Set Your Voice Free: How to Get the Singing or Speaking Voice You Want

by Roger Love

By using the classic exercises and the new material in this book, you’ll be able to showcase the best of yourself—your talents, your passion, your originality, your authenticity. The techniques at the heart of the book are the ones I’ve been refining for decades in my work with artists such as John Mayer and Gwen Stefani, as well as with actors such as Reese Witherspoon and Jeff Bridges, who didn’t consider themselves to be singers before they worked with me, and these techniques will give your voice the power and resonance you’ve always wanted. If all you do is focus on these techniques, you’ll be way ahead of almost every other singer or speaker competing for the attention of your audience. But I hope you’ll take advantage of the additional exercises and advice you’ll find in this edition to go beyond simply sounding good. I’d like to plant the seed of the idea that you can use your voice to become a master influencer. The most profound discovery I’ve made in the past fifteen years is this: If you know how to control the pitch, pace, tone, volume, and melody of your voice—the elements that form the core of this book—you can consciously use them to guide the emotions of your listeners and magnify the impact of every communication you have.

The human voice is set up to speak or sing twenty-four hours a day without getting hoarse or strained or creating any physical problems. If yours can’t, it’s because you’re doing something wrong.

Throughout the book, I’ll direct you to specific audio samples that I’ve recorded and placed on a special website just for you. The address is: www.setyourvoicefreebook.com. You’ll hear clear demonstrations of the sounds I’m referring to, and you may also be asked to make the sounds yourself. Don’t skip that part! Imagining what you’d sound like doesn’t count—you need to try copying what you hear. That’s where the lights go on and the learning begins to happen in your body and mind. What we’ll be doing is as simple as follow the leader. I’ll make sounds and you’ll copy them. There’s not a lot of complicated theory, just a wide variety of playful experiments. As you follow my voice through the exercises, you will be automatically placing your mouth, jaws, stomach, breath, and vocal cords in positions that make it nearly impossible, over time, to produce weak, strained, or “bad” sounds. This is not an intellectual exercise. All you have to do is be willing to let go of a little fear and self-doubt, and duplicate the sounds you hear. To work with me, you’ll need to listen carefully, copy what you hear me doing, let yourself have a little fun, and give up the misconceptions and bad habits that have kept you stuck in an ill-fitting voice. You may not feel that you’re doing everything right, so just fake it and have a little faith.

When you’re through reading this chapter, I’d like you to get out your calendar and block out some time for your private sessions with me. Plan one session of at least half an hour or forty-five minutes during the week for reading and listening to each chapter. Consider that to be lesson time, during which you’ll learn about and experience different parts of your voice. I suggest that you take the lessons a week at a time to give yourself a chance to assimilate the material and let it “soak in.”

The quality of your voice depends primarily on the way you position the cords and the amount of air you move through them, and great singing or speaking happens when the right amount of air meets the right amount of cord. Remember that phrase because it’s the basis of just about everything we’ll be doing together.

I strongly recommend that you get out your smartphone and record each of the tests and exercises we do here. Why record? The voice that other people hear doesn’t sound like the one you hear when you speak and sing because you’re feeling the vibrations in your tissues and bones and hearing sounds as they bounce around the “cave” of your body. Your own voice rings and vibrates inside you. But a listener hears only what emerges into the air, and that version of your voice may seem stripped down or flat compared with the richness you feel yourself producing. On top of that, sound traveling away from you actually sounds different from sound traveling toward you. Because of the gap between our inner perception and the listener’s, it helps many students to give themselves an “objective” ear by recording some of the exercises they do.

Please read the preceding passage aloud into your recorder. As you read the paragraph, you may have noticed a number of things happening with your voice, if not at the beginning of your reading, then as you got closer to the end. Get out a pencil, and as you play the recording back, look through the following list and mark the items that you think apply to you. Did you Start strong but peter out by the end, feeling strained? Have to clear your throat frequently? Sound too soft? Notice that your voice felt too low, and gravelly, especially at the ends of sentences? Hear your voice breaking in spots? Sound nasal? Sound monotonous? Sound squeaky? Sound breathy?

