Singing: What Were You Thinking?

Stephen Sondheim wrote a wonderful song, Anyone Can Whistle. The lyrics say, “What’s hard is simple, what’s natural comes hard…”

Changing your singing with thoughts

My last blog, Change Your Mind About Singing, you learned how changing your thoughts about your singing can actually change your voice. How? Thoughts that cause fear, cause your muscles to contract and hold the voice in. The thought, “I love singing this song,” opens up your body and you sing so much better.

Now you are going to learn more specifically what to think about your singing to help you become a better singer.

Let’s talk about left brain/right brain. Right brain is creativity, music, singing. Left brain is process, task, criticism. You must keep your left brain busy with task and process so that it cannot criticize you when you sing.

Yes, you need to judge whether you are on pitch and in rhythm, etc. and that you can do by observing your singing without putting yourself down. (That’s my next blog!)

So what do I mean by ‘tasks’? Vocal Technique. How you breathe, how you release the sound, how you communicate with your audience and so much more. The process you follow to sing. Actually you might not be aware of any process you use to sing. Keep reading…

I have been accused of being a vocal technique geek. Guilty as charged – and a good thing it is for a singing teacher. The reason I am so into vocal technique is that it saved my singing and all of my students’ voices too.

Breathing is the foundation for your singing. Get the breathing right, and you are going to be a better singer. Now you will learn how to think about your breathing to keep the left critical brain busy so it can’t interfere with your singing.

Inhale is to open.
Drop the jaw and feel as though the breath is dropping to your bottom.
Think: drop the jaw and drop the breath to my bottom

Exhale is a release of the breath and sound.
Think: release my breath as I say the words

Sound too simple? Try it! It’s actually quite challenging to keep your brain quiet and continue to focus on these 2 simple tasks. Observe your thoughts. Are the 2 tasks all you’re thinking? Or is there some criticism in there when you release the sound? Are you actually letting the breath go?

Inhale is to open.
Drop the jaw and feel as though the breath is dropping to your bottom.
Think: drop the jaw and drop the breath to my bottom

Exhale is a release of the breath and sound.
Think: release my breath as I say the words

Let me know how this works for you! Keep it very, very simple – which is actually the hardest thing to do! What are you thinking?

This topic is so important, so vital to learning how to sing, that I have just filmed several new lessons for my online singer training Sing Like You Speak™ Academy.

#singlikeyouspeak

ABOUT SALLY MORGAN
Sally Morgan wrote the book on contemporary vocal technique — literally. Sing Like You Speak® is specifically designed to restore the effortless vocal production that is natural to the human instrument making your singing powerful, joyful and free. Singing so simple it feels like talking to your best friend without sounding trained. Sally has been successfully teaching people how to sing for more than 40 years. That is how she turns decades of learning into days.

Every master begins as a disaster – including Sally Morgan. She gets it that you need to sing for the same reason you need to breathe. She’s felt the pain of not knowing how to release the amazing voice trapped inside. She’s felt the longing to be accepted as a great singer.

That longing became an obsession with finding solutions to vocal challenges. Sally spent many years developing those solutions into what became the Sing Like You Speak® vocal technique that is now empowering singers worldwide.

In both 2018 and 2019, Sally was a featured workshop presenter at SXSW® where she introduced an enthusiastic audience to the power of Sing Like You Speak®.

Sally has helped her clients heal vocal damage, expand vocal range, land a Broadway show, record their original music and tour internationally without vocal fatigue or strain. Besides teaching workshops Sally teaches private voice lessons and has developed online singing lessons – Sing Like You Speak® Academy.

You can see and hear some of Sally’s clients on Broadway stages, Off-Broadway, in Musical Theater – Regional, on Major Label Recordings, the Conan O’Brian show, A Prairie Home Companion and in Federal Courts, the PA House of Representatives, and the U.S. Senate. Sally teaches singing voice lessons in NYC and worldwide on ZOOM as well as online voice lessons on the Sing Like You Speak® Academy http://SingLikeYouSpeak.com/onlinelessons