Tweaking Vocal Transitions in Singing | How to eliminate your break with Matt Edwards
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00:00 Welcome to the Big 5 Virtual Voice Summit
00:35 New Book Release: A Deep Dive into Vocal Literature
01:36 The Essence of Vocal Coordination: Enhancing Singing Techniques
08:24 Exploring Vocal Fold Dynamics: A Scientific Approach
20:03 Mastering Vocal Transitions: Techniques and Exercises
33:01 The Journey of Learning: Embracing the Process
38:26 Final Thoughts: Who Benefits from Intensive Training
Welcome to the Big 5 Virtual Voice Summit
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Philippe Hall: Hello and welcome to the Big 5 Virtual Voice Summit. My guest here in just a minute is going to be Matt Edwards. My name is Philip Hall and I'm excited to join Matt here today. How are you, Matt? Good. How are you doing? Doing great. Been a fun day so far. Great. I know it's an exciting day for you.
Matt Edwards' New Book Release
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Philippe Hall: Thanks Something special came out today.
You want to share it with us?
Matt Edwards: Yeah, today my book, my second edition of my book is finally released. I've been working on this for like a year and a half. And so, uh, I did the first edition. So you want to sing rock and roll. It was the bestseller in the, so you want to sing series. They asked me to rewrite it and I decided to overachieve and completely rewrite the whole thing.
They just asked for revisions, but you know how we are. You're, I have a feeling are very similar. And so it's a whole new book. I'm excited. It's out. You can get it, pick it up on Amazon, Barnes and Noble books, a million, even walmart. com has it listed. So, oh goodness. How you made
Philippe Hall: it to Walmart. Now that, that is groundbreaking for, for vocal literatures.
I think it's cool. It's getting a little bit more mainstream. No, congratulations. I have a deep appreciation for the time, the pondering, the thoughts, the energy that goes into, um, putting something like that together. So congratulations to you.
Matt Edwards: Thank you. Yeah, it's, it's been an exciting project.
The Importance of Vocal Coordination
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Philippe Hall: Well, and thank you for also being here part of the big five virtual voice summit and being a teacher at this summer's Vocal Fold and Airflow Air Pressure Management Coordination Training, where we're going to be talking about a lot of important coordinations and how they link up.
So, in your experience teaching, um, sometimes we get hyper focused on the magic formula, or which ingredients. And, uh, sometimes, There's a lack of ingredients. Wait, the big five. So how, how does working on a single or two coordinations and giving them some hyper focus, how is that going to help a singer?
Matt Edwards: Well, the cognitive science suggests that people can only focus on around four to five things at any given moment. And you can get your brain to do more than four or five things, But it's not necessarily in a learning mode and you're not in a place where skill acquisition is going to really take place.
Uh, so this is where, like we see, uh, it shows up in masterclasses a lot where you'll see a masterclass teacher do 10 things at once with a singer. And in that immediate moment, you might see a lot of things improve because you've lined up 10 new ideas. But the reality is the brain is kind of living in this panic mode.
And, uh, while you're living in that panic mode, you're not actually learning, you're just doing. And so when we really just focus in on what's happening at the vocal fold level, or what's happening in the respiratory system, we're allowing our brain to really dive deep into those two, three, four things, because one of the things is paying attention to the pitch that you're singing, right?
Or one of the other things can be the instructor that you're working with, right? So your brain is already doing that. So you can, if you're just thinking, just a duct, my vocal folds and let my air release. That's enough. And it can seem a little bit boring if you're used to trying to juggle 10 things at once, but in that slower pace, you're actually really living in what's called the cognitive stage of learning where your body can process the information that's being given.
And the research suggests is that people actually get better outcomes. When they slow down and you know, that's hard for a lot of singers. We're a lot of us have a little ADHD, me included, and we want to, uh, you know, just do it all at once and it feels good to do it all at once. Your brain is on fire as you do it all at once, but even though it's on fire.
It's not actually learning. It's not building the neurological connections that you need to repeat the task over and over again without having to think. And so that's why it's so important to do what you're talking about here is, you know, really zoning in on a couple parts of the instrument at a time.
