Finding Compression in Singing with Kaya Herstad-Carney
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00:00 Welcome to the Big 5 Virtual Voice Summit
00:35 Introducing Kaya Herstad Carney: A Musical Journey from Liverpool to the World
01:25 The Art and Science of Vocal Training with Kaya
04:40 Unlocking Vocal Potential: Techniques and Personal Insights
06:33 Exploring Vocal Fold Compression in Singing
09:10 Creative and Corrective Vocal Techniques for Artists
18:22 Embracing Your Unique Vocal Identity
21:27 The Importance of Vocal Health and Technique
23:46 Intensive Training: A Deep Dive into Vocal Coordination
38:57 Closing Thoughts and Upcoming Sessions
Welcome to the Big 5 Virtual Voice Summit
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Philippe Hall: Hello and welcome to the Big 5 Virtual Voice Summit. We're going to speak, be speaking with Kaya Herstad Karney. This is our kickoff event to our summer intensive training event. The big five coordinations of singing. We'll be focusing on airflow and air pressure, balancing and vocal fold coordination.
We'll be talking and working with all of these important elements of the big five coordinations of singing. But let's jump on and welcome Kaya to the virtual summit.
Meet Kaya Herstad Karney
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Philippe Hall: Hello, Kaya. How are you today?
Kaya Herstand-Carney: Hello. I'm great. How are you?
Philippe Hall: Good to see you. Looks like it's, uh, you still have some daylight where you're at.
You're on the other side of the world.
Kaya Herstand-Carney: I am in Liverpool, England, and yeah, we've had a pretty decent day. A little, little cloudy, but not bad for a May day in Liverpool. Often rainy.
Philippe Hall: Yeah, Liverpool. I haven't been, so, um, if you're still living there, when I get to come, it's someplace, I definitely want to visit.
You've been there for a while now, haven't you?
Kaya's Journey and Passion for Music
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Kaya Herstand-Carney: Yeah, I lived there since 99 and came over to study and fell in love with the city and music scene. I spent five years down in London, but wanted to come back here and the music scene and creative scene is fantastic. And yeah, enjoy it.
Philippe Hall: Wonderful. And you've been, you've been helping, I mean, you've been a singer, songwriter, artist, done a lot of recording.
sung with bands, your own different bands and, and you're doing a lot of work helping other singers and artists at the moment, aren't you?
Kaya Herstand-Carney: Yes. Yeah. Um, I love doing artist development side of singing, teaching and helping people, both metaphorically and physically finding their voice. Um, so I'm, uh, yeah, I'm.
It's my favorite part of the vocal, uh, training of being able to kind of help people unlock those things that they can hear and maybe not have access to yet. And, uh, so yeah, I do that mainly in the higher education sector. I run a couple of degree programs in creative music production and songwriting and music performance and a new MA in songwriting.
Get to kind of help people on that part of their training. Uh, as the physical, um, I've called you in practice, uh, uh, voice geek, a self confessed harmony fanatic.
Philippe Hall: Yeah, well, you are definitely multi talented and we've known each other for a few years and, um, uh, I just think I'm a big fan. I, I know you're very hardworking individual and it's, and I feel like I'm pretty hardworking guy as well.
I'm so impressed by everything you're doing, uh, creating curriculums and education, you know, for different organizations and schools and universities and, and still coaching singers and singing, and you just, It's something that's very special. And I talked with Laura about this a little bit early. You just seem to have found your passion and it just keeps fueling your fire.
Kaya Herstand-Carney: Yeah, that's it. Well, likewise yourself as well. You, you know, doing, even putting this together and thank you for having me. And it's just great to see inspiring people around the world who really want to help singers. And it's coming from a place of, you know, you know, wanting to share and wanting to learn more so we can help other people.
And, you know, what a, what a privilege to do as a job, to be able to work in music and, and, you know, help people find their own path and, and be a small part of, uh, artists journeys right across the world, you know, and singing teacher, I teach a fair few singing teachers as well, like earlier on in their career to kind of.
Help them expand their toolkit and yeah, it's it's definitely a passion
Philippe Hall: It's pretty amazing. It does change lives.
The Joy and Impact of Singing
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Philippe Hall: That's why I mean I know I say it, but my, my mission with Singing Revealed is to improve the world one voice at a time, because I've seen that just helping an individual improve their singing changes their whole self confidence, their energy.
