7

Making Your Speaking Voice Sing

HOW’S YOUR speaking voice? Are you noticing a difference in it yet? If you’ve been doing the exercises consistently, paying attention to the smoothness of your breathing and the position of your larynx, you’re probably noticing some positive changes in the way you speak. You’ve left a lot of pressure behind, and your voice should be stronger, less strained, easier to listen to. If that’s the case, congratulations! You’ve allowed the exercises to do exactly what they’re designed to do—fix your voice naturally, without any other special adjustments on your part.

The exercises are full of sounds that force the air and cords to work with each other in an optimal way through the whole range of your voice. Each time you do them, you remind the body how comfortable it feels to produce sound so efficiently and naturally. In fact, if you’ve spent several weeks faithfully practicing, you’ve already fixed 50 to 75 percent of the problems in your speaking voice. You’ve reshaped it, strengthened it, and drained stress and pressures from the body.

But you may not feel that way. You may be enjoying the singing you’re doing and happily venturing into middle voice, yet when you step away from your practice sessions, perhaps you find that you slip into the same problematic speaking voice you’d hoped to improve. Or you may be frustrated because you’re having a lot of trouble getting into middle voice. If you’re like some of my more pessimistic students, you may have decided that your singing is still downright pathetic—and worse, maybe you’re not aware of your speaking voice changing at all.

Why is this happening? The simple answer is that you’re still thinking of singing and speaking as two different, unrelated activities, and you still haven’t mastered the concept of speaking the way you sing.

In this chapter I’d like to help you bridge the gap between the way you sing your exercises and the way you speak. I’ll show you how to carry the sound qualities you’re discovering in the exercises into the strong, resonant speaking voice you’ve dreamed of.

I’ll be asking you to concentrate very specifically on a lot of small components, and it may seem overwhelming to have to think about what your vocal cords are doing as you make particular sounds, or what’s happening as you try to adjust your breathing, volume, and what seem like an endless number of pieces of a giant sound puzzle. Please stay with me. When we’re a little further along, all these little pieces will fit into a whole that requires no conscious thought. Your voice and body will relax into place, and everything will automatically come out right.

Remember, too, that you don’t have to have a flawless voice to have a voice that works well for you. A number of years ago I was helping a noted actor work on his singing voice. One day I noticed that when he spoke, he was restricting the air too much at the ends of his sentences and the resulting sound was a little gravelly, so I mentioned this and told him I thought we could make a few simple changes. He stopped me and pointed out that he had been the voice of God in a couple of the most famous biblical movies in history. I quickly agreed that if his voice was good enough for God, it was probably good enough for a successful actor as well—though we’d probably want to do a little work to ensure that God didn’t get hoarse.

The point is not perfection. Our goal is to find a speaking voice that expresses who you are and delivers your message effectively. Don’t feel compelled to fix everything. Just work on the sounds that get in your way, and keep what works.

It takes guts to stick with singing exercises, especially if being a singer isn’t your ultimate goal, and I applaud you for the work you’ve done so far. Now I’d like to challenge you to step up and claim the changes you’ve made in your voice, then let them come through in the way you speak. It’s easier than you think.

Making Chest Voice a Treasure Chest

First I’d like to reassure you: the quality of your singing, especially as you enter the higher end of the exercises, isn’t a proper gauge of how wonderful your speaking voice can sound. Finding middle will enable you to add gorgeous resonances to the words you speak, so I want you to keep aiming for it and playing with it when you practice.

But if you’ve made numerous tries to find middle but still haven’t gotten comfortable there, don’t give up—and don’t think your speaking voice isn’t improving just because you feel unsteady as you move higher in the exercises. Most of the sounds we use for speech reside, as I’ve mentioned, in chest. The fundamental question for speakers is: How is your chest voice doing? Does it feel thicker and stronger now? Are you doing diaphragmatic breathing and experiencing what it feels like to let your vocal cords vibrate powerfully with a smooth flow of air? Do you find that your larynx is staying more stationary, instead of rising to block your throat?

Let’s put middle voice aside for the moment and focus on using the improved chest voice you’ve gained with the exercises to help improve your everyday speech. I want you to get the gravelly, brassy, nasal, breathy, and otherwise irritating qualities out of your voice, once and for all. Not only do they detract from the message you want to deliver to your listeners, they’re also extremely harmful to your voice. For the health of your vocal cords—and this is vital for singers, by the way—you must take the stress-and strain-induced sounds out of the way you speak.

