What's The Deal With The Voice?

In every church I've served in and visited, the issue of good, quality voice coaching has always been an issue. It doesn't matter what 'style' of worship music you do, it's always the same type of questions that come up:

• How can I teach good technique for my vocalists?
  
• My vocalists' don't have a high enough range, so I'm having to rewrite stuff in lower keys. Isn't there any way to increase their range?
• How do I get that natural, solid tone out of my vocals?

I deal with this in ministry here. And I'm always looking for good, safe options to help my vocal team burst through in that natural tone with a good high range. I'll share some of the resources here in a minute.

In almost every case, vocalists' use about 2 octaves when they sing. They can move into a falsetto and increase a little, but it holds true that 2 is the magic number, even for those trained in a college/university. The human voice was actually designed to cover 3 octaves comfortably, with proper transitions from head to chest. This is one of the most important and key areas that we, in churches, should be focusing on in developing our teams.

So where do you go for some tips on developing the depth of range, the comfortable depth? I've found a resource that I'm still learning about that I've tried and I like. I'll be sharing this with my team in a couple of weeks to see how it works. We've already tried one technique for loosening and stretching that produces a clear, warm sound in ALL of them. It cracked me up too, cause I learned this in my vocal training at Idaho State! It's a silly technique that works:

• You can do a scale exercise or use a mid-range song to do this.
• Relax your face and sing the word 'nay' instead of scale or song words. But when you sing nay, sound it out like this - NYAAY. The n-y connection should like the letter 'n' in words like nino, with a tilde over the 'n'.
• Let the sound be nasally.
  
• Attack the note. Don't slide, bend, etc. Just land ON each note.
• Sing through an entire scale or song.
• Now, repeat using the words.

It may not seem like much, but you are training your voice to capture that true sound and 'free up' that natural, cool tone inside. It takes a little repetition to really feel it, but it is way cool! As I said, my team had a completely different, warm, round tone.

Check out Brett Manning and his resources. It's a little pricey for some, but I'm finding it to be rather interesting and encouraging. I'll share the other sites and sources here soon.

In the meantime, keep it real for Jesus, and have fun serving Him!