Some nasal sounds come about when a speaker tightens the back of his or her throat, which keeps the air from freely flowing into the mouth. With that escape route from the body blocked, unnatural amounts of air are directed toward the nasal area. That produces the rather harsh, trebly nasal sound of the Nasal Professor. Listen to my demonstration on audio 2 on the website (www.setyourvoicefreebook.com). The sound is blatantly obvious here, but many people are painfully close to it without knowing. Could that be you? Try this test. Begin to count slowly from one to ten. When you reach the number five, gently pinch your nostrils shut and keep counting. How do you sound on numbers six through ten? Did the sound drastically change? It might surprise you to learn that there should be no severe change after you pinch your nose. Just listen to how I sound on audio 3. There’s no huge shift when I reach the number six. Why? If you’re speaking correctly, only a tiny amount of air goes into your nose. So when you pinch your nostrils, the amount of air you’re restricting should barely affect the way you sound, though you may hear a slightly blocked sound on the numbers that contain ns—that’s normal. If you noticed a drastic change, it’s a sure indication that you’ve got too much air going toward the nasal area.

We're a few pages into the book proper, and I'm already having my mind blown. This resolved an issue I've been dealing with my whole life. It was this fixable?!

Close your lips, say mmmmmmm,… and feel vibration in back of your throat. Now read a couple of sentences on your own and see if you notice that same type of vibration as you reach the end of your breaths. Try it one more time, this time holding your hand about a half inch from your mouth. Pay attention to how much air you feel hitting your fingers. If your sentences end in that gravelly sound, you’ll notice that almost no air is reaching your fingers. Read again and try to keep a consistent flow of air hitting the fingers; when the air stops or greatly diminishes—take another breath.

I always used to laugh when I called my friend Jeff at his office and got his answering machine. He’d gotten his secretary to record a short message in breathy, Marilyn Monroe–like tones, and when she said, “Jeff can’t come to the phone right now,” it was easy to imagine that the reason had something to do with what was going on in the bedroom instead of the boardroom.

Remember that there are two passages in your throat, one for air and one for food. When you swallow, one function of the larynx, the house of the vocal cords, is to rise, blocking the air passage so no food or liquid gets in your lungs. You can feel this happening if you put your finger on your chin and slide it backward down your throat until you get to the first bump, your Adam’s apple, which is the front part of the larynx. As you swallow, you’ll feel how it goes way above your finger and then back down. At certain times that “swallow, rise, block-the-throat” motion may be a lifesaver—none of us needs food in the windpipe—but when it happens at the wrong time, it cuts off the air passage and stops the production of great vocal sounds. To find out if your larynx is rising too high, closing up your throat as you speak, try this. Put your index finger back on your Adam’s apple and read the next few sentences aloud. If the larynx jumps substantially above your finger, as it did when you swallowed, that’s too much movement. The larynx is allowed to move up and down between one-quarter and one-third of an inch as you speak, but any more than that places it in a blocking position.

A high larynx is one of the most common problems affecting speakers and singers, but it’s very simple to get the larynx to its proper position with a series of low-larynx exercises. Let me give you a quick hint here of how easy it is to lower your larynx. Listen to audio 8 on the website. The exercise I’m doing here is specifically designed to move your larynx down. As you imitate my sounds, you should feel your Adam’s apple move to a very low spot in your neck. You’ll be happy to know that the larynx is one of the parts of the body that has great sense memory. Once it gets used to sitting in its normal position, it stays there, even if you aren’t doing an exercise. And with the larynx in its normal, healthy speaking position, you will have effectively turned down the excess brassiness of your voice.

I think this worked for me. My larynx seems to have shifted a bit downwards. Audio 8 just says to use a Yogi Bear voice (very deep). "Boo-boo, they tooka my picnic basket!"

