Get Physical – How to Use Your Body to Help Your Vocal Technique
It may not seem like it from the outside, but singing is a very physical thing.
It requires a fair amount of intensity, and that intensity needs to be channeled into the right place at the right time.
Since our voices are part of our bodies, how we use our bodies can have a positive or negative effect on the voice.
Said differently, we can use our bodies to help influence our vocal technique.
So let’s dive right into a few ideas that you can use to improve your vocal voice quality.
#1 Tip: Don’t Look Up
Many of us have a natural tendency to look up for high notes as they’re approaching, which does a couple of things.
First of all, just looking up sends signals to your brain that you anticipate will be difficult. And those signals will go to our voices, creating strain and therefore not as good of a sound.
Problem is usually when you look up, you tend to raise your chin and that puts your voice in an unideal position for singing.
This chin raise causes essentially the whole vocal mechanism to rise, raising the larynx and putting unnecessary strain on the voice.
Also, the more you move your neck, the more it alters your tonal quality as you sing. This too isn’t ideal as we want to keep a fairly consistent tone as we sing.
To combat this, focus your eyes on a neutral spot about eye level or maybe even a little below the eye level.
That neutral eye level will hopefully negate that temptation to raise your chin, and therefore help you not reach for the note.
Tip #2: Bending Your Knees
I know you have been told that for good posture when you bend your knees and keep an anchored feeling as you sing to help support the sound.
Keeping the knees bent helps you to relax the body more.
It’s easy to become rigid when you have your knees locked.
Yes, we want that anchored feeling when breathing; but we want to stay loose in the body, simply experiencing a good down and outward expansion
Tip #3: Use Your Hands
We can use our hands to help influence our voice in a couple of different ways.
First, you can use hand motions to help connect the sound.
To do this, create a forward motion with your hands to encourage connection between notes and symbols.
If you tend to be choppy on certain notes, you can use your hand to promote a more consistent airflow.
This helps to even out the sound, giving you a more consistent and desirable sound.
You can also use hand motion to encourage vibrato and ease the tension in our voices.
We don’t want to force vibrato.
But when you have a good handle on consistent airflow and shaping, shaking your hands can be a helpful little trick to encourage a little more vibrato to appear.
In Summary…
So hopefully this has given you some ideas on how getting more physically involved in singing can help you release and improve your sound.
Test out each of these ideas in your next practice session and see how they work for you. You’ll be glad you did!
This training was prepared by Coach Kirsten and is featured on our Singing Lessons App. If you like to get access to exclusive content like this, you can sign up for the app here.