The Five Steps Necessary to Produce Quality Tone

The fourth in a series of five lessons on producing good tone addresses sustaining the tone. In the first three lessons you prepared to sing by understanding "preparatory set" (getting the body ready physically). You learned proper breathing techniques and how to start the first tone correctly. Now that you are breathing correctly and producing good tone, your main objective is to keep producing good tone until you take another breath.

In the last lesson, we talked about the balance and coordination between the contraction of the muscles of breathing and the resistance provided by the tension of the muscles of the valve. Maintaining this balance and coordination throughout the remainder of the musical phrase is absolutely necessary if you are going to have good "control", that is, be able to sing good tone for any length of time. Often singers who have poor technique sing good tone for the first four or five words in a phrase then deteriorate the tone quality through the end of the phrase. The remaining tones in the phrase were either starved for air and therefore pinched (a result of too much breath pressure for the muscle-set of the valve) or a breathy, wimpy tone (too little breath pressure for the muscle-set of the valve).

Let's review the use of the breath (respiration) and phonation (producing sound). Although discussed briefly in the last lesson, it is the most important aspect of maintaining good tone. If you can achieve this, you can sing throughout the entire range of your voice without any noticeable change of quality.

How much should the diaphragm permit the abdominal muscles to build breath pressure and how much should the valve resist this breath pressure? The answer is not to compromise to try to find a tone that is midway between breathiness and tightness. This simply results in vacillation between looseness and tenseness. The secret is to flood the tone with as much breath as possible and to keep from making it breathy by offering it as firm a resistance as necessary in the valve. You evaluate this by listening to the resultant tone. If the tone is free, round, steady and even-flowing with sustaining length and has resonance, the balance and coordination is fine. You will need help from an extra pair of ears in making this evaluation. YOU MUST NOW PRACTICE!!!

As you improve your balance and coordination, you will find that you can sing longer phrases with more control than you can now.

\ Staccato exercises can be helpful in achieving coordination: Make four short staccato attacks while you think of producing a clear, clean stroke followed by a sustained tone. HUH! HUH! HUH! HUH! HUH! If the sustained tone is produced with the same abandon of breath and firmness as in the staccato strokes, it will be full and free. Transfer this feeling into the singing of some phrases which are in a comfortable range. Be patient and you will succeed.

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