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Going Big When You Sing

OVER THE past few years, movies with singing at their core have gained popularity and prestige. These aren’t the “Hey, kids, let’s put on a show” vehicles of the past. Though there are still musicals out there (Frozen, anyone?), the best of these films have been character studies of people whose lives revolve around music.

Because the character’s the thing, directors have looked for top-notch actors who can also sing—or, more likely, actors willing to learn to sing. As a result, I’ve had the opportunity to work with brilliant performers with little or no singing experience playing musicians whose vocals and stage presence are crucial to making a film believable.

You may never be in the position of Joaquin Phoenix or Reese Witherspoon, nonprofessional singers who had to step up to play the country music icons Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash in Walk the Line. But the same insights I shared with them about working in front of a band, and the process we used to go from zero to “legend,” can give you big advantages when you step into a challenging singing opportunity or need to be larger than life to stand out.

The Basics

The first time I meet a nonsinger who’s preparing for a musical role, we don’t go near the songs that person will be working on. If I have access to the actor for several weeks, we’ll spend the first week on technique, beginning with breathing, then mastering chest, middle, and head voice and vibrato.

When actors walk in to learn to sing, like everyone, they have all the sounds they’ve made and heard in their lives stored in their memories. They’re used to the sounds they make all the time, and they tend to stick to them. So the first thing I do is give them vocal exercises they’ve never done before. The patterns of the exercises are varied and jump all over the piano, and I always choose one that’s far out of the range of the sounds they usually make. Soon they’re out of their comfort zone, and they have their first glimpse of a whole new universe. I most often start with the octave jump exercise (refer to audio 22 for men and 23 for women on the website). It forces them to go very low and high in a short time and requires them to sustain (hold out) the top note. This not only requires a good ear, but also takes stamina, breath control, and a great deal of focus.

As these actors learn to breathe differently and handle volume differently, the way you’ve done by working through the exercises in this book, they can create a whole new set of sounds, and their brains begin to see that their voices are much “bigger” than what they thought was possible—louder, higher, and way more varied. Even if I have very limited time with my actors, I always show them how to lower the larynx. This, as you’ve experienced, opens up the back part of the throat, which helps them produce sounds with less tension, so their voices become thicker and stronger. (If you’re inspired to try it again, go to audio 8 on the website.)

Joaquin had already spent hundreds of hours listening to Johnny Cash and watching videos of his performances. He had a solid imitation of Cash’s speaking voice before we started working, and he knew what kind of facial contortions made his face resemble the Man in Black. But he’d spent very little time trying to figure out what notes he could or couldn’t sing—that kind of analyzing wasn’t part of his skill set. He was a true beginner. People who grow up singing pick up at least some technique by imitating other singers. But if, like Joaquin, you haven’t done that, you’ve got a lot to learn.

So keep in mind that every time you hear Joaquin Phoenix sing in the film, you’re listening to the result of a recently learned technique. I’d say that’s pretty heartening to anyone who feels as though he or she is starting from scratch.

Taking a Higher Voice Low

Once we found Joaquin’s voice, we realized he was more of a tenor, born with a high instrument—which is not what Johnny Cash is known for (just listen to “Daddy Sang Bass”). Joaquin would have to learn to get past the obstacles standing between him and the deeper sounds he needed. Like most people, he tended to go airy when he tried to go low because he literally ran out of vocal cord length, like a guitar player who runs out of string. To sing super-low notes, you need the vocal cords to go to a very long and thick position. Remember, the main job of the cords is to act like a gate and hold back excess air. In the low part of the range, there is a lot of air coming through the cords, and if you weren’t born with a low voice, or haven’t practiced for years to deal with all of that extra air, the cords simply can’t stop enough of it from getting out to make a rich sound. As a result, your sound peters out down at the bottom of your range, because you’re all air and no cord.

To perfect the Cash voice and get strong low notes, I had to teach Joaquin how to engage more cord. The trick we used was to go from the airy sound to an edgy one (listen to audio 33 on the website to hear this), which makes the cord vibrate more and also makes the cord longer.

