Hey everybody welcome back again to Ken Tamplin Vocal Academy where the proof is
in the singing. I'm doing this series on answering your
vocal questions by request and using 35 years of my singing and teaching
experience to do my best to give you the goods on these questions that you're
asking. So the next question that I got is you know fear of singing high notes.
I'm afraid to sing high notes. Well you know I think a lot of people are afraid
to sing high notes, in fact there's you know these fun videos roaming around on
YouTube of you know professional singers or you know great singers that are
afraid to sing a note so they duck it or they sing someone else. So there's always
that fear but I want to olay that fear by giving you guys some information I think
that will help you okay. The first thing is I want you to envision yourself doing
something that you love, that you've done a million times and you can do it in
your sleep. Really think about it. I don't care if it was riding a bike, surfing, skateboarding,
writing an essay you know whatever that thing is right. Well it's because you've
done it with repetition and hopefully you've done it correctly with repetition
because just because you Einstein's.. not Einstein excuse me there's a whole.. an old
saying you just wash my tongue and I can't do a thing with it. There's an old
saying is that practice makes perfect. Well practice doesn't make perfect, it's
perfect practice that makes perfect. Let's get that straight. It's not just
practice that makes perfect because you can embed a bad habit. It's perfect
practice that makes perfect okay. So assuming that you've been practicing
perfectly and you're doing something that you love and let's say for me you
know I like to swim in the ocean. I don't think twice about just jumping
in the..now I watch the water conditions and I make sure that there's
nothing crazy but I jump in the water and I go for my swim or whatever it is
that I do and I don't really think twice about it. I really enjoy it right. Well
you guys that enjoy singing should be in the same boat. So I have a singing course
it's called How to Sing Better Than Anyone Else and I walk you through all
this stuff step-by-step so I'm obviously not going to turn you into an amazing
singer in two easy minutes or whatever these crazy videos that are roaming
around that claim that they can make you great or give you great vocal tips in
five minutes. I will give you a great tip and this is gonna be this
right. When you think about the process of singing, its building blocks okay. Now
in a few videos ago I discussed diaphragmatic support and I incorporated
posture and how to breathe correctly, that is a foundational building block
for singing. So once you start to build this house, it's like building a house so
you build this foundation first I cover this in my course I've got a lot of
great free tutorials on YouTube where you can get all this information at
least parts you get a little sound bites of it in order to help you understand how this
works. So so once we're building this house and if you've got your
diaphragmatic support down, you've got your relaxation response between your
chest your neck and your throat, you've built good open throat technique and
good muscle memory for open throat technique, you understand your vowel
modifications and I have videos on all these and all I'll put as many as I can
in the description tag so you can kind of go through them and again they're
small sound bites that alone isn't gonna make you great but it's gonna really
give you a good snapshot of the total sum and picture on what it takes. So
imagine going through this and and practicing this with good repetit..
repetition and good practicing habits correcting.. practicing something
correctly like I said I just washed my tongue I can't do a thing with it. That's
an old TV commercial. I just washed my hands and I can't do a thing with them. Go
check it out old 70s 80s commercial. Anyway back to singing. Once you practice
these correctly with repetition, you're gonna find that it becomes easier and
easier and easier to hit this note. Now the problems gonna be is once you get to
a certain note in your range that it becomes so easy you're gonna want to
sing yet a higher note and that's gonna become easier and then you're
gonna want to sing a higher note and so forth and so on. So it's not like just a
one-stop shop, all of a sudden you know I can sing something great but let me
explain too what I mean. When I think of a high note I don't think of the note
being high, I kid you not. Now most people go oh my gosh my range I
don't go to an a4 if I'm a tenor or a high baritone like me
and that's the total top of my range right. That's how most people think. Well
I don't think about it, I used to think about it like that but I don't think
about it like that anymore. I think about it like okay do I have good strength in
my abdomen to sustain the note I want to do. Have I
just over sung a phrase or am I exhausted from over singing something
from before and now I'm trying to sing something even more difficult or did I
pace myself and there's a whole thing on pacing and we'll discuss that too in a
minute or not in this video but in another video and then do I.. can I
visualize the note that I'm singing. Now here's where this gets interesting.
There's a video out you know how to trick your voice. Well it's kind of
absurd but there's some truth to that and let me explain. I used to like to
surf a lot okay and for you surfers out there or people that have gone in the
ocean you'll identify with this alright. Now in surfing and even if you
haven't surfed, please follow me on this because this will help you. There are
different breaks on the shoreline there's third break which is the break
that crashes right on the sand, there's second break that's a little
farther out and then there's first break that's really far out or you know the
biggest break that comes in from the ocean and they usually kind of come in
waves you know three at a time, four at a time, five at a time you know depending
on the swells that are coming in. Well what a lot of people do when they're
scared is they they're paddling out you know past second break and they're going
to first break and they don't always break at the same spot, sometimes they
break really far out, sometimes they break farther in. So you have to be
prepared to get out to that wave before it gets you right. So that's the high
note, that first break is the high note. So what a lot of people do is they panic
just as the swell is coming in it's intimidating and they look at this swell
and are like whoa what do I do. Well everyone knows what you do is to
get a lay of the land or in this case the lay of the water you don't sit there
and wait and sit in what's called the strike zone and get pummeled by a wave
and end up like a washing machine and washed ashore or pinned down on the
ocean floor right, what you do is you swim out to the wave as fast as you can
maybe even go past it on the first one unless you're experienced surfer, go past
it to let it go by and see because there's another one probably coming up
maybe even farther out and you've got to get past that wave so it doesn't overtake
you. Well so it is with singing. By the way so you get a lay of the land of the
wave right and then when you finally understand where it is then you can ride
that wave in and you know you're good to go. Well so it is
with singing. You don't sit there in the strike zone and just before you get to
the top you panic right and you miss your note. So when I said about
tricking the voice ,what you do and what I do and how I think about notes now is
I think about strength in the abdomen, good ribcage expansion which we
discussed in one of my videos here that we just put out about breathing, a
relaxation response, how to relax my chest my neck and my throat so I'm not
all tense. Everything is coming from my abdomen, all my strength is the engine
that drives my car, I've built good muscle memory for the open throat
technique we just discussed and then I have a vowel, a specific vowel placement
that I want to hit within my voice and I've worked my voice, my register, I've
worked my passagio and I've gone through all the the building blocks of building
my house and all the rooms in the house but I built all the building blocks so
the by the time I want to get to that high note, I don't go (sings) I don't think
about that note being high I think about okay whatever that note was a D or C
or E or whatever it was and and I think about okay the placement to get to that
note requires this much strength in the abdomen, a relaxation response and this
vowel that I want to hit in a certain specific kind of way and it could be
hitting it hard, hitting it lightly or soft or you know a combination there
out right. So getting back to doing what you love and doing it in repetition. The
more you do this over and over and over again, the less intimidating that note is
and then the more you sing a song over and over again and you can pace your set
where you don't over sing one part of the set where you don't have enough
strength to get to the next part of the set and again relaxation response in the
stomach too so you're not bound up all the time where every song is just you know
pure tension and you're able to manage away this stress and really understand
how to get to these notes. That is the way to sing high notes and sing them
stress free and sing them consistently okay. Hopefully this was helpful and God
bless you guys and until next time peace out.
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peace out.
you