Pamelia S. Phillips - Singing For Dummies

After practicing walking with ease, you can then practice walking and singing. Allow yourself time to stop and monitor your posture to make sure you’re staying aligned while singing a song. You can also practice without your shoes and feel the connection of your feet to the floor. After you can feel the opening of the feet into the floor when you breathe, you can then compare that sensation with shoes on.

The same applies for dancing and singing. Practice the alignment described in the chapter and then try out some of the breathing exercises in Chapter 4. When you feel confident that you have those skills solid, try combining those skills while singing and dancing. Even if you aren’t a dancer, move around the room while you’re singing to notice the difference between singing with tension and singing with your body aligned and balanced.

Projecting confidence onstage is important because you want to feel good about your performance and you want the audience to be comfortable watching you perform. Audiences are usually apprehensive about performers who project fear. Projecting confidence involves finding your ideal posture and maintaining it throughout a performance.

If you maintain that posture and a calm expression even if you forget the words to your song, many people probably won’t even notice. I’ve seen it many times: The performer is onstage making up the words, but he looks as terrific as if he’d intended to sing those words. By maintaining poise and posture, the performer projects to the audience that everything is fine and assures them that they needn’t worry, as if to say, “I’ll get back to the original words in a moment.” The performer also walks away feeling good because he stuck to a basic singing rule: Good posture enhances good singing.

To explore how correct posture exudes confidence, pretend that you’re a king or queen. Strut like you own the place. Notice your posture. Now pretend that you’re really sick and that your whole body aches. Doesn’t a ruler move differently than someone who is ill? It’s possible for a king or queen to be ill, but not in this scenario. A king walks tall, carries himself with great dignity and grace, and glides around the room. A sickly person can barely stand, much less project confidence. In this scenario, which one are you? Are you the king with a dignified posture, or are you stooped and closed off from the world? You’re probably somewhere in the middle. Strive to be the king or queen when you sing.

You want the same confidence in your posture when you’re singing and playing the guitar or the piano (or even the banjo or organ). Practice finding the alignment in the chapter and then sit down at the piano. Notice that you can allow the bench to support you and sense the buoyancy in the spine. Feel the weight of your body sink into the bench so you can remain flexible no matter which way you turn. Lifting your leg to use the piano pedals is different from just lifting your foot. You can do either one, but just notice that lifting your entire leg engages the abdominal muscles. The breath work from Chapter 4helps you explore using the ribs or the abdominals to help you sing well. If you’re performing, you may need to turn your head toward a microphone. Even when you turn your head, try to maintain fluid motion in your body instead of tightening the spine or neck when you turn.

Singing while playing the guitar is really fun. Practice finding your alignment with the exercises in the chapter and then grab your guitar. If you normally stand and play guitar, then put your guitar strap around your neck and find your alignment from the exercises in the chapter. Notice what part of your body engages to hold up the guitar. If the guitar is balanced across your body, you may feel that your legs do the work of holding up the weight of the guitar. After exploring the sensations of holding the guitar and maintaining your alignment, start to play the guitar without singing and monitor your posture. Notice what muscles you’re using to hold yourself up while your arms and hands are busy playing the guitar. After you find a good balance of muscles moving while just playing, try playing the guitar and singing. Take your time between phrases to make sure you focus on allowing your breath to drop into your body (see Chapter 4for help with breathing for singing). By allowing yourself longer pauses between phrases, you can monitor each aspect of the technique: alignment, breath coordination, singing phrases, playing the instrument. It takes time to be able to do all of this at the same time, but you can do it with practice.

After you explore playing the guitar while standing, try sitting in a chair and holding the guitar. Notice the muscles that engage as you hold the guitar. You don’t have to sit stiffly, but I suggest that you explore an upright posture before leaning over the guitar. Notice that leaning over the guitar not only affects your posture, but it also affects your muscles for breathing and singing. Next, compare the sensation of singing while playing the guitar with upright posture and when you lean over the guitar. The slumped posture can cause your organs to be squeezed with less room to move when you breathe. You can sing well while leaning over your guitar, but I recommend you practice the alignment exercises until you can recognize tension in your body. After you can recognize and release tension, you can sing well and rock out playing your guitar in different positions.

To find some inspiration, watch your favorite artist sing and play the piano or guitar. Do they maintain their posture while they’re playing? Some celebrities to watch are Darius Rucker or Justin Timberlake playing the guitar and singing and Lady Gaga or John Legend playing piano and singing.

Chapter 4

IN THIS CHAPTER

Getting down to the brass tacks of breath control

Inhaling and expanding your body

Exhaling and extending your breath

Discovering how your body moves while breathing

How you manage your breath when you sing can drastically change the sound of your singing voice. If you try to hold your breath and sing, it doesn’t work. You also can’t sing a loud phrase without using some air — that is, without exhaling. Most people think of exhaling as involving air, not sound. When you sing, exhaling encompasses both at the same time. Although breathing is natural — you don’t have to think about it — when you sing, you need to train your body to breathe in a certain way so that you breathe efficiently throughout an entire song. You don’t want to run out of breath in the middle of a word. The exercises in this chapter help you master breath control so you can sing through all those long phrases in your favorite songs with ease.

Try not to push yourself too quickly when you’re working on breath. Work slowly and allow the movements described in this chapter to become habit.