voice

Deadly Sin #6 - Failed to be in peak form on the day / prepare the instrument

Consider this nightmare scenario.  You've invested years in your skills and your reputation as a performer.  You have great material that you understand thoroughly, you have a high-impact, authentic story, you have a well-crafted and effective plan, and you've rehearsed your performance to professional standards.  You are ready for the stage!  Then, on the day of your debut, you forget to warm up your voice, and you BOMB.  Ouch!

Now you can't protect yourself from freak blizzards or meteors that strike your venue, but there's still an awful lot you can do to increase the odds that you'll be able to put your very best performance on stage when it counts.  Some are long-term, and some are short.  Read on.

Let's start with the long-term, continuous projects.  You need to keep in good general health, good physical fitness, and good vocal shape.  Nothing will get in the way of your expression more easily than a painful stiff back or a crick in your neck, or a lack of energy.  As a stage performer your body is your instrument, and you would never catch a bassoon player treating their instrument like most people treat their bodies!  A big part of training for the stage is keeping the body strong and flexible.  This means protecting time in your day for exercise and stretching, and eating well.  You should do this stuff anyway, and you know it!  But as a performer you really have no choice.  To fall apart physically is to kill your career, amateur or professional.

Once the overall fitness it taken care of, you will have some specifics that depend on your chosen craft.  If you're a singer, speaker or actor, your voice needs to stay in shape.  That means basically two things: don't get dehydrated, and use your voice properly every day.  It's just a matter of discipline.  If you play an instrument, you can relax a bit about your voice, but you will need to be concerned about the various useful muscles and callouses that adapt you to your chosen instrument.  Play every day.

That's the hard stuff.  Just accept that excelling at your chosen craft is going to dictate your lifestyle to some extent - that's a fact, so don't fight it.  Anyway you aren't getting anything useful out of watching TV or playing video games - ditch the useless time in your routine and use it to further your valuable performance goals instead.  You will be happy you did.

Now the short-term stuff.  Leading up to a particular performance, you'll need to focus on a few more things to give yourself the best possible chance of being 100% on the big day.

I know it's obvious but try not to get sick!  You should be healthy overall, but that doesn't mean you're immune to nasty bugs.  Avoid sick people like... well like the plague!  They shouldn't be out infecting people in the first place, but surely they will understand if you decline to shake their snotty, germy hand.  Your most vulnerable point is your eyes - far and away the most common route for infection is from your environment to your hands to your eyes.  So wash your hands regularly and break that chain.  Especially if you have a burning need to rub your eyes!

There's also a lot you can do to keep your immune system in fighting trim.  Eat well, like you should be anyway - lots of vegetables and fruits, a good multi-vitamin.  Get enough sleep.  If anyone complains about your suddenly taking on healthy habits, tell them you're got an important performance in a few days - that will probably keep their derision at bay.  (Geez you might even spread healthy habits to your family and friends!  A pleasant side-effect...)

Finally you need to be in the right frame of mind when your strong, flexible and healthy body hits the stage.  If you have issues about stage fright and anxiety, deal with them!  Develop a pre-stage routine that calms your mind and removes distractions, so you can focus your attention on your high-impact story while you run your plan.  I already wrote a pretty good series on preparing for the stage, which you might want to study.

After that, you will have done everything you can do.  If a meteor lands on your house it's still going to disrupt your performance, but at least it won't be your fault.

You’ve got a great piece to perform.  You’ve made a great plan.  You have rehearsed it to a professional standard.  Then you get on stage, and it just doesn’t come off because your voice wasn’t in good shape, or your body was full of tension, or you were in the wrong state of mind.  What a waste!  And the tragedy is that it would have been easy to prevent.  You need a reliable routine to get your voice, your body and your mind into the right space for a peak performance.  That's what we're going to learn in this mini-series on how to prepare for the stage.

Let's start with the voice.  A clear and responsive voice is critical not only to singers, but to actors and speakers as well.  The human perceptions are very adept at detecting "issues" in other people by the way that they sound.  The sound of your voice is a "deep measure" of your health, and it's easy to prove this to yourself.  Just a few seconds of listening to someone vocalize and you can tell whether they are sick, how much energy they have, and even a lot about their mood, psychology and physiology.  That may be why we developed the capacity to sing, as a species - singing lets us demonstrate our fitness to a lot of potential mates all at once.  (I'm thinking here of prehistoric rituals, not groupies... uh, let's move on.)

Cutting to the chase, a clear and responsive voice is a voice that is free of tension.  Tension in your voice degrades everything about it - your range, your quality, your vocal agility, your dynamic range, everthing.  So finding a tension-free way of using your voice is critical to your success as a performer.

If you notice that your breaths are noisy or forced, those breaths are introducing tension into your voice.  A silent, effortless breath will have the opposite effect, relaxing the voice and resetting it for another phrase of speech or music.  Often times as performers we try to make the breath as short as possible, fearing that it is interrupting the music or the speech.  That fear, together with the fear of not having enough breath for the next phrase, leads us to force the inhalation, and as a result we accumulate more and more tension in the voice as the performance goes on.  Quality degrades, and stamina becomes an issue.  Also this infuses the performance with a sense of panic (which probably isn’t appropriate for every scene.)  Don’t fear the breath – think of each one as a part of the phrase, not an interruption.  Take the necessary time to breathe well.

Now here’s the exercise that I learned from my multi-talented sister Donya, which is very simple and quick.  I am told that it comes from the popular Linklater method of vocal instruction.  I’ll confirm this for you when I read the Linklater book, “freeing the natural voice.”

