New York Vocal Coaching Podcast Ep. 33: Voice Types in Choir

Andy
Welcome back to the New York Vocal Coaching podcast. I'm Andy.

Matt
And I'm Matt.

Andy
Matt, how are you doing?

Matt
Hanging in, going into, what is this, almost the third month of quarantine, and finding some sense of normalcy, as much as normal could be, in all this craziness.

Andy
Yeah, for the listeners at home, regular listeners, Matt and I've been doing solo shows for the past four episodes? I think it has been since we've been on-pause quarantined, and this is our first show back together via FaceTime and the internet. Thanks, internet.

Matt
Thank you technology, and it's great to be back with you, Andy.

Andy
It's great. Both of us, after our last episodes, we were texting back and forth and saying how much easier it is to record a podcast when we can actually converse with one another versus just basically giving a lecture for 20 minutes. It's a lot more fun when you have someone to talk to, so I think we're excited to be here and to do this.

Matt
Fantastic. We've got some listener questions for today, correct?

Andy
Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Matt
Excellent.

Andy
One question that I think both Matt and I get pretty often, and it's in our list of questions as well, and we want to address it briefly today. We get a lot of questions about singing in a choir versus being a soloist, and how to know what voice part we're supposed to sing when it comes to being in a choir. Should I be singing alto, soprano, tenor bass? Is it up to me? Do I tell the choir director? Does the choir director assign me a part? What if I have a lower voice, but they want me to be a tenor? These sorts of things come up often for people and they're not sure really what they're supposed to do.

On top of that, I'm sure Matt gets this question a lot, people always ask, "What voice part am I?" I always jokingly say, "Why do you want to know?" Because I think people get confused about why we have the classification system and what it's used for.

Matt
Yeah, very well said. It's sometimes very weird making the transition between solo singing and choir singing because there are some techniques that are used in one that's not used in the other. The question of, "Which voice type am I?," leads to many crises, for many singers, as they try and figure out where they're supposed to be. What I've found with this, and I did a lot of choir singing, especially in my high school career and then going into college as well, was the voice types are less important, range-wise, for women.

What I mean by that is usually choir music doesn't have an immense range, where really any female can sing soprano or alto. What it comes down to is the tone of your voice. If you have a heavier, darker, louder voice, you tend to sing alto, even if you have wickedly high soprano notes, and if you are more of a lighter female singer, even if you don't have a crazy range, you're probably going to be put in soprano one or soprano two.

The gentlemen tend to have it a little bit more of a cut and dried, where they fall, because the tessitura, or where the songs sit, vary a good amount between bases, baritone and tenors. Where tenors are usually sitting up in that tricky bridge place, from the E4, F4, F sharp, GA, in that place, and the bases and baritones tend to settle down really low, and I've never been a bass or a baritone. I feel like for the guys that makes it a little bit more of a difference as to where you fall and what your voice type is, but even there, a lot of it comes down to what tone you have, and how it blends in with the singers that you're standing next to.

Andy
Absolutely. That's a pretty darn good explanation of all that, Matt, and you're exactly right. I always tell people, it really comes down to where your voice comfortably sits, because like you said, in solo music, we're going to sing a bigger range of music, like notes-wise. In choral music, because there are four voice parts, six voice parts, eight voice parts, your range of the music that you're going to be actually singing is going to be an octave or less, nine times out of 10, especially if you've got tenor one, tenor two, baritones, bass. If you're a tenor one, most of the time you're going to have like five or six notes that you sing, because guess what? You've got a bunch of guys who are right below you, and then another bunch of guys who are right below that. You've got a huge range, you've got four different voice types covering a huge range of notes.

Really it comes down to, if you have the option, where do you feel most comfortable? It's not, "Well, I can sing really high." Yeah, but do you want to be singing high for a 90-minute concert? Because that is what it will come down to. Or, I always tell people, "Could I sing the bass part, or a low baritone part?" Probably. Yeah. I could. "Is my voice going to get super duper tired after a 90-minute concert?" Yes. Why? Because that's not where my voice naturally sits, which is exactly what Matt is saying. I'm sure he would feel the same way, if someone said, "Can you sing bass?" Well, I can, it's not going to feel good after a while, so that's a big factor in it.

