- Posts: 112
- Thank you received: 0
Select posts by Jagrmeister on the now defunct GYOW = GoingYourOwnWay.com
Get a Better Voice
1 year 11 months ago #100
by jagrchive
Get a Better Voice was created by jagrchive
Besides working out, having a strong, confident voice is the one thing that can immediately change people's perception of you. In fact, it may make a bigger difference; your build can often be obscured by clothes whereas your voice will always come through, even over the phone. I was born with an average voice, perhaps below-average. Because I work in a profession where I am largely working on my own (with some meetings), I don't use my voice all the time and naturally give it a workout (as would someone in retail, or in sales). Also, not being a woman- I'm not screaming into my cellphone several hours a day.
Having lifted for many years, I saw how attention to developing muscles works. You focus on it, exercise it with the right technique, and it responds. Your voice is a muscle too (or a set of muscles). For some reason, this only occurred to me recently. I remember reading that Arnold Schwarzenegger , when he first got into Hollywood, realized he had worked out everything but his voice. But he went to work on it, and developed the deep, resonant voice we all know from his movies.
Before I get into the workout, I'll just say I've already seen an immediate difference in how people look at me with my new voice- whether at a restaurant or talking to people at work. I may just leave this thread open and keep adding tips to it over time. There are some things they teach you NOT to do, somethings to do, and certain psychological methods that are important.
My learning has come from reading about 5 different books on the voice, as well as audio books, e-books and whereever else people speak on the subject. Some of these are techniques used to train singers that also work for speakers. For my first entry, I will keep it super-basic.
There are two areas to first work on: breathing and vocalization. The voice is a wind instrument; by working on your breath muscles ( diaphragm ), you strengthen the muscle that produces air that powers your voice; by working on your throat/larynx 'muscles', you strengthen the delivery mechanism that modifies the air to create a sound. [please note- there are many sources of information online that go into the anatomy of voice- this is of course, a simplification]. I set aside about an hour every other day to do these. You can start with something like half an hour and work up. Here are the steps I recommend:
Breathing
--
1. Breath-Sssss : breathe in, and then make the sound "ssss" (like a snake). Try breathing in fully for several seconds then make the "sss" sound for five seconds. Do this 5x.
2. Blow Candle : breathe in, and then blow out gently but steadily as if you were trying to make a candle in the distance flicker (but not blow it out). Breathe in for several seconds, then blow out. Do it 5x.
3. "Sh-Sh": with this exercise, you are giving your diaphragm (the muscle that powers your breath) a workout. Say "Sh" as if telling someone to be quiet. Say it for one set of 5 times then stop. Do a total of 10 sets. If you put your hand on your diaphgragm (just beneath your ribs- in front and above the stomach area)., you'll feel it going back and forth.
Vocalization
--
Vocalization is all about making vowel sounds. That is how you develop your vocal muscles.
1. Siren vowels. Say the following vowels: ee, eh, ih, i, ah, aa, oh, oo, aw, uh. Do them like a 'siren', starting at a high pitch and then coming down to your lowest pitch. So it sounds like "EEEEeeee.....". The vowel sound should last like 3-4 seconds. Do this for all the vowels.
2. Compound. Try saying some words that have several vowels: ohio, tomato, erie, may-tee, payload, ferry. You can do them a siren format, or just say them out loud. Try projecting your voice (speaking louder) with a few of them. Feel free to add other words to this list.
3. Stacatto vowels. Instead of a long sound like the siren, what you're going for here is saying the vowel normally (like "ee" quickly as you would in speech) but going from high to low. So, "ee (highest pitch), ee, ee (mid pitch), ee, ee (lowest pitch). Try this with: moo, mee, mah, woh, why.
-
Keep water nearby. I like to play music in the background (also muffle the sound for neighbors!). If you find yourself getting hoarse, you can stop or skip a day of practice. After 3 weeks, you will notice a difference. I'll post more tips over time and glad to answer questions.
(Note: this was a popular thread on the prior forum....posting it here)
The new voice is your real voice. I do slip into old patterns, when I'm concentrating, like you do- typically when I'm not delivering pre-prepared material. Few things. First, from a psychological perspective, I find its important to own the "new voice" which as I mentioned is your real voice. Bob Corff - who has a decent speaking voice set of MP3s - talks about this. He says your new voice is like the storage room in your home you never used; a decorator comes and shows you what's possible with this room, and with a few changes, it becomes your favorite room. It may feel a little odd at first, and it does for me still. I've done some audio recordings- I was worried my voice sounded exaggerated and too deep- but on the recording it's just fine. Now I know why people light up when they hear it- it is more enveloping and richer. Not the perfect voice, but better. Second, from the physical perspective, the times when I lose the technique is when I forget to do a few things:
*Relax: tension kills a resonant voice. Tension primarily in the jaw and the diaphgragm- stomach. The stomach is notorious at tensing up in difficult, stressful situations. I've only recently noticed how often my stomach tenses up and keeps me from full breath. I try to stretch my jaw periodically too to keep it from tensing.
