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Well now Claude brought up a great point
about warming up.
And every singer has a different strategy
for their warm ups.
How do you keep your voice really
warmed up and healthy, especially when you’re touring
and just in general do you have a process
for your vocal health?
[Claude] We’re all very different.
[Justin] Yeah. I’d love to hear different perspectives.
[Claude] For me personally, I warm up the lower range.
And if I do that softly and then I start bringing that up,
it actually warms up my high range.
I don’t go straight to my high range
because I don’t have a high range when I wake up.
[Mark] I don’t have a high range when I wake up.
[Laughter]
For me, I have to warm up slowly as well.
Especially if my voice is tired from the previous day.
There’s a particular range that I can probably always go to and hit,
but if I’m not warmed up then it’s “cracky”.
And I have to warm up that little “cracky” zone,
and just sing through it.
And you know, I’ll do the trills that will
get me into that range.
And I can just work it and warm it up.
Slowly going from low to high.
And one thing that I do when I get into the high range,
I’ll do.. [demonstrates trills]
I’ll shake it up there.
Because shaking it actually helps to warm up,
get the cob webs out.
So that’s just, just my way.
[Justin] That’s great. Khristian?
I don’t have the Polaroid picture shaking.
It’s funny because for me I actually speak
higher than I sing.
I’m baritone in the group.
And the running joke that I have for myself
is that it’s never hard for me because I'm at the bottom.
So, usually before we have a show,
somebody will have a speaker and somebody
will be singing just having a ball
just singing whatever comes to mind or whatever's playing.
And it’s easy for me to just translate how
I’m speaking in regular life to how I’m singing on stage
because I’m singing the baritone part.
And that’s where I feel most comfortable when I'm singing.
So, warming up I don’t really have to.
But it’s fun to listen to everyone else do it.
[Dave] You know, the funny thing for me is that
I had so many bad habits growing up
that warming up just wasn’t a thing.
It's like if you go out to play basketball,
now we have to stretch for any sport that we do,
but back in the day you just went out and played.
You played for hours, and no problem.
It wasn’t until later, maybe 10 years into
singing with Take 6, I realized…
You know, on the road, your whole body gets tired.
And when your whole body and your energy is down,
it’s really hard to sing, at least for me.
So that’s when I realized, I really need to start warming up.
So, Speech Level sort of techniques
that didn’t really engage all of the wrong kind of muscles
was important for me.
Doing that and then at the same time learning how to
wake up my whole body in enough time
before I needed to actually perform
was really the biggest key.
And then after that, learning that it becomes
more stressful when I’m “rest broken”.
I get my rest, drink plenty of fluids,
and so when it’s time for the muscles to be called upon
they can actually do what they need to do.
[Justin] Absolutely. Joey?
So mine is an interesting story because
I had to have vocal surgery.
Like right at the top of 2020.
And that being that for the 30 years that
I’ve been singing you pick up some
subtle habits that kind of converge in the perfect storm
at particular time.
And that is of course the operation no vocalist
wants to have.
And I had to go through
that process.
But the habits that you’ve developed
over the period of time that you’ve been singing
sometimes have to be recorrected.
Having to sing through sickness,
having to sing through fatigue,
and not exactly knowing how your voice works,
worked against me.
Until everything had to be reset.
And I guess it was a polyp that had
to be removed.
And then I had to start all over again.
with learning how to talk, learning how to breathe,
learning how to do all of that stuff
from the very “square A”.
So the warming up process for me is very intentional.
Because I've, in essence, sustained an injury
that now has to be- I have to warm up to it,
I have to stretch before I get there.
And you have to cool down.
So you can do many of the same things
but all of the surrounding care has to be intentional now
Because it doesn't just come like it used to
like when your in your 20s
and everything was effortless.
[Dave] Is there a fear base to that as well, that,
you know since you've experienced that trauma
that you don't want to go back to that,
you know, does that motivate you?
Yeah you have to.
Umm. The demand in being in a vocal group is heavy.
And then the stigma of
you didn't you don't have any mess-ups.
And, “man you don’t, you don't have to go for vocal surgery…”
because that immediately implies, oh, you must have
screwed something up really bad.