As we take these steps, what we’re really doing is allowing your voice to be as interesting as you are. Significant, powerful, and lasting change is well within your reach right now, as we use the basics you’ve been practicing to make your voice sparkle.

Updating the Diagnosis: How Do You Sound Now?

Let’s start by listening to your voice once more. Because you may not be aware of the way it has shifted over the period you’ve been practicing the basic exercises, I’d like you to go back to chapter 2 and quickly run through the diagnostic tests again. Record them, then compare them with the set of tests you did when we began working together. Are you noticing changes? What’s improved? Do any specific problems pop out? Below you’ll find combinations of exercises that you will use to adjust any qualities that still bother you. In the process of using the exercises consciously to change your speaking voice, you’ll be teaching yourself how to make a direct link between what you do when you sing and what happens when you speak. I promise you that you’ll be very pleased with what you hear. Speaking the way you sing is the key to vocal magic.

Still Too Much Air?

If the voice you heard on your progress recording was still too soft and wispy, I’d like you to concentrate on a few select sounds in the vocal exercises. Most helpful to you will be gug and goog. The gs at either end of those syllables are highly effective at restricting the flow of air to the cords, and both of the syllables allow your vocal cords to move into position and vibrate without being bombarded by too much air. Try these sounds now: return to audio 15 (male) or audio 16 (female) on the website and sing the first two exercises using goog, then gug. I’m betting that your singing has more thickness and power than what you heard yourself speaking on the initial recording—a better blend of cord and air.

When you do the exercise, be sure to sing it in a bigger-than-normal volume, the volume you’d use if you were trying to address someone one hundred feet away, instead of two feet away. Concentrate on how both goog and gug make your voice jump out.

Now go back and speak something—whatever’s on your mind (or just read the preceding paragraph if you like)—into your recorder. Look for a way to speak from the same place you just used to produce the googs and gugs. Try for the same volume, the same intensity and thickness. It’s helpful to flip-flop between words and sounds, and to make the speech a little singsongy at first, so that you might find yourself sing-speaking a phrase like “Gug, gug, this is how I say gug.” (You can hear a demonstration of this kind of flip-flopping on audio 26 on the website.) Keep trying until you feel that the exercise syllables and the words have exactly the same qualities. Your speech will be louder. Thicker. A lot less airy!

You’ll also get a lot of benefit from using the throaty sounds in the exercises—nay and nah. These two sounds are exceptionally good at making the vocal cords vibrate in a long, thick position. Go back and do the nay and nah sections of the general exercises. Let the exercise sounds reposition the way the air and cords are meeting, then slide immediately into speaking. Carry the sound of the short a into a spoken sentence, much as you did with the gug and goog sounds above. Sing a few nahs, then try a sentence like “I caaaaan nah nah nah do thaaaat.” Hold out the a sound, which will intensify the thickness. “I caaaan haaave thaaat.”

Most people sing the nay and nah exercises at a thick, strong volume because it’s so easy and pleasurable to do that. But when they speak, it’s common for them to pull their voices way in and turn down the volume. As well as making it seem that you’re afraid of being offensive or bothering someone, speaking at low volume has a direct effect on the speaking voice: it provides insufficient air to the cords for proper sound.

Make your speaking voice louder. I ask my students to do this dozens of times a day, and 90 percent of the time, even the most outgoing among them complain: “But I’m shouting now!” Please remember that speaking is supposed to use and energize the whole body. I’ve noticed that many people, especially those with very airy voices, are using about a cubic inch of their bodies, and a cubic centimeter of their energy when they talk. Great speaking is about grabbing hold of the words and sounds you want and directing them forcefully, but without pressure, out of the body. In chapter 11, I’ll show you some tricks for fine-tuning volume and ensuring that your sound is always rich and inviting. But for now just enjoy what it feels like to take up more space by getting louder.

Am I saying there’s no place for a soft voice? Of course not. If you’re in a romantic situation, for example, naturally you want to sound as approachable, alluring, and passionate as you feel—and shouting in your beloved’s ear is not going to do the trick. What lets the person you love, or your partner in an intense but hushed conversation, know you’re completely present, that you’re interested, and that you mean what you say? Your listener will hear it when every bit of your body is connected to the voice—and every word you speak is connected to true cord vibration. Listen to audio 27 on the website for a demonstration of the difference between airy whispering and a soft voice that is connected.

