If your mix voice feels inconsistent or strained, this episode breaks down the foundational work most singers skip—and how to build a voice that actually coordinates.
00:00 Introduction to Mix Voice Challenges
03:58 Tension Release: Voice, Body, and Mind
08:33 Exercises for Developing Mix Voice
▶️ Spotify| Apple Podcasts| YouTube
🎁 Free 5 Minute Vocal Warm-Up + Bonus Belt Exercise
🎤 Become a Vocal Pro - 7 Day Money Back Gaurantee
Hello, my lovely friends and welcome to Vocal Tips in 10. I had a Vocal Pro Collective member reach out to me the other day. She's a singer herself and she's a vocal coach and a voice teacher herself. And she was really frustrated because she feels like she's been working on these mix voice exercises and these belting exercises with her singers for some time. Some of them are getting it great.
Some of them are struggling and she was like, what's the deal? They'd been working on this for weeks. So I thought, I need to get into this. This is what we're gonna make. I think it's gonna be a double podcast episode because I could literally have an Erase Your Break, which is the name of my mix voice method and course, little plug right there. I could have an Erase Your Break Mix Voice podcast. Mix voice is so multifaceted. There are also people out there who will say mix voice isn't a thing.
So I thought I want to get into it today and I want to get into in today's episode specifically some of those foundational pieces that many singers like to jump over or don't even think about. They jump right into mix voice exercises and the word I hear all the time on so many videos that pop up on my Instagram is, you just need pharyngeal voice, pharyngeal voice.
And there's nothing wrong with that, right? Your pharynx, they're talking about your oral cavity and your nasal cavity. Of course those are important, but the way they're saying it is like, this is a magical thing you don't know about, What I find is it causes a ton of confusion for singers. Your pharynx, It's part of your vocal tract, your throat.
your oral cavity, your nasal cavity. Yes, those resonators are important, but you also have to have foundational function of the vocal folds.
So let's jump into it. The entire first module of my ERase or Break course, which is a beast. So I'm just gonna put it down in the show notes. It is 10 weeks of step-by-step instruction, all about building your best mix voice. You also can jump in, choose your own adventure.
work where you would like
So the whole first module is called, How to Get Out of Your Own Way. And I feel like this is a huge piece of mix voice. And because this is a 10 minute or less podcast, I'm gonna touch on these each a little bit. If you want more, DM me, leave me a comment.
I'm happy to talk more if you all find that helpful. But when I think about how to get out of your own way, I think about the whole singer, like I always do. So I think about the voice. So we're talking about potential tension in the voice. Great ways to address that might be any kind of an SOVT, semi-occluded vocal tract exercise. So that could be things like a lip trill.
raspberry singing through a straw into water singing through a small singing straw there's loads of SOV T's so I like to think about any tension you might be carrying at the vocal fold level then I work out and I look at okay let's look at the body let's look at the tongue the jaw the neck the shoulders the body as a whole if we are really holding and gripping and carrying tension
in any of these places, it can really impact our singing. It can make things harder. So that's where we look at massage or targeted stretches to release tension in the jaw and the tongue. That SOVT I just did, the raspberry. That is a great one to help release tongue tension. It's also great for breath management. So we wanna look at releasing tension there.
Maybe we need to look at tension in our neck and our shoulders. Maybe we need to look at tension that we're holding in the abdominal area or the diaphragm that's impacting our breathing. So we're looking at the voice and tension release. We're looking at the body because our body is our instrument and tension release. And then we're looking at the mind.
how we think directly impacts how our body functions and our body is our instrument. So what I mean by tension release in the mind is if you are a singer who thinks, God, here comes this note, there's no way I'm gonna hit it. I gotta get up there.
Immediately what happens if you think, no, even just for a second, your muscles tighten to try and protect you and it is genuinely harder to hit. So that's things like looking at things that you're saying to yourself, conscious or unconscious, working through those, you can talk to yourself more kindly. I love using tools like movement to kind of help the body.
override some of those unhelpful cues that the mind might be giving it due to some of our own mindset hangups.
And so I'm talking about how to get out of our own way, tension release, voice, body, and mind quite quickly here. That can be a ton of work depending on where you are. And I feel like this module, the how to get out of your own way or these exercises constantly relooking at what are just habits that we have developed either vocally, physically, things we're continually telling ourselves mentally that are now getting in our own way.