They're, they, their so called friends sometimes can change their income, mentoring teachers can give them, help them keep spreading the joy. There is a universal joy in singing. That's why we do it. That's why everybody that's here likes to sing and wants to know how to do it better. But there is a lot of frustration.
involved as well that we kind of, we need to learn to overcome and we're not going to delve into the mindset of that. But, um, just a quick note as kind of a lead into what, what I asked and, and talk to you about speaking about a client yesterday. Was it yesterday? Time moves so fast. Two days ago. And Very talented singer, just naturally.
She's really, really good.
Embracing Your Unique Voice
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Philippe Hall: And we were just talking about how important it is to embrace your personal sound, that your vocal tract has the specific, specific frequencies. You have your specific voice print, like your fingerprint, and that's what makes you unique. So, when you spend most of your time covering other artists, you're trying to sound like the other artists, because you love their voice, they inspire you.
And sometimes we take it a little bit too far and manipulate our voice out of where it really lives, and that makes singing often more difficult. So she really clicked a couple days ago, just going, having these, Aha! So my voice is good enough?
Yeah,
yeah, your voice is good enough. The only reason you love different singers And because of the uniqueness of their voices, because they embraced their sound, once you embrace your sound, you can still stylize, but part of getting to your natural resonance in this freedom and freeing up your voice is working on improving your skill level at the big five coordinations of singing.
So we, I asked you to talk about, we're going to be teaching this summer. about vocal fold coordination, skill level, agility, and articulation, and how to isolate that more. But I said, can you please talk to us about compression, adduction, thickness, thinness. It even came up in, in this today, in the virtual summit, a couple of times.
I just feel like singers, I've had singers come to me where they had a coach that was telling them more compression, more compression, more compression. They could not sing anymore. And they lost all their high notes. I have other singers coming to me that it's like they're not getting the compression that they need to get their high notes.
So there's both ends of the spectrum.
Understanding Vocal Fold Compression
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Philippe Hall: Can you, can you share your feelings on how the compression, vocal fold compression fits into the big five coordinations of singing and help singers and singing teachers understand a little bit more clearly, how do we, how do we clear up this confusion? That can be out there.
Kaya Herstand-Carney: Yes. Absolutely. And, and we, we've talked about this, uh, several times in the past. We are kind of entering the vocabulary jungle, right? Where there's so many names for different things and we cannot be a hundred percent sure unless we have, you know, MRI camera, we've got electrodes on the muscles. We have our spectrogram in a neutral room and camera up the nose, you know, we, we can only make.
educated guesses, but what we can, we can use our ears and, um, we can look and we can see, um, to find out whether we have a freedom of the sound and a balanced compression will have, um, almost all the volume control, you know? So if I'm going to talk a little bit about compression, I'll say like from my, um, My definition comes more from the kind of vocal habilitation side of, of things.
So you will talk from a weak, uh, medial vocal fold compression, medial meaning in between the vocal folds rather than, so you can have a weak and then into medium.
Speaker 4: So if I, if I'm on a weak medial vocal fold compression, it will sound very airy and it's not very balanced. It's
Kaya Herstand-Carney: really hard to actually get volume like that.
And if I'm medium, I, I kind of call that my, my yoga voice, maybe, you know, it's the very, very balance kind of coming into a stronger medium into, uh, into a strong, uh, media vocal fold compression into, uh, into excess where you get. a lot of, uh, compression, a lot of, um, and you know, you're coming from effort into tension and both, uh, um, specters of the weak and the excessive is really not where we should live for the majority of time.
Um, you know, screaming or whispering isn't going to kill you if you do it now and then, but if that's where you're living, you're probably going to get some vocal, get into some vocal trouble at some point. So like being aware of how you can use this. And another thing I'm super passionate about is that vocal technique you could either use creatively or correctively, just like with music production, where you have like, you can add reverb.
Correctively, to make it sound like you're in the same room, or you can add it creatively because you want to create the kind of mythical sound or something like that. Um, and I think with vocal fold compression, that's also really something that you can use really creatively. For instance, um, I was listening to Aretha Franklin, uh, the, uh, Chain of Fools.
Um, every chain has got a weak link. Well, I may be weak, yeah. And obviously, she can go weak, yeah. But she's using that vocal fold compression. Weak, yeah. And you get that. really cool, um, kind of interpretation.
Philippe Hall: Yeah.