Practice infusing your speech with the vocal intensity that arises so naturally when you use gug, goog, nay, and nah. You’ll feel the airiness in your speaking voice being steadily replaced with a new, and appealing, presence. Your presence.

Smoothing Out the Gravel

There’s no mystery about what it takes to keep your sentences from ending on a rough, gravelly note. The cause and cure, as we’ve seen, is air. When you run out of air and keep on talking, your voice simply runs out of gas. Many of you have probably found that your voices become much smoother and much less likely to run aground on gravelly sounds when you’re working with diaphragmatic breathing. But it can be so easy to lose the connection between breathing and speaking that I’d like to reinforce some basics.

You know that as you breathe, if you put your hand over your stomach just above your belly button, your hand should move in smoothly as you exhale. If you keep your hand there when you’re talking to someone, the same smooth movement should be happening the entire time you speak. If your stomach is always making that inward motion when words are leaving your mouth, it’s very hard for airflow to be restricted. So let’s get back into breathing mode and see if you can experience what it feels and sounds like to eliminate the gravel from your voice.

Turn your full attention to your breath. Standing with your toes propped up on a book for optimum alignment of your body, breathe fully and deeply, keeping your chest and shoulders from rising. Feel the full extension of your lower stomach area and concentrate on freeing your breath so that you feel no pressure on either the inhale or the exhale. When your breathing feels smooth and effortless, pick up something and read aloud, or simply start talking about what you plan to do today. As you do this, keep your full, deep breathing pattern in place. Keep your hand on your stomach around the belly button and stay conscious of the way you’re bringing your stomach in as the words flow out. Anytime you’re speaking, your stomach should be moving in. When you pause during a sentence for a comma or a period, it will stop its inward motion for a moment, and when you resume, it continues its path back in until it’s time to take another breath. As long as this inward motion is happening, you will not hear the gravelly sound in your voice. Give yourself the experience of speaking with lots of air, using the hand on the stomach as a guide.

I’d also like you to pay close attention to your volume level. You can throw your voice immediately into a gravelly mode by pulling back the volume (without whispering). Doing that leaves the cords vibrating but without sufficient air, and causes them to hit each other roughly. What’s the proper volume for speaking? I encourage you to set your habitual volume at what I call the “listen to me” level—also known as the “It’s very important that you hear me” level and the “I’m not willing to be overlooked for another promotion” level. I don’t mean yelling. I’m talking about a volume that attaches importance to every word you say. After all, if it’s not important, why should you bother to speak it? And why should I listen?

It’s interesting to me that the same level of energy that makes a voice command attention and gives it the most interesting and appealing qualities is the level that’s required for superior sound production. It’s as though our voices are designed to be compelling, and listened to—if only we let them. Try speaking more loudly for even a day and see what happens to the way people respond to you. People who are used to turning down the radio and leaning in to hear you may need a little time to adjust to the new, sculpted voice you’ve built, but I know they’ll be energized by your new vocal energy.

Many of us are in the habit of letting our volume drop at the end of every sentence, and it’s no coincidence that this loud-to-soft pattern is so common. We’re getting soft not because we want to but because we’re running out of air. But with just a little practice and attention, you can easily build the strength and skill to set the volume and energy level of your sentences where you want it—and keep it there.

The exercise that’s most effective for correcting this problem is the octave jump. If you go back and listen to audio 22 (male) or audio 23 (female) on the website, you’ll hear how all through the exercise, I keep the same level of intensity. I’m not just hitting the high note and letting it peter out. The volume and strength of the sound are constant, and that’s precisely the quality you want to take with you when you leave the exercises and begin to speak.

Make the transition from the octave jump to speaking like this: Do the first section of the octave jump exercise (just the chest voice parts) using the gug sound. Practice until you feel you can hold the high notes with real power. Then substitute words. Sing: I-CAN-if-I-want. I-CAN-do-it-right. I-WANT-ev-’ry-thing. Now I’d like you to try speaking those words in the same way you sang them. Keep your voice strong and present through every word, and feel the power of your breath bringing each one to life. Listen to the demonstration on audio 28 to hear how this can sound.

Connecting your diaphragmatic breathing to speaking should feel smooth, as though you’re blowing out one big candle instead of puffing at ten small ones. Think of your sentences as a string of beads with breath flowing through them, connected—and each one significant. Speak each sentence as though there’s not a throwaway word in the bunch, and not a single syllable that you can afford to lose by allowing it to become soft or gravelly.

