Your voice is unique to you. It grows as you grow. It changes as you change. If you’re curious about the relationship between your voice and your body, your heart and your mind, welcome. My name is Michèle Voillequé and I can’t wait to hear you. 

I am often asked, what vocal styles do I teach? As in, “I want to learn how to sing rock and roll, can you help me?” Or, “I primarily sing jazz, can you teach me to sing in a jazz style?” Or, “Do you only teach classical style, or do you also do musical theater?”

These are not bad questions. These are good questions to ask if that is your specific goal. And, there are at least three basic things that a human being needs to learn to manage if they’re going to sing anything well at all.

I teach people how to use their bodies well for singing. I myself am classically trained and I teach classical vocal technique which I believe to be the most effective, efficient way to teach people to make high quality sounds that are not abusive to their body. And after that, with that kind of foundation, we can look at any kind of repertoire you like, except death metal.

No, no, no good with death metal. And I’m not good with rap. So aside from death metal and rap – country, rock, musical theater, jazz, what singer song, your own songs, singer-songwriter, whatever you want to be looking at, we can do that.

The reason I place an emphasis on good technique is because regardless of the style, there are three things that a human being needs to manage in order to sing anything well.

I say three things, but they’re actually probably skill sets. They’re, they’re larger than just one thing, but that’s managing your breath, managing your vulnerability and your relationship to your vulnerability, and also managing your presence, your “being-ness,” more broadly.

These three things are interrelated and they affect one another. And it’s difficult maybe to tease one out from another, but I’m going to try.

But first, let me say something about the different vocal styles and what makes them different from one another.

The first big thing that affects how one style may differ from another is whether or not the singer is using a microphone, whether or not the human voice is generally amplified or un-amplified.

It’s a very different use of the body and it’s a very different tone quality if the voice is expected to never be amplified, as is the case with most classical music, so we’re talking about opera, art song, early musical theater.

You need to use your instrument differently if you’re expected to be heard over even a loud piano, let alone an orchestra of anywhere from 20 to 70 players.

That means, for the most part, that a breathy tone quality is not going to work because it will not be audible. But a breathy tone quality that you can hear in lots of other different genres, pop, jazz, country, anything that is more typically amplified and therefore digitized and recorded, there’s a lot of post production after the recording is made, you can sing very breathily – as breathily as you like into a microphone that’s a few inches away from your mouth and let the sound engineer fix it and make it sound magically like it’s louder than a piano, when in reality that just is not possible.

But there’s all kinds of post production magic that can happen so that you can, sing something with a particular, quality, a kind of gentleness that simply doesn’t work in a non-digitized environment.

It’s not going to work in a living room. It’s not going to work around a campfire, but you know, that’s part, that’s maybe a feature of the genre or a feature of songs within the genre that you’re interested in singing, and so that’s something that you get to learn how to do.

But that’s, one of the things that separates classical-sounding music from we could just generally lump more popular-sounding music, is the fact that classical music is not amplified.

That being said, San Francisco Opera has started to amplify some voices, for particular shows for particular reasons. But that’s more, I think, to accommodate the size of the house. The San Francisco Opera House seats about 3,000 people. It’s a large opera house.

And the amplification has been in more recent compositions, modern operas with particular casts and particular voices and they’re trying to help the cast that they have sound as well as they can, within the confines or whatever the opposite of confines is in the cavernous hall that is the San Francisco Opera House.

Anyway, little rabbit hole. Just to say that not true that classical music is never amplified, just that the tone quality that’s expected is one that does not require amplification in order to be heard. So that’s the first big filter that separates one style from another another.

Another filter or feature as it were that differentiates one style from another you can imagine has to do with phrase length. How legato, how long and connected are the phrases? How long are the vowels and how connected are the words to one another?

Some musical theater, these days, kind of sounds like a monologue with a few notes. Like, there’s a whole lot of content – you’re basically delivering a monologue and it has a melody, but there isn’t a chorus or a refrain maybe as you’re used to thinking about it.

So, in that kind of situation, those phrases are much shorter, they’re much wordier, and they call for a different approach than, say, a musical theater song from the 50s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, maybe even the 80s, where, what’s the song that I’m thinking of from, Guys and Dolls?

“There were bells on the hill, but I never heard them ringing, till there was you. No, I never heard them at all, till there was you.”

The Beatles covered it, maybe that’s the version you’ve heard. Great long phrases! That is going to require a different technique than something more modern that doesn’t have long phrases.

There’s a contrast, too, between country music and pop music. Those are really big genres. There’s a lot in them, but you can maybe see what I’m getting at. Like a country ballad is going to have longer, more connected phrases than a pop, dance-y kind of tune.

I have students working on some contemporary pop ballads now that are, I, I struggle to call them ballads. They’re ballads in the sense that they’re talking about, you know, great feelings and, you know, the course of a relationship and like, drama in that way.

But how the lyrics are being delivered is very conversationally and not really with very long notes, very long vowels at all. It’s almost like we’re on the phone together.

