New York Vocal Coaching Podcast Ep. 34: Singing With an Instrument

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
I'm doing well, my friend. How about you?

Andy
I'm doing well. We've been in a quarantine for a while. We've been teaching at home for a while. How's all of that going for you? You getting used to it?

Matt
Still finding a new level of normal. Getting more and more comfortable with teaching online every day, and learning a lot about technology, that's for sure.

Andy
Yeah, absolutely. More than I ever thought I'd want to know, I suppose. It's one of those things that no matter how smooth and used to it that you get, there's always that internet issue that sometimes you can't do anything about it. Sometimes no matter how prepared you are, how clean you've got all of your systems going, if the internet cuts out, doesn't matter. It's just going to be kind of laggy and that is what it is.

Matt
Technology is fantastic as long as it works.

Andy
Exactly. I'm getting used to being at home. I always tell my students, I like being able to just roll out of bed, have breakfast, watch some Netflix, and then go in my studio instead of having to worry about, okay, I got to worry about my commute time and all that stuff. So part of it works. Then when I'm done at the end of the day, I don't have to say, "Oh gosh, I have to get on the subway." It's like, oh, walk out of my studio and I'm home. And here we are.

Matt
Right. Your mind is already mentally clear. Oh yes.

Andy
Exactly. So, you know-

Matt
Pros and cons to everything.

Andy
Exactly, pros and cons. Today folks, we thought we'd just answer couple of questions that Matt and I get. I've been talking to some of my students about them more recently. Matt, do you want to start us off?

Matt
Sure. Yeah. The first question we have is how to get better at singing while also playing an instrument?

Andy
Yes. Are you someone who wants to play the piano and sing, or play the guitar and sing, or I don't know, play the organ and sing or something like that? That's a trick and something that's tricky for most people. Matt, I guess my question for you is when someone comes in, has their guitar, plays the guitar and sings, what are the things that you are looking for? What are the things you're listening for? What are the things you're looking out for?

Matt
Right. Starting at a simple place, there are a bunch of people who are simultaneously learning an instrument along with singing. It's very tricky to put the two together if your mental capacity is taken up with all of these different things you're trying to work on. What chords you need to use, what strumming patterns, what you're fingering should be on the piano, as well as how use a mix, how to keep neck tension out of the equation, it's so many things at once. What I always talk about is start with one instrument, then add in the other. You want to just start with singing. If that's starting to feel pretty good, then you can just work on the guitar or the piano or the organ, whatever, and make sure that's sounding good. Then you can put the two together afterwards. The isolation is so important and saves you a lot of time, rather than trying to do two at the same time and feel like you're juggling way too many things and they all come crashing to the ground.

Andy
A hundred percent. We are humans, are people of... Not of, but we want to be good now and we get very frustrated. It's a tough thing to just stop and say, "Great, I need to slow down and I need to separate these two things." You know what, I consider myself someone who knows their singing voice pretty well. I've practiced singing many, many, many years. I have degrees in it. Yet when I sit down to the piano, it's still something that I have to focus on even if I know the song really well. It's one of those things that our brains have a difficult time really putting a hundred percent focus on two separate things, playing the piano well, in my case, or guitar or whatever, and singing really well. It's tricky and you just have to be patient with it all.

Matt
Absolutely. When you're playing piano, you don't play both hands at the same time. You break them apart, you work on one, and then you put the other together. Taking it step by step, even though it feels slower, will bring you to mastery so much quicker.

Andy
That's exactly right. In the moment, it's slower. In the long run, way faster. That's a hard thing for all of us to do because when I sit down at the piano and sing, I want to be perfect right now, but I know that, okay, you know what? I need to actually just focus on the left hand of the piano before I add my right hand and add my singing. It's just one of those things that just takes a little bit of time and patience and you can do it, so break it apart.

Matt
The other thing is too, playing certain instruments develops certain habits. It's always fun to see when a guitar player walks into the room, almost a hundred percent of the time when they're struggling to hit a high note or they're working on something new, their head turns to the hand side that plays the chords because that's what they look at when they're playing guitar.

