HEY!

[chuy67]

It has been a while, and once again I am happy with the improvement I am making. I just have another question as always lol. During my practice sessions I do not get become horse, but after a while my head voice/ passagio becomes more and more airy on the open vowels and a bit on closed. What can this be from?

[Steven Fraser]

It has been a while, and once again I am happy with the improvement I am making. I just have another question as always lol. During my practice sessions I do not get become hoarse, but after a while my head voice/ passagio becomes more and more airy on the open vowels and a bit on closed. What can this be from?

chuy67: 'airy' (or 'breathy') tone can happen when a 'too loose' adduction happens. There are two muscle motions involved in adduction, the 'swing the bands together' motion, and the 'close the back ends together' motion. For clearest tone, you want them both to happen. If either of them is incomplete, then the tone will be leaky.

What makes 'too loose' is a bit about the breath energy. If the exhalation force is high, it can overblow the vocal bands. IMO, its more likely that you are just letting your adduction get loose as your voice gets warmed up. Particularly in the first 3 hours of the morning, the vocal bands have extra fluid in them (edema), so adduction can be firm with little adduction motion. However, as the day goes on and the singer warms up, the fluid goes into the bloodstream, and the vocal bands lose a bit of their thickness. When this happens, a little bit more adduction is required to get the right balance of glottal open and closed time.

So, what to do? I think a fairly useful exercise, when the airyness starts to happen, is a little recalibration using slides, insisting on clear, soft tone. Also very useful will be onset exercises in the affected range. These two approaches are tried-and-true ways of getting your vocal coordination back in the right relationship to the breath energy.