Adolph Namlik

And I'm saying that as in he doesn't even need to go looking around for anything. It's an incredible luxury to have the key to everything just sitting there. You don't have to look for it. When you're a beginner, and you don't know how things work and you have no idea what you even need to do to make things work, it can take a lot of time to make progress. Even after taking lessons for some years, I went on the self-teach route for a few years, and I've just now started making big progress because I started doing something that a musical friend of mine told me to do like a year and a half ago. I realized I was listening to him.
 
So, to just have it all there and have somebody telling you to "do this" or "that" exercise, and have things start to work before you even full realize why they're working, that's a very worthwhile investment.

Thanks Rob.  I have to give a lot of credit to "The four pillars of singing" and the amazingly talented and knowledgeable singers here who have inspired and helped me over the years.  

Yep. thats all you have to do. "unpack it". Train, practice. Everything Cats needs is available to him, and it has been for as long as he has been posting here. If you train and do what needs to be done, instead of "winging" it, you'll get results. If you don't, you won't. 
speaking of "unpacking it"... I just produced this. Its a tour of the program.
... good luck... 

You can work it out, Cats. Just trying to do too much at one time. Work on your pitch first. What I hear is the actual scale you're singing doesn't sound like you just completely don't know what you're doing; it's off based off the reference note you're playing, and the notes you're singing in the scale tend to trail off. Try playing the note and matching your voice to the note while the note is actually ringing out, and then record it. Then you'll be able to hear whether you can match your voice to the pitch you are hearing. Once you can do that, you can sing the scale starting from that note. And you should also be mindful of the vowel sounds you are making when you do these scales. Focus on the sounds "A" as in "Aye", "E", as in "Ee", "I" as in "Eye", "O" as in "Oh", and "Oo" as in "Ooh". Hold onto the vowel all the way through the scale.
 
Right now, you are focused on your voice cracking while singing notes in your head voice and you demonstrate that by performing a scale improperly, from the wrong reference pitch, while in falsetto.
 
You sound the same as I recall hearing you in that initial Radiohead cover you posted. I said it before, and I will say it again: Four Pillars would be wonderful for you. And this is coming from somebody who has it and sees how you can benefit. Tons of exercises. Robert does many of them, so you can actually do them along with him and perform them as he does them, just like I used to do with my vocal coach. That alone would allow you to work on pitch, strengthen your voice and help develop timbre. There are clear workflows to guide you through the delivery, step by step, which will allow you to pinpoint exactly what you are having trouble with. And then there is the section on this forum for Pillars students to help troubleshoot things further. 
I think you'd be well on your way with that. Otherwise, you can still solve these problems and work on your voice, but it's much more involved. With Pillars, it's just all sitting right there in the luggage; you just have to unpack it.
But, like I said, you can work it out.

?
"Cats"... you are making vocal sounds that have no pitch reference at all. Further, there is little to no compression on your vocal folds, so it is a very weak, falsetto position that has no musculature activated of significance. It is a mess.
My best advise would be to work on onsets. One not at a time and work on matching pitch and getting compression on your voice. And singing some songs. I agree with Felipe, this is wasting your time.

I´ve just heard the clip and honestly I have no idea of what you are even trying to do there
Sing a song, these scales, done in this manner, will do you no good.

Hi Folks, 
It has been a very long time since I posted.  I have made some jumps in my technical skills and so thought I should post a song again.  This actually I did about 2.5 years ago.  Unfortunately I don't have the older recording to do a Before-After comparison.  but the old version was around the time when I started  to learn to bridge but had still not learnt how to smoothly connect to the chest voice.  I had lot of issues then with nasality and "Quacky" sound.  I think since then I have addressed some of them.  
One thing that I would like to share in my experience is how important it is for us singers to keep pushing the boundaries every single time.  When you become better in singing, it reflects not only in your ability to do tough songs at an acceptable level, but it really improves the way you can sing "simpler" songs.. 
 

Someone screaming my name
Come and make me, holy again!
 
 

Rob just suggested the song below. Sounds like a cool jam. Who else wants to try it?
 
 

Hey Cats,
Whenever you post a clip of your singing and ask for it to be critiqued, it becomes a Review my Singing Request. The Review my Singing (RMS) forum is a consultation service that we provide to help you get feedback on your singing and training. As such, it is a paid service because a thorough consultation of your training and singing takes time. We wish to provide you the best feedback and insights regarding your singing that we can.
 
Kindly navigate to the link below if you wish to pay for a review.
 
http://www.themodernvocalistworld.com/store/product/12-review-my-singing/

Agreed. Jarom,... I love your music, but for a review, can you help us focus here?

Can you pick one song for us to review your voice on? Most of us, if not all of the coaches here, don't have time to go through 5 songs. I was going to try, but had to keep pushinng it back in my schedule.