I feel like that's the work that no matter how high a level of a singer you are, we're constantly coming back to because our bodies can change, our voices can change, our mental state can change from day to day, from morning to afternoon, right? From hour to hour sometimes.
So I feel like that focus and that work is many times overlooked and it's a really important part to developing your best mix voice. And mix voice for me means being able to sing from the bottom of your range to the top of your range, have it feel and sound like one connected voice because that's what we have. So you don't have really clear spots where either your voice breaks apart.
Or you have spots where you hear a really big tonal shift. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you can sound and feel like one connected voice. And then you have the choice to have the sound quality that you want when and where you want it.
So if we talk about from a functional vocal standpoint, the other thing I think so many singers like to jump over is the muscular development that you have to have to have all those options and to have your best voice. What we're asking the voice to do when we sing in mix, is we're asking our shortening thickening muscle, the TA muscle that's generally responsible for our low notes.
and the power throughout our range, we're asking that muscle to work in coordination with our thinning muscle, the muscle that stretches and out thins out the vocal folds, your CT muscle. So they work in completely opposing ways and we're asking them to be able to coordinate together. They're absolutely able to do that if they are both developed and developed in the most balanced way possible. What do I mean by that? I mean, if you are somebody who's like, ⁓ my chest voice is where I live.
That's a whole lot of contemporary singers. Those really high notes, I don't really ever work up there and my voice doesn't do that. I don't love it. One, I promise you your voice can do that unless there's an issue going on and then you want some vocal rehabilitation or you want to have those vocal folds looked at. It probably doesn't feel great up there because you haven't worked it regularly. It's also really important to work that stretching, thinning muscle. not only to have good high notes, but to have more agility and flexibility throughout your entire voice.
And two, if you want to take power higher, you have to have the muscle developed that allows your vocal folds to stretch so they can go higher. so if you have a really developed low end, you haven't worked a lot in your upper end. Generally that singer has a good amount of power, let's say, but a pretty diminished range. They cap out quickly so they're not able to stretch up to the notes they would like without screlting, right? Scream belting.
or just feeling uncomfortable or losing their voice the next day without doing a real squeeze and push. On the flip side, the singers that have these lovely, gorgeous, developed upper registers, many times, not always, for me, that is singers who have been trained more classically and they haven't done a lot of purposeful work in that low end, in that speech level, speech-like singing. They generally have nice range, nice agility, but they complain about lacking power.
We want both of those and you're always gonna struggle with one or the other if we don't develop those foundational muscles.
So really quickly, an exercise to help you with that low register if you don't feel as comfy there. I love to base it in speech. Let's think guh-guh-guh-gum. Put it on a five note scale. Guh-guh-guh-guh-guh-guh-guh-guh-gum. And see how it's really speechy? Guh-guh-guh-guh-guh-guh-guh-guh-gum. Work that down as low as you can. Work it up as high as you can regularly. For upper register.
I love vocal sirens. So a vocal siren is just like a fire truck, right? You can do it on an SOVT like that lip trill I did earlier.
Woo!
take baby versions of those sirens. We can do a sliding third. We can do a sliding fifth. I like to do sliding thirds. At least start there. ⁓
got to regularly work those muscles that make up the foundation of how our voice functions in order to get our best mix and to have as many options as possible. Then from there, we can talk about great exercises where we lock in pharyngeal sounds or twangy sounds or whatever you want to call them. I'm not as big on labeling them as I am on you getting the sounds you want from your voice, you having as many options as possible.
you feeling in control of them, that they are consistent and they feel doable and healthy. They
next week's episode, we'll jump into more register connect exercises, mix voice belt, the tonal outcomes we're going for. But I promise you guys, if you do the work on these foundational pieces, you're gonna be so much happier. Like I said, I will put a link to my Erase Your Break course down in the show notes. And then if you have been here before, you know how much I love Vocal Pro. It is now called the Vocal Pro Collective instead of the Vocal Pro membership. And I'll do another episode on that.
already over my 10 minutes. It's just so much more than a membership and it has been for a good long while now It's a full vocal training ecosystem. If you are a member of that, you get the Erasure Break course automatically as soon as you sign up. I'll put that all down in the show notes. I also have a free sing-along warm-up and one of my favorite mix voice belt exercises that will be in the show notes too. Happy singing everybody and see you in next week's episode.
