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Lesson time: (2min 45sec)
Day 10 with Adam Mishan: a chew-and-hum exercise with gentle neck movement to loosen the jaw and free it from the motion of your vocal cords.
This lesson is part of the course 30 Days To A Better Singing Voice
Watch a preview of the full course below.
Lesson transcript:
Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. I'll be your...
So, welcome back to Day 10! How has practice been going? It's a good time to check in, making sure that you're keeping up with the exercises three to four times a day, separating them out with at least an hour break in between.
Again, this is a crucial aspect of your success throughout this course. Building in rest and relaxation is one of the key elements that's going to make this course effective.
The next exercise I want to give you guys to work on is a great exercise to create looseness in the jaw. Up until now, we've been trying to build some independence of the tongue and jaw muscles with the La Ga exercise and the tongue out exercise.
Now we're going to focus a little bit more on the jaw itself. This is a deceptively simple exercise, but extremely effective. The key to this exercise is to focus on the relaxing nature of it.
Here's how we'll do it:
Start with a hum:
Incorporate chewing:
This helps to get the jaw operating independently of the motion of the vocal cords.
Let's do that again and focus on the relaxing effect it has. It might be nice to integrate a little bit of rotation of the head to start feeling that looseness of the head on top of the neck.
Slowly bring it higher into your range. The key is to focus on not pushing or straining to make it happen, but allowing for the sound to come out.
Now, what we're going to do for this exercise is simply put it on the five tone scale. So we'll go like this:
As you do it, you might notice a certain wawa effect that happens as you move your jaw. That's perfectly fine!
We're not focusing on being dead on pitch and making sure that it sounds great. The end result will definitely sound great, but this will not necessarily sound beautiful.
As with the previous exercises that we've gone through, I won't mention it again after this point. To do the full exercise, you have to refer back to the audio section of this course.
Adam Mishan is a vocal coach who taught himself to sing. His videos document the journey from not being able to hold a pitch to singing with real control, and that path now shapes how he teaches - over 200,000 people follow along on YouTube. In his courses you'll work on pitch, breath support, tone and range in small, repeatable steps, the same way he built his own voice. read more
