The Bel Canto Buzz

Introduction

Why did I write this book?

One day, I experienced effortless singing.

It was so easy, in fact, that I felt nothing but complete control. I had been singing an Italian exercise at the time (where else—in the shower). For what had seemed like an eternity to that point, despite having an undergraduate degree in voice performance, twenty years of lessons from six prominent teachers and an enormous financial investment in my journey, I had been struggling to sing well.

And suddenly there I was, transforming from amateur to professional, in a light-bulb illuminating moment of understanding.

Many of us struggle to sing with ease. Yet we remain fascinated by those who do seem to possess the secret to powerful, effortless pitch-perfect singing, as the popularity of several reality television shows attests to. It seems our very souls want to sing.

The Bel Canto Buzz refers to a targeted sensation in the mouth, that when activated, stabilizes our singing and speaking issues, allowing us to remain better tuned and more accurate. We’re going to discover this spot together, exercise it and start you on your journey to effortless singing.

Here’s the key: what if I were to tell you that most of the challenges you’ve been having with your own singing have to do with the language you speak and the way you talk? It is the piece of the vocal puzzle that is almost completely overlooked in mainstream music education. After years of private lessons, I had never heard a single one of my instructors mention that the language I spoke was my primary problem—and yet, now I know that, clearly, it had been.

So, from the moment I felt that effortless tone emerge from my body, it became my fervent desire to share this understanding with anyone who had been challenged in one way or another with their own voice.

I will take it one step further: I now know that everyone can sing well and as a side note, love their speaking voice, too. After almost twenty years of teaching myself, I can attest to the fact that every single person that has crossed my studio’s threshold has left an hour later knowing without a doubt that he or she could in fact access their voice with ease.

So, together, we’re going to unravel the difficulty most of us face when we try to sing. These challenges extend to singing in a variety of other languages where the vowel structure may cause the voice to resonate some of the sounds too far back in the mouth, or consonant issues, where the tongue articulates them farther back on the hard palate, like in the various Asian languages.

First, we will need to understand what singing is: it’s simply elongated vowel sounds. Next, we will discover that we’re built like an instrument, physically designed to vibrate or resonate sound. Once you have these two concepts down, it becomes a question of focusing the mind, stabilizing the muscles associated with singing, and establishing the Buzz.

As a result of discovering this amazing key to ease within my own body, I was able to achieve my dream of becoming a professional singer. In the late 90’s, I moved to Maui and made another rather astonishing discovery; another group of singers who seemed to be creating effortless sound themselves—the Hawaiians. I would often sit and listen to these joyful and radiant musicians, singing in their native language. There was no strain; no aspects of their vocal range that seemed to create any challenges for them. I would often ask if they had studied voice, and then curiously, their consistent reply would be, No.

I then put something together in my mind. The Hawaiian language was put into written form by using the Italian/Latin language as the basis for phonetic translation, the two languages being related through their vowel structure. Both use what is often referred to as pure vowels, something not common in English or other languages. This forward, pure vowel component becomes key to singing ease. These Italian and Hawaiian vowels seem to resonate in one particular spot in the mouth, this place I now call the Buzz. When I help you to understand how to find and feel this place, as well as shift your overall objective from projection to pulling, your singing will be transformed.

Too many people believe that they cannot sing well and often don’t even like their speaking voices. This misunderstanding is caused by a lack of clarity about how singing mechanics work, not recognizing the challenges we all face. As an example, Americanized-English can be out of tune about 80% of the time, if there’s no structural intervention. Unless you are trained (or are very lucky), our language-based issues create more problems than you realize.

If you do question your ability, suspend your current reality for just a little while and I will share with you my understanding. It could change your singing life, as it did mine. This journey holds the possibility of a complete paradigm shift in sound mechanics, bringing you transformation and endless hours of joy! So, if you’re ready, let’s go find our Bel Canto Buzz together!

Chapter 1: Everyone Can Sing! (This Might Surprise You)

Did You Know You Are Built Like a Stereo Speaker?

Most who struggle to sing with ease don’t realize that humans are actually built to sing and that our bodies are designed like a high-fidelity speaker. If you have looked at the internal structure of an old-fashioned speaker, you may recall seeing three cone-like structures referred to as woofers, tweeters and mids; these cones are concave and respectively large, small and medium in size. Each of these cones vibrates when sound is put through the speaker, and that sound is then amplified. The larger cone amplifies the lowest notes and the smallest cone helps resonate the highest pitches or tones.

If you put your hand on your chest and hum a very low pitch around G, you will feel a vibration. Hum a note a bit higher on a C, while placing your hand on your throat. Once again you will feel a vibration. If you hum the next higher Bb, while placing your fingers along the sides of your nose, you may feel another very tiny vibration. So the lungs, throat and sinus area are all parts of the body in which we resonate sound. These are predominantly open areas of our musculature.

The largest open area —the lungs —predominantly amplifies the low notes, just like a woofer. The throat resonates most of the middle register vibrations and, of course, the sinuses and bones of the face then help to resonate the highest notes we sing. As we get used to feeling the vibration of our tones in a more balanced way, all of the resonators in our body work together to amplify sound.

Our Mouths Form a Mini Amphitheater

Now, if we look at the vocal mechanism itself in its simplest form, it is referred to as the larynx. The vocal cords are only a very small part of this mechanism. They are part of this complex structure made up of cartilage, muscles, and even one bone—the hyoid—the only bone in the body that is not connected to any other bone.

