hey chris liepe here with how to sing without strain without straining your voice without
reaching without putting all this tension in your throat and in your face that
ends up making you feel bad when you sing and seems like it seriously limits you
in what you know you should be able to do with your voice
away
straining is especially rampant and prevalent in live situations especially when we've practiced
behind closed doors or made recordings and gotten our confidence up because we're able to make a
great recording and then we go to try something live and we we can't seem to deliver and so we we
end up straining or forcing or trying to control our voice in order to reclaim past glory or meet
expectations that we have based on what we did before or what we think we should be able to do
there's a whole mental component to singing with strain or not singing with strain that we really
have to acknowledge if we're going to actually sing without straining and do that all the time
right we want to get to the point to where we're not straining when we sing we're singing freely
all the time so in this video we're actually going to take cues from two artists that no they're not
the greatest singers but they have mastered the art of performing i believe without strain
learning from them is going to help you release control and release in to freedom first things
first singing without strain and singing freely all across your range has a whole lot to do with
knowing how to use your support correctly if you want to know how to dial in your support
the right way click the link below and join my free voice course that's the best place to start
once you've gone through that and understand how to use your support system correctly come back
to this video again and you're going to get a ton more out of it having said that here's the problem
most people run into when they are trying to sing without strain or sing without straining
they have this sort of checklist mindset oh i'm singing with proper support i think i'm doing all
these things right that someone told me to do i've just done my exercises i feel like i'm warmed up
check check check check check here's now where i should be able to go and sing
great sing freely and be good well in theory yes if you are doing all things right
uh you'll have a better chance of of singing without straining without reaching without
being tension filled but there's an underlying error that you've made if you stop with this
checkbox approach and that is if i do these things right translated if i'm controlling everything
i should have victory when really the opposite is true the main evidence
of when we go in to start singing and we feel strained or tension filled is that we are trying
to control too much we are we are control freaks the the best singers the most free singers do not
look like they're trying to control anything so we can't have that mindset so i want to look briefly
at a live performance from tom petty performing american girl i'd like you to watch and listen
but specifically watch the countenance on his face watch what he does or doesn't do with his
neck and his his upper body in general now i think tom petty has a good voice but he wouldn't be
considered one of those like virtuoso awesome singers right but he's doing a lot of things
really well here and it sells the song which is what all you can ask from any vocalist right are
you immersed in your performance are you selling the song all right let's listen easy an baby
girlfriend
are you singing kind of up there and tom petty tended to do that
and he was also really good at having these e vowels being being higher in his certainly for
his speech range he did it really well but notice how sort of deadpan yeah he's moving his mouth
around a little bit but he's not you don't see him for the most part getting his forehead involved
or moving his neck around he's got this very sedated laid back countenance and body language
even in the midst of what he's doing this is huge for us so here's an exercise to start getting this
into your own person and then start applying it to your singing and it has to do with grumbling yes
grumbling or or maybe muttering or murmuring okay now you've probably been in a situation where
you you've told someone like hey quiet quiet you know you're trying to act like you're not talking
and so you're or or you're you know it's like sort of this ventriloquist approach right
and quiet stop it don't do that okay but then this person doesn't hear you and so
you keep getting louder and louder but you think as long as you're not getting you know your body
language involved that the person can't hear you i realize i'm making up this story but we've all at
least seen this in sitcoms hey stop it go away huh i told you to be quiet stop it all right okay now
what am i doing with my body with my voice there let's pull out a couple things i'm changing the
pitch yeah it's speech level i'm engaging my voice in a way that's kind of aggressive even though
the rest of my body is not intentionally is not really involved so if i if i continue down that
path and start noticing more things about the way my my voice works in that context i'm able to
actually deliver quite a bit of energy and project a really relaxed countenance this is what tom
petty's doing i thought i told you to get back in bed i thought i told you not to pee on the carpet
oh no i'm really really relaxed with with my face but i'm also relaxed with my neck
okay so practice making all sorts of dynamic changes and speech level pitch changes
just like i showed you you're going higher you're going louder you're going lower
but your face and your neck and your shoulders all these things are very very relaxed
then every once in a while give yourself permission to be expressive with your face
what this does is it keeps you from being locked into a particular posture while you're moving
around vocally and again do this just by speaking dynamically with dynamic range and with lots of
different variances in terms of loudness in pitch i thought i told you not to be on the carpet
i thought i told you not to pee on the carpet and just let your voice do whatever it's gonna do
i thought i told you not to pee on the carpet notice how i'm going from here to
and then back down to deadpan now the cool thing is though is there's also there's this range of
expression that's happening and this range is happening via natural expression rather than
trying to meet some some sort of expectation remember i alluded to that at the very beginning
of the video expectations are what lead to singing with strain yeah we want to hit certain notes
yes we want to be able to perform in certain ways but if we go into any artistic
singing performing scenario with that being our goal rather than simply being expressive
we aren't going to get to the level of expressiveness that we need to get to
in order to deliver a strain or tension free performance so this is the first exercise
here's the second exercise we're going to take a cue from lenny we're going to open up yeah
every time taking the deadpan tom petty sort of approach and then swelling our expression from
over yeah and we're going to do it descending
just like lenny sort of does so that we're not trying to reach up for anything else
so first we're not going to do it with any sort of pitch or notes yeah yeah
yeah notice every single time i start like this and then i get engaged and it's okay
to get intense as we finish each yeah tension and intensity are not the same thing intensity allows
you to be free if you're doing it right tension keeps you from genuine intensity yeah yeah yeah
notice i've arced that yeah yeah yeah yeah now let's assign notes comfortable notes yeah yeah
yeah
now i am intentionally starting with the most relaxed everywhere posture and then i'm
intentionally bottling up but i don't stay there with every transition with every yeah transition
i reset i reset to deadpan so i've given myself permission to feel out the range
of energy coming from my body i guarantee you if you follow these two approaches and keep these in
your mind you are going to be able to identify when you are being strained and tension filled
very quickly and you are going to have a vehicle to reset
get rid of those expectations let your voice do what it wants to do and try this yeah approach
yeah yeah
yeah yeah yeah
i'm swelling into every note i don't enter into a note like this i enter it in like this yeah
yeah now you should be able to do this without getting your body involved as well yeah
yeah notice i'm still still pretty deadpanned even as i start going higher
now i'm going to intentionally engage my body and then disengage my body
even as i let my air and support continue to engage
in other words what i'm practicing here is that my body language is not directly correlated with
my energy level those can be detached this allows me to perform as though am engaged and be intense
when i want to be intense but the intensity is not required for dynamics volume or hitting certain
pitches i hope this has been helpful for you again if you haven't joined my free course do that get
a handle on your support and then practice these ways to sing without straining we'll see for more