Hey guys! Welcome back again to Ken Tamplin Vocal Academy, where the proof is
in the singing! I get a lot of requests for this, and
I've done quite a bit on the subject. In fact it's called how to belt, and some
people have referred to me as the king of belting. I think that's a good title!
So I want to just discuss this with you guys so we can kind of clear the air on
a few things, and that's that, you know, it's important to not think about "How
can I run as hard and fast as I possibly can?" That's not the first thing we do. The
first thing we do is we train ourselves up to a certain point, so that we can
belt, and belt correctly. Because if we don't do that, then we find ourselves
hurting ourselves and maybe even losing our voices altogether. Okay? This is
really, really important. So we start, you know, gently. Baby step at a time, and
warming up our voice, and building up strength, and building up more strength. Now
I have a singing course called how to sing better than anyone else where I
cover all of this in the course, to walk you through, step by step how to get to
this belting stage. But let's talk about the belting stage itself. So I'm gonna
give you some examples of belting, and I want you to sort of think about what
this term really means. Now some people have made fun of it. I've seen a lot of
SLS coaches saying it's just shouting. Well, kind of, sort of. I mean the word or
term "Broadway Belt" came from a "calling out." So maybe that's, there's some truth to
that. In other words it's the calling out to push the envelope of your voice in a
way that you're raising it at level as "Hey! That's my car! Stop!" You know, right? So
you're raising this volume, so to speak.
Ironically, I think the reason SLS has a problem with it is because they don't
teach good diaphragmatic support, really at all. There are some that do, but for
the most part that's not their main focus.
So without the diaphragmatic support part, and the strength in the abdomen, you
don't get the belt. Okay? So, but before that we have to train a good quality
solid, clean sound first. And for a while, just to - it's a muscle. We're building
a muscle, so we want that muscle to be strong, so that when we lean into that
muscle we're not gonna tear something. Okay? That's really important. So anyways
let's get to the belting part of this. So let's assume that you've already
built a nice strong clean sound and now you want to move on
into belting. Well, there's a an idea that people think that belting is just
shouting, like at a football match or something. You know scream at the top of
their lungs and the next day they wake up hoarse. Okay? Well, actually the true
way to do this correctly is to build good Open Throat Technique first I have
a video out on that. It's in my singing course. If you want to check it out, check
it out. But I'm telling you straight up you've got to do this first. Then we have
something called glottal compression where we compress air at the glottis. We
don't let too much air pass across the cord, because it'll dry out the cord
and we'll lose phonation, or sound. So what we have to do is we
have to learn how to compress that sound, and hold back the air like this. But we
have to build open throat technique first to maintain good open throat in
the back, so that we're not pinching and squeezing and gagging on our sounds as
we go up, ascending or descending a passage, phrase, or a song. You know
a melodic line in a song. So let's do this several ways, right?
There's different forms of compression and we can compress the voice in
different ways, which is this form of distortion. And we don't want to and I'm
going to get into distortion. In fact I'm gonna do a video on this, up here, shortly.
But we don't want to "yell" so loud that we push so much air across the vocal
folds that it dries them out. So we hold our breath. And we go: Hey
I could go on and on and on. Why? Because I've learned the art of learning
how to control the breath and compress the air, and I'm belting at the same time.
So I'm not out of breath. I could have gone on for a long time. It would have
been annoying. But I know how to control the air in a way, because I've built good
muscle memory first. I have strong diaphragmatic support. And then I can
lean a sound and belt. Right? So I can like get into that space with a lot of
good compression and I'm not over singing. So it's an illusion. Let me say
this again. It's an illusion. And here's what I mean by that. You think that I'm
just killing it with sound and I'm just throwing sound at you really hard. Well
there is that. But there is that because I built resonance. What is resonance?
Whoo, there's that word again. It means that I built up my voice in a
way that I'm able to relax to a sound where my vocal cords have, are so buff,
that they can do the work for me and I don't have to "kill" myself to get this
sound out. Because I've built up. Once you hit a certain point where your vocal
folds are getting stronger and stronger and stronger, you relax into that sound,
and the resonance takes over and creates volume or mass of volume. Right? And it's
at any spectrum of the voice.
it doesn't matter, you know, where I am in my spectrum. I'm still able to relax to
the sound, because I've built up this good muscle memory. Like I said, I cover
this, all of this, in my singing course called How To Sing Better Than Anyone
Else, where I walk you through this stuff step-by-step on how to belt. So belting, again, you know:
Right? You notice I'm relaxed. I'm sitting in a chair. You don't hear me sound like
there's any funk, like I've lost my voice. So the funny part about that is, too... I
just came off of an hour webinar, and I'm doing this this video here. And I'd sung
for, you know, 45 minutes before that, and I'm gonna do a couple more of these
after that. I can sing for hours on end and not go hoarse or hurt myself. And
even if I do... even if I do, and I covered this also in my singing course. I have
remedies on how you can come back to clean up the voice the next day and you
are back in the saddle, and ready to rock! Okay! Thank you guys for joining me!
Ken Tamplin vocal Academy, where the proof is in the singing!
Next time, see you guys soon! Peace! Out!
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