Another consideration is, what type of choir we're really talking about. If we're talking about higher level choirs, if we're talking about elite choirs, the choral director is going to be able to be just a little more specific. For instance, I was in choir for all four years of my collegiate singing career, and because I was in a music school, we could afford, or our choir director could afford splitting us up into eight, sometimes 12, sometimes 16 different parts, because we had the man and woman power, so to speak.

Conversely, I've sung, and I'm sure Matt is the same way, in church choirs, where you have nine women and two guys, and those two guys can sing only really, really low. So what do you do? Well, the lowest voiced women, those women are going to be singing that tenor part. I have sung in many a church choir where I've been the only tenor, and the choir director is, "Andy, I don't know what to tell you, but you're going to have to just sing a little bit louder because you're kind of filling that one gap." That's all I wanted to say, kind of depends on the situation, and sometimes we have a choice as to what we want to sing, and sometimes we don't.

Matt
Right. The other thing that I'll say too, is a common occurrence from choir singers that I run into with the lessons is, they come in and say, "I've been singing alto for eight years of my life in choir, that means I cannot sing high at all." I just want to pull a bulldozer, like drive at full force through that wall, and myth, of what's going on there. Just because you sang alto, just because you sang bass, whatever, doesn't mean that you cannot learn how to sing those higher notes. It doesn't mean that you naturally have a higher voice. Once again, it goes toward that, what type of tone you have? The fun exercise that my college course teacher did was she would do voicing with us. She'd have us sing a simple hymn, and then single out tenor twos, and then tenor ones. She'd say, "Where do you think you fall? We'll place you from there."

Then she would just hear you sing it a couple times, and then just move people around, and you can hear the changes. So say if there were three people that tend to have a higher and brighter voice sitting together, it sounded like a lot of treble coming from one place, like a lot of different voices coming from different places. When she fit a warmer singer in between them, so now you had bright, warm, bright, warm, kind of intermittently, it made such a big difference. It sounded like one large voice, it was so cool. That's how a lot of placing and voicing goes in choirs. It's what makes this unified type of tone with whatever style you're trying to sing as a group.

Andy
Yeah. It's a cool and tough job that choral directors have. It kind of depends on the hand that they're dealt, so to speak. It really depends on the singers that they have. They have to take what they have sitting in front of them, and they have to make magic out of it. Sometimes they have endless possibilities, and sometimes they don't have endless possibilities, and that's fine too, but that's, that's the magic. Like you said, when we do get someone in, the voice student says, "Well, I sang this." In choir, I have to remind them, and you obviously do as well, Matt, we're going to go and shatter that real quick. You may not actually be that, it could be just that your choral director needed you to do something, or they fit you somewhere because it sounded best for the group.

Matt
The other thing is with pop singing, making that transfer over, parts really don't matter at all. Anybody can sing anything if they really want to. It's important just to drop that vocabulary if you're doing that crossover singing, and if you're only a choral singer, just to understand why we use it to begin with.

Andy
Yeah, absolutely. I think we may bring Julie on at one point to really dig into the Fach system in opera, because this is kind of where it all starts when we really classify. If someone's really not pursuing opera, and I'm sure Matt's the same way, I'm not going to be really, really, really hard-nosed about what voice part are you, because it doesn't really matter. We can get into a long conversation about opera classification and things like that at some other time, but just so you know, in popular music, like Matt said, it really doesn't matter. If you can sing it, you can sing it, if you can't, you can't, and there it is, it doesn't matter if you're a tenor, a base, a soprano, an alto, a mezzo, it doesn't matter. It just is what it is.

Matt
Yeah, absolutely. All right. Anything else to add on that front?

Andy
No, I don't think so. I think that covers quite a bit of it. As always folks, if you've got more questions, feel free to email us and hit us up. But I think that covers it all for that.

Matt
Perfect. I agree.