Then we had to approach the many songs in the movie, which was a two-step process. When I’m teaching actors to sing, I first get them proficient at doing my vocal exercises, because that’s how I can control the vocal cords and sounds. Then I help them make the transition from exercise sounds to the actual words they need to sing for the song, project, or film. This two-step idea is not just for actors. Everyone I teach has to be guided through moving from exercises to actual words and songs. It’s the difference between understanding something and applying it.

If Joaquin has to sing the part of the song that goes, “Because you’re mine, I walk the line,” I give him the exact melody to sing, but I have him do it with an exercise sound like gug. So just as the original melody goes, “Because you’re mine, I walk the line,” I have him sing:

“Gug (be) gug (cause) gug (you’re) gug (mine)… gug (I) gug (walk) gug (the) gug (line).”

When I do this, I control the position of the vocal cords and the way the air moves through them. When Joaquin tried the actual lyrics first, he couldn’t hit all the low notes because there was just too much air coming out that low in the range. I chose the gug sound because the g acts as what’s called a glottal stop, momentarily sending less air to the cords, so they can come together and make the low pitches louder and stronger.

When Joaquin sounded good with the exercise sound, we would flip-flop back and forth between the real words and the exercise ones. After some practice, he could substitute the lyrics of the songs for the gugs and make them sound low and powerful.

We didn’t turn Joaquin into a singer as good as Johnny, exactly. He gained greater access to more of his voice, but it was still hard for him to cover the entire range that Johnny could. So we used another tool available to us: We changed some of the keys, making the notes higher than some of the ones that Cash had used, and the lows less low. Adjusting as we needed to, we got enough solid sounds on tape that we could piece together all the songs for the soundtrack, sung proudly, competently, and convincingly by Joaquin, who walked away with a Golden Globe and a Best Actor Oscar nomination, among many other honors, for his performance.

The Making of a Belter

Reese Witherspoon, who won a Best Actress Oscar for her role in Walk the Line, had been a bit of a casual singer in her school days. She didn’t sing that much, but when she did, she would always stay quite high, in a pretty head voice, perhaps believing that all young girls in the South should first be sopranos.

But June Carter Cash, the singer Reese needed to become, was a belter, which means that she stayed at the top part of her chest voice and pushed all the notes out with power to underline the drama of her songs. It wasn’t crucial for Reese to imitate her precisely, because the director realized that people were less familiar with June’s voice than Johnny’s. Our job was to deliver June’s essence—the accent, the feeling of her singing—and especially that belting. For that, we had to focus on training Reese’s chest voice, along with a bit of her middle voice.

Remember, the chest voice is the lower part of the range where most men and women speak. The head voice is the area much higher than where people speak normally, and the middle voice sits right in between those other two. Reese had to learn to hold on to chest voice even as the melody climbed higher. When we began, she was fine as she started singing low notes, but as soon as the notes began ascending, she would surrender her power and go light, airy, and pretty. Sometimes that works if the song, lyrics, attitude, and emotion of the piece call for it. But if the song calls for passion and power, and a more commanding sound, the lighter head voice just doesn’t cut it.

When I first got Reese to sing higher notes in chest voice, she thought she sounded harsh and ugly, in comparison to her pretty head voice. So we had to work to make the chest voice bigger and also pretty. To do that, I added more air to her voice and lowered her Adam’s apple a little more. That helped me open up the back part of her throat, taking away the pushed, tight, strained sound that she was getting too close to. With the throat open, the sound could pour out and actually sound strong and pretty. We did all that, and the results spoke for themselves.

Fans adored Reese as June and loved her voice. Next time you watch the film, listen to how high Reese goes while still keeping her voice powerful and strong. Some of her singing in the film actually goes high enough to be in the middle voice, but we made sure it had enough strength and connection so that there were no breaks or cracks where you hear the voice changing from chest to middle. All of that came with dedication, practice, and learning the right techniques.

Connecting Acting to Singing

One thing that shocks all the actors I train to sing on film is the fact that good “singing acting” is often bad, over-the-top “acting acting.” Actors who are great on camera convey their emotions with a glance, a subtle expression. Acting on camera is all about the visuals and the ability of the camera to pick up changes in the voice and body the way someone lying next to you in bed might. It’s intimate.

