A Simple Mixed Voice Exercise - Try This!

hey everybody uh Sterling R Jackson so today I'm going to make a shorter video and we're going to talk about an exercise that I kind of came across uh recently when I was teaching a student um as many of you may know uh well we start off more honestly the internet is chock full of too much information too much good information bad information and it's hard to decipher what the hell's going on and what's good and if you're somebody that's following singing coaches singing you know people and trying to figure this stuff out you're going to be inundated with just ridiculous amounts of information and try to have trouble putting it together you know and when it comes to mixed voice um you know I know that that can be very elusive it can be very mysterious and it can be very confusing a lot of my students that come to me are definitely trying to figure out Mixed voice and you know found a video about me talking about it and uh go down that rabbit hole anyway as I've continued to teach that throughout the years I've been teaching for 11 years might be 12 years now um there's different ways of trying to attach to these fundamentals or attached to these musculature movements coordinations there's different things that work for some people and there's things that don't work for other people but when I'm giving you these information or these exercises these information I'm trying to get you to latch on to certain movements and certain things that work so that you can recognize how to kind of build all of this on top of each other because it's definitely not one thing and then you're like I got it and then you're moving around and whatever so now I have um one student in particular his name's Joe has a gaming Travel Channel I think it's Average Joe by the way if you want to look him up but um he can do some of these things now and he'll be practicing some of these things and then other stuff's not clicking in as well so I did this exercise with him that we're going to do together here and um it goes over kind of more like the three kind of fundamental parts of mixed voice which are low larynx or maintaining a neutral larynx will kind of refer to it as that um adding nasality to your sound and then adding these cry muscles I think some people refer to them as Edge muscles whatever you want to talk about it doesn't really matter I can tell you all kinds of muscle groups but until you feel these things and hear the sound coming out of your head doesn't really matter if you know what muscles you're using by name so in order to keep this a little bit shorter um recognize again to experience mixed voice and to have it working for you your larynx will be in more of a lower position or you will experience a sensation of a tilted larynx more often than anything that's kind of a higher larynx higher up in the throat you know this kind of weird thing I've I have so many students doing so many different things so keep that in mind that when you do get this or when it starts to make sense we should have a yawning sensation at least a little bit or a opening up of the throat an elongating of the throat going like this that mechanism that feeling was very important when I started learning this and what was great about that in particular was I started noticing every time I was moving high in my voice correctly because I would start to feel this tilting sensation like this and when I wasn't ah ah my larynx was going up higher and then I was breaking so if you can find that and you can pay attention to that it's great remember too that before you get to your Bridge your passaggio you're going to be feeling that tilting sensation so secondly one of the most important parts of all this stuff is that you need to be adding more and more nasality to your sound whether you're practicing straight up nasality just in your everyday singing so you can get a handle on using that space more it doesn't really matter but you're going to be moving up to your soft palate and your hard palate and over that space so you have to definitely make things nasal because if you're still down here and you're carrying a lot of weight in your chest then you can't release that tension to move up higher so that's the second part third part is getting to know what muscles are coming together to compress your voice to make it work and keep those notes more consistent more powerful more mixed we'll say so let's throw these all together now I have not been singing for a week you can probably still tell in my voice I've been sick for about a week again apologies um this kind of cold has been kicking my my anus and um it sucks man it's been really rough so I have not sang at all in a week but we're gonna run through this anyway because I'm pretty confident that I can do it but it still might not sound the uh the sexiest it's ever sounded the exercise as simple as it is goes like this we're just working on Sirens doesn't really need to be um you know like a special place in your voice and that's another thing that's great about this exercise we're moving through it wherever you are however you are you can do it five minutes a day it doesn't really matter um if you have a piano or you know how to play or you can do it with a guitar it doesn't matter anyway first many of you will know that uh we're using o to ooh when we use o to ooh we have a chest voicey vowel on the bottom oh which keeps us nice and open oh oh then we have ooh in the top as we move into head voice oh we're shedding the weight from that Big O to ooh as we go higher we're trying to put a little bit of a yawn in there so we keep that larynx down oh as you feel the tension pull up from o and chest Pardon Me Oh or anything like that know that you need to move over to ooh faster so once again therein lies the idea here is that we're shedding weight as we get higher we're learning how to shed weight and we'll learn how to keep the larynx down so [Music] so think about it now and some people have more luck going up than down and some down but we are transitioning between chest and head voice um if you're having trouble with it think