Waking Up Your Speaking Voice

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From the moment you open your mouth, your voice is one of the primary ways people gather information about you and begin to create judgments.

If you are someone who wakes up in the morning feeling like you croak instead of speak, you may not be putting your best foot forward when it comes to how people perceive you.

By taking a little time to prepare your voice, you give people the chance to take you in as your best, most confident self.

When people hear you speak with a voice that warmed up and expressive, they are more able to fully receive your communication and feel emotionally moved and influenced by you.

Getting Rid of Morning Voice

Check your vocal hygiene

• Get plenty of sleep. The National Sleep Foundation recommends seven to nine hours of sleep per night for adults to function at their best.

• Hydrate the day before. The vocal cords aren’t exactly your body’s first priority when it comes to hydration. How fast your vocal cords rehydrate is directly related to how dehydrated you are in the first place.  Water will travel to your cords faster if you are already hydrated, so I like to think of the water I drink today being for the voice I use tomorrow!

• Use a hygrometer. Check the humidity of your living and sleeping environment, and consider using a humidifier at night if it’s too dry. 

• Mist with a nebulizer. Nebulizers can be used with saline to directly hydrate the vocal cords.  Some people prefer steaming, which feels good, but the water particles from steam are too large to get all the way to the vocal cords. A nebulizer creates smaller particles which allow the moisture to directly reach the vocal cords.

• Warm up your entire body. A short stretch and brisk walk can help get the blood flowing in the body, which will also help it flow to your vocal cords.

Find Your Ideal Speaking Pitch

Many people speak too low in their range and fall into using vocal fry. This can be tiring to the voice. Watch the video below and I’ll lead you through the following process of finding your ideal speaking pitch.

• Say “uh huh” like you are agreeing with someone, and you’ve got to really mean it, or it doesn’t work as well.

• Use the second pitch you get on the “huh” part, which is usually higher than where you start the first one.

• Play around with speaking around that second pitch you found.

• Is it higher than where you normally speak? It might feel or sound strange to you at first, but it’s most likely that you just aren’t used to it. When I’m using my ideal pitch, I like to think of it as using my “happy voice”.

Warm Up Your Speaking voice

For the same reasons you warm up your body before you exercise, it’s wise to warm up our voices before vocalizing.  This is true whether you plan to speak or sing.

Warming up:

• increases blood flow to the vocal cords

• stretches and relaxes the muscles we use for singing

• gets the voice into vocal balance

• helps prevent injury

Let’s try it…

Mini Warm Up for your speaking voice

In this simple 3 minute warmup, you can take your voice from frog to princess (or prince), so that you have more confidence and build stronger trust with your audience, allowing them to fully receive you and your message.

Feel free to pause the video at any point and repeat each exercise as many times as you’d like until your voice feels warmed up.

Please note that I am an affiliate for many of the resources listed above. As an affiliate, I may earn a referral fee if you purchase these products based on my recommendations. Rest assured, I only recommend products and services that I actually use myself.

What is Mix?

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This is the last of a three part series exploring chest voice, head voice, and mix (or mixed) voice.

With so many terms to learn about the voice it can get a little confusing. These three are the foundation of the voice and a great place to get started. Let’s jump into mix voice, and why it is so important to find yours!

What is Mix Voice?

This is where we are able to blend the chest voice with the head voice, so that we can sing from the bottom to the top of our range without a sudden change in quality, and without strain, breaks, or cracks.

If we take just the head voice, we can go really high without too much effort, but there isn’t much power or intensity.  

Then we have the chest voice which has intensity, but on its own, it can’t go up that high without causing a lot of strain and tension.

So we need to be in the middle of them and use a mix of both, so that we have the strength and intensity of the yell (or chest voice) and the flexibility of the whoop (or head voice).

We need the CT (head voice) muscles to thin out the chest voice, so we can sing higher without straining or breaking. When the chest voice and the head voice muscles can coordinate and work together, we can sing through our whole range without it sounding like two different voices!

We get that great “mix” sound where we sound like ourselves, no matter where we are in our range.

Book a lesson with me to explore your chest, head, and mix voice!

What is Head Voice?

THIS BLOG HAS BEEN MOVED TO OUR NEW WEBSITE. GO READ IT HERE.

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This is part two of a three part series exploring chest voice, head voice, and mix (or mixed) voice.

It can get confusing with so many terms to learn about the voice. Another one to get familiar with is head voice because it is used often and sometimes misunderstood. Let’s learn a little more about how to find it and what you need to know about the role it plays.

That’s your head voice. Head voice is associated with your upper register.

Did you notice where you felt the sympathetic vibrations?

Most people feel them in their head. That’s why it’s called head voice.

How do we produce head voice?

That’s just a fancy way of saying there are muscles that need to activate for us to sing higher.

These muscles are outside the vocal folds, and they stretch and thin the vocal folds allowing us to go up in pitch.

The cricothyroid (CT) muscles are associated with our upper register and are dominant in the production of head voice.

What?! Aren’t they the same? NOPE.

Falsetto is breathy and weak compared to head voice. It can still be a great stylistic choice though. It can be beautiful and haunting like in The Weekend’s Rolling Stone at 1:30 for example, or Billie Eilish’s Everything I Wanted, also at 1:30.

Head voice is stronger than falsetto. An example of head voice is Maroon 5’s She Will Be Loved in the chorus at 1:18 where he goes up to a B5 on “be”, or the very first line of Arianna Grande’s no tears left to cry. You can hear these examples have a little more strength and aren’t breathy.

Here is the thing. The muscle coordination between falsetto and head voice is different.

In a balanced chest voice, there is still a little bit of that CT (head voice) muscle activation, especially as we go up in pitch.

Same with a balanced head voice, there is still a little bit of TA (chest voice) muscle activity, more or less depending on how intense of a sound we are getting.

When we are in falsetto, the TA (chest voice) muscle essentially let’s go, and we have no thickening or shortening of the vocal folds happening, so we get a thinner and more breathy sound.

As you sing through your range, at any point, there will be a whole range of choices in terms of how much TA or CT you are activating. This is all a version of mix, which we will talk more about in the next blog.

Let me know if you have any questions! Or, drop in some other examples of head voice and falsetto that you like!