What Is Appoggio? While the word appoggio may be completely foreign to you right now, it won’t be by the end of this blog. I want to give you some idea about what appoggio is and how it can improve your singing by working on you breathing technique, your breath management, which is one of ...…
Techniques to Help Correct Posture As I mentioned previously, maintaining appoggio, in association with proper posture, has more to do with the coordination of the muscles in the vocal tract (the chest, the upper and lower abdomen and the navel) than it does simply holding up the chest and keeping the ribs out. This is ...…
Further Description of Posture and Ways to Help Correct It As I mentioned in my previous post, it’s okay to shift your weight from side to side and can maintain proper posture doing so. I want to add that while singing, your weight should rarely be distributed equally on both legs. In fact, you may ...…
What it Is, and What it Isn’t If you’ve followed my blogs, particularly the series on breath-management, you know that I talk a lot about posture in those posts, because posture and breath-management, to some degree, are two sides of the same coin. For that reason, my posture blog series will be shorter. So, if ...…
Slow Down The Exit Of Breath The title is just a fancy way of asking whether it’s better to get rid of all the breath in your lungs in one quick, noisy action or slow down the breath as it comes out, holding on to it as long as possible. Breath shouldn’t be forced out ...…
Steady, Uninterrupted Airflow Most people, singers or not, tend to hold their breath for short periods of time, two to five seconds or so during normal breathing. I heard one vocal teacher say that this is the sign of a mild neurosis, that it was an indicator that someone has difficulty expressing his or her ...…
Nose Breathing to Replenish the Lungs and Relax the Vocal Tract The logical thing to do when preparing to sing a long phrase is to tank up and get as much air as you can so that you will have enough to complete the phrase. But, if you’ve tried it much, you understand that this ...…
Three Airflow Level Checking Exercises Breathy singing is almost always to be avoided. It is a poor use of air and goes against the goal of singing, which is to turn airflow into tone by an efficiently vibrating larynx. Some singers sing breathy as a stylistic measure, which I think it fine, but it won’t ...…
Breathing for Singing Vs. Breathing for Speech Whenever I talk about breathing for singing or working to develop a breath management system, the push back is always, “Why do I need to learn to breathe? I’m breathe to stay alive, so I’m pretty good at it.” Well, as you may have guessed, or already know, ...…
How to Properly Engage the Abdomen If you have ever been in school or church, or a board meeting for that matter, and suddenly found something to be overwhelmingly funny, and stifled laughter was the result, you know what natural abdominal-wall action feels like. Another example of this can be understood through the panting vocal ...…