Andy
What I especially love to... I mean, I don't love it, but it's predictable, I guess, is what I love about it. When I'm working on a song with someone just without the instrument, sounds amazing. They're like, "Yes, I got this." They pick up their instrument or they sit down at the piano and then all of a sudden their singing grows to crap and they're like, "What happened?" It's like all your bad habits came in. You have to practice your good habits on the guitar, lots of crunching and leaning forward. There's neck tension. There's this and that on the piano. It's always kind of hunching down or there's weird shoulder tension or things like that.

It's just one of those things that just kind of takes time. This is a great opportunity, actually, for people to film themselves. That's always recommend, to film themselves, so they can actually see what they're doing because sometimes we can't really feel it. That's a big part of singing. If they can see, "Oh yeah, my posture is absolute garbage. Obviously I'm not singing well," or, "My neck is absolutely rigid as heck, of course I'm not singing well." Little things like that.

Matt
Absolutely, and you'll see those habits pretty darn quickly. The other thing to always check in with is breathing wise. When you're focusing on a lot of different things, chances are, you're going to want to use a lot of breath. You're going to want to crunch your abs, something like that. So not only pulling apart the instruments that you're working on, but then also the neck tension, the breathing, the compression on the vocal folds, just isolating those singing components also makes a humongous difference.

Andy
Absolutely. I always tell people. I was working with someone the other day and their strumming pattern was fine, but then when they started singing, it was getting funky. We were trying to line up their breathing with their strumming pattern and the rhythm of certain notes because it was just a little clunky. We had to be kind of tedious about, "Okay, when you have this down strum, that's the rest for this and then that's when you need to breathe." Then once we got that sorted out, it all fell into place. It really is a lot of stuff to think about. If you think about singing alone, exactly like you said, compression, breathing, tension, posture, abs crunching, mouth position, blah, blah, blah, blah. The list goes on and on and on and on and on and on and that's singing alone. Getting all those things lined up is vital. Tedious, but like you said, Matt, way more satisfying at the end.

Matt
Absolutely.

Andy
Cool. Shall we go on to one more question here before we wrap up?

Matt
Sounds perfect. For our last question, we had someone reach out and ask, "My voice behaves differently every time I sing. Some days I can sing in my chest voice very easily and effectively, but can't sing with power in mix or head voice and vice versa. What can I do to control all of the registers at the same time?"

Andy
Not be a human. That's kind of a mean answer. Yeah. It's a really good question. Consistency. I think I say the word consistency in my voice lessons, I don't know, 500 times. Consistency of breath flow, consistency of resonance, consistency of your mouth shape, consistency of your larynx. It's one of those things that, if we're talking about building habits, good or bad, how do we build those habits, whatever it is? Doing them over and over and over in a consistent way so they get locked into place, so to speak, so you don't have to think about them.

Matt
Right. Muscle memory is so, so, so important and just like singing with an instrument and on your own, it takes time just to build those muscle coordinations and get used to it and get confident with it. The other thing to say about this is you want to do a bunch of cross training. If you want to work on an excellent mix, you don't just want to spend time on the mix. You want to work on the breathing. You want to work on the chest voice. You want to work on the falsetto for guys, head voice for gals. You want to work every register of the voice so they all cohesively go together to bring this mix and make it easily, make it effortlessly. It's just like an athlete. You wouldn't just run marathons all the time. You would want to pair it up with some strength training or something else to make the body overall more effective.

Andy
Absolutely. Cross training is so vital and it could be genre cross training, or like Matt said, it could be registration or vocal technique exercise cross training. The other thing that I always talk with people about is do we as singers... Not we, but do you, as a singer, when I ask my students this, even know what consistency feels like? Do you even know what it should be? We have to define what that even means to us and to find consistency. If you can't even find it for five seconds, there's no way you're going to have a consistent voice for whatever you're trying to do.

When I talk about this, I try to break things down really, really simply at first so in our brains, we can say, "I know what consistency means. I have either a visual cue. I have a feeling cue. I have a..." Whatever the case may be. One example could be doing a hum (singing), an N (singing), or an NG (singing). Doing just a very slow exercise, could be five, four, three, two, one. It could just be sliding, could be whatever. From there, this is a really easy way to feel consistency behind your nose. This is some good nasal resonance consistency. Although we're not always going to feel that level of nasal resonance for every single word or phrase or song or genre. That's a good starting point to say, "Great. Now I've defined some form of consistency for myself, so I know what I'm even looking for."

