Singing For Dummies. Pamelia S. Phillips
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eyes feels like squinting or a tightness behind your eyes. When the eyes are open and free of tension, it feels similar to the opening you feel behind your eyes when you see something that surprises you. Pretend that a friend you haven’t seen in a long time walks through the door. Notice the opening of your eyes and a feeling of space behind your eyes. The opening or release of tension behind the eyes also helps the forehead to relax.
Releasing the tension in your head and opening the space involves allowing the muscles to stay pliable on your head. If you squint or concentrate really hard for a long time, your head may start to hurt from a tension headache. To prevent that tension, massage your scalp. See whether you can get the skin on your scalp to move around. It might not move much if it’s tight, but you may get it to move a little by massaging and stretching it. You can also visualize your head expanding from the inside out.
Look in the mirror again and notice the space around your mouth. When you’re annoyed or frustrated, the muscles around your mouth may tighten. To release the tension around your mouth and face, look bored. If you pretend to be really bored and dull, you’ll feel tension around your mouth release.
Walking with ease
Maintaining your posture while you walk makes a big difference in your appearance and your ability to sing while walking or moving. You may actually have to sing while walking around the stage. Church choirs sing as they process, and backup singers groove to the music as they dance. What if you have to cross the stage? You want to look glorious for the entire time that you’re walking onstage and when you land in place to sing.
Practice finding your alignment when you’re standing still. Then walk a few steps and land in place. Did you land in the same alignment? Look down at your feet to see whether they’re parallel and the same distance as your hipbones. If not, try again: Walk around and then land in alignment. Eventually, you’ll confidently land in alignment and know that your body is ready for some fabulous singing.
You also want to practice walking with an awareness of the weight and pressure on your legs. You want to feel the sensation that your weight is evenly distributed on your legs and feet and have a sense of buoyancy. Feeling your weight sink into your legs makes you feel much heavier. Pushing into the floor or pavement causes you to feel pressure and tension in your legs. Of course, you want to connect your feet to the floor, but you want to feel an opening sensation, as if your feet touching the floor causes your legs and muscles to open — not contract and tense. Try walking and pushing into the floor, and then walking and visualizing your body with springs that open when your feet connect with the floor.
After practicing walking with ease, you can then practice walking and singing. Allow yourself time to stop and monitor your posture to make sure you’re staying aligned while singing a song. You can also practice without your shoes and feel the connection of your feet to the floor. After you can feel the opening of the feet into the floor when you breathe, you can then compare that sensation with shoes on.
The same applies for dancing and singing. Practice the alignment described in the chapter and then try out some of the breathing exercises in Chapter 4. When you feel confident that you have those skills solid, try combining those skills while singing and dancing. Even if you aren’t a dancer, move around the room while you’re singing to notice the difference between singing with tension and singing with your body aligned and balanced.
Projecting confidence through posture
Projecting confidence onstage is important because you want to feel good about your performance and you want the audience to be comfortable watching you perform. Audiences are usually apprehensive about performers who project fear. Projecting confidence involves finding your ideal posture and maintaining it throughout a performance.
If you maintain that posture and a calm expression even if you forget the words to your song, many people probably won’t even notice. I’ve seen it many times: The performer is onstage making up the words, but he looks as terrific as if he’d intended to sing those words. By maintaining poise and posture, the performer projects to the audience that everything is fine and assures them that they needn’t worry, as if to say, “I’ll get back to the original words in a moment.” The performer also walks away feeling good because he stuck to a basic singing rule: Good posture enhances good singing.
To explore how correct posture exudes confidence, pretend that you’re a king or queen. Strut like you own the place. Notice your posture. Now pretend that you’re really sick and that your whole body aches. Doesn’t a ruler move differently than someone who is ill? It’s possible for a king or queen to be ill, but not in this scenario. A king walks tall, carries himself with great dignity and grace, and glides around the room. A sickly person can barely stand, much less project confidence. In this scenario, which one are you? Are you the king with a dignified posture, or are you stooped and closed off from the world? You’re probably somewhere in the middle. Strive to be the king or queen when you sing.
SINGING AND PLAYING AN INSTRUMENT AT THE SAME TIME
You want the same confidence in your posture when you’re singing and playing the guitar or the piano (or even the banjo or organ). Practice finding the alignment in the chapter and then sit down at the piano. Notice that you can allow the bench to support you and sense the buoyancy in the spine. Feel the weight of your body sink into the bench so you can remain flexible no matter which way you turn. Lifting your leg to use the piano pedals is different from just lifting your foot. You can do either one, but just notice that lifting your entire leg engages the abdominal muscles. The breath work from Chapter 4 helps you explore using the ribs or the abdominals to help you sing well. If you’re performing, you may need to turn your head toward a microphone. Even when you turn your head, try to maintain fluid motion in your body instead of tightening the spine or neck when you turn.
Singing while playing the guitar is really fun. Practice finding your alignment with the exercises in the chapter and then grab your guitar. If you normally stand and play guitar, then put your guitar strap around your neck and find your alignment from the exercises in the chapter. Notice what part of your body engages to hold up the guitar. If the guitar is balanced across your body, you may feel that your legs do the work of holding up the weight of the guitar. After exploring the sensations of holding the guitar and maintaining your alignment, start to play the guitar without singing and monitor your posture. Notice what muscles you’re using to hold yourself up while your arms and hands are busy playing the guitar. After you find a good balance of muscles moving while just playing, try playing the guitar and singing. Take your time between phrases to make sure you focus on allowing your breath to drop into your body (see Chapter 4 for help with breathing for singing). By allowing yourself longer pauses between phrases, you can monitor each aspect of the technique: alignment, breath coordination, singing phrases, playing the instrument. It takes time to be able to do all of this at the same time, but you can do it with practice.
After you explore playing the guitar while standing, try sitting in a chair and holding the guitar. Notice the muscles that engage as you hold the guitar. You don’t have to sit stiffly, but I suggest that you explore an upright posture before leaning over the guitar. Notice that leaning over the guitar not only affects your posture, but it also affects your muscles for breathing and singing. Next, compare the sensation of singing while playing the guitar with upright posture and when you lean over the guitar. The slumped posture can cause your organs to be squeezed with less room to move when you breathe. You