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Hi everybody!
My name is Justin Stoney and I'm the founder of
New York Vocal Coaching here in New York City.
Welcome to episode 12 of Voice Lessons To The World.
The show where we want to help you guys
by answering your questions on singing from all over the world.
I'll give you a chance to ask questions later
but our question for the week comes from Tori G. in Utah
and Tori writes, "Dear Justin, do you have any advice on preventing cracking?"
That's a great question Tori and I think that a lot of people
are going to want to know about cracking.
And the first thing I want to tell you
before I tell you some ways to not crack,
I want to first tell you that cracking is actually a great thing.
Now obviously we don't want our voices to crack in the middle
of a performance or something like that.
But let me tell you why cracking is actually a great thing.
The first reason is that your voice needs to crack.
If it didn't crack you would actually hurt it because we're
trying to balance the force on the vocal cords,
the compression on the vocal cords.
I'll get to that in a minute but if you were not able
to relieve that pressure to crack your voice would actually get
hurt many more times than it does because it can let go and crack.
So, that's one thing is it protects your voice.
The second thing is for developing your mix.
I want you singers out there that are practicing a lot and
working on your voices, to know that if you're not
cracking a lot of times in your technique then
you're probably not working on the mix correctly because
you've got to be able to crack as you're working.
You need to get to the place where the voice wants to crack
and work through that territory if you're going to develop a great mix.
So cracking is a necessary part to your vocal progress.
You've got to be in the area where it wants to crack
and crack a bunch of times if you want to see progress.
So cracking is also a big part of your technical development.
Now we don't want to really crack all the time.
So how are we going to prevent it?
Let's talk about compression.
Compression is the means by which you're going to find the ability to not crack.
If your cords come together really, really hard like this,
this is a lot of compression, it's too much force.
But then this is the opposite of compression,
I have air leakage through my vocal cords.
But if I come together clean and solid, a little bit of compression,
it sounds like a clear sound.
Now as I go higher my cords are getting tighter
they're lengthening out but they also have a tendency
to come apart and to relieve the compression.
And it becomes a balance of how much
compression we're gonna use as we go higher.
If you use none your voice will go into
complete head voice way earlier than you want.
If you use too much you're going to be straining and gripping the cords.
So as we go higher what we need, Tori and all singers,
is to develop the ability to find gradations of compression.
Not too much, not too little, but just right.
And, to fine tune that as we go through our range.
So that's something that you're going to get.
And again, if you don't crack a little bit
you're not going to find the head voice side of things.
And if you don't ever strain actually you're not going to find the balanced compression.
We don't want strain, we don't want cracking,
but we've got to have both of them to find that middle.
So I'm going to give you a compression exercise.
Your goal is not to squeeze it and your goal is not to crack.
Your goal is to find something right in between.
But I'm going to give you a pretty hard consonant,
as we talked about before, to give you a little bit of that compression.
Try this sound for me, just say GIG GIG GIG GIG GIG.
Try that out.
That's good!
Now compare that feeling to this feeling,
just say, HOO HOO HOO.
That's good.
Now you feel the GIG GIG GIG versus the HOO HOO HOO.
GIG GIG GIG GIG gives you a little bit of a tighter feeling on the cords.
Not a strain, that's a big difference, just a more compressed feeling.
One more time with HOO HOO HOO.
And now give me a GIG GIG GIG.
That's good!
So you can feel that that's a little bit of a more compressed sound- the GIG.
So now we're gonna put this on pitches.
This exercise you'll probably be able to take higher without cracking
than something like a HOO or something else.
So, this is giving you a chance to balance your compression
and reduce the amount of cracking.
So guys are gonna be down here-
♪
♪ GIG GIG GIG GIG ♪
And ladies up here-
♪
♪ GIG GIG GIG GIG ♪
And again, you're gonna go all the way up,
you're not gonna strain it, you're going to try to not crack,
you're just gonna let the GIG-GIG take care of your work for you.
So here we go!
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♪ GIG GIG GIG GIG ♪
Great!
♪
Nice job.
♪
♪ GIG GIG GIG GIG ♪
Good!
♪
Good!
♪
♪ GIG GIG GIG GIG ♪
Excellent.
♪
♪ GIG GIG GIG GIG ♪
Nice!
♪
Two more!
♪
♪ GIG GIG GIG GIG ♪
Nice job!
Some of you might be able to go even higher than that
and some of you might have been cracking already.
But that hard consonant and that sense of light compression
a light feeling of the vocal cords coming together
not being too separate not being too gripped,
that's going to help you to find a balance and not crack as you go higher.
That is actually one way of accessing the mix.
So that's compression for you and I just want to throw one
more thing in there about cracking.
You also want to make sure that your breath support is intact.
And we talked about that in the past.
Okay so, you want to make sure you're breathing is down here...
And not up here...
Because if you slam the air the cords are gonna say
you know what I just can't deal with all this air that you're
throwing at me, I'm gonna have to get out of the way of all that air.
So if you're over breathing, if you're pushing the volume,
if you're getting louder as you go higher, the cords aren't gonna like that.
They might strain up and keep you from cracking for a while.
But eventually the compression is gonna be too much,
the air is gonna be too much, and they're gonna get out of the way.
So you need to get the air deep in the body and you need to
make sure you have a sssssss-steady kind of breath.
Don't slam that air or else you're probably going to crack more.
So, think about compression do some compression exercises
to get the light closure and the balanced closure.
Know that breathing is a factor as you work on this.
And then finally, like I say, cracking is a good thing.
It protects your voice, it's just your cords going to
a headier recipe than you wanted them to.
You need to have it for protection and you need to have it a bunch of times
when you're working out your voice.
If you're not cracking and you're only straining,
then you're only working one side of things.
Don't be afraid to crack when you're practicing,
when you're in front of your voice teacher,
or when you're at home.
The only place we don't want you cracking is out on stage.
So do a lot of cracking before you get there.
I hope that's been helpful for you guys today.
If you have questions you want to see us answer on the show
you can send an email to-
Questions@VoiceLessonsToTheWorld.com [♪]
We just encourage you guys to keep practicing. [♪]
Even if you're cracking a lot, go right on through there. [♪]
Don't lose the joy, don't lose the passion, [♪]
don't let people tell you that you can't sing [♪]
because we all know that's just not true. [♪]
If you guys are in New York City we encourage you to check out our website at [♪]
www.NewYorkVocalCoaching.com [♪]
Get with a great voice teacher in your area. [♪]
If you guys like these videos you can check out [♪]
www.VoiceLessonsToTheWorld.com [♪]
I'm Justin Stoney, we'll see you next time. [♪]
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