- As worship leaders, our most important instrument
is our voice but often it's the most neglected.
In this video, my friend Brandon
is gonna share four tips for healthy singing.
And make sure you watch this video to the end
because he's also gonna share a simple warm-up exercise
that's gonna improve the range of your voice
so you can sing those higher or lower notes.
And if you put these tips into practice,
you're gonna be more confident,
your voice is gonna last longer,
and you're gonna have the right mindset
as a worship vocalist.
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Like I already said, one of our most neglected instruments
as worship leaders is our voice.
Just like any other instrument,
if you have a guitar or a piano
or any other piece of gear out there,
you wanna know how to maintain it,
take care of it, and also develop it over time
and make it better.
That's why I'm excited to have my friend Brandon here,
he specializes in vocal performance.
And he's gonna share with you four tips
for being a healthy vocalist.
So, let's go ahead and just take it away, Brandon.
What's tip number one?
- Tip number one, you're a focal athlete,
not just a singer.
So, our voices are designed to function
with muscles and ligaments and it's all about
the way that all those things happen.
Like, we use our diaphragm, which is a muscle, to breathe,
right, runners train themselves on how they breathe.
And so we, as singers, also have to do the same thing.
If you've never worked on your breathing,
I highly recommend that you start isolating that
and start learning how to breathe deep and low
using your diaphragm to help elongate your phrases,
connect things, and also support your voice well.
It's like the engine of a car, is your breathing.
So, make sure that you're keeping your engine
running smoothly and well and that you're
actually utilizing your engine to the best of its ability.
And also, learning to not strain your voice
and actually training it to do
what it was made to do is huge.
Also, taking care of it, athletes take care of their bodies
and so, likewise, we as vocalists
have to take care of our voices.
So, drink plenty of water,
lay off the coffee on Sunday mornings,
and drink tons and tons, just keep yourself hydrated
and make sure that you can last
through those, you know, two, three,
even four plus services that you have to sing.
- I like using the analogy
of comparing our voice of being our instrument
to like an acoustic guitar as an instrument, right,
where an acoustic guitar has its different parts,
it has the strings that vibrate
that, like, are the source of the sound
but then it also has like the body of the guitar,
that's where the resonance comes from
and it's kind of the same thing with us
where we have have our vocal folds,
our one piece of the instrument,
and then we have our diaphragm and the resonance
that happen up here in our head,
that's like the body of the instrument
and it's really important to understand
how all of those things work together.
- Yep, exactly. - So, let's go on
to tip number two, what up?
- Tip number two, you be you.
So many times I get students who come in
who wanna sound like, you know, Lauren Daigle
or Chris Tomlin or Chris Brock from Elevation
and they wanna sound like somebody else
but the big thing is is not everybody's gonna have
that raspy voice and not everybody's gonna have
that belting high, you know, alto sound.
So, learning how your voice was made to sound
is a beautiful thing and then learning
to live within that voice.
Because when you try to go outside of it,
you're gonna end up trying to do something
that your voice wasn't made to do.
The beauty of voice is the fact
that God has designed your voice
to sound the way that your voice was made to be,
not like anybody else's.
So, learning your strengths in your voice
and understanding how your voice is supposed to sound
is huge and then be confident in that.
Look, you are a beautiful, wonderfully made
child of God and your voice is the same.
So, don't try to change it.
- I have nothing else to add to that tip.
(Brandon laughing) You really covered it well.
There's this pressure, maybe I do,
like, there's this pressure we have
to try to sound like the artists that we hear
on their albums and they're amazingly gifted,
chances are you'll never sound exactly like them.
You don't want to, you really wanna, like,
tap into how God has created your voice
and use it to its fullest.
And then maybe pull some stylistic things
from other people that you hear.
Moving on to tip number three.
- Tip number three, practice makes permanent.
We ask our instrumentalists as worship leaders
to practice, you know, an hour to two hours a week,
so we, as vocalists, need to do the same.
And one of the biggest tips I can give you
in practicing and learning to make that more permanent
is the one thing none of us really ever wanna do,
and that's record your voice.
Record yourself practicing.
I had this one song that we were doing
in the season at my last church
and I just wasn't quite getting it.
It just wasn't quite, I wasn't quite confident in it
so I another co-worship leader tell me,
hey, why don't you try recording yourself
and listening to it and that's what I did.
I had like seven or eight recordings
of me just singing Do Something by Matthew West
and each one, I was listening for the nuance in the song
in this particular verse, in this particular phrase,
adding a little bit of style in certain places
that actually fit the song in that one spot
rather than just doing the same thing
over and over and over again.
So, learning to hear yourself,
get yourself some feedback and practicing
so that you're continuously improving is crucial.