*Posture: my voice dies when I curve my spine AND when I lower my chin. In some case, I exaggerate keeping my chin up, to keep my larynx extended. It's the only way to produce the right voice. I've been doing some light back excercises to ensure I can sit up straight.
*Breath and Open the Back of the Throat: When you open the back of your throat, you produce a full voice. Because your voice is a wind instrument. To check how this feels, Do a Yawn ("yaaaahh") from high to low, then at the end say "1". Do this with "1" "1,2", and "1,2,3". The act of yawning like that opens the back of the throat and allows you to project. When speaking of course, you can't do this, but it's the same effect. Finally, the voice is rich when backed with air. Remember to breathe; and ideally at the diapgrahgm (below your rib cage)- not my lifting your shoulders at the high chest. If you breathe, keep your chin up, and open the back of your throat, you should produce the right sound just like playing a clarinet the right way.
My experience has been: it's not as though you will have the best voice on Earth so that can't be the expectation. But I have leapfrogged many people in 3 short months. I've also noticed from past efforts years ago, that if I quit the exercises or don't do them regularly, the effect is lost. All good reason to keep it up and make it a regular thing. Feel free to do some audio recordings to track the change.
Some Advanced Exercises
--
For those using the exercises, here's a few that you may want to add to your routine now or later when you're ready for something that'll develop your voice even further.
1. Long Breath, Long Sound
This is like #1 from the original post (Breath-SSS). Instead you will breathe in for 10 seconds, and make the "ss" sound for 15 seconds. This is challenging. That's why it's an advanced exercise. Breathing in for 10 seconds may take a bit to get used to. Remember to keep your back straight, and inhale gently (through mouth). One technique that works for me is when i breathe, Imagine the space in your back (esp. your high back) to get wider and bigger. As you keep that visualization, the air comes in effortlessly. Imagine the air all going into that space. Try it! It may sound weird but it works. For the sound, try to get to 15 seconds. You may not succeed at first. Keep a steady level of expiration. You will feel a little shaky as you get to 15 seconds, that is normal. Don't kill yourself- but push yourself to get the last part out.
Use a timer to get the timing right; ie:
Online Clock - Smooth Seconds
Do this 5x. Feel free to take breaks between reps so you don't get lightheaded.
2. Projecting
Sometimes, in life, you need to speak up. The best practice to be able to project your voice is to.... project your voice! Set aside 2 minutes (to 5 minutes) of doing just this. I pretend I'm having a long phone conversation. "Hi!". "How are you?". or "No, we don't have that product!". Speak loudly and emphasize the vowels. Do this after your breathing exercises and vocal warmup. If you keep doing it, you will have the ability to project on demand. Your vocal muscles and in-breath will get stronger. You can play music in the background if you want to muffle the sound if you live in an apt. complex. I also practice some basic sounds that I may have to use like "No", and "Yo!" and "Hey".
3. Speech
Putting it together means using your new voice with full words which have consonants and all. With speeches, you learn to pause, color your language and change your pace ALL with your new voice. Sometimes with the new voice, you're so focused on projecting that strong voice, you forget that speech has a cadence-- it goes up and down. It has color- and emotion. Doing speeches allows you to regain all this natural movement in a voice with your better voice. I recommend speaking for 5-10 minutes. A site I've found useful is:
Top 100 Speeches of the 20th Century by Rank - American Rhetoric
I print these out and read them; because I don't want to stare at the screen while speaking them. That would be bad posture and my chin is down. I print out read and speak with correct posture. I pick points in the speech to project to I have the habit of doing that when I need to.
--
Good luck with it!
Source Material
*An FYI, no matter how good these books are, they talk a lot about psychology of voice, the physiology of voice, about why it helps to have a good voice, and about voice as opposed to voice training. A frustration of mine was I've read maybe 10 books on voice, and the amount they dedicate to the actual exercises is sparse. I kept thinking "just tell me what to do"; so that's why i distilled the exercises above. But the books are always good to read for a lot of the nuance and more detailed teaching.