I thought I'd post an official review my singing thread for my new EP "Blink of an Eye" available on all major music platforms. What are your thoughts? What do you like? what do you not like? whats your favorite song?
iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/blink-of-an-eye-ep/id1208272015
Spotify
 

Draven is great. One of my favorite coaches on YouTube.

A very generous response from Draven. Nice. Thanks for your help Draven.
Jeanette, I listened to "Hallelujah".
It is apparently clear that you have a lovely voice with great potential.
Two things:
1). Smule is a fun tool, really a toy to use for singing. With your passion for singing, you should step up and learn how to make a better production to feature your singing. I recommend one of the "everything you need" recording kits found at our The Vocal Gear Store. click on Recording. See the Focusrite kit.
2). You voice is pretty, but no doubt you could benefit from more musculature and strength. That would come from belt or TA ( a muscle ), strengthening workouts.  
 

interesting: there is no second voice in Jar of Hearts, just an echo of my own voice.
Thanks for the feedback! Guess I better get a vocal coach

I listened to Perfume. I tried Jar of Hearts, but it's hard to hear you over the other voice.
You had an ear for pitch and a natural pleasant tone to your voice, but your fundamentals are all a bit off for singing. I'll get to that more in a minute. Yuo have a lot of great potential, and I can hear a great singing voice in there just waiting to be utilized in full. Please don't take my review as harsh. Text alone can feel that way very easily. My hope is to help you, not critisize you.
You need to be training your voice. Not doing so is holding back a lot of your potential. I highly recommend starting with The Four Pillars of Singing and seeking a vocal coach with student success in the style you're going for. Not success as in career success necessarily, but in learning to sing that style well - contenporary rather than classical.
There's only so much I can address in text without you having a coach or doing a lesson with me, Robert, or other coaches here. The first thing I hear is your placement is lending itself to more speech vowels than singing vowels. There are a couple of ways to get you started toward proper placement of singing vowels. Start by making a soft "K" sound while breathing in. That spot your tongue hits the roof of your mouth is where you want to point your vowels, letting the soft palate do most of the work for you. Higher notes will feel like they go deeper into the soft palate as well, and if it makes sense in text, you want to allow your vowels to shade back from that soft "K" spot, adding deeper vowels in the soft palate along with the deeper note (deeper in the soft palate, but higher in pitch). Besides willing them into the soft "K" spot, you can also bare your teeth, or smile. This helps naturally lift the voice. Additionally, when first starting to do this "lift" of the voice resonance and vowels, it may help to place a finger on your lower lip and try to make your voice go up and over it. This is called "over the pencil", as it's modified from putting a pencil between your teeth and sing up and over it with only vowels.
Your TA (chest voice musculature) strength and breath support are a bit weak, which is a HUGE area holding back your voice. GRanted, without proper placement, trying to add these in will only get you yelling, rather than singing with more power. There are ways to strengthen these but it would likely take a lesson to really show you how, since you need get a proper feeling for the basics befroe we can truly help with adjustments.
One thing you can do right now is bridging and connecting. This will help you gain better control over the musculature, placement, and movement of the voice. It's arguably the most important thing to learn for singing besides pitch. I talk mroe about that in the video below. To predicate my videos, I truly only put these out there to help people get a feel for proper sensations of the voice. There are things to do from there that make it even easier. For instance, instead of opening the jaw wide to help TA engagement, this is better for a more controlled vowel: raise the embouchure (lift and bite), narrow vertically, and push the tongue slightly forward into the bottom teeth (which gives extra support to the TA muscles). OPening the jaw may help you learn to turn on the TA muscles and sing higher notes, but narrowing is what allows you control from there.
 

Awesome !!!
If you wish to create accounts at either Soundcloud or Box.net, here are the links for your convenience :
https://soundcloud.com
https://www.box.com/home
Again, a very sincere welcome to our forum !
Adolph

What a detailed reply!, love it. Thank you Robert for answering in such a thoughtful manner. I will make sure to remember your advice here and apply it. Funny thing is before i started T4P i was doing a lot of breathing exercises, stuff like 360 breath / hiss / root the breath exercises / so i may be decent or good in that aspect. But the problem i have is remembering to conciously use it both in training and in singing. As in support. Some programs i studied with just basically said "it's natural, you don't have to focus on it". Some others basically focused all their time on it and made it out like it was like 90% of singing. So that conflicted me and i just ended up focusing on other things. Looks like i need to start forgetting what i learned from those other programs and just start from complete scratch through T4P method. I was trying to fuse some stuff from other programs with T4P, and i guess that's not the best idea. Or if anything i should evaluate what causes possible conflict with T4P and remove it accordingly.

And btw, why i bring it up is because i do feel that my voice fatigues frequently, but maybe that's not related to breathing issues, although i gotta admit.