Exercise to reconnect with your natural voice

In order to reconnect with your natural voice, you can follow these steps in your backstage routine:

1. Lie on the floor and make yourself relaxed and comfortable
2. Exhale completely, and then simply wait for your body to inhale, which it must do.  Do not inhale on purpose, but allow it to happen.  Do this three times to become comfortable with the ease of it.  All of your inhalations in this exercise should be as effortless as this.
3. Take a deep and effortless breath, and exhale without effort, but catch the breath at the lips with a light “ffff” sound.  Notice the effect of this secondary resistance.  Repeat three times.
4. Take a deep and effortless breath, and exhale this time through a “vvvv” sound.  Notice how the vibrations resonate in the spaces of your head, mouth, throat and chest.  Repeat three times.
5. Continuing the “vvvv” exercise, open up the “vvvv” into an “ah” vowel, and notice how the freedom of this tone gives it clarity.

You can use this exercise to “reset” and reconnect with your natural voice at any time.  Many singers perform this exercise at the beginning of every vocal session, to make sure that they are also rehearsing with their most tension-free instrument.

In the next article we’ll deal with freeing and relaxing the body.

OK, if you've been following along with this series, you've already developed all the singing skills you'll need.  You have put yourself in the judge's shoes.  You understand the music in terms of its notes and words, story, scene, objective and development.  You have exercised all your creativity and intelligence to make a truly a great plan.  You're already miles ahead of 99% of the groups in terms of your preparation.  Unfortunately, if you fail to execute during that six minutes when you're doing it for real, some would say that all your hard work was for naught.

(I'm not one of those people - I believe the journey is more important than the destination, but I suppose it's easy to say that when you've already got a gold medal!  LOL.)

I believe that if you can come to the stage well prepared, your voice is in peak form, and you're in the right state of mind, you will knock it out of the park.  Let's treat each piece separately.

Come well prepared

Yes you have a fantastic plan.  It's creative, it's insightful, it's engaging.  But making the plan is the beginning of the journey, not the end.  I'm sure you've heard it a thousand times, but amateurs rehearse until they get it right, but professionals rehearse until they can't get it wrong.  Your best insurance policy against something going wrong at exactly the wrong time is to rehearse to a professional level.  And that doesn't mean getting together with your group and banging through the tunes a hundred times - that isn't going to do it.  If someone tells you they have ten years' experience, do you ever wonder whether it was ten different years or the exact same year ten times?  Makes a big difference.

Professional rehearsals follow a pattern.  If you're staging a play, you start by memorizing your lines, understanding your character, your motivations, and objectives in each scene.  Then you read through it with your fellow actors.  Then you run through it many times on the real stage, under the guidance of the director.  Then generally you'll have a "preview" performance of some kind, with a well-chosen audience, usually friendly.  Then and only then is it opening night.

So let's steal what works, shall we?  Learn your stuff, make your plan, and then move through the professional rehearsal pattern.  Start with just the foursome and a video camera.  Then invite a few friends to come watch and give you feedback.  (Keep an open mind.  They are right - you are wrong.)  Then take the contest tunes onto the stage for a real audience, like on a chapter show or some other public performance.  Video tape that, and review the tape together with your trusted advisors.  At each level you will learn a lot - bake those lessons into your performance at the next level.

The key is that you'll be rehearsing what you're actually planning to do, in an environment that is closer and closer to the one that counts.

Get your voice and body in peak condition

All that professional level rehearsing was a lot of work, so let's not blow it in the last four hours before going on stage.

One of the most important things is making sure your voice is 100% when you hit the stage.  Stay healthy, be well rested, stay hydrated, take your allergy pills - whatever it takes to feel right.  You don't need distractions like a tickle in your throat.

Being at the peak of your potential vocally means warming up the right way for your voice.  With all that pro-level rehearsing you might be in what we call "perma-warm" which is an awesome place to be - do enough singing every day and you'll be ready to sing without much work at all, and your stamina will be fantastic too.  If you can arrange it, sing every day for a few weeks before the big day.

Another pitfall many groups fall into is banging the tunes a dozen times in the warm up room.  I think they do this because at some level they know they are underprepared, or they just don't know what else to do when they're together.  Of course you'll be rehearsed to a level where you can't do it wrong, so you have the luxury of not worrying about it on game day.  Hit the intro of each song a few times.  Sing other stuff that isn't strenuous.  Play with your iPhone - whatever.  Metropolis used to play hackey-sack!  Whatever you need to do, to stay relaxed and focused.

Head games on game day

A lot of this is covered nicely in my previous series on stage fright, but that's not the whole picture.  You get to choose what kind of dialog goes on in your head, and in the last two hours before you go on stage it's even more important that the self-talk is heading in the right direction.

Which of the following phrases would you like to have running through your head, as you prepare for the big day?

• Everyone is going to pick us apart out there.
• They are going to love us - they won't know what hit 'em!
• What if I trip as I go on stage?  What if I wet myself?  What if the theater burns down??
• Everything is going to be fine.
• If anything unexpected happens, I can handle it.
• Gosh my butterflies are getting worse!
• I can feel the adrenaline pumping, ready to back me up.
• I know our baritone will be flat on that note, and everyone will notice.
• Little imperfections are glossed over when the story is strong.
• We never duetted the last two phrases!!
• We are the most prepared group they will see today, and our plan is awesome.

Take your pick - what you hear as you go on stage is all up to you!  One tip - if you're one of the people who like to tell yourself negative things in order to motivate yourself, game day is TOO LATE for that marginal strategy to do ANY good.  Ditch it.

It's also important that you stay on the same page with your fellow singers at a time like this.  Try reminding them about the best phrases in the above list if it seems like they need it.  In extreme cases, you can also take them by the shoulders and say, "we're never going to make it.  This is going to suck."  That usually breaks the ice.