Sarai Worsham, our little guest and Alan Currens

I’m Alan Currens, co-owner of Denver Music Institute and a baritone turned high tenor through relentless work and visualization. And yes… lessons, lessons, lessons. I’m compelled to write this blog today because I know there are others like me who spend their lives singing baritone notes, but coveting the tenor melodies in their favorite songs. You CAN sing them. We ALL have the same basic mechanism and I’m telling you that, one way or another, you can sing them!

If you’d like to see a good example of what I’ll be talking about today, watch Andrea Bocelli. He remains motionless and though you can sense the tension in his core and diaphragm, he is visibly relaxed and at ease where it matters most, around his neck, throat and resonating chamber/mask.

BARITONES STOP STRAINING

Those who seek out articles like this might be baritones who repeatedly make themselves hoarse (blow out their voices) singing Gs… or maybe lower notes, like F# or F. You might experience the sensation that, after singing a while, you feel like you have been yelling at a football game or in a club that has the music too loud. Then, when you are at the top of your range, and you want to push up to a new or rare note in the tenor range… you just push!! Hard! And loud! And sometimes you nail it and it gives you incredible confidence and joy. Then, other times you just screech out a terrible and unwelcome sound. Or maybe you surrender to your softer head voice. Which can be shockingly weak when compared to the top of your baritone range. But there in lies your refuge. In the head voice… and your passigio (the passage from chest to head voice). Using your head voice correctly can eliminate the screeching and cracking and give you the control you want. Then, compressing your air can provide that texture you seek. But it’s in the passagio that you’ll get the gravy tones!!

That’s where phonemes like Steve Perry and Bruno Mars live… G, A, B, C. Those are the money notes in popular music. It’s the most exciting range and it has a built in energy when sung powerfully by a male.

Steve Perry, eventually wore out his voice by reportedly drinking beer and touring relentlessly for over a decade, singing a set list that no other male on the planet has since been able to handle. Good technique for a rocker!

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Journal entry 3/31/16

“I’m so embarrassed by this constant back and forth. I have a break through with my placement or volume control and tell someone and then in rehearsal, I crack or can’t do what I said I could do. What I know I can do. For some reason, when I’m in front of the band, I revert to old mistakes. My consonants and vowels are messing with me. I think they are pulling me out of my breakthroughs. God, there is just so much to think about.”

This is an actual journal entry from my journey to tenor notes. I was so tired of failing, but I never gave up. I never stopped pushing away the bad habits. One by one, identifying them and building better habits. Then practicing the new habits into muscle memory so that even if I weren’t concentrating on everything I was doing, my body knew where to take me to avoid technique pitfalls.

For me the TWO ABSOLUTE BIGGEST PROBLEMS were consonants and what Chris Mercer called “the meat” on my face. My actual mouth and cheeks. I would not shape my mouth in a way to set up my pallet and placement. Ask your coach about that because I’m not certain how to explain it, seeing as we all are a little different. But you’ll see big changes if your consonants don’t pull you back into your throat (“Guh” and “Kuh” are the worst for me) and if your face is helping you to pull the placement into your mask!

How to Sing High Notes

3 Helpful Tips for Baritones that Strain on High Notes

Alan Currens of Mannequin the Band

1 RELAX ~ Yep, the first tip is to just relax everything. Except your core of course… you have to pack that air in tight and compress it:) But relax your body, voice mechanism and mind! About me… I topped out at in the D-F range in the 90’s. That’s unbelievable to me as now I’m able to sing almost an octave higher than that without going into head voice… I frequently questioned my mechanism but somewhere deep inside I knew that I had the tenor notes… however, they eluded me.

For me, when breath ran short at a show or when my voice began to get tired, I just started to yell the notes. That’s bad. Real bad.

After many lessons and countless tries, I started my journey to tenor notes with the motto: You MUST remain relaxed. That motto, along with expert coaching from Aubrie Hamrick and Chris Mercer, and a lot of time on stage with Dana Wield, my business partner at DMI and also with Mannequin the Band, allowed me to experiment and craft my voice in live settings. That’s where I seem to learn best or at least where my breakthroughs come most of the time. And if I couldn’t get relaxed by feeling my own tensions, I would watch great singers with good technique and then imitate them. That actually helped the most. I would watch Steve Perry sing and then literally mimic his tone and body movements, tilt of the head, smiling into the higher notes to pull the resonance into his mask and away from his throat, etc.

One of my most common mistakes was that when I got to the top of my range was that I pushed harder to get the notes out. I kept the note in my throat and just forced it higher with air flow! That dried my voice out fast and made me hoarse. My neck would be visibly tense and strained. And forget control. There was just one volume for anything over an F… LOUD. But I did start to get to a G. And over about two years all I did was get more consistent with that G. Singing in my throat and chest still, and belting it.

My biggest break through came during a vocal warm up when I placed the note in my mask and lifted my palate. Stretching my pallet allowed for my throat to relax. I can’t explain that, but ask your voice coach to work on that with you. Classical training warmups are best for this!

2 SINGING OVER THE PENCIL! I love this one. One lesson, Chris Mercer put a pencil in my teeth and said, I want the notes to always go over the pencil. Never from or in your throat. This allowed me to, for the first time, visualize my mask and pallet. I found that if I kept notes over the pencil I could sing as low as I sing in chest, but then go high with no thought of placement in my throat or mask.

We also discovered that a lot of my consonants were pulling my voice back to my throat and below the pencil. Especially “Guh” or “Kuh” sounds. They’d pull my resonance from my mask and into my throat and I had a tough time recovering. Once my voice went back into my throat, to it’s old romping ground, it didn’t want to come back into my mask and pallet where it belonged.

That’s when I knew I was fighting muscle memory. The only way to win that battle with me, is to get more muscle memory doing the right stuff! So I started really trying to “feel” what was happening in my head and practicing in front of a mirror or filming myself.

DMI Voice Class

3 TAKE LESSONS ~ Take lessons. And don’t just take lessons from one person. I named two in this article but I have studied with many and also watched a host of youtube videos, read books and tried a dozen things, in depth. I recorded my self constantly, waited a day or two and listened back. I started to hear things my teachers were pointing out and then associate those things with what I felt happening in my head or body. Teachers are the number one thing that helped in my journey to tenor. A journey which continues to this day and that will continue as long as I have a voice:)

I hope this helps! Let us know your tips. What has worked for you. Email me at alan@denvermusicinstitute.com. Please tell me what are the resources online or offline that you found most helpful. I’ll share them here in this blog! These tips work for me, but there might be someone reading our blog who could use more or different advice!

REHEARSAL SPACE PLUG!!

DMI Band Rehearsal Room