about holding a ball shape in the mouth oh oh if anything that allows stretching or that o or the ball or whatever is stretching this way as we go higher so it shouldn't be going I shouldn't have any of this sideways kind of horizontal tension in the neck or anything like that it's just like a yawn oh so there's one part of this then we'll run through all of them at the end now we're going to make a nasal sound should sound like a UNG oh and it's gonna be the same feeling but this is what we're tacking onto this so it's uh once again we're compounding the exercise first exercise low larynx then we're adding nasality to low larynx then we're going to add the other part of this but if I go uh almost like a French whatever that would be oh you should feel a vibration in the back where the soft palate where your uvula hangs down [Music] now this if you're doing it correctly keeping the head down a little bit to loosen up these muscles you should be feeling that it's even easier to do than Oda ooh if you're doing it correctly we should still have ODU kind of under there but and at the end of the day the more nasal we're being the more we're shedding the weight of chest voice because we're already moving that resonance elevator up to here [Music] if you imagine you're holding a ball you still are it should be the exact same except we're just moving that ball back towards the nasal the nasal space a little bit more oh do you hear that ooh still in there let me try to do it the wrong way for you [Music] you hear any time this kicks in then I start to break so it's oh oh the correcting there that's happening that correcting is is oh it's the lower larynx we're pulling the larynx back down now once again you can go extreme with it oh you can really be ridiculous if you can do that I've had students that can't lower their larynx on purpose anyway let's keep going now we're going to add into uh some cry sound into that nasality that we just added um think about your mixed Voice or this mixed voice that you might be trying to find like a a voice right here and then a voice right here up here up here we can dance back and forth between these muscles or these compression points uh when you get better at it for you maybe you'll feel it more as a seamless connection like this like you'll be like I can't tell there's two different things happening or maybe like me um throughout your years of trying or singing or whatever you might experience this is two different muscle groups you hear those two very different distinct sounds those are the muscle groups we're finding next which I'm crying into the sound so I'm crying into that nasality sound keeping the larynx down all this making sense we'll start right here it sounds like this so I have oh and now I'm going and I'm starting to cry it doesn't sound and more you can do that the better it's going to work out now I've had I've seen a couple of these videos I try not to watch other people's videos because people were ignorant and they just want to break down information they want to break down singers they want to be like saying all kinds of ridiculous ignorant this worked for me I apologize if it doesn't work for you I'm here trying to give free information so I hope it works for you is it going to be night and day and you're going to be singing Journey after this and you're going to go ahead and stop believing don't stop you shut up anyway um uh the cry technique should not hurt none of this should hurt it shouldn't be that heavy you don't have to go that heavy with it just really start putting that cry in there come back to this video over and over and keep trying to make the sound every day for you know for me it took a while for it to acclimate and make sense but if you're making a different sound and it sounds much different than what you hear me doing come back to it and keep trying to make that sound use your musical brain to kind of put those pieces together now what am I saying I'm trying to talk about the cry technique so um I talked about it like this recently too if I go [Music] if we go full on anything and go completely bratty and annoying like that you're entering into that muscle group mixed muscle group so having said all that let's do this so nasal or yeah nasal uh and then crying into that nasal space oh [Music] some of this making sense let's put all these together in a short little exercise okay low larynx nasality UNG and then crying into that sound [Music] one more [Music] nasality ungm [Music] um crying into that sound I should feel it up here oh oh let's do two more why not [Music] that's where I where my sick voice wants to tap out right now now what to do after we have that you're learning how to take those sounds and sustain those notes oh sorry for the Distortion it's not supposed to be there you can do it with o two ooh see how that's all connecting I hope this helped thank you to good old Joe for uh for helping me figure out if this you know is a good exercise or not uh sorry I've been going for a while but uh this cold is going to keep uh keep dissipating I am getting better each day but it's taking a while um I will see you guys soon if there's things you want to hear about there's things you want to learn about there's things you want me to cover talk about um you know I'm happy to do so if if I feel like it's a good fit let me know of course I'm on patreon teaching more of these things all the time that community of people helps to support my living support my life I appreciate you so much thank you for that um and then yeah if you want to lessons uh you want to look into lessons with me you can go right to my website sterlingrjackson.com and you can book right through the site happy to teach you happy to talk to you about your your issues your strengths your weaknesses um so I will talk to you soon thank you

Channel: Sterling R Jackson

Views: 3,847

Keywords: mixed voice, how to, exercise, scales, sing high, sterling, Jackson, Chris, liepe, lesson, lessons, brett manning, how to sing high, better

Id: WBOiPTp0kPw

Length: 15min 2sec (902 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 05 2023