Matt
Right. Absolutely. The other thing is, depending on what you sing is some things are going to be harder than others. If you can sing and sustain a very strong chest voice on an A vowel, it's inherently going to be more difficult to sing it out on an E vowel. Are you singing the same things when you feel like you don't have this consistency? If you're not singing the same things, then it just comes down to more practice, more training and building those skills of sustaining on different vowels, using vibrato on those notes, whatever.

This also brings up the topic of singing vocal exercises are easier than singing songs and certain phrases of songs are easier than others. The more you can isolate what exactly is taking away that consistency, is it the words you're singing, how fast you're singing them? All of these components come together to make it difficult to hang onto that stability and consistency.

Andy
Absolutely. I want people to know that inconsistency in singing is just part of singing. It doesn't matter who you are or how good you are because like Matt said, when we have different words, different consonants, different vowels, different genres, different notes, naturally, they're going to be inconsistent. It's the job of the singer to figure out how to make them consistent. Naturally, lyrics, words, notes, are not set up to be consistent. That's not what it is but that's the trick of the singer. That's the training like Matt said. Can you make them consistent? What I always tell people, going back to Matt had a good example of having a different vowel. Let's say it could be all vowels, maybe it's an Ah and E. Take two very opposite vowels in some way, shape, or form. Give both of those something consistent to grab on to.

For instance, I'm going back to my N or M or whatever, and say, you want to do a vocal exercise and you say, (singing). Everything sounds really, really different because naturally they are different vowels, so they're going to resonate differently. Then I'm going to give myself an N, let's say, and that is going to be almost my handrail that I get a hold on to to kind of keep it consistent. (Singing). That has given me a good start to have something to hold onto. It's kind of like if you're walking down super clunky stairs. You're on an old, old house or something, and steps are wonky or maybe there's a step missing or something. Hopefully there's a handrail there that you can hang on to so that if you trip, you're still going to stay upright. Same thing with this. You've given yourself a handrail of sorts, a guardrail to hang on to.

Naturally the Ah is going to be maybe a little bit chestier, maybe it's going to be a little bit stronger, maybe darker depending on the person. Then E is going to be maybe headier, maybe it's going to be brighter, but you've got the N there to kind of get them to be a little bit closer together.

Matt
You can take that right into a song too. If you're feeling that the nah nah nah works really well for helping out your mix or chest voice or whatever, take that word and just replace the words of a song with that exercise. All of a sudden you're not singing Let it Go. You're singing nah nah nah on the same words on the same rhythms. Then once you get used to that same feeling, ask yourself what it feels like with the nasal resonance, what it feels like with the strength, what you feel on the vocal folds themselves and maintain that feeling as you add back in the actual words. You'll feel that it gives you a lot more stability and that handrail to grab onto all the way through.

Andy
A hundred percent. That's a great, great, great exercise. You can think about it two ways and I'm sure Matt does it both ways. You can think about giving the melody consistency by doing one syllable, vowel, whatever, or you can take away the melody and only focus on the lyrics and get those to be consistent and then place those on top of the melody. Either way works for you, but again, it's all about breaking it down into smaller chunks for yourself. In the moment it seems tedious. I think that's the theme of our episode today. A lot of singing seems tedious in the moment and honestly, it is. It is tedious, but in the long run, as we've said a million times, you're going to be so much better off and so much more satisfied.

Matt
Without a doubt.

Andy
Awesome. I think that gives people, a good CliffsNote version of how to stay consistent in our voice.

Matt
Yeah, I agree. This isn't the last time that we're going to be talking about these topics either. We could definitely go on about them, but it's a perfect place to start.

Andy
Absolutely. Again, Matt and I could talk for four hours about this stuff, but I don't think people want to listen to a four hour podcast on that. But if you do have questions for us, you know how to reach us. Please, please, please reach out. Find us on Facebook and Instagram. You can email us, [Podcast@NewYorkVocalCoaching.com] You know all these things. some of you have reached out to us already and that's amazing. We're happy to answer your questions, whether it's via email or maybe you'll give us a great idea for our next podcast episode.

Matt
Yeah, without a doubt.

Andy
Awesome.

Matt
All right. Well, this was a joy as always, Andy.

Andy
Absolutely.

Matt
Thank you all for listening.

Matt
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