Kaya Herstand-Carney: You were mentioning Adele earlier. She definitely uses that a lot. You know, you hitting the same note either in a, you know, what you might breath, the airy falsetto, whatever you want to find it as.
And then you have the more beltier sound. I also like to refer to. My muscle belt and my acoustic belt. One of them being kind of pulling the chest voice coordination up, uh, staying in our kind of first mode, um, with a more squared off full mass of the vocal fold vibrating, or the one where you allow those vocal fold to stretch out, go into a thinner fold.
Um, and then using the. vocal tract to create a chesty sound. So I speak a lot in analogies, which I think is my, the songwriter in me, where you have, um, you know, all apples are fruits, but not all fruits are apples and falsetto or like a classical head voice is, is one head voice, but you might be in those muscle coordination.
But if you manage to maintain that vocal fold compression, then you can sound like you're in chest, even if you're up in what would be head voice territory. And that's a much more sustainable place to live. Uh, especially if you're doing 25 shows a month or, you know, if you're on tour or if you're on, um, in the West End or Broadway, you, you can't pull that chest voice up for many days or whatever you want to call it.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.
Philippe Hall: Yeah, I'm with you. I'm with you. I mean, of course, I'm just having fun, you know, hearing what you're saying and things are lining up in my brain. But I also wanted to just communicate this is These are exactly the how to do this is is what we're going to be focusing on During the intensive training, right?
Because it does take Singers out there teachers out there going. Oh, wow. Okay. That sounds great. Oh, yeah, that makes sense But how do how do I do that? like how how do I how do I maintain menial compression in my head voice and and that right there some people just You Thought what is he talking about?
Techniques for Vocal Coordination
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Philippe Hall: right but But some people do know hi kai from ian and um, yeah This is what we're going to be training in the intensive program because obviously we can't pack uh, 35 hours into 45 minutes but if Is there something that helped you when you start out singing to help you click? Maybe that can help some other people.
Maybe I know you have a, you have a great big bag, you're like Santa Claus with your tools. It's like, Oh, I got a present for you. Here, have another one. But what's something that you, uh, like to use for yourself or singers find that what you're describing as? Not all the vocal folds, not the top, but just getting that, that quality of compression that keeps the clarity in your sound.
Kaya Herstand-Carney: Totally. So I think, um, there was a couple of things that was the biggest breakthrough for me, cause I mean, I've been singing all my life. There's literally tapes of me. I'm a January 11th is my birthday. And for the Christmas before I turned one, there's a tape of me singing all the Christmas songs. Like I didn't know the words, but I'm still singing.
Like, so it is, so singing is. You know, it's a combination of nature and nurture with, with a lot of things, but I kind of didn't know how to navigate my middle register even after becoming a professional because I hadn't had a vocal coach who knew how to access that. I went to kind of classical lessons when I was younger and did some musical theater stuff.
And then I wanted to sing folk and rock and, and soul and, and the, my vocal coach didn't know how to navigate that. So it was kind of just going, let's do it one more time. And with more emotion, you know, so, which by the way, solved a lot of problems, because if you do bring emotive into it, often the body has a tendency to kind of settle itself.
But I realized that I, my larynx had a tendency when I was singing in these, the contemporary styles, my larynx had a tendency to, to go up. Um, Every time there was a high note, but there are no high notes or low notes. There's only fast vibrations and slow vibrations, right? And I'm going to say that again, louder for the people at the back.
So there are no high notes or low notes. We just hear them as high pitches and low pitches. What actually happened is just vibrations of the vocal folds. And when, when you're vibrating, At this A440, your vocal folds are vibrating at 440 times per second. It's super fast. Octave below, you've got 220, 110.
I've got a small keyboard here, so I can't go 55. Every octave is a doubling or a halving of frequencies, not higher or lower. So for me to kind of realize that I wasn't just going higher, and then what actually happened is that I'm, I'm, I'm making a tighter space and I'm making a smaller, you know, a bigger space boosts.
a different kind of frequencies and then I was like oh okay wow so if I manage to kind of focus on just moving through this without reaching for them then I can maintain a lot of that sound and that was you know what you might refer to as a mix or um and I I kind of discover that and I managed to lean in more into it through these new exercises and like really using vowels that helped because nothing's, it's not linear, right?
It's not like you just move your vocal folds and all of a sudden everything's perfect because you have to adjust it also depending on what word you're singing and stuff like that as well. So yeah, I think that, uh, the combination of understanding that there are no high notes. And also recognizing when, uh, these things move.