But actors forget that singing is about sound first. In a movie like Walk the Line or Crazy Heart, the Jeff Bridges film about a washed-up country singer, all the subtleties actors count on being able to convey to the camera are swallowed up onstage by the guitars, keyboards, drums, horns, and background vocalists—the swirl of sound and activity in a live performance. Each musician is trying to stand out, lead vocals compete for attention with that dazzling backup singer, and eyes and ears wander to the guitarist who’s just out of the spotlight but laying down catchy lines. Guitar players can just turn up the knob on their amp if they want to be louder, but a singer has to make volume from the inside, while competing with all the electronics and noise on the stage.

You have to be BIG to hold your own. So I train my actor/singers—and anyone fronting a band—to pretend they’re doing Shakespeare in the Park and trying to send their voice to the back row. Small, subtle vocal sounds and changes do not really reach big audiences. Singers need to accentuate the words, go way over-the-top in volume and variety, and make huge acting choices. When the camera is a foot away from Jeff Bridges, or from Keira Knightley in the film Begin Again, it can catch a tiny movement of one eyebrow and viewers think, “She’s up to something, feeling something.” They notice the change and react to it. But if Keira makes a tiny vocal change trying to show sadness, happiness, anger, or any other emotion, 99 percent of the listeners won’t catch it. So I teach my actors that to emphasize emotions while they sing, they have to overact to a degree that most of them feel is silly.

Keira and Jeff both responded to my idea cautiously at first, having spent so many years learning how to create realism on-screen. But I kept explaining, demonstrating and also recording them so that they could listen back and judge for themselves. You can do the same thing.

Keira wasn’t a singer when she walked in, and didn’t have to sound like a polished pro, but she was playing a singer-songwriter whose music gave someone a reason to live. She had to have real presence on the stage. To give her a taste of what that takes, I asked her to record a verse and chorus of a song and pretend she was a little kid standing up on her parents’ coffee table belting out the song to entertain the guests at a party. I asked her to forget realism and think big, making broad, bold choices. I asked her to:

Get really loud and soft.

Go fast and then super-slow, go high and then suddenly low.

Try to emphasize the important words. If the song says, “Tell me if you want to go home,” make the word home bigger than all the other words in the line.

Keira would experiment, and then we would listen back to hear if her rendition was as ridiculous as she thought it would be. Guess what? When she listened, expecting that the word home would stick out like that kid on the coffee table, she was shocked and pleasantly surprised to hear that the word sounded pretty normal. This happens to all of my actors. They begin to see, hear, and understand that the music surrounding their singing is so big and emotional that they have to make the singing a LOT BIGGER than they ever could have imagined.

You do too. So when you sing, accentuate the important words, do something special with them. Don’t sing all the words with the same flat emotion you get when you send out a monotone: “I love my dog I hate my dog.” If you say or sing all of those words with the same sounds and volume, it’s hard to tell whether you love your dog or you don’t. Choose key words and emphasize them. Make exaggerated acting choices that help you take your place alongside all of the other instruments that are producing noise while you are singing. Be a big, bold actor/singer and your audiences will love you for it.

The Mike Won’t Save You

You’d think the invention of the microphone would’ve solved any volume issues for a lead singer, but here’s the problem: The only thing the microphone amplifies is the sound coming out of the singer’s mouth. The guitar and keyboard player both have pedals, keys, and electronics amplifying and drawing attention to their sounds. And as loud as drums are, they still get miked for many live gigs. That’s formidable competition for a singer, considering that even without a mike you can hit a drum with a stick and create way more volume than a voice can.

At the same time you’re being drowned out by sheer volume, some of the sounds in your vocal frequency range may get eaten up by those loud instruments, if they’re making the same frequencies you’re producing. If the guitar is playing the same notes the singer is singing, the sound waves can cancel each other out, and while people will hear sound, it’ll be a blend of voice and guitar that doesn’t let the voice stand out and get enough attention.