Philippe Hall: Yeah, it's quite a, it is a luxury we don't afford ourselves very often. And, uh, I did a great, yeah, had a wonderful experience at a summer intensive last year online. People were, thought it was amazing, but I had the feeling that they, it actually overwhelmed them with how amazing it was. And they, they got a lot of out of, out of it, but they wanted to revisit and revisit and revisit as you should.
You know, learning doesn't happen all at once. It's a repetitive event. And so with my community and the singers I worked with, um, been working with over the last year, uh, we talked and said, well, what kind of a training event is going to be meaningful, not just. Um, click baity or popular, but it's actually going to benefit and, and universal, and it's difficult to come up with anything in singing that's universal.
But I do believe that the five coordinations of singing are quite universal and I'm using them if I'm singing death metal, or if I'm singing opera, it's just in a different amount. But my ability to execute that formula depends on my agility and control over those things. And I can still improve and I still want to improve.
It. That's kind of the blessing and curse of singing is you just get better and you never stop getting better if you keep working. And that sounds in a way arrogant, but it's also frustrating because when you start out singing, you think I'm going to have this done in three years, it's never done and it's nice, but it's not done.
Matt Edwards: No, and you know, it's funny because it's that that is actually the angle, the idea of the coordinations that I talked about in my book, not at the level we're talking about here today, or that you're gonna be talking about in the summit. But my point of view was. From working with so many singers since I wrote the first edition is what people really need to do is coordinate their range of motion, which is a lot of, it's just a different terminology to what you've been talking about today with all of your guests and what we're talking about this summer.
But if you explore the full range of motion of your instrument, You coordinate all of these different vocal qualities. So then as you absorb influences by listening to, you know, artists who are like you, artists who are different from you, you start to absorb influences. And when you want to try to mimic a little bit of what you heard or bring a little bit of a certain vocal quality into your own work, you actually have the coordination to do it.
And so it really, I agree with you. It's about these big five coordinations of the instrument to help singers unlock their voice, no matter what style it is that they sing.
Philippe Hall: I love that and I I'm so on board. This is just so fun. I I joke with my with people I say Matt's like my brother from another mother that I discovered down the road.
It's just like it's just so much resonance here Um, i'm using the word dynamic. I I kind of coined this phrase for singers dynamic movement potential just based on sports science and how this sport evolution of how How people that need to have a high output consistently, how do they activate their muscles and keep themselves healthy?
Healthy. Well, the sports science we know is invested billions of dollars into the research to get peak performance out of their athletes. So if, uh, our vocal coordinations are all controlled by movement, muscles work the same way. They're there's similarities there. So we're just saying the range of motion, this is the dynamic movement potential.
For me. So I'm totally on board with this. And I, and I did, um, ask you based on, on some things you're going to be talking about during, during the intensive program. To talk a little bit about how developing this range of motion, these dynamic movement, this, this isolated coordination, how does that apply to helping us do great transitions?
Whether that's transitioning, you know, from one modal to the next, from head voice, chest voice, belt to mix, and, Or just getting through the passagio, which most singers is like, I just want to get through the passagio without my voice cracking.
Matt Edwards: Yeah.
Understanding Vocal Fold Mechanics
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Matt Edwards: So one of the things I think it's important for everybody to keep in mind is that there are five intrinsic laryngeal muscles.
Okay, so your larynx, here's a model of the larynx. I don't know if we've had a model on the show today yet. But you know, the larynx is here. Um, you have the hyoid bone at the top, the thyroid cartilage, then the cricoid cartilage. And this thyroid cartilage tilts. on top of this cricoid cartilage and that tilting elongates the vocal folds to help raise the pitch.
And that's done by this muscle down here in the front called the cricothyroid muscle. So this cricothyroid muscle is doing all of that tilting. Then on the inside of your larynx, you have another muscle that's resisting that tilt. And it's the muscle that runs through the vocal fold itself. It's called the thyroarytenoid muscle.