So that, that defines one genre from another – how long are the phrases? How many words? Is there a refrain and are you expected to improvise? That’s one of the things that makes jazz very different from everything else. It’s a form that takes the sheet music as a suggestion.

Everyone who’s playing is expected to know the form of the song, know the chord changes, know the melody, but the interpretation of that melody, and the harmonization within those chord changes is not set in stone. In fact, kind of the opposite.

You’re expected to bring your own creativity, your own vision, your own heart to the project. And so you can sing jazz standards like however your favorite singer sang the song, and you can copy what they did.

But I think really to be true to the form, you need to be prepared to improvise, prepared to understand the song at the bones level of the song and provide your own interpretation.

And so there’s a different kind of musicianship that’s required to sing jazz than maybe other forms. Rock and roll is perhaps musically simpler, but there’s also an expectation that improvisation, well there’s a lot of instrumental improvisation in guitar licks, I guess some instrumental solos within rock music, but for the vocalist, historically, it’s pretty straight ahead.

You know, you just sing the tune and your bandmates make it fancy, or go rogue, or make it interesting, however you want to, however you want to look at it.

Feel free to argue with me on this point. I’m not entirely convinced that I’m right here, except that I would say how far you’re allowed away from the melody is one of the things that makes jazz different from rock. And that is one of the things that defines the style.

So to sum up, things that make one style of vocal music different from another have to do with the tone quality that’s expected, which has everything to do with whether or not the music is amplified, the length of the phrases, the number of words, the forms of the pieces, verse, chorus, verse, pre-chorus, chorus, bridge.

Those are words that don’t make a whole lot of sense in classical music. They do a little bit, but those are conventions that are, more 20th century, mid 19th century, and forward.

I’m not sure we had pre-choruses before the middle of the 20th century. That’s an interesting question. Do you see how I keep finding rabbit holes?

So, things that affect how a particular style of vocal music sounds include whether or not it’s amplified, how long the phrases are, how many words there are, generally, the forms of the songs, whether you’re expected to improvise, and how strictly you’re expected to stay within the harmony or the harmonic form of the song.

One of the stories that I love about Willie Nelson is that when he first came to Nashville, he was criticized because his songs were too complicated. There is a joke about country music that it’s three chords and the truth is all you need to make a country music song.

And his songs had lots of truth and way more than three chords, and at the time, that was not acceptable. And through some stroke of luck, he met Patsy Cline, and she loved his song “Crazy.”And she sang the pants off of it, and he started to get work.

“Crazy” is not a three chord song. And it’s become a country and jazz standard. It’s entered the Great American Songbook. It’s come out of its genre and it’s been embraced by lots of people.

Anyway, that’s another thing that, defines the style of a piece of music. How harmonically complicated is it?

It’s probably easy to see that if the phrases are long and, there aren’t very many words, that how you relate to your breath, you could say, maybe it’s more important that you relate to your breath better, more effectively if the genre that you’re singing in has long phrases and you’re expected to create long, beautiful tones, and yeah, there aren’t very many words, it’s just vowel, after vowel, after vowel, after vowel. And, that’s true.

That’s a very quick and dirty way to describe classical music, and your breath control is important.

But as I was saying, those long phrases exist in not just classical music, but they’re in jazz, they’re in musical theater, they’re in pop songs, they’re, yeah, there are long phrases everywhere.

So managing your breath is important, even if you’re not singing classical music. And, funnily enough, managing your breath is important even when the phrases are short, and when they’ve got tons of words in them.  Because it is very – it can be really challenging to only inhale the amount of air that you need for the phrase that’s coming.

Sometimes it’s the wordy songs, the songs with short phrases, that are the most challenging because they require you to use less air than maybe your excitement or just your physical body would want to.

There’s something very rewarding about taking a deep breath into the center of your body and just using all of that air up to the very end and then taking another one.

There’s something really simple and really beautiful about that. You know, you just let the air in. And then you send the air out, and it’s just this great, full, expansive feeling.

And when you get into a groove about it, when you know how to do it well, and you’re not filled with any kind of panic about running out of air at the wrong time or anything like that, it’s very relaxing, it can produce a kind of euphoria.

When you have a song that has lots of short phrases and lots of words, it can be very difficult to feel grounded in your body and free in your jaw and relaxed with your tongue and relaxed with your neck. It’s very easy to feel under pressure.

And because you don’t need to take really deep breaths, because the phrases aren’t very long, you can end up breathing shallowly in a way that just helps your body feel tighter and tighter and tighter, and more desperate and clenched and it can be very challenging.

Learning how to manage your breath is about your relationship with your body below your shoulders. And that is something that’s really important to sort out independent of a particular song that you want to sing.

The second thing I mentioned about managing your vulnerability has to do with the fact that singing anything at all is neurobiologically threatening to your system.

In order to sing something and to be heard, even if you’re singing into a microphone that’s just inches away from your face, for it to go well, you need to have a looser relationship with your jaw than everyday life.

You need to allow your mouth to be open. And allowing your mouth to be open, especially for extended periods of time, means playing with the threat, real or imagined, that you will accidentally inhale something that’s not air.