Your two friends in this competitive atmosphere are arrangements and, as usual, great technique. Ensuring that your musical arrangements don’t have the band playing exactly the same melody as the singer keeps them from competing. And having great technique lets you create volume that’s thick and strong, not airy sounds that dissipate before they reach the audience. This should be apparent, but I point it out to all the singers I work with: The amplifier’s job is not to create resonance and substance in your voice. It’s just to pump up whatever you put into it. If your voice is airy and nasal, the amp will give you a roomful of airy, nasal sounds.

As a lead singer, or as a speaker, you’re competing with the band, street noise, helicopters and sirens in the background, people talking in the audience, clanking forks, papers—no setting is safe from sound distractions. Your first job is to create a voice that sounds the way you want and need it to sound, and then, if you have a mike, the great voice that you already feel comfortable with and in control of will simply be louder so that more people can hear how impressive you sound.

Making Them Believe You

Great singers learn that conveying emotion isn’t about actually getting themselves to feel the emotions in the lyrics. The point is not to sing a sad song and make yourself cry, but rather to make the audience believe you are sad and to win their empathy—to make them feel emotions by triggering their own unique memories. Can you make someone remember the first time she had her heart broken, or the first time she broke someone else’s heart? That’s what’s important if you want to be a successful singer. You need to touch others’ emotions. Have you ever tried to cry or laugh while you are singing? It’s not easy. When a singer cries, his or her throat starts to close up. Do you really want that to happen while you’re performing? I don’t. But I do want you to have the ability to move people at will through any number of emotions. That is a wonderful skill for a singer to have.

Emphasizing particular sounds will help you convey specific emotions. In anger, for example, consonants become stronger, so you hit them harder. And to sing anger to the back row means hitting those consonants hard multiple times. Anger also has sudden volume changes that are designed to shock the listener into being less dominant and more afraid.

Sadness sounds slower, and the words move with more deliberation and effort from one to the next. Because sad people have less energy, sadness also sounds softer, almost too afraid to be heard from such a vulnerable state of mind.

Happiness is certainly louder—it’s a sudden infusion of joy and energy. It’s also faster, as you want to share all of your newfound jewels with everyone around you. You’re so excited about your good fortune, you let the words spill out.

This is key: You have to visualize and exaggerate any emotion you want people to feel. Exaggerating means adding more extremes of volume to your songs (or speeches). More melody extremes. More emphasis on certain words and on consonants. I could take the lyric “I lost my right shoe” and sing it in a way that’s nonchalant, like I’ve got five hundred pairs of shoes and it’s no big deal. Or I could sing it as though I were in the middle of the desert, with days to go before I found water, and this shoe, which my dead mother gave me, were the only thing keeping me going.

An Exercise for Exaggerating

As we saw in my work with Keira Knightley, it’s almost impossible to get a sense from the inside of how your exaggerations are coming across, so I recommend this: Listen to a favorite song and then record yourself singing it with the emotion turned up to 10. When the line seems sad, go way over-the-top and see if you can showcase that. Anger, same way. And if there’s hope, joy, or pleading, make that as huge as you can. If you’re a speaker and want to try this, go way, way past what you think you need in volume, speaking from loud to soft, really fast and really slowly to absurdity, and pumping in melody. Listen back, then cut the emotion and variations in half as you record again.

What you hear is probably not that absurd at this point. The idea is to overact until you are believable. No one ever steps onstage or in front of a camera to underwhelm the viewer. Relaxed and casual doesn’t work. Give your audience more energy, more excitement, more emotion, more entertainment than they bargained for.

The other key piece is matching your physiology to your song and, once more, doing it in a big way. When you’re singing about something happy, it has to show on your face. Your eyes have to smile, your cheeks rise. If you’re sad, the, eyebrows come down. If you’re Eminem angry, the movements of your hands will be faster and stronger and end with something hard, like a karate chop. And if you’re singing about sweetness and beauty, the motion of hands and body should be more fluid, flowing from one gesture to another and using the whole body.