Andy
For our next question, it says, when I sing, my larynx gets pushed down, and I find it hard to control. How should I fix this? This is a longer form question that Matt kind of paired down, and it is an interesting question. Matt, explain why we wanted to answer this, and what makes it fun and interesting to talk about?

Matt
Sure. So stereotypically, when you think of larynx heights, we imagine higher larynx is to be tighter and more tiring overall. There are a ton of people that sing with a high larynx, and we want you to be able to sing with a high larynx without fatigue, but the tendency is high equals, a little bit more tight. So then this singer with that knowledge said, but when I try and sing, I'm getting tired, I'm having a little bit of vocal pain and my larynx is getting pushed down. What could be the cause of this, what's happening, and how do I fix it?

Andy
Yeah, it is kind of an interesting question. I think that is not a super wildly unique problem, but I think it's not necessarily as common as our larynx rising and getting tighter. What is the issue? Obviously, as voice teachers, we can't completely diagnose someone without hearing them or seeing them or really seeing what's going on, but Matt, what would your first suggestion, or a guess, or hypothesis, or anything be for this sort of thing?

Matt
My first thought would go to tongue tension. So if you, while you're listening, just shove your tongue as far forward as you can, stretch it so far out your face, and if you put a hand on your larynx, you'll feel the larynx rise. So because of the proximity of the tongue and the larynx, movement in one tends to create movement in the other. Once again, that's not a blanket statement, a hundred percent of the time, but if you pull your tongue back now, you'll feel that larynx get shoved down, the tendency is. That'll tend to happen, and with that, comes a little bit of tongue tension, so it might make the tone a little bit muffled, plus the darkening of the larynx is going to create a lot of tension in various muscles of the neck.

If the larynx muscles are working too hard, if the tongue muscles are working too hard, there's just a lot of bullying around in the mechanism. And with that comes the need to push more air for power, use more chest voice, use more compression, and that can lead to, of course, with any greater amount of muscle use, just being more tired, quicker.

Andy
A hundred percent. What people forget is that our bodies are fully connected. Our tongue, goes back, back, back, back, back, everything is connected, really, in our singing mechanism. Like Matt said, if our tongue is doing something, our other vocal anatomy is probably going to respond in kind. Like Matt said, tongue out, tongue in. If your tongue has a lot of tension, which isn't always the case, but most of the time it's usually being pressed down or pulled back, we can solve tongue tension in our tongue forward, obviously, that's going to depress the larynx, and that's going to tighten all of that up.

When we have that, we need to make sure, one, the quick and dirty fix is just check your tongue, and see if keeping it in a high arching situation helps. It could be an easy fix like that. What we could also do, which I'm going to have a caveat at the end of this week, you can practice having go the exact opposite way, and so practice going really, really high, larynx-wise is what I mean. You can see if you can control that mechanism, the larynx, up and down without talking, while talking, while singing, silent, all of that stuff.

My caveat to that is, Matt kind of mentioned it before about, there's a lot of bullying around the throat there, the larynx. So we don't want to then bully the larynx up, so we don't want to fix tension by bullying with more tension. Really what I would suggest is finding the relaxation first. You know what I mean? At the end of the day, it's not about forcing our larynx up, because again, we're not finding the actual neutral, relaxed spot. We need to find the relaxation so you can see what "normal, natural, neutral" feels like first. Then we can work from there to play with the larynx height and things like that.

Matt
Absolutely. A concept that I always go back to as a singer and voice teacher is play the opposite, which is exactly what you mentioned. If you're used to one thing, go totally in the other direction just to feel it. My favorite exercise to find this opposite is if you totally stick your tongue out, with your tongue in between your lips and say, "mum mum mum," it's kind of like an M-U-M with the tongue sticking out. You want to start with a very doofy larynx to begin with, we're just going to sing on one note, and then we're going to lift up that larynx as we sing, and just repeat that, "mum mum."

It would sound something like, "mum mum mum mum mum na na."

