Hey guys, welcome back again to Ken Tamplin Vocal Academy, where the proof is in the singing.
We’re going to be discussing nasality today, or how not to sing nasally, but before we
do that, I think it’s really important to ask ourselves a couple of real big questions.
There’s a lot of information floating around on the Internet on a lot of different subjects
from a lot of different vocal coaches. So how can you tell what information is actually
legitimate, and what really works, and what doesn’t?
The only real way to tell is to ask yourself a couple of big questions, and that is this:
does the vocal coach themselves sing, and sing well, so that they can prove and demonstrate
what they’re teaching is true, and do they have a lot of students that also sing and sing
well that prove out their method? At Ken Tamplin Vocal Academy we have over
300 videos of several dozen students that actually prove out what we teach, because we
believe that the proof is in the singing. With that said, let’s get started with nasality.
What is nasality? Well nasality is using too much air throughout the velo-nasal port, or
through the sinus cavities and down in through the nose. So how can we avoid that? Well,
there’s several things we can do that are really easy, simple tips and tricks, and one is this.
It’s going to sound silly, but we’re going to simply plug our nose. Now, we’re going
to do a simple triad scale, I’ll do it first for the guys in the guys’ register, and
then I’ll do it for the ladies… But we're going to start with a real nasally sound
to determine what that sounds like. So I’m going to start with and ah vowel on a simple
triad. (nasally) Lah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ahhh…
Right? Or for ladies it's: (higher and nasally) Lah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ahhh… Right? It’s
going to have that real, real brassy, nasally sound. Well, what we’re going to do is we’re
going to simply plug our nose… Lah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah…
Ladies, let’s try it with you: Lah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah…
Now what we’ve done is we are determining how we can allow the least amount, or no air
out of the Velo nasal port, out of the sinus cavity. Now something that’s a real cool
trick is to get in front of the mirror and look at the back of the throat, and you’ll
see the soft palate should start to rise as we ascend a scale. In fact your uvula, it’s
the little dangly thing in the back of your throat, and the soft palate will start to
rise, and you can actually control and mitigate the amount of air that goes in and out of
the Velo nasal port. Now, we don’t want to always not have any
air to come out of the Velo nasal port, but let me give you an example of, let’s say,
take a simple song, to give you two choices of how to mitigate, or give a percentage of
air to come out of that, to determine a style, or something that you may want to use when
singing. I’m going to pick an old Styx song, I love
Dennis DeYoung, he’s an awesome singer. To this day, the guy can rock. It’s awesome,
his voice is fantastic, where many others have lost their voice. But I’m going to sing
an old Styx song called “Come Sail Away”. I’ll sing it like Dennis, because he uses
a lot of mask in his sound, so “I’m sailing away…” Okay now there’s a lot of mask,
and quite a bit of nasality in that sound. Now, if you want to avoid, or cut back the
amount of air to that sound, it would sound something like this: “I’m sailing a way…”
Now, notice at the end, on the EEE, I did add a little bit of Velo nasal port sound
to it, because I wanted to have it resonate in the front of the face…