♬
Hi everybody!
My name is Justin Stoney
and I'm the founder of New York Vocal Coaching
here in New York City.
Welcome to our second episode of
Voice Lessons To The World.
This is a show where we want to help you as singers
to have the best information and to improve your voices.
Today I'm really excited because we actually have
our very first question ever!
This comes from Kristen S. in Charlotte, North Carolina.
And Kristen writes, "My voice sounds very nasal.
People tell me that my singing
and my speaking voice sound nasal.
What can I do to fix this?"
Now Kristen that's a fantastic question,
and something that a lot of singers struggle with.
And a lot of times it's just due to a confusion
about what it actually means to even be nasal.
See we have two things, we've got nasal resonance
and we've got nasality.
And most singers will fall on one of the extremes
of either too nasal or not nasal enough.
But let's first talk about what these two things are.
So, nasal resonance tends to be a very good thing
and nasality tends to be not so good of a thing.
Nasal resonance,
if you hear me speaking to you like this and I say,
"Hello my name is Justin",
I've got nasal resonance in my voice.
If I take the sound out of my nose,
suddenly I start to sound kind of muddy.
And I sound almost like Sylvester Stallone in Rocky,
"Yo Adrian".
But it sounds kind of strange.
But I put the sound back in my nose,
and then I sound like myself.
So we know that it sounds normal
to have a little nasal resonance in the voice.
So how this applies to singing,
I'll just take a little exercise here...
♬
And I have it in my nasal resonators...
I sing ♪ Mah Mah Mah Mah Mah ♪
But if I take it out of my nose...
♪ Mah Mah Mah Mah Mah ♪
It starts to sound a little bit muddy.
So again, with resonance...
♪ Mah Mah Mah Mah Mah ♪
and without...
♪ Mah Mah Mah Mah Mah ♪
So when we sing, we actually do want to
feel nasal resonance.
A little bit of a vibration right up here.
So then, what's the bad nasal?
That has actually more to do with
the larynx than it does with the nose.
If I speak to you and I say, "Hello my name is Justin",
my larynx is staying pretty put.
If I drop my larynx down, I get a kind of muddy sound. [Low larynx ]
"Hello my name is Justin." [Low larynx ]
But then if I squeeze my larynx up and I say, [ High larynx ]
"Hello my name is Justin", [ High larynx ]
then I start to get a bad nasal sound.
Now what's really interesting
is if I squeeze my larynx up here [ High larynx ]
and I cut off my nasal cavity, [ High larynx ]
I can actually make a really nasal sound [ High larynx ]
without any nasal resonance at all. [ High larynx ]
So a really nasal sound doesn't actually even need
to have nose in it.
So, when you're singing, Kristen, or anybody out there,
you want to make sure that it's not your larynx squeezing up.
That's going to cause nasality.
You also don't want to jam your larynx down.
But you do want to feel a little bit of nasal resonance,
a vibration right in through here.
So that's nasal resonance, that's good.
And squeezing the larynx up
with neck muscles or with your upper body,
that's going to be bad and cause the nasal sound,
the nasality sound, that you don't want.
So, I hope that's been helpful for you guys today.
If you have questions that you want to have
us answer on our show, go ahead and send an email to
Questions@VoiceLessonsToTheWorld.com. [♪]
[♪]
We encourage you guys to not lose the joy, [♪]
don't lose the passion, [♪]
work really hard at your voice, [♪]
find a voice teacher that you love in your area. [♪]
And never let anybody tell you that you can't sing. [♪]
Because we know, that's just not true. [♪]
If you guys are in New York City, [♪]
you can email us for an appointment at [♪]
www.NewYorkVocalCoaching.com. [♪]
Come on down and study with one of our staff [♪]
here at New York Vocal Coaching. [♪]
And if you like these videos, you can check out [♪]
www.VoiceLessonsToTheWorld.com. [♪]
I'm Justin Stoney, [♪]
see you next time. [♪]
♬