I'm only singing on one note, and I'm just adjusting my larynx. By starting low and going high, not only are we getting the high larynx, the opposite, but we're also passing through the neutral, more relaxed place in the center. If you tinker with that a little bit, get used to the high larynx, we already know you're comfortable with the low larynx. Find the comfort in the neutral larynx. Then you could sing with the high larynx, with the neutral in whatever song you're working on, and just journal how it feels, just reflect on that. Does it make it easier? Do you have to do less work? This exercise also makes sure the tongue can't pull back as you're changing larynx position, and that's going to be huge with getting used to this sensation.

Andy
Amazing. That's a great exercise. I'm going to steal that. I was just thinking that, and you just mentioned it, great for tongue tension as well. You use that tongue sticking out as a guide, so you can really see if your tongue is, one, pulling back, or, look at yourself in the mirror so you can see if it's narrowing or fattening or whatever, or is it just kind of sitting there flopping loosely.

Matt
Right. You also want to check in with volume as well. When you drop the larynx, the vocal folds get looser, that means you're going to have to work more to get organic strength through your voice. If things are a little bit too breathy and loose for you, and you're trying to drive all of this effort and force to make up for it, that will definitely be a voice tire-er out-er, and that was a really good English that I just spoke there.

Andy
I love it. It's quarantine English.

Matt
Right, I feel like, slowly but surely, my English is deteriorating. You want to have that checklist. Is it the tongue? Is the neck looking tight? Can you massage through? Can you stretch it out a little bit? Are you blasting too much air? Go through those couple of things and see which one stands out to you the most, that'll tell you why the low larynx could be occurring, what's causing the fatigue, and what direction you need to go in to correct that issue.

Andy
That's amazing. My final thought, to piggyback onto Matt's thing here is, are you able to just have a relaxed neutral larynx when you speak? Is it just a singing issue, or is your larynx just kind of tight, is your voice always down here a lot, it was very extreme, but can you get a neutral sensation? Can you get a neutral larynx when you're just speaking?

And then, if that is the case, what I would suggest then is you can even do it on one note, sing or speak a phrase, and then put it on one pitch, and see if you can kind of connect the two. So if you are able to have a more neutral larynx or relaxed larynx or free larynx when you're speaking, see if you can make that connection between speaking and your singing voice. If you are still having that issue when you're speaking, then you need to find that neutral first, like Matt was saying. Anyway, I just wanted to mention that, because it could be an issue with your speaking voice, and if it is not, that's a great starting point actually.

Matt
For sure. All right, friend. I feel like that really wraps up the two ideas that we were talking about today.

Andy
Yeah, I think so. These are two great questions. We appreciate all of your questions, one common question that we get, and one kind of interesting question. All questions are interesting, they're all equal, but, first question, super common. Second question, not common, but super fascinating to think about and talk about.

Matt
Right. Just to reiterate again, Andy said this earlier, but especially with many of us being at home, picking up new skills or whatever, please send your questions so we can cover the topics that you're most interested in hearing. Andy and I can talk about anything under the sun, and we can be totally content with it.

Andy
Absolutely. There's no question too small. We love talking about the voice. This is why we make our careers in voice teaching, and why we have a nerdy podcast about the singing voice. We love talking about this stuff, so hit us up.

Matt
And of course we hope that everybody continues to remain safe and healthy during this very odd time, continuing to send you very well wishes as you pick up new skills, continue to build your singing journey, and it's really cool to be a part of your singing life.

Matt
Thank you for joining us for this episode of the New York Vocal Coaching podcast. If you like what you hear, please subscribe, like, leave a review, and share the podcast with friends and family. And we thank you in advance for that.

If you have questions, comments, or topics that you would like to hear more about, please email us at podcast@newyorkvocalcoaching.com and we look forward to hearing from you.

You can also find more NYVC content with our Voice Lessons To The World, Quick Singing Tips, and Voice Breakdown series on YouTube. You can also catch us on Instagram and join us on Facebook for our weekly live videos coming to you on Sundays.

We're looking forward to seeing you again two weeks from now for another episode of the New York Vocal Coaching podcast.