gain.

What are your shoulders doing? Has accessory breathing crept back in? To give yourself a memorable demonstration of how much effort it takes to involve your shoulders in your breathing, try lifting your shoulders to your ears and holding them there as you continue through an exercise. Exhausting, isn’t it. Let them drop to the proper position, and keep them there.

Use helpful tricks like the cry sound, and over exaggerate them.

Use flip-flopping to build on the sounds that are most comfortable for you. What’s flip-flopping? It’s a technique of substituting sounds that are easy for you in the vocal exercises for sounds that are difficult. There are a couple of ways to do this, and I suggest that you try them and see which way works for you, listening to the demonstrations on audio 25 on the website.

1. Substitute the sound you like for the syllable I’m singing on the audio example when you get to the high notes. In the one-octave set, we do a pattern of sounds that ends with a high note repeated four times. In a gug exercise, my student Ryan would sing gugs until he reached the repeated high notes. He’d sing the high notes as mums, which were easier for him.

2. Do a set of a syllable you like, then follow it with a set of one of the sounds that’s more difficult for you. Ryan would first do a set of exercises in which he substituted mums on all the high notes. Then he’d do a set of all gugs and a set of all mums. It’s easy to get a little confused with all this switching, and that’s part of what makes it effective. You trick your mind into thinking that your voice should be in middle, even when you’re making a sound that’s hard for you, because it gets harder to associate a particular sound with “high” or “difficult.” Your brain just wants to send you back to the low-stress feeling of releasing into middle—no matter what syllable you’re using.

Are you yelling as you get higher? Turn down the volume! Your vocal cords find it annoying to try to cope with your sound-level changes when you pour extra effort into high notes by getting louder. As you ascend the scales, aim for an even volume, and record yourself or ask a friend to listen to you if you’re not sure how you’re doing.

And finally, stop going from chest to head! It’s that difficult and that simple. Work harder.

When I tell you to work harder, by now you know that I don’t mean strain. I simply mean use all the energy necessary to achieve your goal. Some people are under the impression that in order to speak and sing without pressure, you need to keep your body completely relaxed. That is not 100 percent true. The body still needs to work hard to go from chest to middle to head, and it can work most efficiently and strongly if it’s not impaired by muscle tension and strain. You may think great speaking and singing happen to a body in slumber mode, but that’s not the case. Focus and intent and energy will make your voice sparkle, and without them, it will stay flat and lifeless.

So use your mind to help you. Stop telling yourself that you can’t find middle, and allow yourself to play, experiment, make funny sounds—even look a little foolish. Make a point of using the preceding checklist and the information in chapter 4 to be sure that you’re putting together all the elements that make for great sound. If you remember learning how to drive a stick shift, you know how much you had to think about all the components of shifting, using the clutch, and stopping before the actions became automatic. Learning to use your voice in a new way requires the same kind of concentration and coordination. And the more energy you put into the adventure of finding middle, the greater your rewards will be.

If You Want to Go Higher

I want to be sure that you master chest and middle voice before we spend more time with head voice. That’s why you won’t find a lot of head voice in many of the exercises. As far as I’m concerned, there’s so much potential for strain and pressure in trying to take the voice to its greatest heights that for 95 percent of us, it’s not worth the effort. When students are in front of me, I can monitor any unwanted pressure and help to alleviate it. So when I can’t be standing with you in person, I want to offer you only the safest exercises and ranges to play with. The exercises you’ve learned do cover almost three octaves. Done just as I’ve demonstrated them, they will give you a more connected, usable range than you ever dreamed of.

But for the small percentage of you who can and want to go higher in head voice, let’s discuss how to do it with the audios I’ve recorded for you. When the scale gets to its highest point, simply put the audio on pause and continue using the same syllables as you extend the exercise past the point where I left off, taking it up a half step at a time. Go as high as you can, keeping the same pattern and rhythm you used to begin with. As you reach your limit, start down the range again, until you reach the point where you paused the audio. Turn it back on and resume singing with me. Feel free to do this with any of the exercises. BUT DON’T STRAIN!

You may notice that if you spend a lot of time vocalizing on the high end of the scale, using a lot of middle and head voice, when you go back down to the bottom of chest voice, you may temporarily feel as though the bottom notes have evaporated. It may seem as though you’ve lost a little of the bottom range. This effect might be startling, but it’s quite normal. The vocal cords get used to being in a shorter position if you spend a great amount of time only on the high end of the scale. The effect is temporary. Your full low range will be back in a few minutes.

Please keep in mind that a lot of women have a false conception about head voice. You may have encountered teachers in the past who stressed it so much that you feel guilty when you’re not making that sound. Be sure you absorb all that chest and middle can offer before you become preoccupied with developing a very high head voice. Understand this: I have worked with many opera singers over the years, and I studied and performed operatic pieces for much of my first twenty years of singing. I teach opera singers the same way that I teach everyone else: everyone, even high operatic sopranos, starts with chest and middle before moving to head. Those lower parts of the range create the perfect foundation for a head voice that is full and strong, with powerful resonances. You must climb this ladder one step at a time, without skipping rungs and without neglecting any portion of your voice.

When the Going Gets Rough, Remember: It’s Worth It

We all want instant results, and my technique is faster than any I’ve encountered. But as I’ve pointed out, true mastery takes time. Keep your eyes on the prize, cherish your successes, and remember: when the going gets tough, the tough go to PRACTICE.

My client Sara had recently joined her church choir, not as a star, but as a happy member of the alto section. She’d grown up listening to gospel music, and she loved the powerful swoops and flights that fill it with such incredible joy. But she’d always thought that the ability to create those sounds belonged to superstar recording artists, not regular people. She was startled when she realized that the same richness was coming from soloists who were standing just five feet in front of her in church. It wasn’t just that these mere mortals could hit the high notes. It was that the quality and resonance of every note they sang was so even. The highs sounded just as thick as the lows. Every note, no matter where it was on the scale, rang like a crystal bell.

The question in her mind when she came to see me was: How do they do it? Could she develop that quality too? The beautiful and simple goal of our work together was to find out.

Sara had a lovely voice. In fact, she had two lovely voices. There was the gorgeous soprano she’d developed when her parents sent her to the local mom and pop vocal studio in her neighborhood, where they emphasized head voice. She’d been proud of being able to hit the heights, but as she got older, she realized that this kind of singing had its limits. If she used her trained head voice when she was hanging out with her friends and singing along to the radio, she sounded like a strange opera singer from some other century. It was pretty… embarrassing. So she did what most people do: she abandoned the high notes and began belting out everything in chest. It didn’t excite anyone, but she was happy being an alto. At least she sounded like she was from the same planet as the people around her.

By the time she came to me, her chest and head voices were two islands with a vast sea between them.

In our first session together, I showed Sara the exercises you’ve been working with, and in half an hour, she started to feel and hear and get a sense of the real middle voice. Sara struggled a little in the following weeks. She found middle, she had trouble connecting, middle got stronger again, and little by little it became a part of her voice that she could count on.

After Sara had worked with me for a time, she invited me to a concert at her church. As I watched, she stepped out from the chorus and sang a soaring, heart-filled solo. Maybe it was the day or the place, but at that moment both she and I felt ever so slightly closer to God.

It was the kind of hard-won miracle I see in my work every day. Patience, persistence, and practice will take you there too.