And so this coordination is kind of like that game you used to play when you were kids, where you would grab a friend's hands and then you would both try to lean back. And then you would see if one person could lean further back and you come up. And if you could smooth that out and you could both rock back and forth, you're trying to coordinate who's in the lead.
And who's letting go, and then who's taking over the lead and who's letting go. So that cricothyroid muscle and that thyroarytenoid muscle are always doing that dance of who takes the lead. And so when we're talking about working through different register transitions, you have those two muscles doing this complicated coordination, but they're not alone.
There's three other muscles that you're also having to deal with. There's a set of muscles here in the back. You can kind of see it right here. It's called posterior, or these are the inner arytenoids and the inner arytenoid muscles help pull those vocal folds together a little bit. And there's a muscle we can't really see here on the side on this model, but it's called the lateral cricoarytenoid muscle.
It also pulls the vocal folds together. Then there's this muscle down here in the back. That's called the posterior cricoarytenoid muscle. And it's what helps pull the vocal folds apart. Now, why would you pull them together or apart? Well, if we pull them together more firmly, that means the air pressure is going to make them snap out and back quicker.
And when they do that, you're going to get a louder sound. And if we have less of that closure pressure, as air blows through them, they may not snap back as hardly. We're going to have lighter closure, and that means we're going to end up with a softer vocal quality. Right? So not only are you trying to do this balancing act of who is taking the lead between that thyroarytenoid muscle and that cricothyroid muscle, you're also regulating how hard we're clapping those things together.
And so that's why you want to kind of slow down when you're working at this vocal fold level, and really focus on those, you know, two to three, four things at any given moment. So you can really train those muscles of how to work together. Because if they're not all coordinated on their own, you're going to be clunky.
You're going to go through that passaggio and you're not going to get what you want, right? It's going to work on you. It's going to, I like
Philippe Hall: the word clunky because you know, everybody that has ever started to sing and learn how to sing knows what it's like to be clunky. You know, it's, it's just, it's just that dexterity.
And, uh, if me, if I have to learn sign language and I can see my hand and I can do a lot with my hand. But I'm going to be clunky for quite a long time until I develop that movement. So I'm with you. I still think I'm, I'm really excited about, um, I don't know, this event I'm organizing that I hired all the teachers and I'm so happy you're part of it, but I'm excited to learn from everybody.
And I actually decided to develop some things myself even further that I haven't paid attention to for a while. I mean, when was the last time I paid attention to working, just like you said, that dance between the Ct and ta muscle. I mean, essentially I'm doing it for hours every day. But when have I given it a hyper focus in a specific range of my voice to really Smooth those guys out.
It's like stretching. I used to be the song and dance man I can't I could do the splits. I could do all kinds of stuff. I Hurston touch my toes now I can get it back, but i'm a little out of form, you know, so now i'm like, oh this is gonna be so great I'm going to challenge myself To work on a song. I think it's very difficult, um, and work alongside of everybody.
So I'm excited. I think, I think singers, I think teachers could be very excited about this. And maybe we just talked about that. If you're teaching other. Singers at the moment. You're a coach. How does it help you to develop these coordinations further?
Matt Edwards: Well, sadly, the thing is in academia is so much of our academic approach to teaching other student, other grad students, usually how to teach voice.
It's broken. There's some incredible universities out there that are doing really amazing stuff. stuff. I mean, I'm looking at like University of Colorado, Boulder, just hire Nick Perna, who's amazing. Uh, you know, Ian Howell freelances and does lots of incredible work with singers and helps teachers all over the country.
Uh, one of our grads is the Barbara Caprilli DeMaio is down at University of Central Oklahoma. She's doing amazing work. There's amazing work at Westminster Choir College, you know, Columbia University. There's lots of places that are really good. Right. I know I'm leaving out friends and names here, but I don't want to have to go down the whole list.
But so you have these people who are leading the way who are changing things, but they're like in the dozens of schools while there's still about 400 other schools left. And it's not some, you know, bad plot, or people are out to do something, uh, harmful. They just, we didn't have the voice science resources.
