Unlock the secret to a voice that carries with ease—without pushing or strain.
In this episode, Amber Mogg Cathey shares simple tools and exercises that help singers create a buzzier, more resonant sound. If you’ve ever wondered how great singers develop that forward, vibrant tone, this episode will help you feel exactly where resonance lives and how to activate it.
You’ll explore practical exercises like NG sounds, humming, and forward resonance drills that bring vibration into the lips, nose, and cheekbones—helping you find and maintain the resonant “buzz” that makes a voice carry.
Amber also shares tactile tools like the “shush finger” technique and bone tapping to help you locate and lock in resonance more consistently.
If you want your voice to feel easier, freer, and more resonant, these simple tools will help you unlock it.
00:00 Understanding Vocal Resonance
05:18 Practical Exercises for Resonance
10:02 Conclusion and Resources
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One of my favorite things in the world, in the voice world, is yummy, buzzy resonance. So what do I mean by that? Resonance is the quality of sound whenever you sing. It's taking that sound wave, that's all that sound is, and really boosting some of those upper waves so it carries to our ears. Resonance is so important as singers, as speakers.
It really can make the difference between a good performance and a killer performance. So I want to share with you today some of my favorite tools and strategies for getting good, buzzy vocal resonance. Also, let me say really quickly what I mean by buzzy. Buzzy can be in sound, buzzy can be in feel. So if I am singing, nae, nae, nae, nae, nae, I feel personally a little bit of buzz in my nose and cheeks.
a little bit of buzz at the roof of my mouth. It's not major, it's not like earthquake status, but I feel a little bit of buzz. Does every singer feel buzz? No. Does that mean if you're a person that doesn't feel sympathetic buzz, which is just the vibration of that sound, does that mean you're not as good of a singer? No, it means we're all different. We all feel our bodies differently, we're all aware of our bodies differently, we're all made differently.
Typically, where we feel some buzz, some resonance when we sing, if we feel it, is where we have kind of the most bone or cartilage to vibrate against. I have some singers who feel some buzz in their ears when they sing. There's nothing wrong with you. You have cartilage and bone there. People who get so much resonance, like have you ever done a lip trill and afterwards you just have to like tickle your nose because it's driving you crazy? That's that resonant buzz.
when I'm doing an SOVT and I kind of need to scratch my nose, I'm like, that's the good stuff. That's the buzz. So I want to give you some strategies today to help you play with Getting more resonance in your sound, which, like I said, just makes the sound carry more. It can make it more stylistically appropriate. We use different resonance strategies, different tonal qualities based on the style, the song that we're singing.
I also love focusing on more forward resonance, not only because it sounds better but it usually means better function. If we have a tendency to kind of shape the sound where it sort of goes back, one, it doesn't carry nearly as much. You can hear it's immediately muffled. And two, when it goes back, where does some of that pressure go? It puts pressure on our vocal folds, which can make things feel harder.
Our range doesn't feel as easy, we get tired more quickly. So really good resonance strategies help us sound better and help us feel better. And if you've been here before, you know those are the two things I am always going for. So I wanna give you a few different exercises, a few different sounds that I love, as well as a few different movements and some of those tools that I love because I feel like movement incorporating our body, which is our instrument can make such a difference in singing. I know that it can.
So one of my favorites for buzzy sound is an NG. Like you're going to say the word sing, but you're hold that NG. It's a completely nasal sound. No sound comes out of your mouth. Sing. If you're going to feel buzz there, you are likely going to feel it somewhere in your nasal cavity because that's where the sound is coming out. You might feel buzz in your nose. NG is not only a great resonance sound,
because of that, because it gets us so nice and forward. I love it too for connecting registers, for erasing vocal breaks. You can take an NG on anything. You can take it into a song you're singing. If you have a section of a song where you're like, ⁓ just not getting like the energy and the presence of the tonal quality that I want, sing that section on an NG
I just was working on that Gavin DeGraw song with the singer right before this, so it's stuck in my head. I love sliding intervals.
NGs are so great for buzzy resonance. Also so is humming. And humming can be an HM. One of the things I like to do actually to feel a lot of buzz at my lips, which I just felt right there, is really kind of drop the jaw. think, like you've got more space inside of your mouth. That can really sometimes help you feel some sympathetic buzz right at your lips.
and HN, like the word hun, is also really good. Both of those are really nice and buzzy. One of the ways that I like to lock into the body and feel some of that sympathetic buzz, I feel like it's helpful for most of us, but especially if you are a singer who is like, just don't feel it. This may not work for you, but this could really help. This could be a piece of the puzzle for you.