Turning a Brassy Voice to Silver

If you listen to your progress recording and still detect a touch of the irritating brassiness you heard me demonstrate on audio 7, it’s time to review what we’ve learned so far about the larynx. Brassiness is first and foremost a larynx problem. When your larynx rises as you speak, cutting off the flow of air, your voice loses all its warmth and richness, gaining, instead, a harsh, buzzy quality. You may not hear in your voice the extreme sounds I demonstrated—few of us do—but you may notice grating traces of brassiness. Listen carefully, and if you detect them, take heart—this condition is easily fixed.

Please go back to audio example 19 and practice the Yogi Bear voice that moves your larynx down. Start by adding the smallest of amounts of the demonstrated sound, and see if your larynx stops rising. If that does it… great! If not, keep adding more of this sound until the larynx stops rising. It sounds funny, but it’s highly effective. As you use the sound, you’re giving your larynx a few moments to find its most comfortable position. And after even a short period of talking like this, the larynx is ready to stay in its proper place. Make sure that you’re not creating too much pressure in the area right under your chin as you practice. Sometimes when I ask people to do the low-larynx exercises they tighten the muscles under the chin way too much, using them to pull the Adam’s apple down. Instead, I would like you to think more about lowering your Adam’s apple by lowering your tongue in your mouth. Not by pulling the tongue backward, but by placing the tongue lower in the mouth. Play with it.

As you practice your vocal exercises, keep your finger on your Adam’s apple, and when you feel your larynx rising, use the low-larynx sound to bring it down again. This low-larynx training should open up the back of your throat and take most of the brassiness away.

I’d also like you to use a small hand mirror to check the position of your mouth as you speak. Recite the alphabet and watch what the corners of your mouth are doing. When you reach letters like e and g, do you feel your mouth becoming wide, the corners flaring apart? Some people say e with a very wide smile, their eyes nearly closed and their cheeks high. I appreciate the energy and enthusiasm of that mouth position, but it doesn’t serve you well at all for speaking.

When you let the corners of your mouth go wide, you restrict the amount of resonating space inside your cheeks, which changes the way your voice sounds. Ideally, air is supposed to bounce around inside your mouth and cheeks, picking up resonances that make it sound rich and full. It’s a bit like what happens inside a big bass drum after you strike the top: the sound bounces around the interior space and is shaped by it. When you widen the corners of your mouth, it’s as though you’ve taken the sides of the drum away. The sound is flat, brassy, and tinny.

To correct the too-wide habit, try this: Put an index finger on either side of your mouth. Push your lips in just a bit, so they’re just slightly pursed. Now, start the alphabet again, or tell me about what you’re doing for dinner tonight, and as you speak, don’t let your lips go any wider than their starting position. Keep the corners of your mouth in.

I know you may believe that you have to stretch your lips wide to say e, but that’s not true. To prove that to yourself, say oo, and hold your lips in that position. Now say e. You can make the e sound with oo lips. And you can get out of the habit of making your lips so wide as you speak. The payoff for practicing with this is substantial: you’ll love the rich tones it adds to your voice, and you’ll notice how dramatically the brassiness fades.

Rx for a Too-Nasal Voice

When your voice sounds too nasal, the reason, as you might recall, lies in the amount of air flowing to the nose. Too much air and you will certainly sound nasal. Too little and you sound like Sylvester Stallone playing Rocky. Remember, as you listen to your progress recording and compare it with my demonstrations on audios 2 and 4 on the website, that you’re listening for traces of the sounds I’m demonstrating to the extreme. If you know you’re nasal but you can’t figure out which camp you fall into, experiment with both of the solutions below. Which accentuates the problem? Which seems to correct it? This is your chance to really learn about the factors that add particular flavors and colors to your voice.

The extreme example of the nasal sound is a direct result of a high larynx. When your larynx rises, the back part of the throat closes and directs too much air toward the nasal cavity. The pinched, unflattering tones that result disappear instantly when you lower the larynx using the low-larynx sound I discussed in detail in the previous section. Interestingly, though, it’s likely that you’ll be a little shocked by the new sounds you hear when the nasality is gone.