Even 15, 20 years ago that we have today. So when it ended up happening for a lot of us who went through master's degrees, like myself is you had one vocal pedagogy, uh, uh, class the teacher who I had, who was amazing, was still trying to teach us about voice science when not everybody on the rest of the faculty taught that way.
And so you're learning one thing in your class, but you may be learning something else different in your voice lessons, which left you as the teacher having to form your own tools together, which we all always are going to do, but you had to form them together from scratch to just come up with your most basic introductory level of what to do with students.
And we have all of these great continuing education programs now available. And what all of them do is they give teachers some formulas. They give teachers somewhere to start. So if you are one of those people who went through that traditional pathway where you just had that one class, the teacher was a little afraid to tell you too much of exactly what to do because they didn't want to step on toes.
Totally understandable. But you're sitting here now trying to teach others and going, but I just want somewhere to start. Really diving in to understanding these coordinations is going to give you that place to start. It's going to really help you have some exercises that target what is happening at the vocal fold level and the coordination of the respiratory system with the phonatory system.
And when you understand that, you will then have this basic formula that you can add things from all of your own personal experiences. Right? So you can say, hey, I did learn this thing from this teacher that I liked a lot that may not align with this exact science, but I think it does this thing here when we're coordinating, and I'm going to use that and see if I get the results I'm looking for.
But the good news is, is that when you understand the coordinations, and that exercise fails you, you can step back and go, Oh, why is that not working? And you have a hunch. I have a feeling this muscle group is not actually doing what I need it to do. So you can then switch pathways in. Which is a lot different than the traditional method, which where I was told by more than one teacher, Well, I just don't know why you don't get it.
We'll have to do it another time. I just don't know what to tell you.
Philippe Hall: Oh, you too? You too?
Oh, man,
I was told a couple of times
Matt Edwards: or even, yeah, or even better. Just they end the lesson early and throw you out. I've had that happen too. And you're sitting there going, but it's not my fault. I can't sing through my unicorn horn because I don't own a unicorn.
And as you're asking me to spin it through the tip of the horn, I can't. And you're not giving me any valuable information to change that. Yeah. But when you know the coordinations, you can say, okay, maybe this person doesn't feel the unicorn horn because they don't have enough adduction at the vocal fold level to create the harmonics that excite the bone structure and the little sensors that we have in our skin that help us feel vibrations.
Philippe Hall: I'm just you're just cracking me up with the you're cracking me up with the unicorn horn, man. It's just it's just getting nervous probably because i've been i've been uh been going straight for five hours, but um Yeah, but it's kind of like what it feels like when the coordinations come together. It's like it's magic.
It's like And the singer you're like, oh my gosh I learned how to sing and then it's gone the next moment and if you don't understand how that came together You How can you reconstruct that as a singer and how can you help other singers reconstruct that
Matt Edwards: and it's not to say look I mean if I I do have singers that I work with that do feel something very intense up here And I never tell them not to feel that I don't tell them that's not a real thing I don't tell them they can't do that if it's working for them great But when you dive in and understand the big coordinations You have some ideas of what to do when it stops working.
Because so many times our bodies go through changes, either because of an illness, because of vocal fatigue, uh, you know, acid reflux or just aging. Unfortunately, we all age. And as we age, your voice goes through little ups and downs where things that used to work no longer work. coordinations helps you get through those little speed bumps when they show up in the road.
Philippe Hall: Yeah. It helps me a lot in, um, analyzing when I'm working with. Um, with clients as well that I will, you know, if I know my, the, the person I'm working with really well, you get, you get to know their voice, they get to know you, you can be a little bit more hyper focused, but, but also it's just great to remind them from time to time.
I'm like, okay. Big five checklist. Let's go through. This isn't working for you. Check your airflow, air pressure, and if then, did anything change? Check your vocal fold adduction, thickness, thinness, you know, did anything change? Check your pharynx, your pharyngeal tuning area, did anything change? And usually as they just go through that cycle, they find one or two that it made a big change when they optimize that.