The main function of the larynx is to protect the airway, or in simple terms, keep us from drowning. Speaking and making beautiful singing sounds is just a rather amazing bonus. Our brain has this amazing ability to hear a tone, sending a rapid signal to these folds, instantly creating a pitch. In bel canto, we utilize the emergency systems of our body to reinforce what is called, vocal fold approximation or closure, allowing us to make more effortless tones throughout our phrases. So instead of pressing air out of the instrument, our ribs are sustaining a continuous gentle pressure that controls our larynx for us without forward thrust or force.

As we inhale, there is also a preparation that occurs inside the mouth, towards the back of the throat, where we actually can feel the shaping of the vowels, getting us ready for articulation. This vowel prep area is known as the pharynx or pharyngeal mechanism. By fully engaging that area and keeping it energized throughout each phrase, we’ll also increase our ability to accurately hit notes and achieve more overall ease.

If you have ever been to an outdoor concert for a band or orchestra, you may have seen a rounded structure on the stage behind the group playing. In Honolulu for example, the Waikiki Shell is just such an amphitheater, and it actually looks like a big seashell. This kind of shape behind an orchestra helps to naturally amplify the sound.

The inside of our mouth is designed like a mini-amphitheater. If you open your mouth and inhale, thinking Ah for example, you will notice the tongue sort of goes down and the roof of the mouth goes up. The back of the throat, or that pharyngeal area, is like the curve of the shell.

When executed properly, the coordinated action of hearing the notes and words in our mind, articulating a quick or precise onset, consonant or vowel, initiates the vocal folds to create a tone and the magic of directing, resonating and sustaining a sound happens in a split second.

Everything important that we do as singers happens inside our bodies. Once we begin to really the accurate timing of these small details, and how the sustained musculature supports our singing, we will have a much easier time resonating sound that the world can hear.

Our bodies impulse may be to propel or project sound, reiterated by some teachers, as well, which typically will cause us to force the sound. Too much airflow through the vocal cords without maintaining proper, gentle air pressure will actually diffuse the tone, and in bel canto, also destabilizes our legato or connected phrasing.

As a side note, if our mind thinks we don’t know what we are doing, we tend to try to make sound happen in any way we can, which usually involves inadvertently pushing too much air through the mechanism. Just know that this is a natural reaction to trying to figure out how to do something, when we have not been given any direction otherwise, reminiscent of the Jean Luke Picard Star Trek directive, Make it so!

This is especially true when working with children. There are mixed opinions on how young one should begin vocal lessons. Some voice teachers won’t even take students under a certain age, so they don’t often get effective direction. But the reality is that most kids sing all the time and tend to yell and push regularly. One twelve-year-old that was brought to me for assistance had almost destroyed her ability to sing, as sections of her vocal range were completely missing. It took six months of reinforcing gentle tones and teaching her basic support principles to help guide her voice back to health, where she had a full range of notes available to her again, instead of the four or five notes she could sing for me initially. In my experience gently teaching children good singing habits early, helps them develop healthy singing voices, as they grow into their instruments, particularly when it comes to proper structure and air mechanics.

As we dig deeper into this book, we’ll start to get used to placing the muscles in the right position, feeling how our voices initiate sound and vibrate. Once we understand a bit more about the timing of articulation, our voices will begin to resonate with ease. Then, we’ll play with how we become louder or softer without pushing or yelling. In a few short months, we’ll become our own amplifier!

The Buzz: It Was Right Under Your Nose All the Time!

Believe it or not, how we think about directing and sustaining the sound resonating within us has everything to do with making the whole thing work. Our Americanized-English language’s natural vowel resonating propensity is to move back and forth in our mouths and throats. Sometimes I will say each of our primary sounds lives on different floors in different condos on different streets. As a result of this, our singing can often sound swallowed or covered, like there’s a little garage door darkening and dulling the sound.

By imitating the animated nature of Italian speech through a small facial engagement, we come close to feeling where this mysterious Buzz lives. If you think about someone you know who is Italian, you may recognize that they naturally articulate and speak in a more energetic way. By taking on some tiny muscular mannerisms, we will feel a different brightness to the sounds we make. This will impact our tuning, as we combat the natural intonation sagging that can occur in vocal production, particularly when we try to sing in English.

If you draw a line across your face right under nose, this is the area where the forward vowels vibrate. To isolate this spot, place your fingers like a moustache right under your nose, feeling the indentation between your gum line and cheekbones. Press gently into that space. Now, lift your cheek muscles up off the gum line right beside your nose by about ¼". If you hold still, the sensation may feel a bit awkward at first. If you start speaking, while holding this lift, you might find your speech feels a bit affected or I always find that it makes me sound like I’m from a foreign country, and can’t speak English very well. But, these lifted, engaged cheeks will become important as we begin to stabilize our bel canto approach, stabilizing what we will come to call forward vowels. This in essence will keep our natural vowel chaos in check, allowing us to sustain more even sound production.

If you hum an M for a moment with your lips closed, you may notice a feeling of vibration. If you then lift your cheeks up off the gum line, making a mischievous little smile, then hum again, you may start to notice a small vibration moving up under your nose. This tiny place where you are feeling the vibration, is where the Buzz lives.

One warm-up I use to exercise this area is humming up and back by half steps in your lower register or chest voice. As we do this exercise, we start to bring our awareness to the Buzz. Just doing this one exercise begins to isolate and stabilize the positive vibration that will eventually make your voice sound even and well tuned.

Doing some general humming around the house while maintaining this mischievous little grin, will help get you started down the path of steady vibration. Begin to notice that when the engaged cheeks or smile drops, the vibration or Buzz you feel in the front of your face disappears and moves back into your mouth and/or throat.

Once our lifted cheek muscles are maintained, it’s as if our sound is automatically directed to this Buzz spot, which will allow us