So let's go back to that HM, mm, with our jaw dropped. Kind of think like we've got an egg or we've got something in our mouth to get nice drop of the jaw, I want you to take the bone of your hand.
So if you're watching me on YouTube, you can see this if you're listening to me. Hopefully I do a good job of explaining it. If not, I hope I do, I think I will. But if not, jump on over to YouTube and you can watch me. You're gonna take both of your hands, You're gonna find the bone on each of your hands that's at the base of all of your fingers. We're gonna take that bony part of our hand to the base of our fingers, kind of the top of our palm, and we're gonna put it on the bone of our cheek. Remember how I said earlier, where we feel resonant buzz many times.
is where we have something solid for that sound wave to vibrate against. So bone of a hand on bone of a cheek can be really helpful. Now I'm gonna take my hands, my fingers, and I'm gonna cover my eyes. Why am I gonna do that? Because my eyes take in a lot of sensory input.
So then I'm focusing on that. I wanna take that big main sensory input away so I can just focus on sensation. So the bone of my hands, on the bone of my cheeks, I'm gonna cover up my eyes and I'm gonna go back to that HM with a dropped jaw and I'm just gonna kind of drone around my speaking voice.
And what I want you to do is try that and I want you to think about where do you feel that resonance and know that any answer is okay. Some people will say, ooh, I feel it a lot in my lips. I feel it a lot in my lips. There, I felt it a lot actually in the palm of my hands, kind of vibrating at my cheeks. I also felt it at the bone of my cheek and kind of around my nose. If you feel it at the roof of your mouth, wherever you do, there is no wrong answer or right answer.
The whole point is to take some time to just lock into the sensations you feel when you're creating sound and think about where you feel that buzz, lock into that nice feeling, that nice buzzy sound.
Then we can go into an exercise, we can go into a section of a song, again taking our hands, putting the bone of the hand on the bone of the cheek, covering the eyes, thinking about where we felt that resonance and try to just lock into focusing resonance in that same area. This can be such a massively helpful tool for singers. I see it'd be beneficial all the time. I love it.
Another thing to do is literally take your hands,
put them on your cheeks, right? So I'll tap my cheeks, I'll kind of tap my fingers. Sometimes I just put my hands on my cheeks. Nae nae nae nae nae nae nae nae nae nae nae nae nae nae is a great consonant vowel. That N is a buzzy nasal consonant, A is a bright vowel to get some good pingy, some might say twangy resonance. And then when I put my hands here on my cheeks, many times I can feel some good vibration there.
another tool that I love to really kind of help singers focus their resonance is to take your finger. I call this the shush finger. It does not mean you need to be quiet. You take your finger and you put it right in front of your mouth. I'm doing that in front of my mic right now. So let's say I'm doing that nay, nay, nay, or I'm doing a hum or I'm doing a yum, yum, yum. I really like that for resonance because that Y gets my
jaw nice and relaxed, and then I'm back to that nasally, buzzy, consonant, just like our hum earlier. So let's say I'm going to do yum on a five note scale. I'm going to put my finger right in front of my mouth and I want your focus to be just sing to that finger. Don't overthink it. Yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum. I'm not thinking about up and down. Everything is focused right on that finger.
That can be so helpful too. You'll notice your resonance just kind of locks in. Then you can take that into your song. Put that finger in front of your mouth, sing that section, just focusing on singing everything right to that finger, It just can help give us something to focus on, a much smaller focus that can really help us lock that resonance in. The key here is I did multiple sounds, some different movements, some different ways to connect with the body is to play with these.
and find what works best for you. By the way, are there so many more tools than this? A Y buzz is so great. There's so many great tools for resonance. This is a 10 minute episode, so I'm doing my best to keep in that. Play with these and find what feels good and sounds good for you. If it feels good and sounds good, take that sound into maybe an exercise.
intervals that slide, some kind of scale pattern. If that feels good, take that sound into your song. focusing on resonance, tonal quality that gives you the biggest bang for your buck, that makes your voice sound its best, that really locks in the style that you're going for, and that helps you function even better and feel better. It's just the best. I love me some resonant work. So I hope you found some of these tools helpful.
If you go down into the show notes, I have a five minute sing along vocal audio track that is free for you. And one of the big exercises in it is resonance. It's an SOVT exercise. That's something like a lip trill, singing through a straw into water, tongue trill. There's all different kinds of SOVTs. You're gonna do that to get the vocal folds really set up effectively, get blood flow to them, get them stretching, release potential tension, depending on the exercise you do.
then you're going to lock into resonance. I also throw in a bonus belt exercise. Like always, thank you so much for being here and see you in the next episode. Bye.