Our brains want us to keep our mouths closed because that’s been proven to help us stay alive longer.

I mean, there are lots of social pressures to keep our mouths closed. We don’t think that people with their mouths hanging open are terribly attractive or intelligent. It’s not a good look to just let your chin hang there.

Maybe you can remember being a kid and having an adult tell you to close your mouth, or you know, close your mouth even because you were saying something that was inappropriate but lots of us as youngsters were just kind of in awe of something or were utterly unaware of the fact that our mouth was hanging open and have had an adult correct us.

Because it doesn’t look good and part of it not looking good is that it’s, it’s scary, right? You could inhale something that’s not air and that’s not good for the human body.

So there’s a neurobiological vulnerability that comes with singing, and there’s also just a regular old emotional vulnerability that comes with singing. You’re sharing something of yourself, you’re putting sound out there that somebody could judge as not good.

Maybe you’re afraid of singing out of tune. Maybe you’re afraid of people not liking it. Maybe the song’s really important to you, strikes a deep emotional cord within you. And that’s tender to express. That’s tender to share.

That vulnerability needs to be managed because when it is not managed, throws us into fight or flight or freeze and in those conditions it’s impossible to take a good breath.

When you’re in fight, flight, or freeze, your breathing is going to be suboptimal. You’re not going to be able to manage your breath support.

So we need to manage our vulnerability because it helps us communicate the content of the song more effectively and emotionally connect with the audience and also just physically we’re better able to produce the tone we need to produce when we’re comfortable with feeling vulnerable.

And so the third skill or skill set that we need to acquire regardless of the genre is a grounded sense of being. I’ve talked about this on earlier episodes, a sense of being comfortably at home in ourselves, safe within ourselves, safe in our own body.

This is a little different from vulnerability and staying out of fight, flight, or freeze, but you can see how it’s related. And it’s related to how well we’re able to manage our breath, because if you’re not comfortable in your own skin, you’re not going to be breathing well either.

So, it’s uh, maybe three legs of a stool, or maybe it’s, maybe it’s three sides of some multi dimensional object.

But included in cultivating a grounded sense of being is a healthy posture. And if you just sat up straighter, when you heard me say healthy posture, that’s okay.

That’s not entirely what I mean, but that is part of it. Good alignment of the spine and your head on the top of your spine is something that’s necessary for managing your breath well.

And it’s something that helps you stay out of fight, flight, or freeze when you can be aware of an openness across the front of your chest, and just a general safety or healthy orientation of your skeletal, your musculoskeletal system, that you’re upright and proud, as one of the hymns goes.

That’s certainly part of it. But another part of a grounded sense of being is being centered enough in yourself to healthily connect not only with the music and not only with your bandmates or accompanist or the karaoke track, with the other musicians involved in the song that you’re singing, but also to connect with the audience and to connect with the room that you’re singing in.

Even if you’re singing into a microphone, your voice is being amplified in a room and to communicate a song well, you need to be not only connected to the mic, but connected to the room and the people in the room.

And that allows you to communicate the fullness of the song as a whole person, not just as some floating head in space. Singing is not like speaking.

Good speaking, of course, is just as embodied as singing. But what I mean is it’s possible to go through our days as speakers without thinking about our body at all, because it’s a survival mechanism, right?

You don’t actually have to be managing your breath, comfortable with your vulnerability and feeling grounded and secure within yourself in order to say something.

We have a thought, we go to communicate it, we’re done.

But when we’re treating the voice as part of an art form, when the voice is now an instrument, in concert with other instruments, we want to bring our whole self to that communication. We want to bring our whole body to that communication.

And that makes whatever we’re singing more effective. And if you’re speaking in public, that makes whatever you’re saying more effective.

There is a difference between speeches made in Congress by people who are trained speakers.

I’m thinking of Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia, who’s a preacher. Whether or not you agree with what he’s saying politically, the quality of his speeches is just heads and shoulders above those of other senators or representatives who don’t have that kind of oratorial training.

It’s blindingly obvious. And it’s not that the people who aren’t as well spoken are not as smart, it’s not really a question of intelligence so much as just having the skill of bringing your whole body, your whole self to what you’re doing.

And so regardless of what genre of music you want to sing, I hope that you want to bring your whole self, your whole body to the project.

And in order to do that, you need to know how to manage your breath and be comfortable with your vulnerability, and to cultivate a grounded sense of being, a kind of presence that can hold the song you’re trying to sing.

I really hope this has been helpful. And if you have bones to pick with me about how I talk about musical genres or anything in this episode, please send me an email. Let’s get into it.

Thanks so much for listening.

If you enjoyed today’s episode, please rate and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new people find the show. Subscribing ensures you’ll learn about new episodes as soon as they come out. If you have a question about singing or speaking or being, please send me an email at letters@mvmusik.com.

That’s letters at M as in Mary, V as in Victor, M U S I K.com.

Transcripts and show notes are available on my website. You can subscribe to my newsletter there, too. Can’t Wait to Hear You is produced in conjunction with Particulate Media. I’m your host, Michèle Voillequé. I can’t wait to hear you.