It's kind of like when you learn dance in the beginning, the isolations are really difficult and you kind of want to move everything.
If you isolate the length position, you know, how you use your pharynx, your tongue, your jaw, your lips, your soft palate, and you can kind of make these tiny little adjustments and you have an instant change, right?
Whilst other things is more like, you know, I can teach you how to do a setup, but you won't automatically get a six pack, unfortunately. So that is through doing it again and again and again. And eventually those muscles kind of just click in there. Does that make sense?
Philippe Hall: Oh yeah, it does. I mean, we've all been, you know, we all grew up and became singers and professional singers and vocal coaches.
At least most of the people that are speaking today. We've been through that phase. We can totally relate to what you're going through. Absolutely, 100 percent relate to what you feel now. That's what's really beneficial. So yeah, I, I feel like a lot of people told me, do these exercises, do this. I didn't get a lot of why or how, or when you're doing it, watch out for this because that will lead to this down the road.
You know, I was just, you know, Back in the day, which is like you just practice and you'll get better. Well, it did get better, but there was some things that also created obstacles for me to overcome later on. So what you're saying is absolutely correct. Um, it's not going to happen overnight, but there's a lot of value in, in getting the same exercise unpacked for you.
On and personalizing it because this is what you need. This is what you want to achieve. This is how you get there Now it's going to take some time but don't Don't go in that pitfall and watch out for the lion around the corner and you know Don't stub your toe on that rock just little little things like there can help you get there a lot faster You still have to put in the time.
Kaya Herstand-Carney: Totally. And, and it's always a journey. And, and I think the most exciting thing is as, as an artist, um, you know, rather than just thinking of it, you know, everybody can be better at singing. Just like with dance. Yeah. Everybody can learn the moves. Some people might look differently. And you were mentioning that thing of falling in love with your own voice.
Um, I see, I, I'm, I'm in, analogy of world again, but like a violin and a cello can play the same tune, but they won't sound the same, but it can be just as beautiful. It's just different. And if you can kind of embrace the differences that you have and you know, the size and shape of your vocal tract and the way you've been brought up and your accent and everything that affects you is going to influence your sound as is the music you listen to.
And, you know, there's things you can't hear until It's been pointed out both in your own voice. Um, and I think that's why it's so useful to work with, with a coach that kind of listens to you and works with you in a student centered way where you kind of can explore safely to create the sound that you want, because everybody doesn't like the same thing.
Like I've been watching Taylor Swift's coming to Liverpool soon and it's really It's interesting to see the polarized opinions about this, you know, international superstar and some people are like, Oh my God, I don't understand what's going on. And, you know, and then other people like, Oh, I'm going to tent outside Anfield, you know, it's, you're never gonna have one voice for everybody.
That is like, that's the perfect voice because it's so much preference. And, and. You know, if you don't, if somebody doesn't like your voice, oh well, well, if you're on stage and you're liking it, it's nothing to do with you, that's, they can move on.
Philippe Hall: Yeah, well, yeah, it's totally true. You don't need to be mainstream to, to, um, communicate your message.
And I guarantee anybody that is authentic and true to themselves. We'll find their followers. You will find your tribe. People will appreciate what you do because at the very least that they will appreciate your authenticity. You, your courage just to be you. And I'm going to put this out there. I really believe it's true.
I like to say, I have never heard an ugly human voice. I've heard a lot of beautiful voices struggling to get free. But when they do get free, there's something innately beautiful to our ears about the human voice. Just beautiful. A lot of times there's filters in the way from it being free, but that doesn't mean there's, I've never heard, still to this day, get a voice free.
I think it's gorgeous. I've never heard an ugly voice. So embrace your resonance. Embrace your true, uh, authentic. Identity. It's who you are. And when you do, your singing will, will, um, accelerate. Now we've got off topic on that, but we got, uh, um, want to jump back to our compression topic here. I did. I misunderstand that whispering, singing too low in volume.
Very often it's not good for one's voice
Kaya Herstand-Carney: So I think it's kind of um, if you've heard of the 80 20 rule of like 80 staying in a healthy zone and then 20 you can kind of afford a little bit of Naughtiness, you know the more you exercise the right Ending up unhealthy It's kind of you're whispering and you're shouting will be in the The outer ends but if you live mainly in in the more balanced place then it's more the forced whisper that um can get in trouble and it's not always um you know that kind of if you're trying to whisper through um it can yeah it's not it's not where you should be living most of the time
and
Um, one thing actually, and there's a really hot topic at the moment because of the, I guess it started with Lana Del Rey and Billie Eilish and all these kind of more airy vocals.