Quite often when I work with students, we target the nasal sound, fix it with a touch of low larynx, and then the student stops and says, “That sounds ridiculous!” The voice the student now hears seems to have way too much bass. What I hear, and what we’ve really created, is a healthy, harmonious blend of air moving above and below the soft palate. But it feels strange, as though it couldn’t be an improvement, and the cure seems much too fast. There’s got to be more to it than that.

Actually, there’s not. Your nasality is really fixed—that quickly. Be sure to record your voice speaking with this new larynx placement before you judge it too harshly. Compare it with the too-nasal voice on your progress recording and I think you’ll find that your voice sounds great.

What about the Rocky “stuffy nose” nasal sound? To get rid of it, you’ll need to allow more air to resonate above the soft palate, and that really means you’ll need to concentrate on the physical feeling of middle voice. Middle voice requires you to allow correct amounts of air above and below the soft palate, and every time you hit middle, you are moving away from the blocked, stuffy-nose sound. In the early stages of going to middle, a lot of students mistakenly think that they’re making their voices more nasal, but that’s not true. It’s just that they’re feeling more air vibrating around their noses—which is just what we need to fix the stuffy-nose nasal-sound problem. I can show you a test to see if you are actually letting too much air come through your nose. Pinch your nostrils closed and say the word “Hellooooooooo.” If you sound normal, you are in great shape, without extra nasality. However, if you sound blocked and funny, you are too nasal and will want to use the techniques above to fix that.

As you go through the general warm-up, concentrate on the one-octave and the octave-and-a-half exercises, which take you quickly and repeatedly toward middle. You’ll notice that the throaty nay and nah sounds, which help direct air above the soft palate, are especially effective. Pay attention to when you go to middle, and notice how the sound vibrates a bit behind your eyes and nose. That’s the feeling you’re looking for, and this is all the awareness you need to open up a stuffy, nasal voice. Use the flip-flopping technique I described earlier: Sing through an exercise until you feel the high sinus vibrations of middle voice, then stop and speak a few lines, trying to add a bit of that new sound quality to your speaking voice.

If You’re Still Too Husky

It’s unlikely that many of you will be having problems with the husky, Louis Armstrong voice at this point, since we’ve had so much practice regulating the flow of air to the vocal cords. That husky quality, which results from blasts of air causing the outer edges of the vocal cords to vibrate, probably began to disappear as soon as you tried your first exercises using goog and gug. The glottal stops produced by the gs are the perfect antidote to the rushing sound of air that hasn’t been slowed enough to be shaped by consonants.

If you’re still hearing traces of huskiness, go right back to goog and gug and let them continue to help moderate the flow of air to the cords. One more time, try to carry the richer, more controlled sound you hear in the exercises into your speaking voice by doing a few googs and gugs, then speaking with the same intensity. As your body and brain jump from exercise to speech, you’ll find that you begin to expect your speaking to sound like your singing—exactly the habit we’re working to develop.

You May Get Tired—But It Won’t Last Long

Making changes in the way you breathe and speak can feel strenuous at first. My student Evette told me that when she tried diaphragmatic breathing, she hated the “side effects”—it made her light-headed, and she felt as though she might pass out. She was also concerned because after even a small amount of practicing, her voice would give out, and she’d have to rest until she felt her vocal strength returning.

As Evette spoke, I noticed that her soft voice seemed tight and constricted, with a slightly nasal quality. Were these problems—the lack of strength, the light-headedness, and the soft, tight, nasal voice—related? Absolutely. And by looking at how Evette worked with her voice, you’ll begin to see how you can treat the voice as a whole instead of separating it into tiny parts with different instructions for each. Improving your voice goes beyond fixing specific flaws. It’s really a matter of strengthening the basic technique that supports and improves your entire voice.

Watching Evette do the basic warm-up, I noticed that she was still raising her chest and shoulders. To remedy that, I asked her to place her open palm on her upper chest area, several inches below her neck. As she inhaled, I told her to keep her hand still and not let it rise. (Doing this, instead of thinking specifically about keeping your chest and shoulders down, is a helpful trick when you’re learning diaphragmatic breathing.) As Evette accomplished this, the air very easily went lower in her body, and her breathing was much better.

But she still felt light-headed. I explained that the hyperventilation she was experiencing is normal as the body tries to get used to the increased air that proper diaphragmatic breathing provides. But if you don’t take deep breaths consistently, your system can’t regulate itself. To get past the dizzy feeling, you need to stick with the correct breathing until the body adapts. This should take no longer than a couple of days if you stop going back and forth between deep and shallow breathing. What’s really necessary here is consistency—twenty-four hours a day of proper breathing, regardless of your activity or mind-set.