It's just a wonderful checklist, but just brings me back to the whole purpose of, of this event we're gonna be doing. If they have not yet developed the skill level, they can't execute. And I am very sympathetic, but I say, look, the you, you, uh, your, your, your pharynx in your tongue, they're just moving together.
They're, they need to work a little bit more independently, and that's coordination and separation. And, uh, and that's why I think it's going to be super valuable. Um, yeah, I sidetracked you a little bit, but thank you for sharing that. Do you have in your experience with working with some singers? I think you you've have in mind, maybe some, some exercises or some tricks on how to start developing the coordination there at the vocal fold level or one coordination.
Yeah. So you've been thinking about the CTTA, the, the, the handoff coordination, or?
Matt Edwards: Yeah.
Exercises for Vocal Coordination
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Matt Edwards: So I'll start with the easiest hard exercise that you're probably ever going to find. I love that. And this is for a lot of singers. And if it's not hard for you, that's awesome, because that means your instrument's really coordinated at the vocal level.
But the easiest hard exercise is to transition from a breathy voice to a full voice, and to breath, be able to transition from a full voice back to a breathy voice. This seems like it should be real easy, but it requires all five of your laryngeal muscles to do something. It requires that TA and that CT to hang in that balance zone where everybody knows who's taking the lead.
And then it requires those three other muscles that I mentioned to determine how firmly pressed together the vocal folds are, and how lightly pressed they are. And to move between those two with the gracefulness of a dancer. You watch a dancer gracefully move, not me as a dancer, maybe you as a dancer, but you watch something gracefully dance across the stage.
Those muscles are in perfect coordination. You want to get your vocal folds to the point where they have that perfect coordination. So we'll see how mine is today. It's allergy season here in Virginia. I'm going to keep it low today, but we're going to start down here on this low C for me. This is a good spot to start for me.
Usually I'm going to just going to sing breathy. And then I'm going to, as I continue to sing breathy, start to get that voice to be more full. So
Then I want to do the opposite. I want to take it from being really, uh, full voiced and take it back to breathing. So, ah, so I'm
going until my vocal folds are barely touching. Then you're going to work that exercise up and down throughout your range. Now, as you get towards your passing points or the passaggio points, that's where your voice is really trying to transition between vocal qualities. It's going to get quite difficult and you may never really master a perfectly smooth transition because in that part of your voice, the smooth transition is flipping.
For a lot of people, right? So we're really trying to learn how to go from maybe a chest dominant sound to a head dominant sound and back. And you've got to work that coordination a lot and not every style of singing requires that. If I'm working with the rock singer, I don't need them to get that transition smooth because they're never going to do that for you.
Fine of a coordination up there. So I usually work within the coordination that's necessary for their genre. But if I'm working with like a musical theater performer or an opera singer who wants to be able to do those really expressive sustained notes, where they're able to go back and fade to nothing.
This is an exercise that they really need. Yeah. It's choral singing. And, uh, indie folk singers, jazz singers, there's plenty of people that would want that ability. And so we train that ability by, you know, starting full, fading off to nothingness and going back and forth. And, uh, you know, at the same time, you're working glides and other things to explore your full range.
And when you get the full range of vocal, uh, of your, you know, head voice and chest voice, then you start using that coordination that you develop through the, uh, crescendo decrescendo exercise to start finding your mix.
Philippe Hall: I love that it is an exercise. And I love that you said that the, the easiest heart exercise is the hardest, hardest, easy exercise.
It is. So the thing is that exercises In my opinion, don't have to be extremely challenging to be extremely effective, and at the same time, um, deceptively challenging. Deceptively challenging. So, that was a really great demonstration, and One thing I find is that with the singers, you know got the big five i'm playing weatherman here Everything's like a mirror image for me, but If we're gonna work, let's say that It's so easy for the other five coordinations to Want to help and if we let them help like we're going Well, um, what am I doing there i'm engaging different things at different moments And we want to be able to use all five of these.
I'll try one really hard like on a G.