Bob Corff - Speaking Voice - link
Book- Training the Speaking Voice - Virgil Anderson
Book- The Voice Book - DeVore and Cookman
Winning with Your Voice: Morton Cooper: 9780879804428: Amazon.com: Books
Jay Miller- Confident Voice - free videos ; course
MP3 exercises
Amazon.com: The Vocal Recovery Warmup (Male Version): For Male Singers With Tired, Sick, Aging, Or Weak Voices: Susan Anders: MP3 Downloads
Amazon.com: Voice Lessons To Go - V.1 Vocalize & Breath: Ariella Vaccarino: MP3 Downloads
Having lifted for many years, I saw how attention to developing muscles works. You focus on it, exercise it with the right technique, and it responds. Your voice is a muscle too (or a set of muscles). For some reason, this only occurred to me recently. I remember reading that Arnold Schwarzenegger , when he first got into Hollywood, realized he had worked out everything but his voice. But he went to work on it, and developed the deep, resonant voice we all know from his movies.
Before I get into the workout, I'll just say I've already seen an immediate difference in how people look at me with my new voice- whether at a restaurant or talking to people at work. I may just leave this thread open and keep adding tips to it over time. There are some things they teach you NOT to do, somethings to do, and certain psychological methods that are important.
My learning has come from reading about 5 different books on the voice, as well as audio books, e-books and whereever else people speak on the subject. Some of these are techniques used to train singers that also work for speakers. For my first entry, I will keep it super-basic.
There are two areas to first work on: breathing and vocalization. The voice is a wind instrument; by working on your breath muscles ( diaphragm ), you strengthen the muscle that produces air that powers your voice; by working on your throat/larynx 'muscles', you strengthen the delivery mechanism that modifies the air to create a sound. [please note- there are many sources of information online that go into the anatomy of voice- this is of course, a simplification]. I set aside about an hour every other day to do these. You can start with something like half an hour and work up. Here are the steps I recommend:
Breathing
--
1. Breath-Sssss : breathe in, and then make the sound "ssss" (like a snake). Try breathing in fully for several seconds then make the "sss" sound for five seconds. Do this 5x.
2. Blow Candle : breathe in, and then blow out gently but steadily as if you were trying to make a candle in the distance flicker (but not blow it out). Breathe in for several seconds, then blow out. Do it 5x.
3. "Sh-Sh": with this exercise, you are giving your diaphragm (the muscle that powers your breath) a workout. Say "Sh" as if telling someone to be quiet. Say it for one set of 5 times then stop. Do a total of 10 sets. If you put your hand on your diaphgragm (just beneath your ribs- in front and above the stomach area)., you'll feel it going back and forth.
Vocalization
--
Vocalization is all about making vowel sounds. That is how you develop your vocal muscles.
1. Siren vowels. Say the following vowels: ee, eh, ih, i, ah, aa, oh, oo, aw, uh. Do them like a 'siren', starting at a high pitch and then coming down to your lowest pitch. So it sounds like "EEEEeeee.....". The vowel sound should last like 3-4 seconds. Do this for all the vowels.
2. Compound. Try saying some words that have several vowels: ohio, tomato, erie, may-tee, payload, ferry. You can do them a siren format, or just say them out loud. Try projecting your voice (speaking louder) with a few of them. Feel free to add other words to this list.
3. Stacatto vowels. Instead of a long sound like the siren, what you're going for here is saying the vowel normally (like "ee" quickly as you would in speech) but going from high to low. So, "ee (highest pitch), ee, ee (mid pitch), ee, ee (lowest pitch). Try this with: moo, mee, mah, woh, why.
-
Keep water nearby. I like to play music in the background (also muffle the sound for neighbors!). If you find yourself getting hoarse, you can stop or skip a day of practice. After 3 weeks, you will notice a difference. I'll post more tips over time and glad to answer questions.
(Note: this was a popular thread on the prior forum....posting it here)
The new voice is your real voice. I do slip into old patterns, when I'm concentrating, like you do- typically when I'm not delivering pre-prepared material. Few things. First, from a psychological perspective, I find its important to own the "new voice" which as I mentioned is your real voice. Bob Corff - who has a decent speaking voice set of MP3s - talks about this. He says your new voice is like the storage room in your home you never used; a decorator comes and shows you what's possible with this room, and with a few changes, it becomes your favorite room. It may feel a little odd at first, and it does for me still. I've done some audio recordings- I was worried my voice sounded exaggerated and too deep- but on the recording it's just fine. Now I know why people light up when they hear it- it is more enveloping and richer. Not the perfect voice, but better. Second, from the physical perspective, the times when I lose the technique is when I forget to do a few things:
*Relax: tension kills a resonant voice. Tension primarily in the jaw and the diaphgragm- stomach. The stomach is notorious at tensing up in difficult, stressful situations. I've only recently noticed how often my stomach tenses up and keeps me from full breath. I try to stretch my jaw periodically too to keep it from tensing.
