How to sing without tension

hey guys Adam ishani our singer-songwriter and vocal coach and I've got his question often and I was very surprised that this is really a question but it's surprising to me how many people actually have difficulty with figuring this question out how does he without tension that is a big question but for a lot of people what is the most misunderstood is what tension is I've created a few courses and have worked with a bunch of students through those courses and what a lot of students have difficulty with finding is what tension is in their voice you know I had one student who thought like you need to squeeze the neck in order to close the vocal cords and so they're like well you say in this course to get court closure but then you say to stay nice and relaxed aren't those opposites I kind of had to say whoa what are you saying is cord closure and identify what exactly he was talking about and then make the correction so what I want to do with you guys right now is go through different sources of strain and what that strain sounds like and so for a lot of people this is not as obvious as it might seem for me or for you know somebody who might not be a beginner but for a lot of beginners this seems to be a very very difficult topic to be able to find out and it's important to be able to figure this out because it's the foundation that everything else lies on so first let's talk about the main culprit of strain which is the neck so the neck has all these exterior muscles muscles outside of the larynx that often want to get involved in the process of singing but they're really absolutely unnecessary to a great degree to be involved like this muscle right here if you can see this muscle this is called the sternocleidomastoid it is not necessary for singing we don't need that muscle to engage in order to sing properly but so a lot of people think like well I want to really be able to grab onto the sound and have some sort of security so I'm going to sing from the neck so what you'll hear is a lot of [Music] that type of push that's these muscles or ah as they're going higher they're tending to strain these muscles in order to hit those higher pitches as opposed to keeping these loose oh and finding a release up there they are straining and pushing from these muscles if you're interested in learning more on how to sing I created a resource that I wish would have been around when I was starting to sing with the subscription I've created you get access to all of the courses that I've created and more that are coming you get access to all of my private lesson recordings that I have from other students so you can learn vicariously through them and you get monthly one-on-one lessons with me all of this is available for one low monthly price and it's a very well-rounded approach to learn how to sing click the link down below to get access now the next point of strain and tension can come from the jaw so the jaw has a set of muscles the main one being the masseter muscle and that muscle kind of runs from the cheekbone down and that muscle right there can get very tight and for a lot of people it is very tight like just pushing on it for me right now I feel some tender spots so that can get very tense now the main problem is when you're singing and you get a jaw thrust so that looks like this so the jaw is not meant to thrust forward as you're singing so I had a student that he was singing yeah I'm free free free and so that jaw kept on coming forward free and that held back and tighten the sound made everything sound strangled so you can hear that that jutting forward of the jaw is not helping my sound rather what we want to do is think of hinging the jaw back so we want to go ah ah ah so you can see I go down and back down and back ah nah uh-uh the other way that the jaw can be a point of tension is if somebody's singing a song and they're not allowing their mouth to open properly right so a lot of people don't realize how open their mouth has to be until they actually look in the mirror and see what opening their mouth feels like it looks like and how ridiculous it feels then they start to realize wow that's how much I actually need to open it for singing that's pretty crazy so I get people are like yeah I'm free free I'm their jaw jutting forward and their mouth is closed free falling there's no way you're gonna be able to sing that no I with the jaw that tight do I get free free you want to make sure that that jaw ah drops even on E specifically we want to allow that jaw to drop the next point of tension for a lot of people is the tongue and also the digastric muscle that is connected to it so the tongue we see in our mouth is only a very small portion of the muscle that is actually the tongue the base of the tongue sits right in here underneath your chin and so if you put your finger under your chin there is a muscle called the digastric muscle that if you go ah you shouldn't feel it engage no matter what note you are at in your range I should say disengaged if while you did that with me any point it started to engage that tells you that there's tension involved and we don't want to have that tension the other thing that I would just work actually with a student and he was trying to get a lowered larynx physician so we were trying to get a little bit of a spongebob token so we're trying to lower the larynx and anytime he did that he actually got a bit of a gag reflex to jump in so here we go hi Heisman and that's actually the larynx rising that gag reflex is a whole bunch of tongue tension jumping in to get in on the process so what we really want to do is focus on but in the the letting the tongue is holy laughs so the laughs that it sounds like you guys saw a novocaine from the dentist like you got a shot and over came from the dentist your tongue is numb this says heavy enough so if you're not able to let it sit and rest like that over your bottom lip at which and jump and try to like go into weird configurations you know you're starting with a lot of tongue tension so what tongue tension sounds like is something like oh let's see if I can do this I gotta engage my digastric it's hard when you've been training your muscles to not do this to start doing it but like if I go there it's really engaging there E you're really getting that digastric muscle to engage so that's what tension kind of sounds like so we want to release that I want to do is I focus on relaxing my tongue and then that muscle relaxes as well now with that mushy tongue II [Music] articulation is going to suffer so then our goal is to try to keep the base of the tongue relaxed while the tip of the tongue does what it needs to do to articulate the vowels and the consonants so for those of you who have been confused about what tension in the voice sounds like I hope this gives you a decent demonstration of what tension sounds like and the way to fix it and what the main culprits are so there are more muscles that are involved obviously there's tons of muscles involved that could potentially be causing trouble but those are the main ones the neck the jaw the tongue we want to try to keep those nice and relaxed and you know malleable so that obviously the tongue needs to do some work but we don't want it to be in a tense constantly bound up position let me know if you guys have any questions in the comments down below if you like this video please hit the like button down below and if you want to see more videos like this please check out that one right there you're gonna like it

Channel: Adam Mishan

Views: 43,806

Keywords: adam, adam mishan, am vocal studios, mishan, how to sing without tension, sing without tension, singing without tension, without tension, no tension, vocal tension release exercises, open throat singing technique, tongue placement for singing, how to sing, singing exercises, throat tension, bel canto, vocal range, vocal warm ups, how to sing high, tension, tension free, how to belt, relax, high notes, vocal warm up exercises, high note, relaxation, smule, singing, lesson

Id: wTSNXZUgiMY

Length: 8min 26sec (506 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 14 2020