That's about as loud as I can get without involving another coordination. That's just trying to isolate, not do more. So then you start adding other things to, to transition. Well, now we got to know where we're going, where are we going? If I'm, ah, that's the sound. Right, that's my pharynx, that's the whole vocal tract set up.
So, I think it's really valuable if we do a bigger one.
Then it's a different sound, but I'm trying to stabilize those things and work with that one coordination of the vocal fold coordination. Of course, we've got air pressure going on, but if I'm also changing my resonance strategy at the same time, I'm never really going to find the coordination control of those elements.
And I think that's super, super important. Excellent. And it can be done, and it doesn't have to be done at a high pitch range, because once you figure it out, you'll know how to apply it in different things. But then, yeah, like you said, it can get, it can get chunky, a little clunky, but I think that's something I'm pointing out, because it seems to happen to a lot of singers.
They'll go, uh, one singer, just the other day, he's like, Philippe, I found these three things. It's this guy from Poland. I love him. He's awesome. Very doctor, very hyper intelligent. He's like, I can do this. Oh, oh, but then it gets stuck. And he said, I can do this. And then it gets stuck. He said, and then I found this one and then it gets stuck.
I'm like, good, that's great. Those are three different strategies, but they have some overlap. And instead of overlapping and working together, yeah, they hit a limit. They don't work anymore. At that point, you've got to start combining them. But then we get right back to the essence of this range of motion.
If you don't have this subtle control over it, it's really difficult to make a smooth transition.
Matt Edwards: Yeah, and like what I would do to say like, uh, you know, from my point of view, and we all look at this like slightly differently, but that example student that you're talking about sounds like that they're getting good coordination of the CT and the TA muscles working really good together to regulate pitch control, but when they need to make a transition, They don't have the coordination of those other three muscles to make the slight lightening or the slight thickening or the slight increasing the closure or decreasing the closure that they need to as they go through that pitch range.
So that to me is like one of those instances where you've done great work at coordinating. Two of the five muscles, but if we can help you coordinate the other three muscles and then integrate all five of them together, we should start to see some changes.
Philippe Hall: Oh yeah.
Advanced Techniques and Practical Tips
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Philippe Hall: It's, it's going to be so exciting to find out and see how, how much progress people make in the, in this, uh, during this intensive training, um, try to maintain a medium volume from breathy to pressy.
So Kevin's just, uh, has some great comments on there. Yeah, any tips? How do you find it? Get a medium volume to go from brassy to pressy. I'm not 100 percent sure what you mean, Kevin, and unfortunately can't really demonstrate, but I think it's that medium zone tends to be the hardest. That's tends to be that, that handoff zone where if you don't have quite enough, it goes, ah, and if you have too much, it just locks up on you.
Matt Edwards: Yeah. Well, I think so too. Like, you know, part of what it might be, what he's playing with too, is that there's, look, as much as we love to discuss how to break these things apart, individual, into individual components, they all do interact with each other is the reality that there is it's an interactive system.
But again, the brain can only play. process about four to five things at any given time. So if we sit there and get into these deep conversations about how resonance impacts vocal fold vibration, which is true, it's dust tends to, in my experience, get beginnings in intermediate singers locked in their heads.
I think that once somebody wants to teach voice, Really diving more into that is helpful because then you realize, Oh, this vowel quality that I'm trying to use is the reason I can't get the vocal folds to do what I want to do. But I feel like us on the coaching side are helping singers work through that without getting them too much in their head.
Uh, one of the reasons I like this coordination approach. That you and I talk a lot about is because learning takes three stages. Learning takes the stage of being in what's called the cognitive stage, which is you don't really know what this thing is that you're trying to do. And you're just figuring it out.
We advanced to the motor learning stage where your body is building the new neurological connections, but you still need a little bit of help. And after you lived in that stage long enough, you move to the mo, uh, to the automatic stage and an automaticity, you have the neurological connection so you can just do the thing.
You can just walk. Most people watching this today can probably just walk, or if you're in a wheelchair you can just get your arms moving, you don't have to think about it that much, right? Or if you're using crutches, you just know how to move them. That's because you're in the automatic stage for mobility.