Um, if you listen to them live, they generally don't stay in that coordination as they do in the recording because it is so hard. tiring. Uh, and they also use a lot of production techniques like oral exciters and like essentially frequencies added. So it sounds more whispery than what they're actually producing.
And that's a big one. We get a lot of students, I'm sure you do as well, you know, even professional clients who come in and go, Oh, I'm, I'm going to learn this song and I want to sound like that. And, and they haven't actually realized that there are six Kelly Clarkson on because of you, you know, six times, you know, Clarkson couldn't even do that song on tour.
It was on the album. Um, you know, and, and, and vocals are athletes in that way. And, um, I think that's why having a good routine and having a kind of good, whether you want to, I don't call it, I call it more like balancing the voice rather than warm up as such. It's, it's more kind of finding that balance between the vocal fold compression and the airflow that you were talking about earlier, you know.
So you've got vibrator in a good balance and that balance, then you can increase and decrease airflow, but we're still in balance.
Philippe Hall: Yes, I'm totally with you.
The Importance of Breath Management
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Philippe Hall: I just want to point out this. This is the whole point. This is the whole point of, of the big five intensive training event. It's because it's really easy to say this.
It's not that easy to do it. And you can't do it if you don't develop the specific coordinations, like, where's that compression and where is it in the adduction, what, you need to train it, you need to train it, you need to develop that coordination, and when you do, and you balance that with, I've got control of flow and pressure balance, Now you can execute it and you can execute it in a healthy way in a sustainable way But until you attain that skill level You're going to be struggling You'll have things connected like, uh, like I said, fingers on a hand, you know, it's like You can say live long and presh prosper.
Can you say peace rock on and live long and presh prosper back to back? Ah, it's so hard, you know, how fast can you do that? That's the same thing going on in here even smaller parts that we can't even see so it takes some development and that's why You know We, um, last summer we did a great intensive on belt and mix, and it was very popular, but I observed as a teacher, uh, people understanding, but not being able to execute.
Preparing for Intensive Training
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Philippe Hall: So that's why I want to have a focus this year on giving you the tools for these individual coordinations so you can execute. So if I want to get a Billy either sound and I'm going to say, and I'm singing like, and I'm singing. Um, lie me to the moon, how would I go from there to get a Billie Eilish sound?
Kaya Herstand-Carney: So, um, sometimes I will use, um, you know, natural instinctive things like, Oh, let's do a little sigh. Ah, fly, you know, and I might pick you, pick you into the, that kind of category. Um, so sometimes I'll go that kind of toolkit and, You know, it might be, it might be like the end of a cry and you might have a little bit of that kind of thing.
Um, but sometimes we use the combination of vowels and consonants to help put us in that category. If somebody is that kind of. a full compression and haven't explored the, the breathier sounds, I probably would do some SOVTs first, so your semi occluded vocal tract exercises, where it's a resistance exercise essentially, and most of you would have done some even if you haven't heard the term, things like Um, or even, um, or, um, humming, um, the straw, you know, I love a straw, but the thick one in water and things like that, and just like practice a little bit of maybe even like the method of what you're going from quietest to the loudest to the quietest again, um, play around with dynamics in that way.
So, um, I told you, I
Philippe Hall: told you it's like Santa Claus. Here she comes.
Let's go back because they're all they're all great but and you're basically in essence saying well I've got to try different things out with the individual singer to see what helps that person get there because Not every tool is gonna work the same for everybody and which which is true But let's let's say big five coordinations of singing I sing fly me to the moon And I come to you and I say I want to sing Billie Eilish.
What, what are we doing here with the big five, air flow, air pressure, vocal folds, pharynx, tongue. There's a specific design that makes that fly me to the moon. I know it cause I can do it. Right. So what, what's, what's going on there as far as air pressure and air flow rate. Is, is there a difference between that song and the Billie Eilish?
Kaya Herstand-Carney: For sure, there's more compression. There's more vocal fold mass, um, vibrating. Um, and, um, I mean, sometimes you might actually create that kind of Billie Eilish y sound with more airflow than what you'll have with, you were talking about this earlier, where the subglottal pressure, if your vocal folds are compressed, they need less air to vibrate than if, if, if, Is there a pot which is sometimes like a
Philippe Hall: Yeah, exactly singers always freak out when I say that.