I don't shut up!!  i'm always singing and training for long periods of time. So i gotta work on that maybe. Is tough to not sing, sometimes it just happens.

Or if anything i might do what robert suggests in this case, instead of singing all that time, replace it with being "Mr Buzz a lot" or "Mr Lift and Pull back a lot".

Anyways thanks for the answer Robert. And yes! i love that movie. Very inspirational. And relatable too as a student, he was frustated and thought he was being played because it "didn't look" important. But all along he was building a foundation without even knowing it. Priceless. 

 

First of all, just thought it would be nice to point out that i sent this question to Rob by email. And he sent me here, so that he could answer it in public and everyone could benefit. What a nice guy Rob is. Been learning a lot from his program, still studying and working on all the stuff, registered not long ago. It's quite a lot of content to fully diggest and grasp!.  And most of all, actually apply!. Which is awesome of course, haven't had a course as detailed/comprehensive as this one. Not even close. Before i bought it i was actually wondering why many people called it "comprehensive", now it makes total sense. And the time i spent wondering on if i should get it, could have been spent further studying and applying the techniques. So i encourage others to start ASAP.

On to the question, might be a rather simple question, that i probably know the answer too but just am not concious enough to apply it, it can be easy to forget. So of course asking will save me the doubts. And hopefully others as well.

This quote from the program/book "Engaging the respiratory system sufficiently to optimize your phonations as a singer is not intuitive for the body. Even after 30 years of singing, training and teaching around the world, i still, to this day, have to be very conscientious of engaging my respiratory support when i train and sing. If i do not, just like everyone else, i start sounding like a duck (and get tired from all the squeezing)."
So basically what i took from this was, concious support is mandatory, both in training and singing. Basically you should ALWAYS engage some sort of support. Both in training and singing?.
Now i didn't include this part in the email but i want too add a question, how "key" is this?. I think a lot of students these days need a lot of "value guidance" in order to fully recognize what they should be working on. It seems self explanatory, but on a scale of 1/5 - i'd like to know where this stands specifically in your program. Just for perspective.

Which btw reminds me of a feature i really liked in the program, in which Rob basically does what i just said. He outlines the most "key" lessons to work on of every section/module. And of course each one also has long detailed descriptions/ illustrations / examples / and my favorite - benefits and troubleshooting. He clearly put A LOT of effort into this. Very thoughtful effort, might i add. Since a lot of programs out there don't go into such detail. 

Anyways, That's the question. (With some extra rambling included).

Heck in a sense that's a mini review. Although i could say a lot more. Rob deserves the praise.

Also thanks Rob for encouraging me to get registered, there is clearly a lot of value in this forum i was missing on.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts about 4Pillars Tyrone, I appreciate it of course, but also people that want to learn more about the program also appreciate this. Your point that the program is comprehensive is a common point that many people make. I find that most people, once they get into "Pillars" and learn how to use it, really have a good time with it. There truly is a lot to explore. The amount of information you can learn and train is only limited by your time, commitment and the size of your ambition. It truly is the program for people that want to study and train. It is great to have you as a student.
On To The Question:
I have to preface this statement by saying, this is my personal experience. I am not suggesting that all accomplished singers feel this way. Likely, not everyone does. But for me, I need to keep my "eye" on the respiration from time to time. It is just a statement that reflects my personal experience as a singer, not everyone's. But the point for everyone is to insure that you are aware of it.
Yes, as a general rule, good advise for everyone. Seems to work for me... so I'm passing on the advise.
A bit of a strange question... ??  Good, balanced respiration should be... good and balanced at all areas of your voice and range. The vocalize, or intervals you are singing or training should not matter in regards to the level of attention and importance on respiration.
Thanks again Tyrone. Yes, precisely because 4Pillars is so comprehensive, I have instructed people that own it to train with the "Blue" modules and lessons first. It is one small way to help people get oriented on where to start and to prioritize. I am VERY pleased to hear that this idea was helpful for you. Thanks for the feedback!
Uh ya!? It is the best vocal forum in the world brother!  Going on 8 years strong and with rock stars like Draven, Richards, Formica, and everyone else here. You are covered!
Tyrone... I have to say. Be sure to find the video and downloadable PDF in the "My Training" page at www.TheVocalistStudio.com , where you will find the 6 respiration workouts. They are also listed in the back of the hard copy book, inside the red training pages. There is a video of me doing the workouts as well. Also, regarding respiration. The Wind & Release Onset is the BEST onset to increase your respiration balance. It helps improve bernoulli physics in the glottis and overall, will do wonders for your respiration. So..
1. The above mentioned breathing exercises.
2. Working Wind & Release Onsets into your sirens ( Integrated Training Routines ).
 