It’s important for all of us to stop drawing a line between speaking and singing. Remember, your brain thinks they’re almost the same thing, and I hope you’ll regard the work we’ll be doing next as sound exercises. They’re simply vocal exercises attached to musical notes, and they’ll help you, as nothing else can, to make your voice its most resonant and beautiful.

Do the exercise on audio 11 (male) or audio 12 (female), record it, and then play it back. As you do, use the following checklist to help yourself listen for the same indicators I do when I’m with a student. I want you to understand what’s going on in my head so we can effectively share the same set of ears. Pay close attention, and take note of the answers to the following questions: 1. What happens in the range you normally speak in, those comfortable notes that feel as though they vibrate mostly in your chest? What is that comfortable voice like? Is it thick or kind of reedy or whispery? Does it have a nice resonance? 2. What happens as you approach the top of this range? Is there a buildup of pressure as you go higher? Do your throat muscles feel tight, as though you’re doing the equivalent of lifting weights? Are you straining hard? Are you getting louder, and shouting as you move higher? (Notice that in the demonstration, I am just moving up and down the range, not changing volume at all.) 3. As you try to go higher, what happens? Does your voice seem to get thinner and less powerful? Does your voice crack, or yodel and flip into an airy nothingness? Does your sound change so dramatically that you sound like a completely different person?

Comfortable is somewhat deeper than my usual speaking voice. Straining hard. Higher pitches are tougher.

To begin, we’ll need to create an unobstructed pathway for the inhaled air to travel to the lungs. First, stand up straight, with your feet shoulder width apart. Roll your head around to ease any tension in your neck, then hold your head level, with your chin parallel to the ground, not tipped up or down. Let your shoulder blades slide toward the center of your back so that they’re back and down. If you do this, your chest will be open instead of collapsed, which is just what we want. Slumping, or even rounding your shoulders forward slightly, partly collapses the upper rib cage and keeps the muscles between the ribs from being able to expand to accommodate the lungs as they fill with air. What we’re looking for is the physical ease that comes from good alignment. Now bend your knees slightly—just relax and unlock them—and tuck your pelvis under. This slight adjustment helps ensure that the diaphragm can function at maximum capacity. You could think of these movements as taking the kinks out of a garden hose so water can flow out easily. You’re creating an open pathway for the movement of air.

Now I’d like you to put your hand on your stomach, with your middle finger on your belly button. All the action that follows should take place in the space between the base of your ribs and just below your belly button. Keeping your shoulders in that beautiful, open position, back and down, imagine that your stomach is a balloon, and as you inhale, let it fill with air. Concentrate on filling this “balloon” only. And when it’s full, blow the air gently out through your mouth. Try this for a few minutes, remembering that you just want to blow up the balloon without lifting your shoulders or puffing up your chest. How does this feel? Did you find that it was the opposite of what you usually do? Raising your chest and shoulders as you inhale is called accessory breathing, and it’s the surest way to get the least amount of air into the body with the least amount of control. Often, people not only pull their shoulders and chest up as they inhale, but they also feel they should pull in their stomachs. That combination—I think of it as the Hercules breath, because when you do it, you take on the strained look of a guy in the gym lifting heavy weights—keeps all of the movement in the upper part of the body and results in very shallow breathing. Both of these styles of breathing, of course, can be so habitual that they feel completely natural.

In a very short time, your breathing should be free of chest and shoulder action, and you ought to be able to inhale without stomach tension. Don’t worry if you get a little light-headed at first. People tell me that they sometimes feel a tiny bit dizzy as they begin to learn diaphragmatic breathing. That’s because you’re bringing more air into your system than you’re used to, pushing more air out than before, and possibly hyperventilating. This will pass—and your body will appreciate all the life-giving oxygen you’re feeding it.

If you try to take in air very slowly, you’re actually restricting the flow in and most likely inhaling through your mouth. You’ll notice that your lips are partially closed and pursed, or your teeth are close together. You might even hear air get caught where your lips and teeth meet, creating the hiss of air being sucked through a tight opening. This is not diaphragmatic breathing. When you’re doing it correctly, the air flows silently in through the nose and races into your lungs.