Music Lesson: Days 5 Through 9

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh I'll be your.

Welcome Back

So welcome back! How was the first four days of the course? My hope is that you've been able to experience a greater sense of relaxation and freedom in your voice over the past little while.

You would be hard pressed to find a voice that wouldn't benefit from a lot of the exercises that we went through.

Now, without further ado, we're going to jump straight into days five through nine.

First Exercise: The Straw Exercise

This first exercise is going to be familiar to all of you, but then we're going to jump into some exercises that will be a little bit unfamiliar to you.

Let's Get Started

We're going to start off with the straw exercise.

• With this, we're going to try to move the shoulders as well as blow through the straw.
• Keep the sound as relaxed as possible as we do it.

Are you going to try it along with me?

It doesn't necessarily matter what note you're on right now, and just make sure that your shoulders continue rolling the entire time.

Important Note: Make sure that your shoulders don't get stuck as you're doing this.

Understanding Muscle Independency

One of the most important parts of learning any new skill, especially while singing, is being able to learn muscle independency.

• For example, a pianist wants to be able to learn how to play two notes really, really fast.
• He needs to be able to move the muscles of one finger while relaxing the muscles of another.

The same thing is true with singing.

You'll notice that a lot of people have very strong muscle dependency. You can see this when a singer needs to scream out a high note and clench their face in order to scream out that high note. This shows that the muscles working in their throat are dependent on those muscles clenching as well.

Next Exercise

In the next exercise, what we're going to do is learn to develop independency between:

• The muscles of the tongue
• The muscles of the jaw
• The muscles of the larynx