What do you mean? What do you mean less air? But it's more pressure talk about it. Tell Blame why i'm sure there's a million people out there wondering how that works
Kaya Herstand-Carney: Well, one of the, like, if you imagine, so you see somebody running into the street and you're going to stop, um, you're going to yell at them because a truck is coming, you go, Hey!
I didn't have to go, you know, and take a big, massive breath in. It was a short and shallow because, and it's still loud. And people, that, that is one of the exercises I use if I'm, I'm in a group kind of situation where, You know, that is an instinctive way of creating, volume is a product. It's not a process, right?
You don't have to, if you're going to, I'm angry. I'm going to come over and be really loud at you. It's not how things work. You know, can I jump
Philippe Hall: on that? Because I talked about earlier that you need to relax to inhale. And so in that sort of a situation, people might be thinking they're not relaxing to inhale if, if something is coming to go, Hey, I wonder, I want to point out it's just fast.
You still, your abdominal wall is going to relax for a split second. That air is going to come in and bam, there's the sound. So it's gonna hold true for every time you breathe to get into efficient breathing. You have to relax. To, for the diaphragm to be able to go through its full range of motion. All right.
There's always little exceptions. Maybe I only need, like you said, a tablespoon of air, you know, then I'm not going to need that full diaphragmatic process. It could just be, Hey. Right? A little teaspoon of air. I
Kaya Herstand-Carney: think it's the same thing in that way as well. You know, we have so many different ways of breathing, because breathing literally keeps us alive.
So the body will adjust. You know, when you have somebody who's broken their ribs, and they can't do, it all expands in the body. It works out the way. But it's so funny when students come in, and they go like, Oh, I have a problem with my breathing. It's hardly ever they're breathing. It's the breath management, right?
Um, and sometimes by just doing the getting them to breathe fully out and getting that recoil breath and and understanding that The most important thing isn't filling up on air. It's we need a refill. We're not a petrol tank. Yeah, we need Well,
Philippe Hall: and also you can't I mean what good is it going to do to keep filling it up if it's already full It's not going to do any good at all Right.
Kaya Herstand-Carney: And we're getting rid of the carbon dioxide side of things. So, you know, our body knows how to do this. Sometimes the kind of breath management problems is really because we have overridden with habits that we picked up along the way or stress or all that kind of stuff.
Philippe Hall: It's a good tip for you singers out there.
If, if you're feeling tight, um, I feel like you're running out of air. It's not going to work every time, but sometimes you'll be surprised. You feel like you don't have enough air for a note. As soon as you feel that feeling, breathe out, find out how much comes out. You might be surprised how much toxic gas, not toxic gas, but there's not enough oxygen in there.
You just didn't have that reset and flow. And you picked, you said something about compensation and workarounds, which I, the body is designed. To, to absolutely, uh, work around anything that gets in its way. So, um, I'm squishing us closer together cause we're, so we can be friends here. Um, anyway, so interestingly enough, the big, the big five coordinations of singing are going to work the same way.
Let's look over your air floor coordination. What if you have, you're using subglottal pressure, but you have no flexible expansion? So, Now you're going to enter into the zone where something has to compensate because it's out of alignment. What if you're going, you have great pitch accuracy, but you're trans, you're really struggling with transitions?
It's because one of those things is out of alignment. You might have great pitch accuracy and you have a lot of high pressure, but perhaps That transition, you don't have, you haven't developed the control of letting go of some of the tension, letting go slowly of some of the compression to help you change into a different sound.
So, and the body finds a way and when the body's compensating for something that's not out of alignment, it's less efficient. It's not going to work, right? If I, if I walked around like this my whole life, you know, not because I have a deformity, I just got in the habit, um, half of my body is going to be much stronger than the other.
Kaya Herstand-Carney: Totally.
Philippe Hall: I
Kaya Herstand-Carney: had a student, you know Stone Cold, Demi Lovato song? Which I mean is a workout it is one of those songs that I called them You know when you have to train and but she actually nailed it Eventually, we spent kind of five months on it. Well When she started stone cold stone Cold it's like would you ever actually say it like like, you know, you can speak for quite a lot of time and, and, and it was also really reaching down.
