Sarai Worsham, our little guest and Alan Currens

I’m Alan Currens, co-owner of Denver Music Institute and I have a baritone range turned high tenor range through relentless work and visualization. I love writing about this topic because I’d love for the exhilaration I felt when expanding to tenor to be felt by as many singers as possible!

If you are anything like I was when I started this journey, you are frustrated with hitting the ceiling of your range, straining and maybe even having trouble controlling the volume of the F-A notes (or whichever of those you have been able to hit, I topped at an out of control G when I started).

Journal entry 2/14/15

“Dammit, dammit, dammit! I am so sick of this! I get it right in voice and sing f*cking great in the car but as soon as I’m in rehearsal I go back to tense and yelling”

This is an actual journal entry from my journal. I would go on to learn that the volume of the band triggered a physical “muscle memory”response in my singing in which I would go back to what I had done wrong for some 20+ years! I cover that below in #2.

BARITONE RANGE

I’ve seen both trained and untrained singers do the same thing at live shows: they run out of breath and technique begins to slip, they are at the top of their range and aren’t able to support the notes correctly so they begin to yell the notes. The kind of yelling you might do at a sporting event. This makes us hoarse, and it can take days to fully recover our voices.

For the first three Helpful Tips on the Baritone Range, read my previous blog How To Sing High Notes. What follows are 3 More Helpful Tips!

How to Grow the Baritone Range

3 More Helpful Tips for Baritones that Strain on High Notes

One of Mannequin’s Front men hitting those highs!

1 VISUALIZE ~ as a part of your learning and rehearsal. Visualization is something that the most successful people do. Pro athletes or competitors do it before a game, contest or match. Actors do it for important roles or scenes. Speakers do it before important speeches. The point is, it’s a free and powerful tool that you too can use. And it doesn’t require training to do.

Having said that, you can expect to get better over time.

Here’s what to do ~ Without actually singing, lie down or sit comfortably in a quiet area, so that your body is relaxed and you have nothing to think about except your visualization. Begin to recall all of your voice coaches advice. Support. Placement. Vowel sounds. Everything they told you about how to manage your higher notes and make them more effortlessly. Now imagine doing that. Singing your higher notes with ease. With a relaxed neck and shoulders. With only your core working, not your whole body. Imagine it until it feels like you actually did it. You may not see immediate results, or you may. But keep at it, you will feel something different and imagine something different each time you do it. Adding in what you have learned from your coach as you go.

Consult one of our expert voice coaches to learn more about technique – Catheryne Shuman

2 REHEARSE IN PERFORMANCE ENVIRONMENT ~ Try to rehearse in the same environment as your perform. You may practice in a controlled environment and do well, but then in band rehearsal or on stage, your technique falls apart and old habits and problems surface.

That’s because your mind, your ears and body are now doing way more than they were in that controlled environment. This should be expected. For one thing, it’s probably a lot louder and now your ears are not able to hear what they could in rehearsal, thus you try to sing louder until they can. When you do that, you probably force more air through your mechanism and this throws off your vocal chords and in turn your resonance. You have to go into your throat to make your voice louder in your head, and so now your placement is wrong. Then you find yourself back where you started.

So recreate your performance or rehearsal environment. I was able to do this two ways. One, I put on earbuds and turned up the music so I couldn’t hear my actual voice. I had to learn to listen to my voice through the vibrations in my mask and head. I found that to be pretty easy.

The other way was to go to our actual rehearsal space and crank up the PA until it was as loud as the band. Then I’d sing along to the track (or karaoke) of the song I was working on and practice NOT pushing my volume up.

Consult one of our expert voice coaches to learn more about technique – Brittany Mahoney

Alan Currens and Mannequin the Band

3 RECORD OR VIDEO YOURSELF PRACTICING ~ Record yourself and then listen back. Do this all that you can! And also, take video if you can. As often as possible. This is the most telling way to observe yourself. A mirror is fine, and you should do that also, but when you use a mirror you are preoccupied with all of the things to consider while singing. A video or audio is a way for you to step back and become objective of what you are really doing and you’ll grow your baritone range before you know it.

I hope this helps! Do you have tips you’d like to share. What has worked for you. Email me at alan@denvermusicinstitute.com and let me know. I’ll share them here in this blog!

Article By – Alan Currens. Alan is the co-founder and co-owner of Mannequin the Band, a globally booked Colorado Wedding Band and co-owner of the Denver Music Institute, Denver’s home for music lessons and music workshops as well as performance guidance and performance opportunities in our open mic nights and recitals! In 2020 Mannequin acquired a partnership with Open Stage Denver production company and has begun to lay the ground work for their upcoming blog and podcast series, The Bones Of Giants. Inspired by a book of the same name that’s being written for release in 2021. The Bones Of Giants addresses the staggering number of failed music careers by taking on what the book calls “the trilogy of music careers”. The blog goes live in summer 2020 and the podcast will be soon to follow.

~ Alan is a former touring artist and Paramount Pictures recording artist.

DMI Band Rehearsal Room