The Karate Kid Trains Vocal Onsets:
I love this scene from the movie "Karate Kid". It reminds me of the teacher / student relationship. Many students don't understand why it is important to train the rudimentary, the basics and as TVS students, the ONSETS. But after the beginning stages are over, TVS students begin to understand how power training the onsets can be. The TVS onsets build instantaneous motor skills and muscle memory, similar to the defensive moves that the Karate Kid experiences after his Sensei, shows him WHY he has been training repetitious movements. I hope this scene will inspire viewers as much as it has inspired me and other TVS students.
Let me know if I can help you ... and thanks for posting here so we could share with others.
 

It's not really tightening, it's leaning in and out. It has a similar feel and function to the push downward, but the mentality of it changes the structure enough that it tends to stablilize more and not put undue pressure on the pelvic floor. When I want to get really loud, I still push down, but even then I think about it differently than I used to and mentally push more into the abs than I do downward. Either way, you end up moving the diaphram much more slowly and controlled than ignoring the abdominal pressure altogether. I don't think it's contrary to the way TFPOS teaches it, I think it's complimentary. In many ways, it's a matter of semantics. But I think it's a crucial distinction of semantics for a better visualization and thus better support when a student is simply just pushing as hard as they can downward. See the video below. I don't like Trimble's vocal style, and there are many things he's doing to the contrary of contemporary singing. But this way of achieving breath support is someting to consider when learning Robert's method. Again, not cnotrary to, but to help adjust your sensations, visualization, and technique to achieve the end result faster.
I teach a few things differently than Robert, but again, not to the contrary. For instance, I have my students use a stirring straw for warmups, cool downs, and even when trying to get the sensation of tuning the formant, proper pressure balance, and relaxation of compression. IT's just another way to achieve the same sensation that has helped my students learn the TVS methodology faster.
 

I'm glad I brought you here! I'm glad to help however I can!
I often go full appoggio, but it's not always necessary. There are definitely softer parts of songs. However, even on softer parts, proper respiratory balance is a must for longevity and consistency. I use extrinsic anchoring a lot too, but I'm training to rely more on intrinsic anchoring (especially in embouchure, since my tendency is to open vertically on higher notes which isn't the most pleasant sound, haha!). As for "the push" for volume. I have a couple of students who are Yoga teachers and refused to do it that way. I had to search for a better way, especially given their explanation of the horrible things that can do to the pelvic floor and your internal organs. Now I teach to pull in or tighten the stomach slightly when breathing in to the kidneys or lwoer, which causes the air to expand the obliques instead. Then when colume is needed, "lean the ladder" the other way. In other words, lean into the abs, even while keeping the slightly tightened. It makes the lungs work more like bellows, and give much more diaphramal control than breathing with the stomach out and pushing down for volume/support.

You sing in key, which is a major plus  You also don't have a "weird" voice.
Training your voice doesn't make you sound "trained". I'm not even sure if that is a sound, considering the major variety in both singer who've taken lessons and those who haven't. You train you voice in order to more easily get the sound you want consistently, releave tension, and make your voice last for many years to come. You will sound like you want to and not like you don't want to.
Here's one of many examples - Simply lifting the voice to the soft palate will help with all of those things I mentioned. That means baring your teeth a bit on higher notes, and focusing on the voice going up and out, singing more towards where the hard and soft palate meet. I often have a student put their finger on their bottom lip and try to sing up and over it. Singing from the throat, where you typically speak from, does not make for a lasting consistent, and controllable voice. Also, lifting the voice as described doesn't mean you can't dampen the larynx and change your tongue position slightly to get something that sound exatly the same as you did before. But it will be a conscious decision and much more relaxed and consistent, rather than being whatever happens to come out.

I listened to your other song too. I hear what Rob is talking about concerning Sob mode, and I also think it has a lot to do with your chosen dynamics. For instance, in the other video on your channel, you have a bit more twang and compression. However, even in that video, you chose to not allow yoruself to belt when the song called for bigger dynamics. It was almost as if you were holding back, which kept the song (or both songs) from ever climaxing or taking people on an emotional rollercoaster that you could have with those lyrics. You obvisouly were able to keep your chest voice musculature engaged on higher notes, but you stayed soft in volume, which rounded out the voice, made it prettier, and pushed it much further back towards your throat (hence "sob").
By belting, I don't mean yelling either. Don't be afraid to get loud when the song calls for it or you want to show passion or emphasize parts. Get loud from pushing into your abs from behind, not from pushing from the throat. And let that extra air pressure push right into your soft palate. Then lean the voice a bit more towards your teeth for more edge, if you like. The extra air pressure will cause more twang through what's called Bernoulli's Principle, and cause more volume without pushing frmo your neck (which would be yelling). The focus on keeping the voice up into the soft palate and then out towards your hard palate will also cause more compression.