You are able to move whatever it is that you need to move in order to make yourself take a, you know, move around a space. So what we need to do is get your voice to the point where you're able to just do these coordinations so that you can then focus in on the storytelling or living in a mood or a groove and just letting the music happen.
And that's the ultimate goal. And so, like, uh, you know, as the commenter Kevin was saying, uh, you know, he may be working on there and finding that it's a struggle. That's fine, because that just is an indication you're in that motor learning stage that you're figuring these things out. And what I would say is play with your resonance as well.
So if you're on that pitch and you want to get it quieter, keep a closed resonance, more of like what we would call a reverse megaphone, where the front is narrow while the back remains open. And then as you sustain and try to increase the volume, open your resonance up a little bit more. So you get a brighter resonating vowel quality, which might make it appear louder because our ears are more sensitive to high frequencies.
So then we're getting.
Where we can start to bring some dynamic variation into that lighter vocal quality by playing with the resonance. But to me, that's starting to get into an advanced coordination exercise. So if you're a beginning singer, you're probably not going to be able to jump right into that. But if you're a more Here, that may be the kind of work where you want to start common.
I think you saw like, uh, I know some methods call this recipes or combining coordinations and you know, that's kind of to me getting into that.
Philippe Hall: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You're moving on from the basic air flow, air pressure and vocal fold coordination, and now you're involving the other three coordinations, the five big five coordinations, but they're not going to, they'll, they'll falsely compensate.
If there's not stability and a high enough level of stability in the one, then experimenting with the others, like I said, just gets you off track. Then you find something, but you don't know what you found. That's, that seems to be the pattern that you, uh, you adjusted some things, but what did you adjust?
Do you know how much you adjusted each of those five? Most singers don't, like you said, cause they're not at that, that skill level yet. So I think I'm, I'm totally. On board with you on that. Um, yeah, it's going to be so fascinating. I just want to talk to you also about How how we're setting this up? So you've mentioned that several times I don't know if everybody's picked up on it, but it's like ringing the bell for me.
Uh, Very clearly. I have a fun sound effect there. So So basically I am working on Something i'll call professional practice technique And it is based on all the sciences of learnings and how much you can focus and repetition and when to, it's all about how to practice basically. But you keep touching on this.
That's why I wanted to ring the bell and say, yeah, in this intensive, we're going to have these coordination exercises to train your, your skill level. and agility level and control over these coordinations, but we're going to do it in this manner. So it's got to be, it's got to be short enough that you don't lose concentration.
It's got to be specific enough and you have to have enough background information so you know What you're going for and what to watch out for and that so the whole program is going to be built up on Doing some specific exercises um on a regular basis and In in this the research i've done you've got to do it for two to three weeks for it to start coming into that Habitual action that's like at a minimum and then we start adding some things in there So it's really It's, you just keep dinging those bells, um, and I just wanted to mention that.
So if, if somebody's curious about, well, how is this program going to be set up? Is it just going to be Matt and I having a good old time talking for 35 hours now? It's not going to be that. You're going to have some more detailed instruction. You're going to have some specific exercises and, and, and really some guidance on how to apply them in a program that's going to help you achieve that.
It's some very, uh, fast growth.
Matt Edwards: Yeah. And like that's what in my sessions, my plan is to talk about really how to deal with this transition through a really structured exercise program called weaving through the middle. And so weaving through the middle is all about first getting the coordinations between the five intrinsic laryngeal musculatures, and then starting to walk through a variety of vowel qualities and exploring how we get into the transition from the top and into the transition from the middle.
So you discover all the possibilities and then when we get back together the next time we'll talk about how to develop strength and stamina with that. So you're right, there's going to be a lot of like logical progression more than just the today, the fun, fun discussion, which I always love. But you know, my goal is to make sure that everybody leaves with some action items that they can actually take back into the practice room.
And to start exploring and, you know, you mentioned two to three weeks. I think that I do see a lot of my clients see those changes in two to three weeks. But I also think it's reasonable. The research suggests six to eight weeks for the cognitive stage of learning. Yeah. And I just bring that up not to contradict, but to just kind of remind people that if you're sitting there working at it.