- And that goes along the lines of the analogy
you used of being a vocal athlete
not just a singer and athletes need to train,
they need to practice.
I know if I stop going to the gym
for a couple weeks and then I go back,
I'm like, it's horrible.
It's just a mess. - It's so bad.
- I feel horrible and that just obviously
affects all areas of my life
if I'm not practicing crossfit regularly.
So, same thing applies, you're a vocal athlete,
you need to be training and practicing.
- Totally.
- Let's go on to tip number four.
- Tip number four, it's all about worship.
Don't beat yourself up.
The big thing here is understanding
that no matter what we do in practice,
no matter how hard we try to get the right notes
and do the right things, mistakes are gonna be made.
Like, most of us aren't professionally trained singers.
Not all of us studied in college or in high school
how to actually do this right.
And even professionals make mistakes.
So, don't beat yourself up.
The key here is understanding that when you step out
to lead in worship, where is your focus?
Is it on getting the notes right?
Is it on singing that one phrase perfectly?
Is it nailing that bridge?
No, it should never be on that.
It should always be on worshiping our lord and savior
with everything that you have,
everything within you should be given to him in glory.
- And I think, kind of, the flip side to that
but also with the same goal in mind
of it's all about worship is that
the reason we need to care about our voice
and maintaining about our voice
in practice, in training, and get better
is that when it comes to worship on Sunday
we're not stressing out about
will I reach those things or,
it will just all comes naturally to us
and it won't distract the congregation,
you know, when us, our voice cracking
or something like that or
both the fact that you wanna kinda chill out,
you don't wanna stress out
about being this amazing vocal performer,
but at the same time, put the work in
so you can also relax during the worship service
and actually just focus on worshiping God
and your voice will just follow right along.
And as I mentioned at the top of this video,
Brandon has a bonus little tip for you guys
when it comes to healthily expanding your vocal range.
'Cause I know as a guy, I like to hit
some of those higher notes
that like Matt Crocker can hit.
- Oh, yeah. - Or Mack Brock
or some of those worship leader male vocalists
I look up to, and even for female vocalists,
you can use this tip as well
of how to expand our range.
So, go ahead in and show us what that tip is.
- Okay, so in order to understand this tip,
you have to understand that most people understand
that our voice actually is two different voices.
You have your head voice
and you have your chest voice, right.
And really it's all about resonance
and the way that your vocal folds create those two, right.
So we can get into the deep stuff of that another time.
But the warm up is actually pretty simple
and if you've ever sung in a choir
or you've ever had a voice lesson,
you've probably done it before.
But utilizing it to actually access
a different part of your voice
is really what you wanna try and do.
So, what we're gonna do is we're gonna actually
siren down from the highest point in our head voice
that we possibly can and bring it
as low as we possibly can.
And bring your head voice as low as you can
until you feel it start breaking, and then go further,
so you'll probably hear my voice break a little bit
but the goal is to actually make it a seamless transition
so you don't hear the break at all.
And then you're gonna do the same thing going up
and you wanna be able to shift your head voice quickly
without hearing much of a break in the range.
So, it should be a nice smooth down and a nice smooth up.
And then what that'll end up doing
is you'll try to blend those two voices together
into what we call a mixed voice, all right.
And if you can start trying to get the tones
and the timbres of those two voices to blend and mix,
you'll be able to utilize that higher register beautifully.
Okay, so here's an example of how to do those two exercises
very quickly, okay, so going from high to low.
♪ Ah ♪
Now, here's the thing, you heard the voice break, right.
- Um-hm. - You heard the voice break.
So, don't be ashamed of the voice break.
Happens to all of us, okay.
Your goal is to try and get rid of the voice break.
So, now I'm gonna try again
and I'm gonna try and work that break even more
so that I bring my chest voice
to match where it's meeting, okay.
So, here we go, one more time.
♪ Ah ♪
And you just keep working that break, right,
so I'm not as warmed up as I probably could be
to demonstrate that perfectly,
but the thought is still there.
The fundamentals are still there.
You wanna try and get that break
to be as minimalistic as possible.
So, now going from low to high, you do the same thing.
♪ Ah ♪
Right, so it's the same kinda concept.
- I find it's almost easier, too,
going from low to high.
- Sometimes, yeah. - And also,
it helps, I think, moving your finger,
actually or hand or whatever. (Brandon laughing)
Like, give some sort of physical association
with the movement. - Yes, it really does.
- Of the pitch of your voice.
So, do that a lot, do it, I don't know,
maybe on a sub-quasi regular basis,
maybe once a week, couple times a week.
- Yeah, I do it before every Sunday.
- There you go, every.
- Every Sunday. - Before every time you sing
or maybe before rehearsals.
That'll really help expand that vocal range.
Brandon, thank you so much for those tips.
- My pleasure. - Thank you so much
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