But it happens.
[Justin] Yeah.
And you can come back from it.
[Justin] Yeah.
But everything has to be intentional.
So yeah there's a point in my range
where if I'm not warmed up it will show first
and so I have to warm that whole part up.
I got to get sleep, I got to make sure
that I'm hydrated enough.
Because not being hydrated enough will expose
that particular part of my voice where the polyp was.
And you have to smooth that out.
At some point after the surgery I had to
get that particular section of the vocal cords vibrating again
because it didn't vibrate like everything else did around it
because it had a polyp there.
And so that has to be intentionally worked through.
And they told me within the rehabilitation,
you're going to get to this part of your voice
and it's going to sound uncontrollable.
Don't freak out when as you come back to
this part of your voice you have to train it again
to vibrate like the rest of your vocal cord.
So don't freak out when you get to that
part or that section if notes are out of control.
Like wow, I didn't even, I didn't mean
to hit that at all.
But that's part of the process of healing
that will bring you back to your performance level.
[Justin] I think that's very encouraging, actually, to singers.
That top level singers are athletes.
And athletes sometimes get an injury
and you can come back from it.
If, especially if, you're intentional and wise
and you do the work.
So, often you can come back stronger.
Because sometimes you have to be reminded
of the building blocks that brought you back
to where you are now.
And especially if you experience an injury to it
you have to go back to the building blocks.
That's anybody who's experienced any injury
in any area.
You’ve got to go back to the building blocks
and start that process again
to build it back up.
But this time because you're intentional about it,
you can actually go further than what you did before.
But you have to be intentional about maintaining
the right habits.
[Dave] I would think though, and this is a question for you Joey,
and probably for you as well, Justin.
You mentioned elite athletes.
[Justin] Yes.
But if I hurt my knee, something happens in here
I can see what my knee has to do
and I know I can stretch it out and certain things,
but it doesn't seem like we think about our vocal cords
as muscles that are voluntarily manipulated,
if that makes any sense.
It seems like that's just…
Like breathing, you know you don't
focus on breathe in, now hold it for two seconds,
let it out.
You know that's not something that you
usually think about.
It seems like it's involuntary.
And so, um, you know when it comes to producing
tonality and to control that to that seems uh, voluntary,
but to be able to make sound at all
seems involuntary.
So that's that little distinction seems important to me.
[Joel] So one of the things that had to happen
is they had to help me identify how the muscle
you're using right now has nothing to do with
your vocal cords but you're thinking that you
have to push and so you're engaging
surrounding muscles that are actually uh,
fatiguing the muscle that you're actually needing to use.
Really it's as simple as breathing through
and making that consistent.
You're thinking that it's the straining of these muscles
that's causing you to be able to talk like this
and every time you do that you got to stop doing that.
So they had to help me identify that here's
where your sound comes from,
here's where you think your sound is coming from
and this is doing nothing but making this tired
because all of these muscles are fatigued now
that surround it.
And this is all you ever really needed.
So to go from being silent to then making a noise again,
and I think their process has changed
in the last few years.
Now they're trying to rehabilitate you,
and to get you back to talking faster
than what they used to do.
But to start talking again and to talk
in the right way that you're supposed to talk
using the right muscles, you have to learn
how to do that again.
So you have to identify this is the muscle
or this is the grouping of organs I need to be engaging.
This has nothing to do with it, let that go.
You have to identify then start moving through.
We still have to get to this guy.
[Justin] Yeah!
I view voice teaching as basically
being a personal trainer for the voice.
And, sort of, my job is to be able to hear
on the inside which muscles are working
or working too hard or not working
and just like a personal trainer might say,
hey we're doing biceps but you're really
bringing that shoulder, let's hold down this
so that the right muscle gets the work.
Listening in there and knowing actually
which sounds cause what…
You know whether it's a [demonstrates] kind of sound
or a [demonstrates] kind of sound,
knowing which does what and trying to reduce one
and add the other, it's really personal training
on the inside of the larynx.
[Dave] And how much is that then saying
let me strengthen your lats so that your shoulder
can stay down?
[Justin] It's exactly like that, that's the exact process.
But it’s just this stuff, instead of this stuff.