The Power of “Big”

Astonishing things can happen when you go big and match your physiology to the music you’re making. The indie band Future Islands got career-making attention during its first appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman in March 2014 (you can look for a clip on YouTube). Lead singer Sam Herring performed the band’s soon-to-be hit “Seasons (Waiting on You)” by doing what Pitchfork described as “wilding out and owning the stage with some seriously goofy and committed dancing.” It was weird. It was compelling. It was definitely over-the-top. I’d taught Sam, and even I thought so. But if you look at his eyes and listen to the lyrics, he’s angry and directing the feeling of the song through his body. He was authentic, he stood out, and, perhaps not entirely by chance, “Seasons” wound up as Pitchfork’s top song of the year.

You may still doubt that exaggeration is any way to get an audience to believe you. But did you believe Elvis? Did you believe Prince? Did you believe Tina Turner? Michael Jackson? Go back to their videos and watch what they are doing onstage with their bodies and emotions. There’s nothing small about that. Did you believe Bono? Beyoncé? Pink hanging from silks? The megawatt stars want audiences with their mouths open saying, “I love this.” And for them, there’s almost no such thing as over-the-top. Big is believable. How many hours can Bruce Springsteen deliver “the Boss” onstage? Four? Six? He never stops. He gives 1000 percent every second to his fans. But YOU won’t know what “big” feels like until you give it a try. I guarantee that you’ll start getting bigger results.

Why Singers Need a Great Speaking Voice Too

Even when you perfect the way you sing and have a charismatic stage presence, you can spoil the magic when you open your mouth to speak. Some of the most powerful performers I’ve worked with drain away all the excitement they’ve built with their songs by speaking in between songs in a voice that is disappointingly unsexy and uninteresting, without a spark of power.

Audiences are yearning to connect with the person, or persona, they see commanding the stage, and speaking is so important that I now tell singers I’ll work with them only if they’ll let me work on their speaking voices too. We put too much time and effort into creating a real flow of emotion between the song and the audience to throw it away. Which is exactly what happens when the person who just sang the power ballad that had people up and cheering suddenly sounds as exciting as an accountant when he tries to do more than yell, “Are you ready to rock?”

If you can’t maintain the same level of interest, mystery, and surprise when you’re speaking from the stage that you had when you were singing, you ruin the experience for the audience. You don’t have to be spontaneous—you can practice and refine your comments the way you did your songs. I work with singers all the time to help them figure out what they need to say between songs and in interviews, staying focused on what maintains the mood of the show.

More often than not, we’ll rehearse a song, and then we’ll think about what kind of emotion the singer needs to keep alive afterward. If Eminem is rapping about how ticked off he is, he can’t finish a rant and then say, “Hey, I had the most amazing banana split for lunch. Anyone like banana splits?” The Eminem character talking about banana splits might have a story about seeing someone get run over in front of an ice cream parlor and pulling her into the backseat of his Bentley to drive her to the hospital. And if he does, he needs a voice with the same kind of “seen it all, survived it all” edge that runs through the rest of his work.

Every moment you speak onstage, your voice needs to enhance the character you’ve taken pains to create with your performance. If Beyoncé is full of sexy moves but stops to chat with the audience in a really nasal voice, or sounds like Nicki Minaj, the illusion is broken, and people will think she was faking it when she put so much sensual power across in her singing and dancing. They might even laugh, for all the wrong reasons.

I insist on working with singers’ speaking voices because I know the sobering statistic that says about 85 percent of all professional SINGERS who damage their voices do so because of the way they SPEAK. Isn’t that interesting? No matter how much singing you do during the day and night, you always speak more. If you are producing any sounds like the squeaky hinge, or the airy Marilyn Monroe voice, you are drying up your cords and making them red and swollen. That will take its toll on the cords fast and create hoarseness. So be sure you study the parts of this book that will help you keep your speaking voice healthy.

And if you skipped the speaking and presentation chapters of this book, singers, go back and take a look. They’ll be your secret weapon when you grab the mike to chat with your fans. Then, when you reach the level of a Bono, you’ll be ready to use your voice for good. One of the best results that comes from working to build a voice people love and trust is that they’ll listen to you when you step off the stage. If you choose, you can use your voice to make the world a better place by becoming an advocate for people and issues you believe in. And on the most personal level, you’ll have the power to use your beautiful voice to show your compassion and love to the people closest to you—the “audience” that means the most.