And four weeks later, you're going, why can't I do this yet? That just makes normal that you're just in the normal progression of things. Six to eight weeks later, when you're finally going, I kind of get this great. You're normal. You kind of get this after six to eight weeks of working on it. The good news is, is as the dominoes start to fall, it starts to accelerate in pace.
And so usually after that, you know, initial cognitive stage learning, it gets more fun and require a little less concentration. because your brain is starting to figure it out and then we can really accelerate your progress. But yeah, I think being patient with yourself is so important when you're working through these big five coordinations.
Philippe Hall: Absolutely. It takes, it takes some time and looking back, it, it's, you look back and you'll say, Oh, that went really fast. But when you're starting out, it's like starting, you know, hike at the bottom of the mountain. You're going to be coming out to Southern Utah. And there's some beautiful hikes out here.
When you start that hike, it's like, woof, you've got a long way to go. But when you're back, it was like, that was great. It was, it went by so fast. So I'm on board with you. And I, when I work with new clients, I mean, it's just, it's a, it's just a requirement. If you want to do coaching with me, you have to commit for three months.
And that commitment is not because I want your money. It's because if you work with me for three months, I can help you develop better habits. And if you don't do yourself the favor to dedicate three months towards something, two to three months, You're not going to leave with any significant change. And, and I'm more invested in, in creating lasting change than, than quick fixes.
So since we're talking about it and then it's fun and I'll just throw that out there and we're going to have to wrap it up, but yeah, this, this, uh, practice technique program I'm involving, it's, it is that it's, we're going to do. Exercises for the focus. For three weeks and then you'll, then you shift them into a secondary focus and put another, other exercises in the main focus.
And then you keep stacking that. So you can start stacking that if you do it really method, method, method, method, method, methodically. Sometimes I
Matt Edwards: get stuck.
Philippe Hall: Yeah. And I get stuck between German and French and English sometimes, but yes, you, you get.
Conclusion and Event Details
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Philippe Hall: You just keep shifting them through because the brain can only focus on so many things you brought that up So if overload is not going to be helpful Hyperfocus for fast progress and development of your of your learning skills Matt, thank you so much for being here any last thoughts on Recommendation for for who this intensive training program is going to benefit
Matt Edwards: Well, I think that like any singer who really wants to try to learn more about how their voice actually works, I think is going to take a lot away from hearing all these different speakers.
You know, there's lots of different viewpoints. So you just got to remember that you may at some point in time, find that something's a little bit contradictory. Well, this person said this, and this person said that that's not actually contradictory. That's just people that have different clientele, giving you different variations of instrument information that Because what I do with one of my, you know, Broadway performers is going to be a lot different than what I do with one of my aspiring high school students.
And so if you heard me talking and working with only that high school student, you may think, well, those exercises, you know, don't work for me at all because I'm a Broadway pro. Or if you hear the Broadway pro exercises and you're a high school kid, you're like, well, that doesn't work for me. And so I think that's why an event like this is really great, where you get a bunch of different teachers who are all known for.
for their work with singers of different levels so that anybody who comes to the event can kind of go, Oh, that is what resonates with me because that's kind of at my level and that's where I need to do the work right now. And so I find that when singers just absorb lots of different points of view and lots of different information, they start to find what aligns with their identity as a singer, what they're trying to do with their artistry.
And then the technique starts to empower them to communicate their experience, their life story, the moods, grooves, the moments they want to live in through their music, because they have a diverse body of tools that empower them to do so.
Philippe Hall: Amen. Amen. I can't add anything to that. Listen up. That was gold right there.
If you, if you Want to know where to find this? It's just in the description. Just go into the description and click the link. We all have these coupons for this weekend, so you'll save. You get a nice big discount this weekend. So go ahead, get yourself signed up. Join Matt, me, and the rest of the team for this wonderful intensive training event.
Matt, thank you so much for being here. Look forward to working with you soon.
Matt Edwards: You're very welcome. Thanks for having me.