Once Evette had proper amounts of air coming into her body, we needed to work on how much came out when she spoke. Remember that if you place your fingers directly in front of your mouth as you speak or sing, you should feel a solid stream of air. Evette did not; in fact, she could feel almost no air hitting her fingers at all. We remedied that by using the steps below, which I described earlier:

I told her to increase her volume by 500 percent to get a better balance of air and cord thickness, and we knew we’d hit it when she could feel a sizable amount of air against her fingers and hear a fuller, richer sound.

Next we used the low-larynx sound to correct the nasal tones in her voice. I spoke several words using the low-larynx sound and asked her to repeat them back to me with the same tonal quality. Her larynx responded instantly, because like many people, she didn’t have a serious high-larynx problem. Instead, she’d gotten so used to “speaking small” over the years that her throat tended to close up.

As soon as we opened up the back part of her throat with more air, more cord, and a lower larynx, a strong, normal-size voice popped out. But using that bigger voice was exhausting for her. After a few minutes of speaking that way, she felt as though she were losing her voice and getting hoarse. That was the combined effect of a couple of factors:

The larger amounts of air were a bit drying to her vocal cords, which needed more lubrication. I asked Evette to start carrying a water bottle with her and to drink from it constantly.

The thicker cord vibration was more physically taxing, and it also required a greater amount of mental concentration. Extra mental focus often tires the body because in trying so hard to make a particular sound, you can exhaust yourself emotionally, using huge amounts of energy. The solution is patience. Keep making the new sounds, but rest when you need to.

Evette’s homework was similar to the prescription I give many students: Concentrate on diaphragmatic breathing, using all the tricks and suggestions you’ve seen in this chapter and in chapter 3. Then, remember to maintain the same volume levels for singing and speaking. That doesn’t mean start singing more softly. It means speak as loudly as you sing when you practice. And finally, don’t give up. It took Evette three or four weeks to integrate these new habits into her life, but she persisted, and now she’s got the improved strength and stamina she deserves. You will too.

Taming the Tongue

The final element I’d like you to think about at this point is your tongue. I often find that my students do well with the exercises but inadvertently find themselves tripped up by the position of their tongue, something they’ve never given much thought to. The position of the tongue is crucial for great sound, but it’s also central to swallowing—and the swallowing functions can sometimes influence speech in negative ways.

Go ahead and swallow now without drinking. Notice where your tongue goes. You should feel it push up against the back part of your closed teeth. Its job in this position is to seal off the mouth when you swallow. As the front part of your tongue pushes forward to seal off the teeth, the back part of your tongue rises and closes the back part of the throat. Swallow again and look for that placement. This is very important, because if the tongue does this rising and closing motion while you are trying to make a sound, it will drastically constrict the back part of your throat and restrict the amount of free air that can exit.

As you speak, your tongue is supposed to stay pretty much resting at the bottom part of your mouth, with the tip practically touching the back side of your bottom teeth. It can move slightly away from the teeth, but only slightly. Practice saying the vowels with the tip of your tongue almost touching the back of your bottom teeth. I’ll bet many of you will notice that on certain letters your tongue wants to move back, and that’s a problem. When your tongue retreats, the back part almost always begins to rise and close off the air. Work with the vowels and try to get used to keeping the front part of your tongue closer to your teeth.

A Recipe for Success

With the work we’ve done here, you have the tools to use your vocal exercises, and your work with the larynx, breath, and tongue, to make dramatic improvements in the sound of your speaking voice. Keep recording yourself to monitor your progress, because your ear may take a while to catch up with and embrace the positive changes you’ve made.

Enjoy the new richness and energy in your voice, and be open to the new kinds of expression it leads you to. Knowing you sound better, you may want to speak up more, or even step into the spotlight. The investment you make in your voice is certain to reward you by energizing your whole life.

Coming chapters will give you the information you need to care for and fine-tune your instrument. Once that’s done, we’ll work on adding even more interest, variety, warmth, and color to your strong, healthy voice. I want you to leave monotone behind, and I’ll show you how to use your voice dynamically to capture and keep your listeners enthralled. Everything builds on the basics you’ve learned here. They’re the springboard to vocal mastery.