Would you like to know how to improve your vocal tone when you sing? More specifically, how to improve your singing tone? In this video, we cover how chant talking can help you improve your vocal tone. What you can do slow, you can do fast. We will use that style of learning today.
It is important to note that we do want to work a tone in a way that is natural. So we oscillate between exaggerating what we're feeling and then integrating that into something that feels very speech like and natural for us because we don't want to give the impression that we're overproducing the sound or we're working too hard. So there are many many different factors that can create a singer's tone. In fact there are several that are happening at the same time interacting with each other. That creates the singer's tone at any given moment. But today we're gonna be playing around with your natural natural speech because ultimately it is how the singer manages the language that creates the tone. So we're gonna be doing this in a way that is called the chant talking. There are three rules of chant talking:
1. It has to be speech like.
2. A little bit higher than your normal speaking range.
3. Incredible slow..
Now this is so that the influence of the mouth particularly the jaw the tongue in the back the throat are not so restrictive on the sound. So we allow the voice to venture into just a little bit higher. This will ultimately free your resonance so much more. And then number three it has to be smooth so this will really challenge the muscles that govern the breath process steadying that air flow and really strengthening your voice and giving you a little bit of drama.
So now that you know the rules of the game I want you to please just tell me tell me the word hello. As if you are slowly calling down a well as someone like you. Go ahead and give that a go. Now we're not singing. I mean we are but we're not focusing on singing We're just creating the conditions of music by playing with rhythm pitch inflection and dynamics. Now I'm ranting a little bit I can sense that so I'll calm down. So as we're talking and you said no as if you were calling down a well did you notice that how your breath was behaving was very stable very consistent. Let's go ahead and try that again Oh good. Now if you can speak in this way slowly then you can sing anything. I promise you that much. But another element that we noticed that when we slow something down is called oh then tone. So that pretty much means that we're all building up those spaces just again in managing the language itself. We're not we're not distorting or manufacturing the sound. Sometimes it feels like we can do when we're singing when we go to speech and use the basis of our natural speech. We have a a way of creating a sort of connectivity that feels like connecting a string of pearls and the way that we handled that language. So the best way to practice this you can practice this with song lyrics. That would be fantastic. But I really encourage you to simply read aloud for about three to five minutes a day. Now what we're doing is we're creating the conditions for a beautiful open dramatic professional sounding tone should just emerge and you can do this by just taking some text. It doesn't matter what text you take. In fact I have chosen the most random book I own which is Appalachian folklore omen signs and superstitions because I'm dark like that and I'm just randomly opened to any page.
That's the gift of chant talking with some random text. It doesn't matter what you're reading you could read the directions on shampoo bottle. All is well there but you going to mimic the conditions of music is that the melody goes up and it goes down. But you're going to handle those language in a very open consistent manner creating more drama creating a room more romance and creating more polish. It's how you handle the vocal tone now as you were listening to a singer I want you to listen in an active way and see if you can if you can hear the way that they're handling the language is very much like a string of pearls connecting one word to the next. This is the very basis of both artistry and tone. It's how you handle the breath the shape and the language. So even though it's ridiculous and it is ridiculous. I want to encourage you to play with this for at least three to five minutes a day whatever you can do slow you're going to start to notice yourself doing this when you say when you sing and when you speak. You are going to notice that every time you open your mouth to speak, you have another opportunity to work on your singing tone.