So it was a star
where you don't get any resonance because, um, you know, it is very low for, um, well, she's kind of a mezzo soprano style voice. It is low. Um, and we were kind of working on the resonance with getting the vocal folds together using, you know, combination. Um, like one tool I use for that, if, if, so that's the opposite of getting into airy, we're getting a little bit more compression that getting that, um, or something like that, where you, where you get a little bit more vocal fold mass.
Um, and. That really opened up the higher end where you have to jump up two octaves because you then have a bit of compression. It's easier to maintain compression than to jump from an airier kind of style into full on belty style.
Philippe Hall: Yeah. It's easier to do this than to do.
Kaya Herstand-Carney: Yeah,
Philippe Hall: totally. And
Kaya Herstand-Carney: another one, um, that I actually wanted to mention, I've got my little bullet point.
The one thing, uh, that I think is a massive kind of, uh, breakthrough is understanding how you can have different onsets, or like the attack of the note can be different. Either, you know, either you can let the air flow start and then the vocal fold come together. So you almost get like a, uh, you're more likely to get into a more weaker vocal fold compression.
It doesn't mean there's anything wrong with weak here. It's you know,
it'll have that kind of more area sound whilst the opposite on the vocal fold comes together, uh, your glottal onset and then the middle ground. And again, most of the time. middle ground is the most healthy balanced doesn't mean we can't do the others. It just, it's good to find, you know, in, in, um, in rehabilitation, they work a lot with negative practice as well, where they're like, okay, show me that it's right.
And show me how you did it wrong. Just to kind of, you know, know the difference. And I'm, and I do use that with onsets, making sure the students understand that, you know, if they do start with a really aspirate onset or the airy onset, then they're more likely to struggle getting those vocal folds together, especially in the middle, So that is another one of those that, um, yeah, I'd really, uh, encourage everybody to practice and we will definitely work on in the summer as well.
Philippe Hall: Yeah. That is a great, great example because those are, those are the things we're covering here in the training. We're covering airflow coordination, vocal flow coordination. So airflow, airflow and air pressure balancing. And those, those, those two things have to come together. Um, to give you control over your onset.
I mean, the onset is just that. Vocal fold function and air function. We're not even getting into the pharynx or, or the tongue. Even though, again, there are five things on one hand. They're not going anywhere. Well, if we've got a couple of things stuck together, then we have a less efficient hand. So that's exactly what we're going to be working on developing more isolative control to X, to improve your skill level and dexterity.
If you will, your vocal agility and flexibility.
Final Thoughts and Farewell
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Philippe Hall: Um, dad, tell me, tell me what excites you about this intensive training coming up for. For singers in general, why, why should people do this? Why are you recommending to your clients that people do this?
Kaya Herstand-Carney: Well, I think sometimes having like a bit of a bootcamp or a little bit of a, well, we call it a challenge.
Me sets, it's kind of like creating smart goals. You, it's specific. You, you can, you start there and you end there and you, you go in and you find out the goal and you know, you know, that you've improved because sometimes when you're training, especially, you know. majority of my students are either, um, pros, semi pros or, or wanting to be pros.
And, um, you sometimes stagnate a bit in your training. You do what you've always done. And, and, um, just like when you're in the gym, if you just do the same exercises with the same weights for the entire, you're not going to improve. You're just going to stay the same. So
by. coming in and you know, whether it's conferences, whether it's challenges like this and actually getting some new tools in your toolbox, um, hopefully gets you excited.
And, and, and, you know, I can, I'm, I'm, I'm an eternal student myself. So like, I just love going to these kinds of things and, and picking up a few ideas and, um, and coming back into the studio with, with new. Spark basically and and finding out something about your voice, you know It's always something new to learn and and that's exciting.
Philippe Hall: That's exciting for me, too. And thanks for sharing that I'm looking forward to learning from you and learning from all the other teachers. It will be very exciting for me And I'm so excited to see people's progress. So please, you guys consider this, it's going to be a game changer for you. The better you improve and control your coordination of, of the big five.
It's just more easy to combine them to seeing anything you want. Everything is going to get more efficient and it's so nice to have a focus. Focus time where you're just focusing concentrating on developing a specific skill. Have a great day I'm going to take a short break and we'll be back on with matt edwards here in a few Minutes kaya.
Thank you so much for joining us and thank you for supporting This educational event for singers and teachers around the world. Have a lovely day
Kaya Herstand-Carney: You too. Thank you. Bye. Bye