*Posture: my voice dies when I curve my spine AND when I lower my chin. In some case, I exaggerate keeping my chin up, to keep my larynx extended. It's the only way to produce the right voice. I've been doing some light back excercises to ensure I can sit up straight.
*Breath and Open the Back of the Throat: When you open the back of your throat, you produce a full voice. Because your voice is a wind instrument. To check how this feels, Do a Yawn ("yaaaahh") from high to low, then at the end say "1". Do this with "1" "1,2", and "1,2,3". The act of yawning like that opens the back of the throat and allows you to project. When speaking of course, you can't do this, but it's the same effect. Finally, the voice is rich when backed with air. Remember to breathe; and ideally at the diapgrahgm (below your rib cage)- not my lifting your shoulders at the high chest. If you breathe, keep your chin up, and open the back of your throat, you should produce the right sound just like playing a clarinet the right way.
My experience has been: it's not as though you will have the best voice on Earth so that can't be the expectation. But I have leapfrogged many people in 3 short months. I've also noticed from past efforts years ago, that if I quit the exercises or don't do them regularly, the effect is lost. All good reason to keep it up and make it a regular thing. Feel free to do some audio recordings to track the change.
Some Advanced Exercises
--
For those using the exercises, here's a few that you may want to add to your routine now or later when you're ready for something that'll develop your voice even further.
1. Long Breath, Long Sound
This is like #1 from the original post (Breath-SSS). Instead you will breathe in for 10 seconds, and make the "ss" sound for 15 seconds. This is challenging. That's why it's an advanced exercise. Breathing in for 10 seconds may take a bit to get used to. Remember to keep your back straight, and inhale gently (through mouth). One technique that works for me is when i breathe, Imagine the space in your back (esp. your high back) to get wider and bigger. As you keep that visualization, the air comes in effortlessly. Imagine the air all going into that space. Try it! It may sound weird but it works. For the sound, try to get to 15 seconds. You may not succeed at first. Keep a steady level of expiration. You will feel a little shaky as you get to 15 seconds, that is normal. Don't kill yourself- but push yourself to get the last part out.
Use a timer to get the timing right; ie:
Online Clock - Smooth Seconds
Do this 5x. Feel free to take breaks between reps so you don't get lightheaded.
2. Projecting
Sometimes, in life, you need to speak up. The best practice to be able to project your voice is to.... project your voice! Set aside 2 minutes (to 5 minutes) of doing just this. I pretend I'm having a long phone conversation. "Hi!". "How are you?". or "No, we don't have that product!". Speak loudly and emphasize the vowels. Do this after your breathing exercises and vocal warmup. If you keep doing it, you will have the ability to project on demand. Your vocal muscles and in-breath will get stronger. You can play music in the background if you want to muffle the sound if you live in an apt. complex. I also practice some basic sounds that I may have to use like "No", and "Yo!" and "Hey".
3. Speech
Putting it together means using your new voice with full words which have consonants and all. With speeches, you learn to pause, color your language and change your pace ALL with your new voice. Sometimes with the new voice, you're so focused on projecting that strong voice, you forget that speech has a cadence-- it goes up and down. It has color- and emotion. Doing speeches allows you to regain all this natural movement in a voice with your better voice. I recommend speaking for 5-10 minutes. A site I've found useful is:
Top 100 Speeches of the 20th Century by Rank - American Rhetoric
I print these out and read them; because I don't want to stare at the screen while speaking them. That would be bad posture and my chin is down. I print out read and speak with correct posture. I pick points in the speech to project to I have the habit of doing that when I need to.
--
Good luck with it!
Source Material
*An FYI, no matter how good these books are, they talk a lot about psychology of voice, the physiology of voice, about why it helps to have a good voice, and about voice as opposed to voice training. A frustration of mine was I've read maybe 10 books on voice, and the amount they dedicate to the actual exercises is sparse. I kept thinking "just tell me what to do"; so that's why i distilled the exercises above. But the books are always good to read for a lot of the nuance and more detailed teaching.
Bob Corff - Speaking Voice - link
Book- Training the Speaking Voice - Virgil Anderson
Book- The Voice Book - DeVore and Cookman
Winning with Your Voice: Morton Cooper: 9780879804428: Amazon.com: Books
Jay Miller- Confident Voice - free videos ; course
MP3 exercises
Amazon.com: The Vocal Recovery Warmup (Male Version): For Male Singers With Tired, Sick, Aging, Or Weak Voices: Susan Anders: MP3 Downloads
Amazon.com: Voice Lessons To Go - V.1 Vocalize & Breath: Ariella Vaccarino: MP3 Downloads
Please Log in or Create an account to join the conversation.
Time to create page: 1.120 seconds
