Hey everybody welcome back again to Ken Tamplin Vocal Academy where the proof is in the singing. I'm doing this series on answering your vocal questions by request and using 35
years of my singing and teaching experience to do my best to give you the
goods on these questions that you're asking. So the next question that I got
is you know fear of singing high notes. I'm afraid to sing high notes. Well you
know I think a lot of people are afraid to sing high notes, in fact there's you
know these fun videos roaming around on YouTube of you know professional singers
or you know great singers that are afraid to sing a note so they duck it or
they sing someone else. So there's always that fear but I want to olay that fear by
giving you guys some information I think that will help you okay. The first thing
is I want you to envision yourself doing something that you love, that you've done
a million times and you can do it in your sleep. Really think about it. I don't care if it was riding a bike, surfing, skateboarding, writing an essay you know whatever that
thing is right. Well it's because you've done it with repetition and hopefully
you've done it correctly with repetition because just because you Einstein's..
not Einstein excuse me there's a whole.. an old saying you just wash my tongue and I
can't do a thing with it. There's an old saying is that practice makes perfect.
Well practice doesn't make perfect, it's perfect practice that makes perfect.
Let's get that straight. It's not just practice that makes perfect because you
can embed a bad habit. It's perfect practice that makes perfect okay. So
assuming that you've been practicing perfectly and you're doing something
that you love and let's say for me you know I like to swim in the ocean.
I don't think twice about just jumping in the..now I watch the water
conditions and I make sure that there's nothing crazy but I jump in the water
and I go for my swim or whatever it is that I do and I don't really think twice
about it. I really enjoy it right. Well you guys that enjoy singing should be in
the same boat. So I have a singing course it's called How to Sing Better Than
Anyone Else and I walk you through all this stuff step-by-step so I'm obviously
not going to turn you into an amazing singer in two easy minutes or whatever
these crazy videos that are roaming around that claim that they can make you
great or give you great vocal tips in five minutes. I will give you a great tip
and this is gonna be this right. When you think about the process
of singing, its building blocks okay. Now in a few videos ago I discussed diaphragmatic support and I incorporated posture and how to breathe correctly,
that is a foundational building block for singing. So once you start to build
this house, it's like building a house so you build this foundation first I cover
this in my course I've got a lot of great free tutorials on YouTube where
you can get all this information at least parts you get a little sound bites of it
in order to help you understand how this works. So so once we're building this
house and if you've got your diaphragmatic support down, you've got
your relaxation response between your chest your neck and your throat, you've
built good open throat technique and good muscle memory for open throat
technique, you understand your vowel modifications and I have videos on all
these and all I'll put as many as I can in the description tag so you can kind
of go through them and again they're small sound bites that alone isn't gonna
make you great but it's gonna really give you a good snapshot of the total
sum and picture on what it takes. So imagine going through this and and
practicing this with good repetit.. repetition and good practicing habits
correcting.. practicing something correctly like I said I just washed my
tongue I can't do a thing with it. That's an old TV commercial. I just washed my
hands and I can't do a thing with them. Go check it out old 70s 80s commercial.
Anyway back to singing. Once you practice these correctly with repetition, you're
gonna find that it becomes easier and easier and easier to hit this note. Now
the problems gonna be is once you get to a certain note in your range that it
becomes so easy you're gonna want to sing yet a higher note and that's
gonna become easier and then you're gonna want to sing a higher note and so
forth and so on. So it's not like just a one-stop shop, all of a sudden you know I
can sing something great but let me explain too what I mean. When I think of a
high note I don't think of the note being high, I kid you not. Now most people go oh my gosh my range I don't go to an a4 if I'm a tenor or a
high baritone like me and that's the total top of my range
right. That's how most people think. Well I don't think about it, I used to think
about it like that but I don't think about it like that anymore. I think about
it like okay do I have good strength in my abdomen to sustain the note I want to do. Have I just over sung a phrase or am I
exhausted from over singing something from before and now I'm trying to sing
something even more difficult or did I pace myself and there's a whole thing on
pacing and we'll discuss that too in a minute or not in this video but in
another video and then do I.. can I visualize the note that I'm singing. Now
here's where this gets interesting. There's a video out you know how to
trick your voice. Well it's kind of absurd but there's some truth to that
and let me explain. I used to like to surf a lot okay and for you surfers out
there or people that have gone in the ocean you'll identify with this alright. Now in surfing and even if you haven't surfed, please follow me on this
because this will help you. There are different breaks on the shoreline
there's third break which is the break that crashes right on the sand,
there's second break that's a little farther out and then there's first break
that's really far out or you know the biggest break that comes in from the
ocean and they usually kind of come in waves you know three at a time, four at a
time, five at a time you know depending on the swells that are coming in. Well
what a lot of people do when they're scared is they they're paddling out you
know past second break and they're going to first break and they don't always
break at the same spot, sometimes they break really far out, sometimes they
break farther in. So you have to be prepared to get out to that wave before
it gets you right. So that's the high note, that first break is the high note.
So what a lot of people do is they panic just as the swell is coming in it's
intimidating and they look at this swell and are like whoa what do I do. Well everyone knows what you do is to get a lay of the land or in this case
the lay of the water you don't sit there and wait and sit in what's called the
strike zone and get pummeled by a wave and end up like a washing machine and
washed ashore or pinned down on the ocean floor right, what you do is you
swim out to the wave as fast as you can maybe even go past it on the first one
unless you're experienced surfer, go past it to let it go by and see because
there's another one probably coming up maybe even farther out and you've got to
get past that wave so it doesn't overtake you. Well so it is with singing. By the
way so you get a lay of the land of the wave right and then when you finally
understand where it is then you can ride that wave in and you know you're good to go. Well so it is with singing. You don't sit there in the
strike zone and just before you get to the top you panic right and you miss your note. So when I said about tricking the voice ,what you do and what
I do and how I think about notes now is I think about strength in the abdomen,
good ribcage expansion which we discussed in one of my videos here that
we just put out about breathing, a relaxation response, how to relax my
chest my neck and my throat so I'm not all tense. Everything is coming from my
abdomen, all my strength is the engine that drives my car, I've built good
muscle memory for the open throat technique we just discussed and then I
have a vowel, a specific vowel placement that I want to hit within my voice and
I've worked my voice, my register, I've worked my passagio and I've gone through all the the building blocks of building my house and all the rooms in the house
but I built all the building blocks so the by the time I want to get to that
high note, I don't go (sings) I don't think about that note being high I think about
okay whatever that note was a D or C or E or whatever it was and and I think
about okay the placement to get to that note requires this much strength in the
abdomen, a relaxation response and this vowel that I want to hit in a certain
specific kind of way and it could be hitting it hard, hitting it lightly or
soft or you know a combination there out right. So getting back to doing what
you love and doing it in repetition. The more you do this over and over and over
again, the less intimidating that note is and then the more you sing a song over
and over again and you can pace your set where you don't over sing one part of
the set where you don't have enough strength to get to the next part of the
set and again relaxation response in the stomach too so you're not bound up all the time where every song is just you know pure tension and you're able to manage
away this stress and really understand how to get to these notes. That is the
way to sing high notes and sing them stress free and sing them consistently
okay. Hopefully this was helpful and God bless you guys and until next time peace out. Hey guys if you like what you heard please LIKE and SUBSCRIBE to my channel
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